Comment by NotAnEconomist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotAnEconomist | Hacker News Reader

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> I find it alarming that a scientific organization has rules that restrict free speech using such vague, subjective language.

Feminism has always been a sexist power movement, and the natural outcome of that is always authoritarian social policy.

At it's core, feminism is about the sole focus on accruing benefits and status for one sex (or gender, depending on who you ask).

Feminism fights for women's rights, but not men's: the vote, but not forcing women to enlist in selective service; workplace rights, but not for men to have parental rights; women in STEM, but not men in psychology, teaching, etc -- or even men in school at all.

Perhaps there was a time that kind of sexist focus was a force for good, but I have to seriously question that. Regardless --

If you're part of feminism in an academic context, you're part of a majority power movement, which routinely denigrates and attacks the minority gender in blatant violation of Title IX -- and have been for decades.

Feminism is sexism.

So it's surprising to me that the scientists are surprised.

Could you please follow the guidelines more closely?

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

> Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Additionally, this is a pattern with the account that needs to change:

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, and we ban accounts that do it.

We count alternate accounts as well, so they all get banned unless all improve.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Feminism fights for women's rights, but not men's

I mean, that's the whole purpose. I don't have a crystallised opinion on 3rd wave feminism but the 1st and 2nd were clearly necessary.

It's like saying the black panthers were bad because they were not fighting for white people's rights.

As far as I know, women aren't a minority. They have longer lifespans than men.

But overall I do agree, they needed some extra rights. However, the feminist movement now feels extraneous, as most of their rights have been achieved.

Like any good bureaucracy, IMO the organization exists to further promote its existence, goals be damned.

It's odd to me that you circumscribe justice to only "minorities".

On the left, we don't use the word "minority" any longer, because the number of people in the group is largely immaterial in its marginalization.

Instead, we talk about "marginalized" groups which, regardless of their size, face systemic disadvantages peculiar to themselves. I consider the American white masses to be marginalized in ways made clear to me by Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash"[1], despite our numerical predominance (and complementary privileges).

So when one seeks to falsify Feminism, it doesn't strike me as remotely relevant to discuss the overall ratio of women:men. Women's marginalization is no less significant because it's widespread. To falsify Feminism, instead, one must adopt immutable definitions of "women" "men", I think.

I haven't personally teased apart my own socialized gender ontologies, however.

1. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209433-white-trash

No, but women are marginalized in many aspects of life, including their careers. That leads them to be minorities in leadership positions and other positions of power, which then perpetuates the cycle.

I don't mean to imply anything about previous millennia.

I'll just note that we're two decades into this one.

I think this argument would carry more weight if, you know, the numbers had changed. If the top spots in the highest paid fields (finance, medicine, management, research, technology, media, government) were actually reasonably close to parity, you might say the movement has run its course. But since we are still far off from that, and women are still expected to do more than half the work around the house and so on, it seems there is still work ahead.

I'm not saying men should not have parental rights (and, it should be added, obligations). And of course there are people working on that issue (to pick one). But do you have data that suggests this is as large an issue as, say, the dearth of women in top positions?

The top-paying subfields in finance, medicine, sci/tech, are all heavily affected by the "people vs. things" distinction that the article talks about, in being highly skewed towards "things". (Business management actually has similar problems as managers are heavily selected for being risk-loving and it's well-known in the social-science literature that women tend to be more careful than men at assessing risk.) There might be more hope wrt. the people-focused part, and we do see women having quite a bit of success there, even more so in parts of the world like East Asia where contemporary feminist ideology, with its pandering to wishful thinking and populism while neglecting the facts on the ground (as described by OP) is not really a major focus compared with the West.

People vs things is not a thing.

Imagine someone wrote a paper that said men are horrible at management or anything collaborative because all their testosterone makes them so angry that they simply get too emotional to work with others.

If you are a man -- and who knows on the internet -- you know this is garbage. Yes men have more testosterone. That is a fact, and no one is arguing. Yes, testosterone means you are more likely to get angry, but it doesn't follow that your anger levels prevent you from working. Come on!

But now, instead of believing you, people say you are hysterical and anti-science, and you have to do a study to prove you don't get so angry you can't work. Every day people post examples of men who went ballistic at work. The study is inconclusive and you are wasting all this time trying to prove that the testosterone doesn't make you angry. Every time you lose your temper, people point out that you are a guy and of course you're prone to that.

That's what this "people vs things" distinction is like.

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