Comment by srpablo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srpablo | Hacker News Reader

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> Completely irrelevant and not true in my opinion.

Hardly, when talking about brash/abusive behavior in the context of an industry where women are underrepresented, I think it's plenty fine to mention that there might be a connection to be made.

> the gender of the poster makes no difference

Eh, I don't agree. It's well-observed in social sciences that men are given more leeway to be abusive than women are; one example is how often words like "abrasive" or "bossy" come up in performance reports: http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...

Or just look at our popular media: how many male antiheroes on TV have enough audience to support them vs. women antiheroes? For every Walter White or Doctor House or Tony Soprano, how many unlikeable women are there? Roxane Gay writes about this pretty well. http://www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/not-here-to-make-friends-u...

> Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?

Per above, I don't think it's "shoehorned." And I think it's fine if we talk about it more than we currently do, because there's plenty to suggest we don't talk about it enough or are insufficiently introspective about it.

It's shoehorned because it's inserting a completely unrelated assertion despite nothing in the slightest pointing to it at all on the rest of the article.

It would have made just about as much sense if they'd written "This would be entirely different had it been written by a black person". But they just had to make it political and race just isn't a hot enough topic in the tech world so they didn't go for that.

It's a pathetic attention grab that sullies an otherwise valid critique.

>Eh, I don't agree. It's well-observed in social sciences that men are given more leeway to be abusive than women are; one example is how often words like "abrasive" or "bossy" come up in performance reports: http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias....

Have they ensured that they are using identical behaviors in this comparison?

If women are socially punished for being abrasive or bossy, you could consider THAT to be a problem. I might consider it a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive, and in fact I truly do.

Somewhat relatedly, the supposition some people have that "women" need to be especially protected from teh scary curse words pisses me off. THAT is a gendered prejudice based on Victorian morality or something.

> I might consider it a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive, and in fact I truly do.

This is a common error, but you're mixing up the idea that the government shouldn't be allowed to penalize you for your free speech and the idea that no one at all should be able to react to you for using curse words, getting angry, or coming off as abrasive.

If I think you're an asshole, I'm perfectly within my rights to not hire you, not befriend you, make fun of you to other people, not invite you out on camping trips, "accidentally" give you smaller slices of birthday cake at company parties, write internet comments calling you a doofus, etc.

I don't know why you think I made that error. Is it because I said "human right" that you think I was making a point about government censorship?

I read your comment above as saying this:

"It's a problem that women are socially punished for being abrasive because I consider being abrasive a basic human right."

It is a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive. That fact does not protect you from social punishment if you behave in a way that the people around you don't want to tolerate. Nor should it.

I meant to say if women are especially penalized in an unfair way that hinders them from other basic stuff like career and community. Of course people are free to dislike abrasive styles of talking. But combined with gender discrimination, it becomes a problem. I don't think men should be excessively punished for cursing either, but they generally aren't (in secular societies).

What does being abrasive or bossy have to do with abuse? These are character traits, and not necessarily bad ones.

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