Why feminists are so annoying

http://www.felienne.com/archives/3230

by Mojah • 11 years ago

46 78 11 years ago

richmarr• 11 years ago

  the country that first legalized gay marriage

Out of curiousity I started reading... depending on the interpretation this is either Canada, Denmark, or Mesopotamia. I'm guessing she means Canada.

Good post though, spot on.

programLyrique• 11 years ago

Well, she seems to live in the Netherlands ( see http://www.felienne.com/about-3 )...

dghf• 11 years ago

Netherlands 2001, Canada 2005, Denmark 2012 (though recognised same-sex "registered partnerships" from 1989).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Contemporary

MichaelCrawford5• 11 years ago

I lived in Truro, Nova Scotia when two mounties, both men, were wed in Yarmouth, both wearing their red serge dress uniforms.

Most of the wedding guests were also mounties, also in red serge.

They made headlines all over the country for weeks; there was an outpouring of support.

My maternal grandfather was a surgeon in the US Army Air Force Medical Corps during World War II.

He committed suicide in a spectacular way in July 1948, after he was arrested for what at the time was the felony of sodomy. Being quite wealthy, he posted $10,000.00 bail withing the hour - 1948 dollars - then later that day was found dead in a rented rowboat in a lake outside Spokane, Washington.

He made headlines all over the pacific northwest because he totally stymied the medical examiner with the cause of his death. Eventually they somehow figured out that he overdosed with insulin.

My grandmother initiated a legal action to have my grandfather's death ruled a suicide. I don't know how that turned out because my mother refuses to discuss it, she was told he had a heart attack.

I at time puzzle over whether I should initiate a legal action to have it declared a murder.

minot2• 11 years ago

OK, I'll bite.

women ‘nagging’ about equal rights are so annoying

Now, let's talk about the three concepts OP introduced.

1. Simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction.

2. People want to believe they are reasonable creatures themselves.

3. Accepting that there is a bias against women, means you must accept there is a bias in favor of men.

The problem here is not that women want equal rights. No rational actor wants equal rights, only increased rights. It is very disingenuous to talk about a "white privilege" or a "male privilege" without acknowledging there are privileges that come from being $input_race and $input_gender. Of course, people of $input_race and $input_gender will usually not complain about the privileges they get.

It is absolutely OK to seek parity in terms of rights. It is understandable that people seek greater rewards for themselves. Lets just not delude ourselves into thinking that what we want is equality when what we really want is better rights and greater rewards for ourselves.

If feminism is about equality in rights and responsibility regardless of gender or sexual identity, there are a lot of people around who go by the wrong name.

Downvoters: please leave a note.

bayesianhorse11• 11 years ago

Long story short: You believe that feminism has already gone so far that women have more rights than men, right?

MichaelCrawford5• 11 years ago

Ever gone through a divorce?

minot2• 11 years ago

Long story short: no.

NotableAlamode12• 11 years ago

In the US and other western countries, women clearly have de-facto more rights than men. They are much more leniently punished for the same crimes, they are much more rarely homeless, they do get more attention (and money) from social services. In divorce cases they more or less automatically get the children and half of the husband's money. They commit suicide much less often, way fewer workplace deaths. They are allowed to vote but not subject to the draft.

TheSpiceIsLife• 11 years ago

That's not what the parent was saying at all. Would you be so kind as to explain how you came to this interpretation?

iopq7• 11 years ago

In the United States women are born with extra rights such as:

1. Intact genitalia - males don't have this right

2. The right to vote and receive financial aid - males only receive these benefits if they sign up for Selective Service

3. The right to choose parenthood - males have to pay for a child even if they don't want to. Women can choose to give up their child for adoption. A male can not choose not to be a parent.

makomk• 11 years ago

Long story short: feminists won't consider men and women equal until women are not worse off than men in any area, and will accuse anyone who tries to fix the areas where men are worse off of misogyny. This will never lead to equality, no matter who has more rights now. All the arguing about whether "women have more rights than men" is part of the problem, and that applies to both sides.

shoo3• 11 years ago

No rational actor wants equal rights, only increased rights.

Really? Aren't you making some kind of sweeping implicit assumption about the ethics/goals/aspirations of this hypothetical rational actor?

What about highly altruistic hypothetical rational actors?

asgard1024• 11 years ago

No rational actor wants equal rights, only increased rights.

I can't agree with that. There are many smart people out there who are interested in other people's rights, for example, Noam Chomsky.

Now you could say that he does the cause he does just because he is interested in self-promotion. But how does that work then? If other Americans agreed with his views, then it would mean they are too interested in other people's rights and so they are not rational. If they wouldn't agree, it wouldn't be a very efficient way to self-promote.

You could also say that Noam Chomsky is not rational. Then, many people like him are not, and your comment is not relevant to the real world.

In fact, the blog post author herself is probably not interested in getting more rights for herself. If she was, she would just be a feminist, and wouldn't be annoyed at them. You have very simplistic view of other humans. (It could actually be stated in terms of game theory, which is itself simplistic, that you believe everybody is a hawk.)

alextgordon• 11 years ago

It's the same as rich people who are often so cruel and unconcerned about the less fortunate (e.g. Trump?). It's not that they're sociopathic rational actors, they simply cannot comprehend being poor.

PavlovsCat• 11 years ago

While I can only speak for myself, that I can do: At some point, the bottleneck of personal happiness becomes the suffering of others. The food I eat would taste better if others weren't dying of starvation, period. The same goes for fairness. No man is an island, and all that.

bayesianhorse11• 11 years ago

You don't need to be a feminist to want to make a programming community more "diverse". Often the lack of diversity is a sign that there is toxicity in the culture. Trying to attract more women, or people of color, or LGBTs rather than chasing them off can only make a community more healthy, in my opinion.

Also, once you really take a look at "feminist" issues, they are a bit deeper and more complicated than people who say they don't believe in feminism seem to think.

MichaelCrawford5• 11 years ago

In the united states, it is unlawful for employers to discriminate for reasons of age against people over forty. Even so, software engineers become unemployable in their late thirties.

I am fifty-one.

Also in the united states, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against the mentally ill, as well as those who are simply perceived as mentally ill.

I have quite sever bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. I link to my essays "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" and "My Deepest Fear" at the top of every single page of my website, including my resume:

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-...

"My Deepest Fear" concerns my vividly paranoid visual hallucinations. The specific reason I work as a coder rather than as a physicist is that I still write good code when I am hallucinating. I first realized that to be the case in 1988, I wrote LwSD in 2003 and now I can't get a job.

How often do discussions of diversity include the mentally ill or the middle-aged?

Among my deepest concerns is that I see many younger engineers - startup founders are the worst, as well as the people who they employ - making many of the same stupid mistake I did when I was their age, or the mistakes of my young colleagues.

My aim these days is to find a job where I can teach the children not to fuck up. Unfortunately I cannot get a job because all the young people think I am incapable of writing code.

I did the storage and firewire for a wireless audio recorder that won a technical academy award.

gaius• 11 years ago

One day all the 20-something brogrammers are going to hit their 40s and thing damn, the time to tackle ageism was 20 years ago.

bayesianhorse11• 11 years ago

It's probably time to start a "Old Boys&Girls Club" movement in technology.

tucosan2• 11 years ago

This. I find it hard to deal with the new wave feminists as well as the very vocal group of anti-feminists. IMHO the quality of the debate is a function of people on both sides being stuck in their filter bubbles, a phenomenon which can be witnessed in so many important debates. Modern feminists and their counterparts seem to fall prey to their own respective biases, rendering the whole debate an unproductive endeavor.

It is difficult to simply proclaim oneself a feminist, since it has become too broad a category to be a meaningful label anyways. Which school of feminism do you mean when you call yourself a feminist? How many people taking part in this debate are even able to distinguish between these different schools?

That being said, I personally highly prefer working in a diverse team. Teams constituted solely of (white) men tend to be way less fun to work in, compared to a more diverse team. Diversity in my experience does stimulate more creative approaches to a problem domain due to the heterogenous backgrounds of the team.

pbhjpbhj• 11 years ago

Teams constituted solely of (white) men tend to be way less fun to work in //

If you live in an area and work in a field where more white men are qualified for the work available than other colour-sex groups then you probably act in a racist and sexist manner then.

Isn't this just an extension of a reason why (in the UK at least) computing fields are currently skewed, that those who chose those fields were socially dismissed as "nerds". Now, shock horror, other peoples refusal to associate with them due ostensibly to fashion/social mores has lead to homogeneous groups.

It seems to be taken as a truism that such homogeneous groups exist because the internal individual morality enforces biases - but the same result appears to be achievable assuming that those external to the group are the ones with the biases. In practice I imagine it's both.

Wanting your teams to be fun is fine, find a way to determine how "fun" someone is and use that rather than assuming that position in a colour-sex space is a proper metric for "fun-ness".

Diversity in my experience does stimulate more creative approaches to a problem domain due to the heterogenous backgrounds of the team. //

This is interesting to me because colour and sex don't demonstrate anything about the backgrounds of people yet those are the characteristics you've chosen. In my kids primary school (UK) there are families with heritages that are Chinese, Spanish, Pakistani, South African (Afrikaans), Zimbabwean, German, Welsh, Scottish, English, Polish, and probably a few more I don't know or can't recall; but they're not really that diverse, they are on the whole middle-class British born children. There's seemingly more difference between the few that are working class/multiple-generation unemployed (or just poorer) than between those of different geographic heritage.

It troubles me that people like you will reject giving my kids, who are relatively poor compared to the society around them, any opportunities because you can't see past their colour and sex (white, male). IMO if you're happy to accept that with everything else being equal you should give a job to my youngest's best friend - a black girl - in preference to him just because her grandparents live in Zimbabwe then you've got to also accept those who chose other arbitrary characteristics too, like giving a job to someone just because they're white. I don't think you can equivocate and say racism is fine how you do it but not how someone else does it.

lclarkmichalek• 11 years ago

Part of it, to me, has always seemed to be due to the institutional/personal divide. I enjoy watching people playing video games professionally, and yet as a feminist, I can say that it is ridiculously sexist scene. I can condemn the institution without condemning its members, and my saying it is a sexist institution is not my apportion blame; I simply would like to see the system improved.

See also: gamegate

tshadwell• 11 years ago

Where's the sexism in e-sports? I don't really have a position here, I just wanted to know.

My gut feeling is that there will be a very high percentage of e-sports players who are men because the majority of competitive video game players are men.

danso• 11 years ago

1 They remind us that the world is not a fair place, which contradict the Just World hypothesis. Simply said: people want the world to be fair and they happily refute evidence of the contradiction. So if girls in tech say they have less opportunity, we all love to believe they are wrong. The world cannot be unfair, could it? So: they must be wrong. This is, of course, untrue. There are many studies done proving that there is some subtle bias, like the one where resumes with a male name were rated as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant.

I've often wondered how much being Asian-American has contributed to my current life of being a programmer. Throughout school and college, I've never shown any particular passion or innate skill. But I got a lot of subtle encouragement, such as from my immigrant parents who thought majoring in computer engineering would be practical even though I was much more into journalism. After college I didn't even bother looking for programming jobs, but I gradually got moved more and more into programming roles...the engineering degree helped, but I have to guess that some of it was a lot of benefit of the doubt given to me, based on me looking like a computer nerd or having the stereotypical math aptitude attributed to Asians (I'm also pretty average at math). After enough years of this, I'm not a pretty competent and passionate programming...but it seems hardly by active choice. I believe the average young woman probably doesn't get as many chances or benefits of the doubt that I have.

mike_hearn• 11 years ago

The article seems to say: "Feminists annoy me because they are right".

This is not why feminists annoy me, though. I don't think they are right at all. So the title of the blog post seems to extrapolate her own views out into a universal truth.

This sort of thinking is especially dangerous:

With the same high school grades a white person has a 78% higher chance of being admitted to a university than a person of color

I do not know where this stat comes from as she provides a cartoon instead of a reference, but assuming it's not a trivially bogus stat (e.g. because of differences in application rates), it sounds a lot like it could be a Simpson's Paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

The very same argument was made to suggest a gender bias in admissions at an American university (Berkeley): when you selected just people with the same grades, more men were accepted than women. Sexual discrimination!!!

The problem is, when they tried to figure out which department was discriminating, the bias disappeared (actually became slightly in favour of women). It turned out to be a statistical anomaly caused by the fact that women tended to apply for much more competitive courses than men, like English Lit, so they were rejected more often due to overcapacity - not due to their gender. When you select only application rates and gender, this type of data abuse causes misleading conclusions.

I don't know that the race stat is another example of this, but I find it hard to believe that such a dramatic case of racism across so many institutions could persist for so long without severe legal problems, if it was as open and shut as Felienne suggests.

Final issue I have with this blog post:

You believe God put dinosaur bones in the earth to test your faith, you think vaccines cause autism? Yes, that’s crazy but also funny haha who cares?

The first is harmless belief that doesn't normally impact other people, the second triggers preventable outbreaks of exceptionally serious diseases. So lots of people care and parents opting out of vaccinations is a very controversial issue right now! It seems very strange to use this as an example!

iopq7• 11 years ago

It could be that white people with the same grades as people of color have higher SAT scores or any other factor that is not being stated.

Or it COULD BE that people of color includes East Asians that actually get discriminated against BECAUSE they're so successful in college.

I'd like to see the actual sources on the claim because it's too vague for me to comment on.

octatoan• 11 years ago

Going against established scientific fact does hurt other people. What if you have kids and turn them into young-earth creationists as well?

shoo3• 11 years ago

What you are saying is superficially reasonable!

But it is possible to argue the other direction in few ways:

* what if you raise kids to have a keen understanding of the scientific method, and other skills/knowledge that asist them in achieving their aims, but also encourage them to be selfish sociopaths? Would this be better than raising highly moral, altruistic young-earth creationists?

* What if the net result of our civilisation's scientific and technological development is that we kill off all of the species / generally wreck the planet? Perhaps it would have been better to live in a more "traditional" society that resists the adoption of new ideas/practices. Perhaps life would not be so comfortable as it is now, but it might be far more sustainable!

edit: I guess the overall point I am trying to make is that scientific principles is but one of a set of tools that lets you more effectively learn-about/predict/control your environment. Another example of a similarly useful tool could be "negotation skills". But, in itself, having access to these tools does not immediately make you less likely to cause harm. They merely make you more potentially more effective. But is it a positive thing that that you are now more effective? It depends what you're trying to achieve!

kungfooman• 11 years ago

Imposter syndrome.

scrollaway• 11 years ago

This post is weird. There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed and most of those have nothing to do with the cause, but the means employed.

Riddle me this: Let's say some tech company has to match a man/woman quota of at least 40% on a CS position. (This is a pretty common theme in various places)

Going by the numbers in this post, there's a 1.6% ratio in the author's class. Let's be extremely generous and say there's a 9:1 male/female ratio in CS.

With those numbers, there's a 30% skew in favour of female employees. In a sector with a 9:1 male ratio, that means one in three male employee is rejected because of numbers. The real ratio is actually MUCH higher, remember. And on the other side of the equation, female employees would be very aggressively sought after because positions are not actually easy to fill and just because you can find the bodies doesn't mean the employees are good. Is this where we want to end up?

End sidetrack. There's a lot of causes out there. Discrimination, everything. But feminism, I think, annoys more than others because it promotes unhealthy "fixes" such as this one above. You don't want to force people into a new belief system, you want to change their belief system. The former is super awkward for places where discrimination doesn't happen, and imho just perpetuates the issue.

You want more women in CS? Make technology look like less of a boy's club at an early age (and leading into tech education) and wait 15 years for the results. I think the Minecraft kids generation will yield some pretty fantastic surprises on that level.

rayiner• 11 years ago

Re: forcing people. One of the great victories of our time was the federal government beating people over the head with racial equality. Broadly interpreting the 14th amendment and commerce clause to make not just de jure discrimination illegal, but trampling on peoples' core rights of association to tell them they had to invite blacks into their restaurants and hotels. It was ugly and a gross overstepping of the government's bounds, but necessary because the people needed to be civilized and they weren't going to civilize themselves in any reasonable timescale.

If the government hadn't brought down the hammer we might still have a segregated south today. It's ugly and not always the right answer, but sometimes you need to beat civilization into people.

I'm not suggesting we need the government to be involved. But sometimes you need top down intervention to fix a problem, and the fix isn't necessarily fair while its in progress. Sometimes top-down intervention is the only way to fix a problem in the long run, because he actors with power have no incentive to self-improve.

etherael2• 11 years ago

This argument could've been used to justify Belgian involvement in the Congo, as well as criticise ever leaving Africa to it's own devices. Sometimes, y'know, you've just got to beat civilisation into people.

I really wish you'd think more on this, and think long and hard. It's really depressing to see someone who I know is intelligent and thoughtful, although I deeply disagree with them, promoting such an abhorrent position.

Lastly, also;

he actors with power have no incentive to self-improve. (sic)

Bring that to its logical conclusion with regards to the entity imposing the top down violence in order to beat civilisation into people.

pliny• 11 years ago

You want more women in CS? Make technology look like less of a boy's club at an early age (and leading into tech education) and wait 15 years for the results. I think the Minecraft kids generation will yield some pretty fantastic surprises on that level.

The only way I can make sense of the gender / race quotas for technical positions is that it's a bootstrapping problem: something along the lines of

(i) Women don't want to pursue careers in tech because it's a boys club.

(ii) It's a boy's club because there aren't enough women in tech (i)

(iii) There aren't enough women in tech because women dont want to pursue careers in tech (ii)

Which seems to be an intractable problem without outside interference.

So if you decided that you were willing to make tough sacrifices (or force other people to make tough sacrifices) then you could solve (ii) by forcing/encouraging tech companies to hire more women even if they're less qualified than male candidates and that would solve (i) by making women want to purse careers in tech now that it isn't a boys club which would solve (iii) by changing women more likely to want to pursue careers in tech and (wait several decades) presto now you don't have to discriminate anymore.

That said, I hope you're correct about the Minecraft stuff because that would very conveniently solve the problem without anybody having to do anything they don't already want to (but hoping that problems solve themselves is a bad problem solving strategy).

etherael2• 11 years ago

Actually, no, it turns out this is in fact false.

http://douglasernstblog.com/2014/01/17/white-privilege-artis...

TLDR; a 4.0 GPA is not equal everywhere. Also, affirmative action means that you actually get a bonus for being a PoC, and if you are Caucasian or Asian, you are discriminated against as a matter of admitted policy.

But hey, just world hypothesis makes people ignore that little tidbit too.

Quelle surprise.

colomon• 11 years ago

Huh? I mean, I think the stats as presented in that cartoon are complete BS [1] too, but that link is in no way a meaningful refutation of it.

[1] First hint: note that both pairs of stats presented add up to 100%, yet are described as relative odds of getting in. The second pair is even explicitly labeled "percentage of bachelor's degrees." Second hint: There have been multiple major lawsuits against affirmative action where both sides agreed that (some) minorities were being favored in college admission processes; the debate is over whether that is just. Third hint: Those lawsuits have stated that some PoC get boosts from the admissions process and other PoC get docked points. Yet this cartoon treats all PoC as a single homogenous group.

sputnikus• 11 years ago

I watched https://youtu.be/pPcMZX8OCP8 before reading the article and I find the video to be a very appropriate response.

wanderer2323• 11 years ago

That's one classic "pro-social justice" blogpost written in a didactic tone, touting some anecdotes, making a point of a statistic without any references and conflating all sort of social issues (women in IT? college admissions? bachelor degrees?). Funny thing is, the post itself if a perfect answer for why feminists are so annoying.

benaston• 11 years ago

No, feminists are annoying because the most vocal ones take a simplistic rather literal view of equality, which is a distortion of the more nuanced truth behind the ideology.

Men and women have clear differences which should be celebrated. This means men and women can never be literally equal.

It so happens that women are significantly over represented in nursing. It is not obvious that fighting this imbalance is worth the effort.

joepie91_• 11 years ago

In the Netherlands, this difference is actually part of the typical school curriculum, in what I guess is called 'civics' in English. 'Gelijk' vs. 'gelijkwaardig', which translates roughly to 'identical' vs. 'equal'.

hal9000xp• 11 years ago

I'm from Moscow. I found feminists a bit annoying too. I worked for the second largest tech company in Russia. Everybody complain about Russia. But I have to say, that in my unit, there was many girls who works as developers. These girls are good software developers and I didn't see any issues working with them. Our HR and my team lead had no bias at all against women. It's ridiculous to think that there are bias against women. If she is a good candidate, she will be hired even in Russia. It's just a business, only skills are important, nobody give a .... about your gender. Shareholders interested in net profit, that's all.

By the way, I see curious little correlation between leftists and feminists (hello to USA). I'm not leftist.

Girls usually care much less about career (at lest in Russia) that's why they earn less in average. But those who care, do well (not only in tech).

P.S. I love this video about feminists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc And this right-wing channel too.

auganov• 11 years ago

I hope a day comes when the mainstream figures out there's no generic "feminism" and "feminists". Whenever I hear people say "feminists bla bla bla", it's like - ummmm who exactly? It's pretty much like ranting about some imaginary "leftists".

jpgvm• 11 years ago

At the end of the day the issues with apparent female/male biases are mostly (but not purely I don't think) a matter of culture.

If you don't perpetuate an image that a man should be a certain thing and a woman something else you won't have these problems.

Fix TV, fix magazines etc, fix other women telling women they can't be programmers/engineers/other male dominated jobs. Fix other men telling men they shouldn't be manicurists/nurses/other female dominated jobs.

It's not men telling women they can't be programmers usually. Just like like it's not women telling men they don't want men doing their nails.

The fact it's always framed as men vs women is just dumb.

There are still some bias issues left over once that is resolved but it's not clear if they wouldn't just resolve themselves once the above is corrected (salary gap for one).

jbssm• 11 years ago

Well, because they usually lack coherence in their reasoning.

It's not fun to argue with someone that shouts equality when it suits them, and then are willing to accept an all world of specially tailored laws that specifically benefit them.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

That's zero-th level thinking on the topic. Read some, get some perspective on the problem and its possible correction.

sergioz• 11 years ago

Well, if women are underpaid (all else being equal), why companies doesn't prefer their labor as low-cost substitute?

Why feminists are so annoying

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