21 ms·

Absolutely, lets throw away our sense of humor and wordplay because there are theoretically people that might be offended (maybe, kindof. You know. In theory.).

Absolutely, lets throw away our sense of humor and wordplay because there are theoretically people that might be offended (maybe, kindof. You know. In theory.). (N.B. the people that seem to be offended so far are offended on other peoples behalf..) Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?

nknighthb 13y ago
I am not offended on anyone else's behalf, but am personally offended, and I am a man. Don't pretend I don't exist because it's inconvenient to your worldview.
- overgard 13y ago
  You're offended because someone used the word bro. You must be a hit at parties.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    > You must be a hit at parties. Thank you for demonstrating why I'm offended.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - antics 13y ago
    You should remember that there are actual people behind the words on your screen before you say something awful like this. This is not very nice. Another thing I'd point out is that there is a huge number of women who feel the same way. Rather than simply asserting they are all emotionally incontinent, you should ask yourself whether there is something about the experience of being a female programmer who feels like an outsider that you do not understand. (I am betting you are a man, but if you are a woman, I actually still stand by this.) I say this, overgard, because I assure you that if you talk to people who are offended you will find that most of them are reasonable people who want to talk about this in a reasonable fashion. Not just oversensitive sissies who are looking for things to be offended about.
    - overgard 13y ago
      > You should remember that there are actual people behind the words on your screen before you say something awful like this. This is not very nice. I take it all back. I'm sure he's the life of every party.
      - geetee 13y ago
        You monster.
        overgard 13y ago
        It's true. When I'm not poking fun at people on the internet, I spend my time kicking puppies.
      - antics 13y ago
        :( Come on. This is, like, a completely reasonable request.
- romanovcode 13y ago
  I hope, for your own sake, that you're joking here.
  - raganwald 13y ago
    I'm offended, and you'll find I do not joke about oppression.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
ilyanep 13y ago
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Not_a_woman http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Not_a_woman http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/You%27re_the_sexist#.22Talking_about_sexism_victimises_women.22 http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/You%27re_the_sexist#.22Ta...
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  Someone should coin an analogue to Godwin, where linking to the Geek Feminism Wiki is seen as an instant loss of credibility. The wiki is hugely anecdotal beyond all reason, poorly written, often incoherent and their editorial guidelines clearly show that they have virtually no standard as long as the content fits under a vaguely feminist or social justice-oriented perspective. (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Meta:Editorial_guidelines http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Meta:Editorial_guidelines) Their "vision of intersectional feminism" is postmodernism gone wrong.
  - ilyanep 13y ago
    Well now you're making an ad hominem fallacy. Can you please read the actual pages I linked and tell me why you disagree with their arguments or why the arguments they are debunking don't apply to what you wrote?
    - stelonix 13y ago
      An ad hominem is an attack on the messenger. The poster merely gave reasons why the credibility of said link shouldn't be taken at face value.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - ceol 13y ago
        "Credibility"? It's an argument. You either agree with it or you don't. That was most certainly an ad hominem. It was an attempt to counter a point by attacking the messenger, not the argument. Textbook, really.
glesica 13y ago
Another offended man checking in. Why is it so hard to accept that sexist language and actions are offensive to men? I suspect that most people would agree that white people can be offended by the use of terms like "nigger", or jokes about slavery. So then why can't men be offended by misogynistic language or jokes that are likely to create a hostile environment for women? I clicked, I saw the name and was a little turned off but thought maybe it was just a clever shortening of a reasonable word I hadn't thought of (the way "man" is short for "manual"). Then I saw the "girls are bros too" thing and I realized that nope, the authors are just insensitive at best, jackasses at worst. They saw the complaints coming, but they thought it was more important to make some sort of off-color joke than to have their product taken seriously as the useful tool it could be.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mumbi 13y ago
  for a man to be offended by this FOR the sake of women, you must be one pussy whipped mofo. let the down votes commence.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Your post still being +ve is proof that voting on HN is totally broken.
    - mumbi 13y ago
      hit a little too close to home?
  - glesica 13y ago
    So because I find words and actions that might belittle another person offensive, there's something wrong with me? What would you call me if I objected to a racist joke? Would you claim that I was somehow "whipped" by the targeted minority group? Considering the feelings of others is not a defect, it's part of our humanity.
donotsurveil 13y ago
English is not my mother tongue so maybe that's why I don't get the humor here, what wordplay are you talking about ? man is short for manual following a unix tradition, bro is a word associated with despicable attitude and stupid behavior holding those as life goals which has absolutely no link with its actual use. There is no way I'm sharing my library of command examples I built for myself over the years with this ill-named initiative.
- egypturnash 13y ago
  "man" is the English term for "an adult human male". "bro" is short for "brother", and is a thing a certain set of English-speaking adolescent and adult males call each other to express their affection for each other. "man" is a shortening of "manual", used to name a Unix command which will show you the docs for a command-line tool. "bro" is a Unix command which will show you a brief example of how to use a command-line tool and nothing else. If you're lucky it may be exactly what you want to do. But probably not. So the wordplay here: two three-letter words for a particular kind of guy, for Unix commands that tell you how to use other commands. And if they decide to change the name based on people objecting to the cultural assumptions they see in "bro", I'd suggest "guy". Or maybe "dude", which is a little longer, but always feels more laid-back and chilled-out to me than what "bro" has become. Hope that helps!
- blhack 13y ago
  No, bro is short for "brother", which is a male gendered person who has the same parent as you. Brother and sister are the gendered names for children having the same parents. "bro", in this case is short for "brother".
  - wildgift 13y ago
    It's not that simple. I think it originated in surfer culture, as a kind of appropriation of Black American culture to call each other brother and sister. In the 90s, on the west coast, it was common among white hippies, deadheads and surfers to call each other "brah." That said, I don't know where African Americans got it from, but labor unions used the terms brother and sister going back to their beginnings in the 1800s. So it may have been copied from that. Anyway, I think it migrated from surfer culture to fratboy culture. There, it acquired a tinge of elitism and sexism, because... well, frats are elitist and sexist.
blhack 13y ago
I took a poll of the other person in our hackerspace right now: she thinks this is funny. >Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke? I think so. Every female hacker I've ever talked to has expressed that their worst fear is people acting differently around them. They want to get treated like humans, not like outsiders. Banishing any sort of word play because "the women" is pretty offensive to women.
- dgabriel 13y ago
  I took a poll of me, and I think it's bad and not funny. Now we're equal.
- vectorjohn 13y ago
  As others have said, it doesn't matter if you can find a counter example. So you have a sample size of 1 and you think that matters at all?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- rosser 13y ago
  Your anecdata, voluntary, sample-size-of-one survey has completely changed my mind. I feel terrible for having thought this was tacky before. To whom do I submit my abject apologies? EDIT: Also: Banishing any sort of word play because "the women"... Straw-man.
- CJefferson 13y ago
  I took a poll of the only other person in my house at the moment. She thinks it's juvenile and she certainly wouldn't want to recommend it to other people in a public setting.
Spooky23 13y ago
I'm not offended by it. It just sounds stupid.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Sure. It's just one drop of water out of a clear blue sky. The sort of thing that is easily tolerable, hardly even a nuisance really. Maybe you don't have many female friends, maybe none of your female friends work in tech, and maybe you've never had any female coworkers. The fact is, for women in tech it's been raining, it's been raining every single day for decades. One drop is tolerable, but it's the unrelenting deluge that makes life miserable. Every day there's a thousand little pinpricks reminding women that they are the outsider, that they don't belong, that they are an intrusion, an afterthought. It ranges all the way from overt sexual harassment at conventions and in the workplace to sexualized images of women being used in slide decks at programming conferences to thousands of little locker room humor "jokes" floating around everywhere and being made every day. Make no mistake, these "jokes" have consequences. We look around and we wonder why there are so few women in tech. A big reason is that so few women have the passion to don raingear they'll have to wear for the rest of their lives. Most rational folks will just choose to go somewhere it's not raining as much or as often. So yeah, this joke is "funny", a little. Is it funny enough to justify adding to the deluge? Absolutely not. Not by a long shot. And pretending that the deluge isn't there is either ignorant, delusional, insensitive, or just actively hostile toward women. There's little excuse for this sort of thing anymore. It's raining. It's been raining. It's almost certainly going to continue to rain for a good long while. Don't be the sort of asshole who adds to the rain without thinking.
- Steuard 13y ago
  Well said.
- overgard 13y ago
  This argument would almost make sense if the joke was at all about women. Except it's not. The only mention of women on that page is a message that they're included too. The word "bro" is making fun of college age american males, it literally has nothing to do with women at all. I mean, I'd think this level white knighting would be excessive if it even had something to do with women, but I'm fantastically amused by the reaction here considering that this joke has NOTHING TO DO WITH WOMEN AT ALL. The "offensiveness" of this is pure extrapolation. Seriously, you're all just /assuming/ that women are going to be offended by this. But somehow, those of us that are saying that maybe you should let women speak for themselves if it really bothers them, we're the sexists.
Steuard 13y ago
It's not about offending people. It's never about offending people. Plenty of people could have delightfully off-color senses of humor, love playing Cards Against Humanity, and still find this name highly problematic. It's actually about the signals that we send by using language closely associated with groups or attitudes that have long histories of excluding women or others from our culture and community. And just to throw an anecdote or two into the mix, I have at least two female friends in tech fitting that exact description who very explicitly avoid Hacker News for these reasons. Every time they see a woman speak up about being uncomfortable with some aspect of tech culture, their impression is that the community here closes ranks to shout her down rather than accepting the legitimacy of her experience. These are brilliant, fun, unflappable women, and they don't feel any need to subject themselves to that sort of crap. But that means that Hacker News (and to some degree, tech in general) doesn't get the benefit of their participation.
- scott_s 13y ago
  I bookmark a very small number of comment pages for HN members, and yours is one of them. I just wanted to let you know that.
  - Steuard 13y ago
    Wow. Thank you!
- falcolas 13y ago
  A short confession. After participating in this forum for a few years, I never thought this was an actual problem. Watching this whole thread of conversation has been very enlightening, and not in the way I had hoped. So, on behalf of those of us who had not seen these attitudes before so blatantly on parade, my sincerest apologies.
  - Steuard 13y ago
    For me that moment of realization came about three years ago, on an entirely different forum. I came into a discussion (on a topic similar to this) between a female friend of mine and another guy a few hours after it started. Every post of his had me nodding: I probably would have said just the same thing if he hadn't beaten me to it. So it was frustrating and confusing to see my friend getting increasingly hurt and angry as they went: why couldn't she see how much this guy was making sense? I was pretty intensely annoyed with her by that point. I decided that if I was going to be able to get through to her about why she was being unreasonable and this other guy was right, I'd have to dig through some of the links that she'd shared so I could make a convincing case that her position was unfair. I read the articles she'd linked to, and I still couldn't figure out why she'd been so upset. Confused, I read them again. Then I read some of their links, and theirs, and began hunting for more. What had begun as a determined mission to convince my friend that she was blowing things way out of proportion gradually turned into a dawning horrified realization that I had been solidly and unthinkingly on the wrong side of this whole range of issues for years (despite thinking that I was very committed to gender equality). Only those few hours of delay before I'd seen the original conversation had saved me from being the one saying totally insensitive and hurtful things to my friend, and I can still think of times in years past when I did say things that make me cringe today. Ever since, I've taken it as a sort of penance to try and share what little of this stuff I've started to understand whenever I see people talking about these issues the way I used to. I hope that it occasionally plants a seed of understanding for someone, even if it doesn't take hold right away.
reddiric 13y ago
It's less "in theory" and more "in practice" when lots of people are telling you it's not funny, it's offensive. Also, it's not funny, it's immature, it's offensive. You can continue to be as oblivious and boorish as you want, I can't control your behavior. But I'll be blunt in telling you it's not funny, it's offensive, because you seem to have a self-indulged ignorance that people who feel that way exist in any meaningful way. It's true that those voices aren't as loud and may not exist in your echo chamber, but you can't feign ignorance and claim that everyone telling you it's stupid, not funny, immature, and offensive don't exist/are a vanishingly small minority. >> Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke? >> If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it,
oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
> Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke? Literally no-one said anything of the sort; the fact that this is where your mind went speaks volumes about your attitude towards women.
deevus 13y ago
I never understood the idea of being offended. It's probably because I'm nigh unoffendable (?). Also, I share the sentiment of Steve Hughes - "So what? be offended! nothing happens!"[1] [1]: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b48_1305790944 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b48_1305790944
mikeash 13y ago
No, let's merely be aware of what we come up with when we use our sense of humor and wordplay. I'm not tremendously offended by the name, but I'm put off enough that I can't be arsed to actually click the link and see what these things are. It's simply in bad taste. Imagine if somebody built a new version of ksh that had three times as much stuff, and they decided to call it kkksh. This is not the same degree, but it's the same basic thing. It's just distasteful and dumb. Witty wordplay can sometimes get away with being distasteful if it's sufficiently good. But "bro page" isn't good. And note that none of this is based on my guess at what other people would think. I simply don't like it much myself.
- sdegutis 13y ago
  I'd agree, all except the last line. The reason I find it distasteful isn't because I myself am offended, but because I know it's going to needlessly offend others. Whether I agree with them being offended or not, I know that it could be easily avoided with little to no cost. That's what makes it distasteful.
torbjorn 13y ago
The hostility towards bros in this thread makes me feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.
davesque 13y ago
You really think that this is just something that people "maybe, kindof. You know. In theory." might be offended about? To me, this is on par with the titstare fiasco. Seriously, people. Grow up and get a life. Not everyone in the world is a "bro".

nknighthb 13y ago

I am not offended on anyone else's behalf, but am personally offended, and I am a man. Don't pretend I don't exist because it's inconvenient to your worldview.

overgard 13y ago
You're offended because someone used the word bro. You must be a hit at parties.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  > You must be a hit at parties. Thank you for demonstrating why I'm offended.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- antics 13y ago
  You should remember that there are actual people behind the words on your screen before you say something awful like this. This is not very nice. Another thing I'd point out is that there is a huge number of women who feel the same way. Rather than simply asserting they are all emotionally incontinent, you should ask yourself whether there is something about the experience of being a female programmer who feels like an outsider that you do not understand. (I am betting you are a man, but if you are a woman, I actually still stand by this.) I say this, overgard, because I assure you that if you talk to people who are offended you will find that most of them are reasonable people who want to talk about this in a reasonable fashion. Not just oversensitive sissies who are looking for things to be offended about.
  - overgard 13y ago
    > You should remember that there are actual people behind the words on your screen before you say something awful like this. This is not very nice. I take it all back. I'm sure he's the life of every party.
    - geetee 13y ago
      You monster.
      - overgard 13y ago
        It's true. When I'm not poking fun at people on the internet, I spend my time kicking puppies.
    - antics 13y ago
      :( Come on. This is, like, a completely reasonable request.
romanovcode 13y ago
I hope, for your own sake, that you're joking here.
- raganwald 13y ago
  I'm offended, and you'll find I do not joke about oppression.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

ilyanep 13y ago

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Not_a_woman http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Not_a_woman http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/You%27re_the_sexist#.22Talking_about_sexism_victimises_women.22 http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/You%27re_the_sexist#.22Ta...

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
Someone should coin an analogue to Godwin, where linking to the Geek Feminism Wiki is seen as an instant loss of credibility. The wiki is hugely anecdotal beyond all reason, poorly written, often incoherent and their editorial guidelines clearly show that they have virtually no standard as long as the content fits under a vaguely feminist or social justice-oriented perspective. (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Meta:Editorial_guidelines http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Meta:Editorial_guidelines) Their "vision of intersectional feminism" is postmodernism gone wrong.
- ilyanep 13y ago
  Well now you're making an ad hominem fallacy. Can you please read the actual pages I linked and tell me why you disagree with their arguments or why the arguments they are debunking don't apply to what you wrote?
  - stelonix 13y ago
    An ad hominem is an attack on the messenger. The poster merely gave reasons why the credibility of said link shouldn't be taken at face value.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - ceol 13y ago
      "Credibility"? It's an argument. You either agree with it or you don't. That was most certainly an ad hominem. It was an attempt to counter a point by attacking the messenger, not the argument. Textbook, really.

glesica 13y ago

Another offended man checking in. Why is it so hard to accept that sexist language and actions are offensive to men? I suspect that most people would agree that white people can be offended by the use of terms like "nigger", or jokes about slavery. So then why can't men be offended by misogynistic language or jokes that are likely to create a hostile environment for women? I clicked, I saw the name and was a little turned off but thought maybe it was just a clever shortening of a reasonable word I hadn't thought of (the way "man" is short for "manual"). Then I saw the "girls are bros too" thing and I realized that nope, the authors are just insensitive at best, jackasses at worst. They saw the complaints coming, but they thought it was more important to make some sort of off-color joke than to have their product taken seriously as the useful tool it could be.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mumbi 13y ago
for a man to be offended by this FOR the sake of women, you must be one pussy whipped mofo. let the down votes commence.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Your post still being +ve is proof that voting on HN is totally broken.
  - mumbi 13y ago
    hit a little too close to home?
- glesica 13y ago
  So because I find words and actions that might belittle another person offensive, there's something wrong with me? What would you call me if I objected to a racist joke? Would you claim that I was somehow "whipped" by the targeted minority group? Considering the feelings of others is not a defect, it's part of our humanity.

donotsurveil 13y ago

English is not my mother tongue so maybe that's why I don't get the humor here, what wordplay are you talking about ? man is short for manual following a unix tradition, bro is a word associated with despicable attitude and stupid behavior holding those as life goals which has absolutely no link with its actual use. There is no way I'm sharing my library of command examples I built for myself over the years with this ill-named initiative.

egypturnash 13y ago
"man" is the English term for "an adult human male". "bro" is short for "brother", and is a thing a certain set of English-speaking adolescent and adult males call each other to express their affection for each other. "man" is a shortening of "manual", used to name a Unix command which will show you the docs for a command-line tool. "bro" is a Unix command which will show you a brief example of how to use a command-line tool and nothing else. If you're lucky it may be exactly what you want to do. But probably not. So the wordplay here: two three-letter words for a particular kind of guy, for Unix commands that tell you how to use other commands. And if they decide to change the name based on people objecting to the cultural assumptions they see in "bro", I'd suggest "guy". Or maybe "dude", which is a little longer, but always feels more laid-back and chilled-out to me than what "bro" has become. Hope that helps!
blhack 13y ago
No, bro is short for "brother", which is a male gendered person who has the same parent as you. Brother and sister are the gendered names for children having the same parents. "bro", in this case is short for "brother".
- wildgift 13y ago
  It's not that simple. I think it originated in surfer culture, as a kind of appropriation of Black American culture to call each other brother and sister. In the 90s, on the west coast, it was common among white hippies, deadheads and surfers to call each other "brah." That said, I don't know where African Americans got it from, but labor unions used the terms brother and sister going back to their beginnings in the 1800s. So it may have been copied from that. Anyway, I think it migrated from surfer culture to fratboy culture. There, it acquired a tinge of elitism and sexism, because... well, frats are elitist and sexist.

blhack 13y ago

I took a poll of the other person in our hackerspace right now: she thinks this is funny. >Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke? I think so. Every female hacker I've ever talked to has expressed that their worst fear is people acting differently around them. They want to get treated like humans, not like outsiders. Banishing any sort of word play because "the women" is pretty offensive to women.

dgabriel 13y ago
I took a poll of me, and I think it's bad and not funny. Now we're equal.
vectorjohn 13y ago
As others have said, it doesn't matter if you can find a counter example. So you have a sample size of 1 and you think that matters at all?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
rosser 13y ago
Your anecdata, voluntary, sample-size-of-one survey has completely changed my mind. I feel terrible for having thought this was tacky before. To whom do I submit my abject apologies? EDIT: Also: Banishing any sort of word play because "the women"... Straw-man.
CJefferson 13y ago
I took a poll of the only other person in my house at the moment. She thinks it's juvenile and she certainly wouldn't want to recommend it to other people in a public setting.

Spooky23 13y ago

I'm not offended by it. It just sounds stupid.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Sure. It's just one drop of water out of a clear blue sky. The sort of thing that is easily tolerable, hardly even a nuisance really. Maybe you don't have many female friends, maybe none of your female friends work in tech, and maybe you've never had any female coworkers. The fact is, for women in tech it's been raining, it's been raining every single day for decades. One drop is tolerable, but it's the unrelenting deluge that makes life miserable. Every day there's a thousand little pinpricks reminding women that they are the outsider, that they don't belong, that they are an intrusion, an afterthought. It ranges all the way from overt sexual harassment at conventions and in the workplace to sexualized images of women being used in slide decks at programming conferences to thousands of little locker room humor "jokes" floating around everywhere and being made every day. Make no mistake, these "jokes" have consequences. We look around and we wonder why there are so few women in tech. A big reason is that so few women have the passion to don raingear they'll have to wear for the rest of their lives. Most rational folks will just choose to go somewhere it's not raining as much or as often. So yeah, this joke is "funny", a little. Is it funny enough to justify adding to the deluge? Absolutely not. Not by a long shot. And pretending that the deluge isn't there is either ignorant, delusional, insensitive, or just actively hostile toward women. There's little excuse for this sort of thing anymore. It's raining. It's been raining. It's almost certainly going to continue to rain for a good long while. Don't be the sort of asshole who adds to the rain without thinking.

Steuard 13y ago
Well said.
overgard 13y ago
This argument would almost make sense if the joke was at all about women. Except it's not. The only mention of women on that page is a message that they're included too. The word "bro" is making fun of college age american males, it literally has nothing to do with women at all. I mean, I'd think this level white knighting would be excessive if it even had something to do with women, but I'm fantastically amused by the reaction here considering that this joke has NOTHING TO DO WITH WOMEN AT ALL. The "offensiveness" of this is pure extrapolation. Seriously, you're all just /assuming/ that women are going to be offended by this. But somehow, those of us that are saying that maybe you should let women speak for themselves if it really bothers them, we're the sexists.

Steuard 13y ago

It's not about offending people. It's never about offending people. Plenty of people could have delightfully off-color senses of humor, love playing Cards Against Humanity, and still find this name highly problematic. It's actually about the signals that we send by using language closely associated with groups or attitudes that have long histories of excluding women or others from our culture and community. And just to throw an anecdote or two into the mix, I have at least two female friends in tech fitting that exact description who very explicitly avoid Hacker News for these reasons. Every time they see a woman speak up about being uncomfortable with some aspect of tech culture, their impression is that the community here closes ranks to shout her down rather than accepting the legitimacy of her experience. These are brilliant, fun, unflappable women, and they don't feel any need to subject themselves to that sort of crap. But that means that Hacker News (and to some degree, tech in general) doesn't get the benefit of their participation.

scott_s 13y ago
I bookmark a very small number of comment pages for HN members, and yours is one of them. I just wanted to let you know that.
- Steuard 13y ago
  Wow. Thank you!
falcolas 13y ago
A short confession. After participating in this forum for a few years, I never thought this was an actual problem. Watching this whole thread of conversation has been very enlightening, and not in the way I had hoped. So, on behalf of those of us who had not seen these attitudes before so blatantly on parade, my sincerest apologies.
- Steuard 13y ago
  For me that moment of realization came about three years ago, on an entirely different forum. I came into a discussion (on a topic similar to this) between a female friend of mine and another guy a few hours after it started. Every post of his had me nodding: I probably would have said just the same thing if he hadn't beaten me to it. So it was frustrating and confusing to see my friend getting increasingly hurt and angry as they went: why couldn't she see how much this guy was making sense? I was pretty intensely annoyed with her by that point. I decided that if I was going to be able to get through to her about why she was being unreasonable and this other guy was right, I'd have to dig through some of the links that she'd shared so I could make a convincing case that her position was unfair. I read the articles she'd linked to, and I still couldn't figure out why she'd been so upset. Confused, I read them again. Then I read some of their links, and theirs, and began hunting for more. What had begun as a determined mission to convince my friend that she was blowing things way out of proportion gradually turned into a dawning horrified realization that I had been solidly and unthinkingly on the wrong side of this whole range of issues for years (despite thinking that I was very committed to gender equality). Only those few hours of delay before I'd seen the original conversation had saved me from being the one saying totally insensitive and hurtful things to my friend, and I can still think of times in years past when I did say things that make me cringe today. Ever since, I've taken it as a sort of penance to try and share what little of this stuff I've started to understand whenever I see people talking about these issues the way I used to. I hope that it occasionally plants a seed of understanding for someone, even if it doesn't take hold right away.

reddiric 13y ago

It's less "in theory" and more "in practice" when lots of people are telling you it's not funny, it's offensive. Also, it's not funny, it's immature, it's offensive. You can continue to be as oblivious and boorish as you want, I can't control your behavior. But I'll be blunt in telling you it's not funny, it's offensive, because you seem to have a self-indulged ignorance that people who feel that way exist in any meaningful way. It's true that those voices aren't as loud and may not exist in your echo chamber, but you can't feign ignorance and claim that everyone telling you it's stupid, not funny, immature, and offensive don't exist/are a vanishingly small minority. >> Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke? >> If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it,

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago

> Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke? Literally no-one said anything of the sort; the fact that this is where your mind went speaks volumes about your attitude towards women.

deevus 13y ago

I never understood the idea of being offended. It's probably because I'm nigh unoffendable (?). Also, I share the sentiment of Steve Hughes - "So what? be offended! nothing happens!"[1] [1]: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b48_1305790944 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b48_1305790944

mikeash 13y ago

No, let's merely be aware of what we come up with when we use our sense of humor and wordplay. I'm not tremendously offended by the name, but I'm put off enough that I can't be arsed to actually click the link and see what these things are. It's simply in bad taste. Imagine if somebody built a new version of ksh that had three times as much stuff, and they decided to call it kkksh. This is not the same degree, but it's the same basic thing. It's just distasteful and dumb. Witty wordplay can sometimes get away with being distasteful if it's sufficiently good. But "bro page" isn't good. And note that none of this is based on my guess at what other people would think. I simply don't like it much myself.

sdegutis 13y ago
I'd agree, all except the last line. The reason I find it distasteful isn't because I myself am offended, but because I know it's going to needlessly offend others. Whether I agree with them being offended or not, I know that it could be easily avoided with little to no cost. That's what makes it distasteful.

torbjorn 13y ago

The hostility towards bros in this thread makes me feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.

davesque 13y ago

You really think that this is just something that people "maybe, kindof. You know. In theory." might be offended about? To me, this is on par with the titstare fiasco. Seriously, people. Grow up and get a life. Not everyone in the world is a "bro".