Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

See, toxicity destroys business.

I was once told by different toxic people that I lack social competence while working on projects with them (nobody agreed with them on that). The toxicity caused by them made several key people, myself included, jump the ship and the projects tanked. Lessons have been learned.

>If I am not responsible for how people interpret my words, who is?

Others too.

First because "Effective communication requires effort" from BOTH sides.

And also because others can deliberately misinterpret your words for their own gain, or because they're biased, or because they've been primed by factors outside your control, or for lots of other reasons...

>If someone is unable to clearly express themselves without being misunderstood

That has been the case for everybody for the entirety of history.

There are better or worse ways to express something, but there's no foolproof way to express even the simplest thing in a way that you "wont be misunderstood".

Sometimes even saying "yes" or "no" with the wrong tone (or what the other person perceives as the wrong tone) can be misunderstood.

  *You are painting an entire gender (or the majority) with really broad generalities, all under the premise that gender based discrimination is overrated and exaggerated

No offense but it seems like this is a stock response that you've kind of pasted in here. Because it's all very self consistent but it doesn't actually relate to what I was saying because I wasn't generalizing like that and I wasn't assuming the premise that things are exaggerated, I was talking about when people misattribute blame. I know not all women blame like this and I know that there is discrimination based on a number of factors including gender skin color and other perceptions. I was simply saying that the tendency to misattribute blame along those lines of hot topic issues and avoid facing yourself and laying responsibility correctly at your own choices for successes or failures he is disempowering and it's funny how that's often carried out under the guise of these narratives which pretend to be for the empowerment of women or of some other group.

But the second half of your comment I really agreed with. I think there are a lot of these things happening but I think the term microaggressions is a misnomer because it incorrectly dismisses the validity of or presumes a magnitude of people's feelings where you don't actually know if that's the case.

You can't in general say that everybody needs to react the same way so you don't know if something which seems small to someone else is actually really big to another person.

but what I think the mistake of that kind of talk about this is that really this comes back to people being able to communicate effectively about their own feelings with other people who might be crossing boundaries or hurting them somehow. Like you said the other people might not even realize they're doing it and that's reasonable because everybody's reactions are function of their own individuality. so I think the mistake here is in sort of trying to aggregate and assume you know a common reaction and try to solve this as a you know sociological level rather than going no this is a personal problem of being able to communicate effectively with people you interact with and letting them know how you feel about something.

And not having to feel "oh I need to invoke sort of the mighty sword of the Zeitgeist discourse" you know in order to give validity to how I personally feel about something. It should have validity in and of itself and I think if people can be effective communicators about that then they will have a fine time navigating you know personal situations.

the other problem which I think is a basic interpersonal thing which seems to be missing from this discourse is that you can't blame other people for how you feel and react to things. And trying to hold them hostage to or blame them for your own reactions it's just a violation of a basic interpersonal boundary and it's just wrong. and it's also deeply connected with incorrectly mislaying responsibility for things. because by blaming other people how you feel and react you're incorrectly mislaying responsibility for how you feel and react.

The "lifting" of one's own personal reactions to the level of you know a social offense, (as in, my feelings are hurt therefore somebody did something "wrong", sociologically) unfairly limits the ways in which offended people are allowed to react or things about which they're allowed to feel offended, but it also incorrectly invokes the language of systemic bias for things which don't cross that level, which then starts witch hunts and creates more bias, when these common things (incorrectly called "microaggressions") are simply the result of I think interpersonal communication issues. The other thing that that type of labeling of anything that goes wrong for you as some sort of part of something that's wrong with society is that it traps you in and supports The narrative of you being a persecuted victim of some institutionally oppressed class. Which is very disempowering and very limiting for how you will then be able to respond and think about things.

from a cynical point of view of trying to control large numbers of people in groups and that would be great if I wanted to control you and limit your reactions but it would not be great if you valued freedom, authenticity and personal expression.

you might say you can't separate those things like this systemic sociological bias from interpersonal communication but I think it's really important to separate them because you have to have effective individuals to have an effective society and you can't have effective individuals if people do not respect these basic interpersonal boundaries and you know ways of communicating about themselves, that work.

so I think this is the case where there's a sociological solution for a personal problem but it's not very useful, and is actually maladaptive.

so I think there is a separate issue which can be dealt with sociologically and that's the elimination of unfair and discriminatory bias in all forms and education about bias... but confusing, in the way i try to describe here, the issues of responsibility, personal reactions and interpersonal communication with this sociological issue is a mistake.

If nothing else this will be an interesting time for historians to look back on. At some point sanity must set in and after that I wonder how they will reflect on this period.

If someone avoids certain social situations or conversations out of anxiety that women might suddenly think they are awful, might that not say more about them than about women?

When people talk about accusations of sexism like they are a hidden landmine someone might accidentally step on, it makes me wonder about the person's soft skills. Not just the inability to have insight into what might come off as sexist, but also a lack of experience in how to respond when one makes a mistake and does something sexist.

If you want to be able to talk openly and honestly with someone and give feedback, you should build a relationship with them so there is mutual trust and respect.

Ideally you don't have a fixed outcome or solution in mind when you talk with them about the issue, other than helping them make the best decision regarding the issue. If you think you know what's best without discussing it with someone and getting their thoughts, you are arguably disrespecting them.

If you can't have that sort of conversation, at the very least you need to lay out your reasoning and experience when giving feedback.

Preferably you do both, using both a past constructive relationship and your reasoning to discuss an issue and talk about potential solutions that they can decide on.

Otherwise you aren't providing constructive feedback, you are just giving your opinion.