Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I compare the experience to living in a hotel vs. living at home

This is very apt. If we've all grown out of our parents' basements when we left /., then let me share my own analogy.

When SSHing into different servers I used to bring my .vimrc and .bashrc along with me, because how could you live without them? Likewise for switching computers, you bring along your config files. When a new job required me to be at lots of different computers, and SSH into lots of different servers, I also made a conscious effort to reduce my dependency on customization. That's when I developed my significantOther vs girlInEveryPort modes of operation.

In significantOther mode of operation, I invest the time to customize the environment so that it is perfect for _me_. This is like looking for a woman to marry. It takes time, and the first woman (or config setting) has no more chance of being the best as does the twentyith. We invest much time finding on what we _can_ compromise, and on when we cannot.

In girlInEveryPort mode of operation, I have little problem using vanilla VIM and standard Bash. I might stumble a bit and touch her in ways she doesn't like, but overall we get the job done and nothing is broken afterwards.

The perfect balance for me was to discover that I could have both modes of operation.

Hi, a little feedback from a wise person who has been on the internet for a while: while you probably thought this was a clever analogy, you would do a lot better not saying things like "I might stumble a bit and touch her in ways she doesn't like".

try to avoid gender-specific analogies in computing. You may think you are being clever, but you're really just making yourself look like a cad (And not everybody will give you this feedback directly. They will just stop talking to you).

Thank you for the feedback.

What is the problem with gender-specific analogies in computing? If I'm making an analogy with relationships, and I am a man, why wouldn't I use a female for the other half?

There's a subtle distinction here so please bear with me.

I guess that to some extent this exchange is affected by being cross-cultural without the participants being aware of it. The fine-pointed contemporary standards that currently apply in—for example—the major cities of the U.S. are not in circulation worldwide. This leads to misunderstanding and excessive harshness. People read comments as if they were written by their next-cubicle neighbor instead of someone on the other side of the world. Does that matter? I think it does; we instinctively make allowances for who the other person is and where they're coming from, in the interests of getting along. Alas, on a text-based internet forum that information isn't available, making tolerance harder. This can easily make the difference between thinking "god, what an asshole" and thinking, "wow, what a pleasant and articulate person". Unfortunately for us all here, the bias is always toward the asshole bit, not the pleasant bit.

Because this bias is so strong and so poorly understood, as moderators we normally urge tolerance and ask readers to stretch a bit to understand each other. In fact I was just writing a defense of your original post in that spirit. But then I figured I'd better read it thoroughly, and noticed this:

> I might stumble a bit and touch her in ways she doesn't like, but overall we get the job done and nothing is broken afterwards

That one sentence is in a different category from the rest of what you wrote. It's one thing to use gendered relationship analogies in a technical discussion. In many places where HN readers reside, that now feels anachronistic and crude—a bit like "take my wife, please" jokes—but is easy enough to give the benefit of the doubt to. But when you take it as far as a sexual analogy that toys with ambiguity around consent, that's crossing into a different zone altogether.

Thank you very much.

I defend that sentence as meaning "touch her with consent in ways that are different that what she is used to". In keeping with it being an analogy for config files, I would like to edit it to read "stumble a bit when I touch" but it seems that my post is locked to editing.

You are invited to edit that phrasing in, or if you can unlock the post I'll do it.

Thank you for taking the time to explain. I'll do my best to apply what I've learned.

After thinking about it some more, I stand by my original wording. The first time that we do something - whether it be with a woman or a new server - we make mistakes. That is what I was trying to express. In no way did I say or suggest that I would do things without somebody's consent. I'm sure if somebody is out looking for examples to make then he can twist my words into meaning that, but it is very clear from the context that "against consent" was not my intention. Those people out on their witch hunt are the problem.

But it was not clear that it wasn't your intent. Intent doesn't explain itself, least of all on the internet where we don't have the nonverbal signals people mostly rely on for that. You can't assume that clarity of intent in your own mind translates into comparable clarity in the reader's mind. The opposite is more likely the case.

It gets worse actually. If you word your comment in a way that pattern-matches any highly-charged idea that people already have from elsewhere, they are sure to interpret you as meaning that, even if your intent was in a different place entirely. It is comparable to a smaller mass getting pulled toward a much larger mass, even if its intent was to fly elsewhere.

On a forum like HN, where we'll all responsible for taking care of the commons, the burden is on the speaker to disambiguate. To do otherwise is effectively to troll the community, and it turns out not to matter much whether someone did that intentionally or not; what matters is the effects it has.

  > If you word your comment in a way that pattern-matches
  > any highly-charged idea that people already have from
  > elsewhere, they are sure to interpret you as meaning that

I see, thank you.

It's not "gender specific" analogies, so much, it's "extended sexual metaphors" that are off-putting.

I don't think I'm wise honestly, but I know I'm not a rapist and am not overly sensitive

There are 7.7 billions people in the world, even if every American chose to not talk to me, there will still be 7.4 billion people to talk to.

Fortunately most of us don't live in the US and people are not creepy weirdos who stop talking to you for stupid reasons.

This is straight up misogynistic and is a great example of why women are driven away from our industry, because of language like this.

I don't think so. If you swap gender roles in the text its not demeaning and is still a cheeky commentary on married life. Mentioning a woman or their relationship to a man (in this case) doesn't automatically make it offensive.

While it is a very unusual metaphor, I don't see how it is misogyny or derogatory against women. This is wildly off-topic but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

It’s archaic. The analogy isn’t well served by using women and sex as an example, and I don’t really see why someone needs to hear about touching women in ways they don’t like when all they’re talking about is a shell configuration.

This probably would have gone down well back in the 60s, but we’ve hopefully since moved on from comparing women to objects, and comparing how we treat women to how we treat inanimate things.

Personally, I downvoted because the author’s attitude to women has absolutely nothing to do with discussing good alternatives to laptops.

Because men and women still marry and still chose each other as partners?

And the more men and women wait for that moment to chose the right person, the more the probability of making the right choice increases.

As long as I support women rights, I don't see what's wrong if an eterosexual man talks about choosing the right woman for him.

Should men not chose carefully their partners?

Yes it is a strange metaphor but language like “I might stumble a bit and touch her in ways she doesn't like” is rapey and comparing women to config files is just weird. The whole comment feels like it is objectifying women

You're right, you have a good point there.

> “I might stumble a bit and touch her in ways she doesn't like, but overall we get the job done and nothing is broken afterwards.”

Why the downvotes?

Because it's an analogy for user preference files in drunken frat boy language... And no one here is a drunk frat boy. So it just comes off as tasteless and creepy.

I do not see any drunken frat boy language. I see an analogy. An analogy that makes sense to me.

What people are saying is that you should use an analogy that does not involve touching women in ways they do not want to be. Regardless of whether it "makes sense" to you, outwardly it feels degrading—especially that specific sentence that multiple people have pointed out to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans

Another poster mentioned that is was because I used a female example in a relationship, instead of a gender-neutral example.

There are very vocal people who have very strong opinions that all hypothetical relationships much be gender-neutral, to them it is horrible to "assume" that if one partner is male then the other is female.

No, it's because you drafted sex talk into a non-sex topic.

Perhaps the mild cognitive dissonance caused by the choice of reference points.

Possibly also cross-domain projection of various strongly held views.

Some very vocal, very opinionated people are on a crusade to remove the idea that man with woman, or woman with man, is the default configuration for sex.

They actively downvote any comments that suggest that M-F is "normal" all over the internet, from Reddit to StackOverflow. I would say it's been happening for a while but the past few months have been very extreme.

Nope. It’s about objectification.

Hi, I'm the OP of this "controversal" opinion.

There is nothing objectifying anybody here. I really do not see how anyone is getting at that. In what way have I made anybody an "object"?

With all the respect in the world, I understand what you are crusading for. But you are on a witch hunt, and actively making people your enemies who would otherwise support your cause.

Your failure to understand how your comment could be considered "objectifying" is your own. The reasoning has been explained to you. Saying those who would point it out to you are on a "witch hunt" reveals a serious lack of reflection on your part.

What are you wittering on about? I was merely pointing out that the criticism for your, frankly crass comments has nothing to do with gender or orientation. Don’t shoot the messenger...

It could simply be a single person with multiple accounts trying to manipulate the overarching discussions through downvotes. The downvoting patterns sometimes raise an eyebrow for me too.

That type of behavior is termed "Call-out culture," or "Cancel culture."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call-out_culture

Reply on news.ycombinator.com