Those white male retired coal miners living on welfare in trailer parks and dying of black lung will never understand the plight of middle class office politics.
I think the issue here is simple. Some women make complaints about events in their daily lives, and connect it to a wider conflict/issue about the rights and status of women. Let's call these women group A.
On the other hand, it seems rare for men to complain in the same way.
I've seen men complaining about group A merely having discussions.
I've seen men complaining about the treatment of men whom they are not connected to (e.g. coal miners, kindergarden teachers, nurses).
However, I rarely see personal gripes.
I'd invite you to actually make a personal gripe, because it will be more topical than dragging up an age-old trope.
That said, I think I should clarify my comment was about online discussion. In real life, there's no shortage of people griping from all walks of life, but online (or perhaps, I should say on the tech circuit online) most of the articles, blogs, and comments don't seem, representative of men's' personal struggles, but rather complaints about women discussing their lives, or complaints that some sub-fraction of men whom they can't claim membership with is having issues.
Probably an unhealthy situation, but my understanding is that a man talking about his problems is seems as undesireable/unattractive/not-manly by both men and women.
(This post is not meant to any claim of "which gender has it worse" or anything of that nature, as I find the whole "my suffering is worse than your suffering" line to be counterproductive)
I've found that men are OK with talking about more serious feelings directly, for example if someone close to you died. This would largely depend on your friends though.
The worst example I know is this article that invalidates a vulnerable and personal story by reading it in the most uncharitable and mean-spirited way, such that no empathy with the man is possible.
http://www.rawstory.com/2014/12/mit-professor-explains-the-r...
Similar to the "code of blue" when it comes to police misconduct, no one seems willing to criticize fellow women when stuff like this comes out and say "that's uncalled for" or "that's not what feminism is about."
I won't tell my personal story here, but it has similarities to Scott's.
However, I rarely see personal gripes.
I'd invite you to actually make a personal gripe, because it will be more topical than dragging up an age-old trope.
They tried to destroy his life.
This surprised no-one.
Maybe that's why more people don't do it?
https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-for-you-to-be-widely-...
"destroy his life" is comical hyberbole, and shows the same absurd provincialism that Aaronson initially showed when he claimed that "nerdy men are in fact among the least privileged men out there", blissfully ignorant of the people who weren't raised in upper-middle-class households or get invited to special schools for the gifted.
This is why I usually don't post in threads like these. Grandparent asked for an example of men griping. I gave one. When people tell me about their problems, I try to sincerely listen, not tell them that their problems aren't so bad because some other area of their life is okay. I'd like to ask for the same courtesy.
I doubt that grandparent would use the words "comical hyberbole" if exactly the same treatment had been doled out to someone because they were female, gay, trans, etc. In my opinion, such people have forgotten the concept of justice being blind.
My theory is that Silicon Valley (aka "white men" in the most air-quotes way possible) have moved on to solving the problems of the whole world (whether the world wants them to or not) because they don't have acute social obstacles they have to deal with.
The rest of us have things that bother us every day: we work on fixing those. There's no app for that: it takes the hard work of millions of women and people of color every day. Hard work that is assumed as a "given" by most companies.
And this is in no way a critique of white men for not working on these problems: they're not your problems to solve. Just please don't tear us down when all we're trying to to is claw our way up to your level. A little support (even purely verbal) goes a long way.
Here's an honest question so I understand your perspective: what is an example of verbal support that someone could say to, e.g. you, that you believe you would appreciate in the moment and not interpret as patronizing or condescending?
My personal experience (and that of others I know who fall into what you'd colloquially call "privileged" groups) is that it feels safer to not remark on an individual's race or gender at all unless you know them really well, even in a positive and supportive way, for fear of it backfiring and being interpreted as bigoted.
Maybe you can't come up with an example because it's highly context specific, in which case that's fine, I'm just wondering if you have a comment on delivery in social contexts.
I think it's a mistake to assume that anybody who isn't complaining about something doesn't have anything to complain about. Look at somebody like Robin Williams. Who expected him to kill himself? Nobody.
In general, men are discouraged from complaining about their problems in public. It's unseemly and unmasculine. So to be fair to everyone, we should not assume that the volume of complaints is any reflection on how hard people's lives are.
It's really hard to imagine that this is an instance of sexism, or that men aren't sometimes treated similalrly. Yes , we don't see equivalent "I (male)" statements, but maybe because men generally don't want to complain, or think that it is a personal issue and they don't generalize it to a gender issue
Your theory doesn't account why certain classes of immigrants(specifically Indian and Chinese), often marginalized in society, seem to do so well in silicon valley. Do they get lumped in with "white men" too?
You know what's worse? Being a poor black person.
Wanna know how you can tell? Go ask those coal miners, if they could swap their skin color, would they?