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Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

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Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#731

Post by jabelk »

overgard wrote: post #487
InclinedPlane wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. It's just one drop of water out of a clear blue sky. The sort of thing that is easily tolerable, hardly even a nuisance really. Maybe you don't have many female friends, maybe none of your female friends work in tech, and maybe you've never had any female coworkers. The fact is, for women in tech it's been raining, it's been raining every single day for decades. One drop is tolerable, but it's the unrelenting d…

This argument would almost make sense if the joke was at all about women. Except it's not. The only mention of women on that page is a message that they're included too. The word "bro" is making fun of college age american males, it literally has nothing to do with women at all. I mean, I'd think this level white knighting would be excessive if it even had something to do with women, but I'm fantastically amused by t…

That's the thing. That's why some women notice and others don't, and it's always split. The women who notice, notice that the use of the word bro EXCLUDES them from the joke. The women who don't notice, don't recognize or don't care that they're being excluded. In most fields, these jokes happen all the time from women AND men and everything is sunshine and rainbows. But in programming, the jokes come almost ubiquitously from men, about men, with nothing AGAINST women except for just ignoring the existence of female programmers. And at some point, it becomes really difficult not to notice the constant exclusion.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#732

Post by aragot »

Karunamon wrote: post #566

For real? Someone does a play on words with man pages and we end up with a 546 comment thread about SJW bullshit? Unbelievable. Someone does a cool thing and the discussion is about the name they chose for it . Not what it does, not what problem it solves, but because someone, somewhere, might have an issue with the name. Concentration on the minutae of mostly irrelevant things instead of stuff that actually matters,…

546 comments, including:

- 530 talking exclusively about the name,

- 14 mentionning the name as an issue and

- 2 commenting on the real, useful, technical stuff.

Thank you HN

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#733

Post by Domenic_S »

Crake wrote: post #703
KuraFire wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever considered the idea that your apparent dislike towards all things and people described as "feminist" suggests that you have, over the course of your seemingly-angry life, adopted a huge amount of misogynistic perspectives on things? Because, hate to break it to you, but you were born a feminist. Everyone is. Every person that has ever lived on planet Earth was born a feminist. Because the idea that wome…

>Because, hate to break it to you, but you were born a feminist. Everyone is. >You are born a feminist; if you don't die a feminist, you lost a bit of your humanity during your life. If everyone is born feminist, where did this allegedly sexist society come from in the first place? You are neglecting to account for the entire field of biology and genetics, as well as making feminism sound like some sort of creepy rel…

> (although it's certainly starting to resemble that, recently)

Recently? :) Find some articles and pictures from the '70s.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#734

Post by xamebax »

Crake wrote: post #682
vinceguidry wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything wrong with deciding in a particular case whether the complainants are being goobers or not. What I do see a problem with is just assuming that everyone trying to do their part to moderate culture so as to be more inclusive is just an Internet whiner. That's just anti-social and it perpetuates the problem of sexism in hacker culture.

>What I do see a problem with is just assuming that everyone trying to do their part to moderate culture so as to be more inclusive is just an Internet whiner. This might have something to do with the fact that 99% of the time, they ARE internet whiners. This is why no one wants to be associated with feminism anymore. An over fixation on censorship and a staggeringly low amount of self-awareness.

>no one wants to be associated with feminism anymore

Oh gosh, you're commenting on HN, you obviously should have some data to back your opinions with? Right?

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#735

Post by xamebax »

mumbi wrote: post #296

Great idea. Never been a fan of the whole bro thing, but I say keep the name. If the women want a 'sister pages', let them make it.

I'm not sure if treating men as the default is the best way to go here, dear. I mean, it's the 21st century already.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#736

Post by a3_nm »

falcolas wrote: post #582
Steuard wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about offending people. It's never about offending people. Plenty of people could have delightfully off-color senses of humor, love playing Cards Against Humanity, and still find this name highly problematic. It's actually about the signals that we send by using language closely associated with groups or attitudes that have long histories of excluding women or others from our culture and community. And just…

A short confession. After participating in this forum for a few years, I never thought this was an actual problem. Watching this whole thread of conversation has been very enlightening, and not in the way I had hoped. So, on behalf of those of us who had not seen these attitudes before so blatantly on parade, my sincerest apologies.

I had a similar moment of realization about gender equality once. I used to believe that IRC was a very nice medium because the gender of the participants was not revealed (unless they wanted to), so (I thought) it was entirely free from gender prejudices.

Then, I discussed with someone on the channel of a hackspace I used to go to (but had just started attending so I didn'n know the people well); I had never seen the guy IRL but he said he would attend the next session so I could figure out who he was in real life.

But when I come, none of the participants were him. And then a female participant shows up and a while later it turns out that "he" is her, and I was shocked to see how unexpected this felt.

I'm not implying that the IRC user being female was in any way shocking, nor did I believe that the women who had joined us (and, this time, the only female participant around) could not be a "real" participant to a hackspace. It's just that, while I had wondered of every participant whether it was that IRC guy or not, I just hadn't made the connection for her.

And, thus, I realized that, without even noticing it, no matter my opinions about gender prejudices, I must have had a pretty strong mental image of that IRC user being male, for me to be so surprised when she turned out to be female. IRC wasn't gender-neutral. It was male by default.

I'm not sure how related to the discussion this is, but for me this was the moment when I realized that prejudices weren't just something that stupid people did, and that I was also influenced by them even if (especially if) I didn't notice.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#737

Post by jabelk »

VexXtreme wrote: post #726
jabelk wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said "I have literally been denied housing multiple times on the account of not being a local and that fact wasn't even hidden from me. Do I care? Not really" To me, that sounds a lot like you "not really caring" about "prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their actual or perceived membership in a certain group or category" which is the wikipedia definition of discrimination. So I'm not seeing the stra…

You're moving the discussion goalposts. This isn't about housing in Asia and I have no time to discuss that. I have made my opinion on racism and discrimination well known. If you are choosing to ignore that and move goalposts around, it just proves you're an unreasonable person.

YOU moved the discussion goalposts by bringing up your trip to Asia in the first place. And then you told me I had no right to be indignant about the systematic exclusion of women from tech because it was a "first world problem" compared to the discrimination you faced in Asia which, of course, you didn't even care about anyway! So don't try to tell me that I'm unreasonable.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#738

Post by Crake »

elohesra wrote: post #599
benched wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you haven't worked on my current team. I used to cringe on a daily basis for the one woman on the team, until she left. They think they're being funny, and they think they are somehow "standing up" for their right not to be P.C. I honestly don't know if they know or intend their tone to be bullying. This comment is a binding site for the following comment-pattern: It's Your Job To Stand Up To Them.

Maybe the correct solution would be to do more than just cringe? If you did indeed confront them, then I apologise for assuming otherwise, but it seems to be the case that there's an awful lot of posturing as a warrior for social justice on HN, yet very little actual, difficult, real-life work towards any social justice causes.

That would require actual effort/danger, which SJWs would never put themselves through. Moral superiority is their goal, not any sort of change.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#739

Post by Crake »

sethammons wrote: post #611
theorique wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole bro humour is deliberately exclusionary, it is an in-joke for tying together small groups of (mostly) young males. That is what it is for. It's important to draw the distinction between the usage of the term to (1) describe oneself and one's peers and create an ingroup as opposed to (2) describe (and often criticize) others I don't see a lot of unironic usage of (1), aside from the odd tone-deaf fratboy. I…

I agree with (1) and (2). I know the first thought I had when I saw "bro pages" I thought is was a pun on "man pages." Turns out I was right. As others have noted, no one seems oppressed with "/sys" or that since jewelry is mostly a feminine product, that using "gem" is hostile. Or Julia. Etc. I'm sure the argument is something akin to being that because we are in a male dominated space, that feminine gendered words…

Nah, you've got it about right. It's not offensive at all, and the contortions people are performing to make it so are quickly becoming quite mind boggling.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#740

Post by Crake »

jabelk wrote: post #676
overgard wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Thanks.

The entire problem is that "saying 'bro' is poking fun of other men"! It is a joke, by men, about men, in regards to programming. To reiterate: a joke, regarding programming, written by men, that completely disregards women. Of course, on its own, that is pretty irrelevant. There are jokes like that all the time on all sorts of topics. But in this situation, it is ALWAYS men joking with/about other men. Women are exc…

"If it's not about women, it's sexist."

Ok.

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