Whether it's helpful or not, I hope it's self aware. Jumping from denigrating men to celebrating a culture without denigration in a single sentence is impressive.

> Is this casual sexism helpful to anyone, men or women?

It communicates the author's perspective to the reader, and that may be useful to them if they believe (correctly?) that such a statement will bring them favour.

Personally, I dislike it and hold a dim view of it; but I can't speak for others.

Weird. My first thought reading that even men! parenthetical was not that the author actually had a dim view of men.

If the parenthetical read "even women!" that would not be perceived as a minute poke at the female ego. Commentary would be at least an order of magnitude louder/more inflamed. You know damn well there would never be an "even women!" parenthetical by any author who cared about their career.

So it's weird for you to take what little commentary there is and shoehorn it into 'minute poke at the male ego'. Honestly I paid way more attention to it due to your comment, otherwise it would have just slid out of my awareness.

Exactly this. How many people who are commenting are missing the point is hilarious.

Fwiw, my take is that outrage culture has gone too far... maybe its time to play their game.

>If the parenthetical read "even women!" that would not be perceived as a minute poke at the female ego. Commentary would be at least an order of magnitude louder/more inflamed.

Come now. Far worse things are said about women all over the web all the time.

And the point is the double standard. When women are outraged about toxic male behavior that leads to sexual harassment, violence, rape culture, keeps them out of employment in certain fields, etc, they're derided and dismissed as radical feminist man-hating social justice warriors engaged in mob outrage and misogynistic witch-hunts.

When men are outraged about literally anything, no matter how trivial (and this is very trivial), it's always perfectly justified.

> Come now. Far worse things are said about women all over the web all the time.

You can't possibly be ignorant enough to think that the existence of blatant (albeit throwaway) misogyny like the example here would be tolerated on HN? There'd be rightful complaints right at the top of the thread and dissenters would be downvoted to hell. To be clear, I'd very much be joining in on the downvoting: a throwaway joke about women being bad at something isn't within the bounds of what I consider acceptable in eg learning materials.

Believe it or not, there are people out there who were raised with a shred of moral consistency, and who have actual moral beliefs (like being against sexism) instead of whatever grotesque facsimile of a conscience you've convinced yourself is your moral center. "But there are people out there who do worse!" isn't an ethical argument, it's a toddler's excuse for acting out.

How can we end toxic masculinity if we cannot tolerate male fragility?

Men expressing vulnerability and anguish when hurt ought to be lauded, not laughed at or dirided.

I looked at that book, but I was worried about the Gtk part, the book is now a few years old, is the Gtk stuff still relevant? My worry is that Gtk seems to always be coming out with new versions and its hard to know whats still relevant and good.

Is that a valid concern or not?

This isn't vulnerability and anguish, it's petty nitpicking and virtue signaling.

That sounds like irony. Given the author is German and lives in France for years, it could totally be a sarcasm to denounce the current situation. It's hard to tell just by text though.

> Why is it always that SJWs like you need to find that one joke, one excerpt and turn it into some kind of personal war/problem/argument/discussion/hate?

Namecalling ("SJWs like you") is against the hacker news guidelines. I would suggest you read them.

Also, it's worth noting that actual, self-proclaimed SJWs (I am one, I know many, and am in their communities) wouldn't have any problem with the joke in question, because it's "punching up", i.e. it is making a joke about social problems in a group that has the systemic advantage. So your name calling isn't even accurate in this case.

> Instead of focusing on the VALUE brought by the author, you managed to dig up one benign joke and went on to discredit the entire thing.

Please point out where the poster "discredit[ed] the entire thing". I don't see them discrediting the entire book, I see them questioning a bit of context around the joke, which is a perfectly valid thing to do.

> Why aren't you ashamed of yourself?

Why aren't you? The poster is asking a legitimate question around the context of a line of the book, and you're insulting them and denigrating them for this.

Maybe this is more about outrage culture (being upset over relatively small things like microagressions rather than "real problems", often argued to be a fallacy of relative privation, unless the small things are not a problem at all or the argument is that the response is disproportional to the magnitude of the problem) than about whether an SJW is of a feminist or some other persuasion. Some disagree that SJWs are necessarily feminist or vice versa. A lot of these terms aren't exactly clearly defined.

The argument could have been a lot clearer and less confrontational. At least it seems more consistent than anti-feminists being "reactionary" for the old times where we could make jokes about women but being offended by jokes about men.

> SJWs like you

That's awful lot to infer about someone from one sentence.

> turn it into some kind of personal war/problem/argument/discussion/hate

Picking the "discussion" part out of that, why is discussion on these topics a bad thing?

> one benign joke

Benign is subjective.

> discredit the entire thing

I think a more charitable read would not result in the implication that the question was intended to discredit the entire work.

> you actually put EFFORT in finding something

Or perhaps the parent just saw this when reading the page.

> Why aren't you ashamed of yourself?

Probably because it was just a simple question being asked.

To clarify, by parent I was referring to the original commenter who made the parent comment to yours. My comment had nothing to do with biological parenthood. I'm glad you had a good laugh :)

> Why aren't you ashamed of yourself?

Regardless of the argument, that's an unkind, personally-attacking tone and doesn't seem necessary to your criticism.

This is not productive. I have opinions about the tone here because I like reading comment threads here. "Hurt" is not something I can speak to.