Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.
For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says
As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.
My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.
So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support, but usually after I or, more rarely, someone else sounds the alarm, and usually without much persistence or apparent investment. There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems, which does nothing to disincentivize being piggish around here - some people seem to earnestly care about the problem, but this isn't enforced by the community at large, it's just a preexisting disposition (near as I can tell).
I would like help reducing the incidence of:
- Comments and posts that casually objectify women or encourage the objectification of women. "Objectification" is what happens when a person is treated or discussed as an object, not as an autonomous being. (Non-women can also be objectified, and that too should be stopped.)
- Casual use of masculine and/or heteronormative examples in posts and comments that aren't explicitly about gender. It's just not that hard to come up with an unsexed example. Be especially careful when using the second person. If you need to use an example with a gender, there's no reason to consider male the default - consider choosing randomly, or you could use a real person as an example (who isn't presumed to archetypically represent anyone in the audience) instead of a hypothetical one (who might be).
- Sweeping generalizations about women, if they are not backed up by overwhelming hard data (responsibly gathered and interpreted). The cost of being wrong about this sort of thing is high, even if the culprits don't bear it themselves, and extreme care should be taken.
- Fawning admiration of pickup artists who attain their fame by the systematic manipulation of women. If it is necessary to refer admiringly to a pickup artist or pickup strategy (I'm not sure why it would be, but if), care should be taken to choose one whose methods are explicitly non-depersonalizing, and disclaim that specifically in the comment.
We could use more of the following:
- Thoughtful use of qualifiers and disclaimers in talk about sex and gender. Robin is not right.
- Attention to the privileges of masculinity and attempts to reduce that disparity. (Note that of course there are also female privileges, but until Less Wrong hosts custody battles or we start suspecting that some of us might be violent criminals, they are unlikely to come into play nearly so much in this location.)
Thank you for your attention and, hopefully, your assistance.
If the evidence linked to in the post didn't persuade you that I'm not alone in those feelings, I'm afraid I don't have any more handy to offer, especially since as I write this comment the site is down and I can't do searches.
When I try to be cute, I usually do a better job. There exist people who assume that if there were sexism around, their keen sexism senses would have detected it; therefore, in the minds of these people, anyone who points out sexism they didn't notice is making it up. Mockery of the "whiny girls" typically follows. The existence of those people and the fact that they are idiots does not mean that I am automatically right when I say there is a problem in this community. However, anyone who, upon reading any statement of sexism that they hadn't already observed, would dismiss it without further thought, would have found the post wasted on them. As you might have suspected, I think I'm right and that people who think that the problems I point out aren't problems are mistaken. That doesn't mean I think every person who disagrees with me about this falls into the category of person targeted by my disclaimer.
That would be quite unlike what my disclaimer said.
This is an interesting claim, and I would like to hear more about why you think it seems likely.
The fact that I am more offended than you by a certain class of things - specifically, by things that have to do with a group I belong to and you do not - does not make me easily offended, any more than the fact that Superman can be quickly brought to his knees by Kryptonite while ordinary humans walk around unaffected means that Superman is easily weakened.
Okay. It's not like I've got an airtight, formally valid proof backing me up there, so you can certainly do that.
Thank you for the vote. I'm not sure what you mean by coercion. I don't really have the power to (going by Wikipedia) threaten, intimidate, trick, or otherwise exercise pressure or force on anyone here - I mean, I have the power to downvote, and the power to type sternly. But I had that before, and I've made my wishes about gendered language known before. I also would make a terrible officer of the thought police: I can't read minds, can't enforce my rules about the contents of minds, and don't know anybody who can do either of those things and is disposed to do so according to my wishes. My only powers are to read what people type, and vote, and type sternly.
Okay. People are certain to draw the line in different places with objectification, just as we already do with things like lying and violence and other wrong things. My job is mostly done if you think objectification exists and that this isn't cause for confetti.
If it's so tiny, it shouldn't be such a struggle to get people to accommodate the wish. I have less trouble getting my roommate to drive me to another city an hour away and back.
Great :)
I'm sorry you feel creepy. It would be nice if it were possible to confront privilege without feeling creepy. I think it's worth it anyway. By "attention", I mean thought, care, consideration - not necessarily copious chat. As for "guilty of sexism until proven innocent", I don't see it. I'm not descending on a fledgling community in which no one has ever used the words "women" or "female" or even so much as a gendered pronoun and screaming, "You're all male chauvinist pigs and you must obey my law!" I'm pointing out a problem that a handful of posters have perpetuated. I have been and remain surprised by, not resigned to or broodingly resentful of, the fact that these few posters have not been as widely repudiated for these actions as I would have thought.
Thank you for this lengthy and thoughtful reply. I, too, am encouraged to notice the points on which we agree or are not that far off.
I don't really think you are the "thought police," and I didn't mean to imply that. But I do stand by my assessment of your post as vaguely coercive. There is such a thing as coercion by public shaming. I think this is what Roko might have been getting at in his recent post. If you do not see how this is a legitimate concern, then perhaps I can pull an "Alicorn" and just insist that if you were a man, you... (read more)