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undermind comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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True. Sexism is frickin pervasive, and that is the underlying problem.
Though it's only pointless quibbling at this point, I still think your previous comment was too simplistic - if nothing else, it doesn't have any of the depth of this, and, though it is perfectly consistent with the view "most people, even good people, have sexist tendencies due to our culture", it appears to be coming from a less well-developed view, which is why it has been downvoted. This again may be a question of inferential distance, which thus demonstrates itself to be a very useful concept.
I think it's not. Basically, I think what I called "racists and sexists" are people of whom only a minority foams on /r/mensrights and A Voice For Men, or listens to right wing talk radio, or believes in "male headship under God", or attends the local Klan. The majority are people who think they are normal, whose biased ideas don't even show unless provoked by a situation where their privileges are under threat (AKA "political correctness gone mad"). Feminism that isn't about shopping provokes them. Anti-racism that is neither anodyne nor cap-in-hand provokes them. And they react, often in ways that look like incidental decisions, to exclude the threat. Such as, here, by marginalizing equality for half the species into an academic backwater.
I can't figure out which part this is refering to.
Also: I'm pretty sure I agree with what you've been saying in these posts, including this one. (Has that come across clearly? I'm curious.) I also may have been strawmanning you (thanks MugaSofer for pointing this out), which is an interesting combination.
That refers to "I still think your previous comment was too simplistic".
The thought behind it was not too simplistic, but I think its presentation in that comment was, largely due to leaving out this background information; I think this is why it was downvoted, and is also what left it open to strawmanning (sigh sexist language).
I think it comes from the fact that a genderless figurine looks male to our eyes - you can see it doesn't have breasts, and any other pieces of anatomy it's missing are either routinely stylized away or covered up.
Also, waist-to-hip ratio -- it would be harder to make a scarecrow with wider hips than the waist.
I agreed with everything you said but this line. Could you clarify it please?
Hmm. My attempt at answering this: The "incidental decisions" is about such actions as choosing male candidates over female candidates with identical qualifications, ignoring women`s contributions at meetings and then agreeing strongly when a man later says the exact same thing, and so on. As for "excluding the threat", maybe it refers to perceptions of women as being less skilled, rather than having the cognitive dissonance involved in admitting you're picking the man because he is male.
So subconscious bias, then? "Excluding the threat" makes it sound deliberate and disingenuous.
In my interpretation, yes, subconscious bias, and avoiding the issue or finding various non-answers when it is raised to conscious attention.
I habitually define racism and sexism to exclude such bias, which seems to have led me astray in this case
The reactions are driven by social instinct reacting with defensive in-group cohesion to out-group threat, so they have effects without feeling like attempts to achieve effects. They feel like righteous indignation, or wanting someone who looks like us, or fear, or moral disapproval, or dismissal as uninteresting, etc.
Ah, OK. I was confused by the anthropomorphism there.