The root cause of my responses is your attitude. You berated this person for no good reason after reading two sentences of what they had to say. Regardless of what you think about how I'm responding to this, I wish you would just acknowledge that simple fact.

Telling someone that they are sticking their fingers in their ear (strongly implying that they're acting like a child) and then telling them to "level up" clearly conveys vitriol. It's just a bullshit, reactionary, polarizing and inflammatory statement to make. You say that you want everybody to respect each other, but then you do that. I don't think I can spell it out any more clearly.

(Also, when I said "According to you, men are horrible jerks" I was referring to your view of the "utopian finger-in-ears attitude [which] ignores the reality of the harrassment and the systemic uphill battle female devs face". Clearly one can say that you think industry men are horrible jerks without creating a strawman. It's a misunderstanding, I didn't quote you out of laziness. There's a fine line between a misunderstanding and a strawman, but it's there. Why don't we just chalk this whole exchange up as a misunderstanding?)

You're hot on the subject of women's rights. I get it. But I'm glad that paulcole's original question that started the whole sub-thread got many downvotes here because my own opinion is that I'm sick of hearing about women's plight in the first world. Give me a fraking break. This is a post about Javascript. Let's talk about that and if the alleged 10-20% of women in the industry decides to join in to talk about the actual fraking topic, let's not make a big deal about it.