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XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

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Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#101

Post by saulrh »

olalonde wrote: post #93
Steko wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, just wow. It's almost as if you didn't read what Randall wrote. He's not saying "all men are ogres". He's saying "ogres exist and some women wish to avoid them". "I take great offense to my culture being defined ..." Total straw man, he didn't define any culture as this, he noted that it's one characteristic of our culture. "Yes some people do that, but VERY few." That's irrelevant. Baghdad is still a dangerous…

> Total straw man, he didn't define any culture as this, he noted that it's one characteristic of our culture. From Randall's post: Our culture's relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them [...] > "Do you want to walk around Baghdad at night alone?" An American man's likelihood of getting killed in Baghdad is a couple of magnitude h…

  In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from
  car accidents than from crazy murderers.
That's true. However, if I'm doing my math right, the statistics for rape and sexual assault are an entirely different story. The US isn't on both of these lists[0][1], so we'll take a proxy and compare: Germany has 6.5/100k deaths/year in accidents and 8.9/100k rapes/year. Note that that's per 100k people, not per 100k women. Then note that, in the US, we have 28 rapes per hundred thousand people, more than three times the rate in Germany. Then note that something like half of rapes are never reported to the police [2].

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#UN_Statistics

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_accident#Statistics_...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Under-_and_over...

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#102

Post by silencio »

tomjen3 wrote: post #57
silencio wrote: post #24

I'm just glad Google+ has an "other" option to begin with. Facebook lets you hide gender (which would be nice to have in google+), but they only offer male/female. Really, I'm more disgruntled that Google+ lets you put down your relationship status and types of relationships you're looking for, but no way to specify which genders if any you are interested in talking to. I've been mulling over removing that part from…

>I have some female friends that would prefer to talk only to other females as well, it doesn't even have to go as far as preferences for dating. Why not only add female friends to their circles then?

Well, Google+ and many social networks feel designed to be opt-in so interaction between people that aren't directly connected somehow is limited and suboptimal. For example, some people I don't know have added me to a circle of theirs on google+ and have shared some bizarre pictures and things I don't care for, and I have to purposefully seek these out if I cared to look at them. That solves a lot of problems right there.

Some networks don't always work like that. It's the general idea of the thing more than it was google+'s implementation I was referring to by the end of that paragraph. I personally just want it in google+ out of habit, because I have it set that way in Facebook and all my dating site profiles and such. Inevitably I have a guy hitting on me and I don't want them to have a misunderstanding or to waste their time. It also helps to search for other people to talk to, and that benefits more than just me or my friends.

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#103

Post by olalonde »

silencio wrote: post #89
olalonde wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be deep ignorance of what it's like to be an old fat bald guy in our culture. Who do you think had the worse night? My guess is that it's the old fat bald guy who had to go home with his right hand, got publicly humiliated in front of all of his friends by getting rejected and physically pushed by a girl half his size. Not to forget his wallet is probably much lighter after paying all those drinks to w…

There is a lot more to it than "old fat bald guy". I don't know why so many people keep missing the extra clues, including in this past weekend's skeptic/atheist brouhaha over Richard Dawkins being ignorant. In short, it's the same damn situation. "Nice guy" (which is an unknown to the woman) approaches woman, gets rejected, is pissed off. Nice guy forgot to look at the situation, which was woman alone with man hitti…

I agree with you on most point except this one.

> When you're a fat, bald guy that does exactly that, you don't get to be treated like it's all okay and the girl is obligated to spend time with you because you bought her a drink or ten.

Where I live right now, women (and some men) surprisingly often offer me drinks in bars. Most of the time I'm not attracted to them but yet, I find it only fair and nice to spend some time with them. I even sometimes dance with old and fat women. I don't see anything wrong with this and if I don't feel like spending time with a stranger, I respectfully decline the offer and pay for my own drinks.

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#104

Post by FeministHacker »

Qz wrote: post #16
macrael wrote: post #2

He's written about gender very well before.[1] It is certainly a subject that I don't know very much about, but I appreciate that it can get very complicated very quickly. What are the good reasons for requiring it to be public? Secondly, do you think that "other" is enough? To what lengths should developers go to handle rare corner cases? [1]: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/06/sex-and-gender/

I vote for the text field option.

The range of answers you get when you give a free text entry field is wonderful, and proves why this is the best route.

On matters like forced revealing of gender, my gender is rage.

I'm in the process of trying to convince an genderfork academic I'm friends with to actually put a 20 marks question on an exam "what is your gender?".

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#105

Post by olalonde »

saulrh wrote: post #101
olalonde wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Total straw man, he didn't define any culture as this, he noted that it's one characteristic of our culture. From Randall's post: Our culture's relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them [...] > "Do you want to walk around Baghdad at night alone?" An American man's likelihood of getting killed in Baghdad is a couple of magnitude h…

In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from car accidents than from crazy murderers. That's true. However, if I'm doing my math right, the statistics for rape and sexual assault are an entirely different story. The US isn't on both of these lists[0][1], so we'll take a proxy and compare: Germany has 6.5/100k deaths/year in accidents and 8.9/100k rapes/year. Note that that's per 100k people, not per 100…

Right, but I was really objecting the "American killed in Baghdad" vs "woman murdered/raped in the US" comparison. What I meant is that the risk of a woman getting raped/murdered in the US is much closer to the risk of getting killed in an accident than of walking at night in Baghdad. I'm still sure there are far more than 8.9/100k deaths in Baghdad.

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#106

Post by zb »

andreyf wrote: post #6

Why not simply reword the question to ask whether you prefer to be referred to as a "he" or "she"? In the rare case that it doesn't align with your genetic or anatomic gender, it's not exactly the end of the world.

That already is the definition of "gender".

The issue here is whether there should be an option to make the data non-public.

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#108

Post by demallien »

olalonde wrote: post #73
demallien wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but VERY few" I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. You know, if it's only 1% of men that act in a sexually predatory manner (workplace sexual harrassement, groping on public transport, all the way through to rape), how am I as a woman supposed to react? Online it's even worse, I can expect sexually explicit comments to be made to me with a probability approaching 1.0 if I reveal my gender (HN is a pleasant exce…

There seems to be deep ignorance of what it's like to be an old fat bald guy in our culture. Who do you think had the worse night? My guess is that it's the old fat bald guy who had to go home with his right hand, got publicly humiliated in front of all of his friends by getting rejected and physically pushed by a girl half his size. Not to forget his wallet is probably much lighter after paying all those drinks to w…

Your response is disturbing. You seem to think that the fact that a man has bought a woman a drink gives him the right to initiate unwanted physical contact. It does not, and I suggest that you avoid any temptation in life to act as though it does. Buying a woman a drink gets the man the right to start a conversation that the woman can terminate at any moment if she so wishes, and nothing more. I note in passing that you can 'purchase' the same right much more cheaply by finding a witty line, or just having the courage to walk up and say hello.

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#109

Post by silencio »

olalonde wrote: post #103
silencio wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot more to it than "old fat bald guy". I don't know why so many people keep missing the extra clues, including in this past weekend's skeptic/atheist brouhaha over Richard Dawkins being ignorant. In short, it's the same damn situation. "Nice guy" (which is an unknown to the woman) approaches woman, gets rejected, is pissed off. Nice guy forgot to look at the situation, which was woman alone with man hitti…

I agree with you on most point except this one. > When you're a fat, bald guy that does exactly that, you don't get to be treated like it's all okay and the girl is obligated to spend time with you because you bought her a drink or ten. Where I live right now, women (and some men) surprisingly often offer me drinks in bars. Most of the time I'm not attracted to them but yet, I find it only fair and nice to spend some…

I feel like we're on the same page yet not.

I believe the key to the situation is will and interest. It is not drinks or attractiveness or grinding. All of that is awesome if everyone is okay with it. I too will also regularly talk to, dance with, and spend time with people that I may not want to sleep with but that I find interesting and comfortable to talk to. I will let them know this in advance, and most of the time they're completely fine with just the brief companionship and otherwise accept my declining their offer. This is basically the old bald guy chatting away with a woman and maybe even having a dance together, with no expectation of sex. Or the old bald guy that walks away from a woman that just said "thanks, but no thanks" to him.

What I am never okay with and what I believe is wrong and worthy of public shaming is the old bald guy that tries to grind up against and buy drinks despite the woman pushing him away. It doesn't even have to be the old bald guy. It could even be a ripped young guy with a nice suntan, a significant other or a friend or anybody to anybody else. You're not showing that person any respect by ignoring their boundaries.

I don't know if I'm doing a good job explaining this, but thanks to said skeptic brouhaha someone else has a very eloquent piece on this subject: http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-sch...

While I don't care much for the statistics, the situations created to illustrate the third and fourth points is of particular interest to this conversation.

Lastly about drinks, I think that declining the offer and buying your own drinks is the right thing to do. Some people don't understand that and like to freeload, which is rude but what can you do. The person buying drinks needs to understand that there is no obligation attached to buying someone else a drink.

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#110

Post by perlgeek »

brianmatter wrote: post #77

i'd love to know what makes "Radall" the expert on what "Many women grow up with"

I've seen a video of Randall talking about a variety of stuff (I think it was "Google Tech Talks" or so), and I got the impression that he just talks to people, and listens to what they say. While reading his comics I also thought multiple times that he must be a very good observer.

That doesn't necessarily make him an expert in the sense that conducting a scientific study would make him, but it's still worth listening to him.

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