4 ms·

To quote my significant other: "who the f* actually cares about this!?" Of course you will find women who support your point - as you will find people who supp

To quote my significant other: "who the f* actually cares about this!?" Of course you will find women who support your point - as you will find people who support $something, no matter what it is. The fine line between caring and taking care of a problem and moving every topic off topic, justifying it with something small, unimportant, knowingly wrong interpreted and ripped out of context is the key to change something without creating a mass of people who are just sick of a topic because of the mentioned behavior.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago
If it's small and unimportant, why not do the right thing and use a non-sexist term instead of a sexist term? Why are we defending the use of a masculine mass noun to refer to all humans when it confers no advantage over an equivalent non-sexist term while adding, however incrementally, to the totality of messages that women are not welcome in tech?
- quesera 14y ago
  > If it's small and unimportant, why not do the right thing and use a non-sexist term instead of a sexist term? Because we don't agree that it is a sexist term at all, and altering common usage to suit the sensibilities of a tiny group of people[1] is a) pandering, which is discriminatory, and b) impossible. > Why are we defending the use of a masculine noun to refer.. Well that's just it. It isn't a masculine noun. It's gender neutral. It takes no stance on the debate whatsoever. Its resemblance to a masculine noun is interesting but not relevant. If the author had meant it in a gender specific way, he would have committed a grammatical error. Right bark, wrong tree, I think. You're just making easy noise. If you are passionate about the underlying issue which you've conflated here, I hope you also spend energy in more fruitful efforts. [1] by which I mean the tiny group of people offended on behalf of the larger 51% of the population, the vast majority of which doesn't even recognize this conversation as linguistically, much less socially, interesting.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

If it's small and unimportant, why not do the right thing and use a non-sexist term instead of a sexist term? Why are we defending the use of a masculine mass noun to refer to all humans when it confers no advantage over an equivalent non-sexist term while adding, however incrementally, to the totality of messages that women are not welcome in tech?

quesera 14y ago
> If it's small and unimportant, why not do the right thing and use a non-sexist term instead of a sexist term? Because we don't agree that it is a sexist term at all, and altering common usage to suit the sensibilities of a tiny group of people[1] is a) pandering, which is discriminatory, and b) impossible. > Why are we defending the use of a masculine noun to refer.. Well that's just it. It isn't a masculine noun. It's gender neutral. It takes no stance on the debate whatsoever. Its resemblance to a masculine noun is interesting but not relevant. If the author had meant it in a gender specific way, he would have committed a grammatical error. Right bark, wrong tree, I think. You're just making easy noise. If you are passionate about the underlying issue which you've conflated here, I hope you also spend energy in more fruitful efforts. [1] by which I mean the tiny group of people offended on behalf of the larger 51% of the population, the vast majority of which doesn't even recognize this conversation as linguistically, much less socially, interesting.