TimS comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 30 November 2012 03:54:46PM 7 points [-]

Er... what if it still doesn't seem disturbing after rumination?

Yes. There are certain very common tropes whose gender-reversed version offends me (thereby making me realize that the original version is fucked up too), but almost all characters in a work of fiction being the same gender isn't one of those.

Examples: 1) When a woman posts some mysandrist generalization about “all men” on her Facebook wall, I am deeply offended¹ -- so I can guess how women feel when a man posts some mysogynist generalization about “all women”, which happens more often IME. 2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr, kind-of bothered me (though I'm not sure I endorse that feeling) because it reminded me of the gender-reversed version, which is a very common trope and offends me. But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I'm not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pictures of sexy women in underwear on their Facebook wall (which happens much more often IME) plenty of people boo that.²


  1. The one time I actually complained about that, though, the person who had written that status told me that I was obviously not the kind of guy she was talking about so I shouldn't be offended. Since that time, I just entirely ignore any mysandristic or mysogynistic generalization I read.
  2. When I post a picture of a sexy woman in underwear on my Facebook wall and a woman complains about that, I dig their Facebook wall until I find a picture of a sexy man in underwear and jokingly complain about that. She usually gives me an obviously jocular excuse for why she posted it.
Comment author: TimS 30 November 2012 03:57:34PM *  2 points [-]

Totally off topic, sorry. How did you do footnotes? I'm so jealous.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 November 2012 04:51:17PM 3 points [-]

I use Unicode characters for superscript numerals (on an Italian keyboard under Ubuntu it's AltGr-1 and AltGr-2), four hyphens for the horizontal rule, and regular Markdown for lists (1., 2. etc.).