"You can't be sexist against men" is a classic Orwellian contradiction in that (by the plain meaning of the term) it itself is a sexist statement while simultaneously reinforcing this redefinition. It is so blatantly self-refuting that I'd long assumed it to be some kind of straw man, not something feminists actually said.
What you're essentially doing is trying to pack into the word "sexism" the notion that everything in society is systemically biased in favor of men, at the expense of women. But rather than establishing and defending that notion, you pack it in as an unquestioned assumption so that you don't have to defend it explicitly.
As a result, you deliberately minimize any injustices suffered by men to the benefit of women, implicitly saying that it doesn't matter as much when a man faces sexual discrimination. Again, you could simply argue this point explicitly, but for some reason you're trying to pack it into your language.
Steve Klabnik's point, stated explicitly, would be something like this: "that instance of sexual discrimination against men, in favor of women, doesn't really count for much, because on aggregate, society still discriminates against women in favor of men." As far as I can tell that's what he meant, and it's even a defensible argument from a feminist perspective, but it also lays bare a lot of assumptions that not everyone might agree with, so it's couched in the superficial form of a semantic argument. This not only makes the controversial premises of the argument easier to swallow, but renders them in a form of a simple factual claim giving the illusion of certitude.
As far as the scope of this discussion is concerned, I don't have a problem with Mr. Klabnik's point, but simply the dishonest way he expresses it.
Since you claim that there is a redefinition, what exactly do you think sexism meant in the first place?
"prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women" (Merriam-Webster)
"prejudice or discrimination based on sex; behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex" (Wikipedia)
I think these are all perfectly acceptable "plain English" definitions of "sexism".
Definitions are nothing but arbitrary convention anyway--my point is that when you explicitly unpack the feminist definition of "sexism", seemingly semantic arguments like Mr. Klabnik's are packing in a lot of assumptions that deserve to be unpacked. Generally, I don't favor definitions that pack in tendentious assumptions for political purposes.
I disagree that there are extra meanings being packed into the word sexism beyond the meanings you cited. That you are unaware of the origins and issues that go into sexism doesn't remove the meanings of the word. To be fair, no mainstream outlet or publication tends to talk about things at that length and level for a variety of reasons, many of which are due to systemic sexism, but don't confuse common understanding for the only understanding. Common understandings that lack depth or more rigorous information are what contribute to a common understanding that promotes racism, sexism, and other issues.
For more on sexism as a definition, see: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/sexism-de...
"A running theme in a lot of feminist theory is that of institutional power: men as a class have it, women as a class don’t"
"What this imbalance of power translates to on an individual level is a difference in the impact of a man being prejudiced towards a woman and a woman being prejudiced towards a man"
Or as I called it: "the notion that everything in society is systemically biased in favor of men, at the expense of women", leading to the conclusion that "it doesn't matter as much when a man faces sexual discrimination".
Fine. We agree that the same assumptions are being packed into the feminist usage of the word "sexism". My argument is that these assumptions need to be called out and defended in this forum. If this were a feminist forum where everyone could be reasonably assumed to have already accepted those assumptions already, perhaps the implicit jargon would be more appropriate. Furthermore, the act of imposing this jargon is a backhanded way of imposing the assumptions behind that jargon.
There's nothing Orwellian about that, though, because we are talking about information that hasn't been made available or accessible for others rather than taking terminology and changing its meaning to suit a political agenda diametrically opposed to what the original term stood for. In fact, that mass media has perpetuated sexism and feminism as things that do not have a systemic basis or ignoring that they do is the more Orwellian thing going on in US society.
As for imposing assumptions, the notion that using terminology correctly and explaining and examining that terminology is somehow backhanded in a discussion or argument is silly. How else are we going to get better understanding without using actual terms and the ideas behind them?
Thanks for pointing this out. I did go through high school, so I'm hip to your extremely erudite reference.
> "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful.
Really. I don't find much use for it. Maybe if I just spent more time virtuously casting my opponents as evil users of "Orwellian" tactics, I could also point out that _their_ worldview is manichean.
Given recent events though, I'm surprised you're still going around setting yourself up as some type of moral authority. Someone who bullies women programmers doesn't really have much credibility on this issue, does he?
Whoa...slow down there, hoss.
Steve explained that his tweet about @harthur's replace utility was not meant to disparage its author, or its code, but was meant to express his feelings about Node (i.e. the ecosystem for which replace was written). And, he apologized, "unequivocably", for the fact that his tweet had caused pain to @harthur:
http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node
And, @harthur then said this in a followup to her original post,
http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/open-source-rocks-fo...
My last blog post was quite a downer, so I want to do a short follow up for posterity.
First of all, there were some nice responses to it from Steve Klabnik and especially Corey Haines, who gave a very sincere straight-up apology. Several people have told me they are usually very nice, so keep that in mind.
So, your characterization appears to be incorrect and unfair.
"unequivocably" -- which is non-standard -- instead of, "unequivocally",
when writing his apology. :-)
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69930/unequivocab... )
(I didn't even know that people said 'unequivocably.')
Racism/sexism/whatever... a wrong is a wrong. Fight it wherever you find it. My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups". Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same. Recursively. All I have seen the left do in the last 40 years is carve up society into ever smaller and more specific groups with associated victim-hood points and it doesn't get us anywhere. All you are doing is entrenching division.
Sure. Sexual discrimination is bad, no matter who is being discriminated against.
It's about false equivalencies. You might want to see the last part of my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178799
> My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups".
Two people aren't a group?
> Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same.
You might actually really like Latour, who's a sociologist who argues that his entire field is wrong because of too much abstraction. I've been reading 'Reassembling the Social' lately, and it's fascinating.
That said, I actually disagree that the cause is 'thinking of people as groups,' but you of course are entitled to your opinion.
> All you are doing is entrenching division.
I'm not sure how advocating that we have more women in computer science is 'entrenching division.'
I would argue that many of the pressures men face, such as those to "man up" in difficult situations rather than freely express their feelings, counts as a routine, ingrained, and pervasive form of sexual discrimination. Even if I fully agree with your definition of sexism, that doesn't mean that sexism against men is nonexistent.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/object
According to this line of argumentation, anyone doing OOP is calling it the wrong thing.
(This particular dictionary has a reference to a 'computing dictionary' waaaaay down at the bottom. But if you picked up an actual dictionary, or went to a different one, it wouldn't be there. Dictionaries have different things for the same words!)
No, we are not. That is the entire point. We are not in a women's studies department. We are not women's studies majors. We are not talking about women's studies. So the terminology of women's studies is not relevant.
>Within all of these fields, sexism is a technical term that means (with slight variations between fields) exactly what steveklabnik above summarised it as.
No, it is not. History and philosophy do not use sexism that way. Only a minority of sociologists do. The only example you listed that is actually correct is women's studies.
When looking at issues of gender in history, modern history does use the language of privilege - ie sexism might be talked about as manifest in terms of what records or history is recorded and treated as important by the people who are being studied. When discussing issues of gender, modern Philosophy has to deal with system level analysis - hence the use of ideas of systemic sexual discrimination as sexism. Recent sociologists seem to non-controversially use this terminology also.
You're of coure, free to reject an entire branch of science, but that doesn't seem very hacker to me.
Also, you appear to be deliberately misrepresenting a small subset of sociologists as being representative of the entire field. That redefinition of sexism isn't even universally accepted in women's studies and feminism, much less sociology. It is in fact a clique that uses those terms that way, not a branch of science.
We've used them in the vernacular (which is the dictionary definition) to describe individual offenses, but when sociologists and academics use them (the field the terms came out of), it is very useful to describe a power structure and things that happen within that power structure.
I'm sad to see that steveklabnik has been downvoted so much on this board for saying something that is so very correct.
No, they are very important to sociologists who also happen to be into women's studies. Pretending all sociologists go along with that is dishonest.
>and were coined in large part by sociologists looking for a way to describe social phenomenon that they'd observed.
No they were not, see the rest of the thread.
>but when sociologists and academics use them
Which is relevant to lay-persons using them here on this forum and then being told they are wrong when they are not wrong?
>I'm sad to see that steveklabnik has been downvoted so much on this board for saying something that is so very correct.
I suspect the downvotes were more due to the way he told people their correct use of a term is incorrect, simply because there is a second correct use of that term.
However, we are still discussing the subject matter that things like Women's Studies and Sociology deal with, so using the terminology makes more sense than not using the terminology, especially when people who are going to actually be able to say anything useful about this will mostly either already know the terminology or quickly learn. Getting exasperated at people who will not use the correct terminology even after it is explained to them seems justified to me, in the same way that if some people kept saying that a "page" obviously only refers to either a piece of paper or a trainee knight or a trainee legislator, "because common English usage and anything else is Orwellian psyops" (quote marks indicating aggregate ranting of the hypothetical other), when we were talking about single page applications in the context of webapps, and they resisted correction, exasperation would be justified, and accusations of trolling would not be remiss.
So, I think that insisting on using the correct terminology from the disciplines that deals with something makes sense where we can, whenever we want to actually talk about something in a useful way, and people who insist that using the correct terminology is somehow a conspiracy or evil or whatever (to be clear, you have not suggested that, but others in this thread have) are totally trolls.
No, it doesn't. The vast majority of people do not recognize the other meaning of the word. So in a discussion among ordinary people, like the one here, using the ordinary word's ordinary meaning is appropriate. The response from SJWs that everyone is wrong for using the word correctly is not reasonable.
There is a discipline which deals with this stuff. Being initially ignorant of that is fine - no one knows everything - but when people say "Look, there is a discipline that deals with this stuff, and here is how the terminology works and here is why" then replying (as you have done) "No, ignore that and use the colloquial usage when talking about this stuff" without watertight explicit reasoning as to why either that discipline does not apply, or some other discipline is a better fit, or the discipline is somehow flawed in a way that makes this terminology wrong, is stupid and also both morally and practically bad.
Do you understand this now, or do you think that the word 'page' should only be used to mean either 'paper' or 'position analogous to squire, but for either knightly or political office' even when we discuss webapps?
>Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn’t matter
> [Sexism and racism] have used to keep the powers that be in power.
A direct statement about the systemic, power imbalance nature of sexism. Sexism is both those individual instances of discrimination and the overall systemic and social issues that allow it to perpetuate.
Yes. I even understood it, which appears to be what's bothering you. The quotes you refer to, once again, does not support the claim. The statement "sexism has been used to do X" does not mean "the definition of sexism is X". Paint has been used to cover walls. That does not mean the definition of paint is "stuff that covers walls".
Racism is socially systemic racial discrimination.
Classism is socially systemic class-based discrimination.
This is why you'll find people who say "You can't be sexist against men." You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm. When the discrimination becomes routine, ingrained, and pervasive, that turns it into an 'ism.'