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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

For me, I'm totally fine with the house being cold and in the low 60s during the winter and just using sweatshirts and space heaters as necessary.

However, some folks (especially females) don't like the ambient air being that cold because their fingers start to hurt. Can't blame people for not wanting to wear mittens at home.

EDIT reply to: >(note that some people regard the use of "females" as a noun to be a red flag)

Thank you for the heads up but I'm surprised "females" has become controversial. I did a cursory google check with a mainstream respectable outlet like NYTimes and they use "females" the same way I did. When did the norms change?

https://www.google.com/search?q=nytimes+%22especially+female...

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Keeping your hand ligaments warm is crucial to prevent damage while typing.

There are gaming and compression gloves for this.

That's really interesting, re. ligaments. Can you point to any resources around that, so I can learn more?

There are tons on material connecting cold muscles and ligaments with low blood flow and risks of inflammation. Arthritis, carpal tunnel, RSI etc.

Random links:

https://www.stelizabeth.com/healthyheadlines/cold-weather-an...

https://www.barringtonortho.com/blog/carpal-tunnel-and-cold-...

Those links connect cold with the symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome not the cause of it.

Are you saying it increases the risk of injury or just pain?

That's why I clearly wrote that there's a ton of material and that I was sharing 2 random links.

> Are you saying it increases the risk of injury or just pain?

Both. Lowering blood circulation decreases the ability of muscles, ligaments and tendons to self-repair. Among other things, cold lowers blood flow (and viceversa). That's why people warm up before stretching.

I’ve read a lot of conflicting research about warming up before exercise. With evidence it improves, does nothing, or reduces performance depending on the specifics etc.

My intuition is cold hands would be a risk, but I don’t particularly trust such intuition.

> Thank you for the heads up but I'm surprised "females" has become controversial. … When did the norms change?

It is still not uncommon to see the word used that way in scientific text, official documentation, and data collection forms, though in those contexts the word male is probably near-by too so “female” isn't being used in isolation. Even in those places it is less common than it used to be.

Over the last ~decade referring to women as females, particularly in less formal contexts like discussions here often are, has become associated with incels & similar individuals/groups. They use it as a pejorative term, deliberately¹ using the technically-correct-but-unnecessarily-formal word as a way of distancing from women, suggesting they are a lower form², or blaming women for the unfair distancing the speaker perceives³. Then again they use almost every word as a pejorative term at some time or other, they seem to have a lot of negative brain wiring of which their attitude to genders may be but one of many symptoms.

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[1] and in spoken form making sure to pronounce the word in a way to make the intent obvious

[2] for a popular culture reference that might help: if you are a Trek fan, think how Ferengi characters talk about women

[3] “why don't these people I'm constantly bad-mouthing ever like me?”!

Women, children and old people often feel the cold more.

(note that some people regard the use of "females" as a noun to be a red flag)

But I think it's a legitimate question of whether feeling the cold especially indoors is a sex-related or a gender-related difference, and I think someone could reasonably guess it was the former. Do women feel colder indoors than men because of e.g. clothing norms, or do females feel colder indoors than males regardless of their gender identity? I have read the explanation that the difference is mostly caused by the delta in metabolic rate -- in which case distinguishing by sex rather than gender seems clearer and more accurate.

So, you're saying, the majority of all people.

>When did the norms change?

Given that the vast majority of the search results you linked to are from articles 20-30 years old, I'd imagine sometime around 1990-2000.

>majority of the search results you linked to are from articles 20-30 years old, I'd imagine sometime around 1990-2000.

One of the links from the 1st page of Google results is a February 2022 article written by a woman (Nicole Gelinas).

https://www.city-journal.org/surge-in-violent-crime-against-...

I'm not debating it because I truly don't know but it sure seems like a lot of people (including women) did not get the memo that "females" has suddenly become an offensive word.

That's not a NYTimes article. Furthermore "vast majority" does not mean every single instance, it means significantly more than 50%.

Google results will vary from person to person, but for me only 2 of the first 10 results are from the past 20 years, which is especially surprising since Google tends to prefer more recent results. I think 80% counts as "vast majority".

Finally since I'm at work I decided to just ask 4 women colleagues and they all agreed unanimously that referring to women as female is weird. It's clinical and unusual in the same kind of way as referring to people as "human" (said in a kind of alien/robotic voice that people use to make fun of Zuckerberg).

>I decided to just ask 4 women colleagues and they all agreed unanimously that referring to women as female is weird. It's clinical

I actually already agree with your coworkers reactions but your survey isn't really what I was doing. In regular conversation, I don't call women "females" and don't know anybody who does. Yes, that would be clinical sounding and de-humanizing.

But in writing, when we wanted the text to refer to both F-gender-age-over-18=="women" plus F-gender-age-under-18=="girls" ... the elegant short phrase that covered both was "females". It's just a form of text compression.

And (some) women journalists still using "females" in 2022 means people are still using it innocuously. It's a shame that incels ruined it.

Yes I definitely agree with that overall.

>"females" has suddenly become an offensive word.

This is a trend lately. Black, master, slave tend to become forbidden words. The planet is revolving and evolving.

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