Also "Men, after all, embody most of the problem;" will not be winning many converts to your point of view. Men are not a uniform being. You're painting with some really broad brush strokes and the only people who are going to hear what you say are those that already fully believe it themselves.
This is true with most problems. How many people saw a problem with the Windows hegemony? That doesn't mean it's not a problem, just that many people are not in a place to see it.
> Women have free will and can choose the career of their liking.
Yes and no, in that order. "Career" is an essentially social concept. Consider, for example, that women got less than 10% of medical and legal degrees as recently as 1972:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_do...
What changed between now and then wasn't women's free will, which they have always had. It was the social context.
> Men are not a uniform being. You're painting with some really broad brush strokes
Sure. So are you. I think most people here are smart enough to understand how a generalization works.
> "Men, after all, embody most of the problem;" will not be winning many converts to your point of view.
Sure, there are people who, for the moment, are such delicate flowers that they cannot admit that they might be part of the problem. But if those people "convert", they will not do much good.
If anything, I'd say privilege based on treating people as abstract monoliths and having double standards, and being unfair and abusive towards others did cause and causes "the problem", one a symptom of which you call "the" problem.
You know nothing about what others think about, what they know or don't know. I grew up with mostly female friends, always loved to work in mostly female teams and am at the moment, too, and one of my proudest childhood moments was a 13 year old female friend telling 9 year old me that I'm "the only one I can really talk to around here". I believe in being fair irrespective of person, and being supportive to ANYONE who needs support, and that besides making them laugh surely is one of my qualities my female friends would not ever want to miss in me. If I was as I am to them because they're a woman, that would be regression, plain and simple. For me people are persons first, things like gender and age second, and people who think there is "being a woman" versus "being a human who happens to be female" I want to have nothing to do with. I feel exactly the same way about men who do the reverse.
Anyways, crawling on one's knees because of identity politics is BS. Don't interrupt others nilly-willy, listen, don't presume, don't be rash. Don't trample on "small ones", be a compassionate person and show it. This has nothing to do with where you are or who you're dealing with, and nothing to do with gender. It's called being a good person, and this talk about empathy is really like blind people talking about colors. Why not simply recognize the psychological make-up of people by dealing with them, not by gender or nationality or other statistical probabilities.
To sum up, not only is something way better, way more thorough and honest possible, it's being done every day, all the time. It's just those people quietly enjoy being decent to each other.
Did you mean a different word here? Because as far as I've seen, the emphatic males are the biggest problem in this context.
> You know nothing about what others think about, what they know or don't know.
Do you recognize the multiple ironies in this statement?
Yes, I'm generalizing. That is a necessity in discussions about broad characteristics. You don't have to have a Not All Men explosion [1] because you don't feel like a general statement doesn't fit you perfectly. If you think you're better than average, good for you. Not everything written for a broad audience has to be about you; you can move on and read the next comment.
> Why not simply recognize the psychological make-up of people by dealing with them, not by gender or nationality or other statistical probabilities.
I agree with part of this, in that people have wide variation in nature and experience and I want to respect that, not put them in little boxes for my convenience. But there are useful correlations between external appearance and experience, especially where that experience is about how people are treated.
For example, when walking at night in my urban neighborhood, I go well out of my way to give women a lot of space, to not walk too close to them for too long. I'll slow down, pass them, cross the street, get on a different train car, or take an alternate route altogether. Why? Because women are highly likely to have experienced street harassment, stalking, or worse. To them, I'm Shrödinger's Rapist. [2] There's no need for me to make a personal inquiry into their history and psychology, which would be hella creepy and would ruin the effect I'm trying to have, which is just to give them room.
And giving women a different sort of room is what I was arguing for above. Your rant mainly seems to be about things that I didn't say. If you'd like critique some points I actually made, that would be swell, but for now I stand by everything I wrote.
As an aside, you seem to be tacking dangerously close to the shores of "I don't see color", which has a lot of issues. [3]
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=not+all+men
[2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_Rapist
I do the same on long stretches of walk at night etc., but generally? Whenever I pass a woman in broad daylight I have to get away to make sure she doesn't feel threatened? Ever heard of body language, ever heard of not BEING a threat and so lively a person that the situations where you have to worry about this become rather rare?
> And giving women a different sort of room is what I was arguing for above.
How about this: ask them if they want to be treated like a wounded animal. Don't just presume. Or even better, read their body language, too. It's not rocket science, and compared to that your "useful correlations" are like trying to build a CPU with a bucket of sand and a spoon. It's not that I don't know all you say, it's that I know more. Allow for that possibility.
I do, but I don't believe it to be the case here. Random anonymous dudes full of hypocrisy and drama but low on facts don't score well on my credible witness scale, especially when the topic is the experience of women.
But yes, guys should be aware that their common instinct to come in and dominate a thing will often not be well received. Partly because dudes pushing to dominate is how the problem was created and is maintained. Partly because as men we are less likely to actually understand a problem that we don't experience and therefore have thought less about. And partly because there are plenty of women who have been traumatized by men acting like that in the past, and so reasonably see it as a danger signal.
So I encourage guys who want to solve this problem to spend a very large amount of time listening and learning. To always be seeking to defer to the people who are actual experts and/or who are already working on it. To pick up the work that is the least showy, the least glory-filled, the least status-gaining. In short, to approach the work with a deep humility, a high level of respect for the people who have lived at the sharp end of this problem for years.