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Emily comments on Religion, Mystery, and Warm, Soft Fuzzies - Less Wrong
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Comments (112)
I hate to pick on petty details, but I've been pondering the absence of women here lately and this sort of thing really does add up to a sense of being an outsider. This is awfully male/hetero-centric. (I somehow don't get the feeling that "you" here is a lesbian or bi woman. I guess I could be mistaken.)
Being handed that sense of outsider-ness is really distracting from the rest of your post. Which I will now read more carefully in an attempt to focus on your actual point instead of petty details.
Point of curiosity: Have I ever done this? I usually try to avoid this sort of thing but of course it's not always conscious either.
Closest I can think of is the mind-projection fallacy (torn dress = sexy), but that's really much more the sci-fi writers doing it than you -- hence the fallacy.
Yep. But just to check, was anyone out there offended?
I am much less offended by this than by the suggestion I will be attracted to Jessica Alba. "Women" includes me. I will take it as a compliment.
I can tolerate all sorts of stuff, and can just accept the maleness of this site, but it should be easy to amend to no longer be gender specific, or heteronormative. "The touch of another person's skin will still be wonderfully sensuous", perhaps? Or miss out sex as an example, stick to sunsets, music, rainbows, animals, the vista from a hilltop, the sea, great literature.... for examples of the merely real.
I find this type of nitpicking really annoying. Surely everyone (no matter their gender / sex / preferences) understands the sentence 'Women will be alluring' to be a generalised example and can easily convert this to include their own specific preferences without the author having to jump through hoops to provide examples that apply to everyone.
"The touch of another person's skin will still be wonderfully sensuous" - you can't say that - you are discriminating against those without a sense of touch!
"sunsets" - you can't say that, what about blind and/or extreme photo-sensitives
and so on.
If he had written 'Football games will still be exciting' I would have got the intended meaning and moved on, despite the fact that I have zero interest in football.
I'm genuinely puzzled by this sort of hostile reaction to what was really a pretty mild request for gender neutral language/examples. It seems utterly out of proportion to the original comment(s).
Clearly, any example one comes up with is probably capable of somehow excluding someone, and trying to screen off all possible objections seems unduly onerous given (a) it's damn near impossible; and (b) the benefits of not excluding left-handed hermaphrodite axylotl enthusiasts are, all things considered, rather small.
But that's not quite what we're talking about. While women are certainly scarce on LW, in other parts of the world, they comprise roughly half the population. And using gender neutral language/examples is really easy - much easier than jumping through actual hoops, and probably also easier than writing comments telling people how annoyed you are about their nitpicking. The cost-benefit analysis here seems pretty straightforward.
So why does this seem to annoy (some) people so much?
Is the problem that you actually think it's illegitimate for people to be bothered by stuff like this? Seriously? Wanting to be included is illegitimate? Wow. I guess it's easy to think that things don't matter when they don't systematically affect you personally, but still.
I am irritated to find my post named as "nitpicking" when I was answering a direct question. I too "got the meaning and moved on". Alvarojabril below, much clearer- "The glance of a lover will still be alluring". Why not go with that?
Sorry, the rather harsh 'nitpicking' should really have been addressed to the top comment in the chain that started this line of discussion. I placed it as a comment after your contribution because I wanted to point out that even your attempts to give a more generic and widely applicable example will be doomed to failure, because you will always end up making some assumptions about the audience.
I'm sorry about that -- I'm aware that it does seem like nitpicking, and if it were just an isolated thing then it certainly would be irrelevant nitpicking. But when it's a common occurrence that I believe really does have a negative impact, I don't see it that way.
I do feel a bit guilty about having created a runaway thread and somewhat derailed the topic at hand. On the other hand, the number of responses suggests to me that others agree this is an important topic, so I don't think a discussion on it is a bad thing at all.
The outcome of this surely seems likely to swing behavior closer to what you would like to see. It seems that the comment was a success. I wouldn't feel guilty about it at all.
Yes, but we should keep these assumptions to a minimum, especially when: a) they might negatively affect some people's experience of LW. b) it is fairly easy to make it more universal.
Gender role models matter for choosing a science major in college. I realize that is only a loosely related issue, but it does make me think more carefully about gender issues.
Women are a much larger actual and potential audience than the blind. Therefore, it makes much more sense to consider women's preferences when writing.
But are "Women who would be annoyed by the statement 'Women are alluring'" a large potential audience?
I would think that the audience for this specific sentence would break down into (roughly):
a) Those it directly applies to (hetro males, bi females, etc.), who immediately agree 'Yes, women sure are alluring!' b) Those it does not apply to , but who regard it as complimentary (e.g. hetro females), 'Yes, I sure am alluring!' c) Those it does not apply to, but who understand its intention without feeling that it marginalises them. 'I don't get what the big deal about women is, but I know LOTS of people who find women alluring' d) Those it does not apply to, who feel actively excluded. 'I don't find women alluring, the author is trying to exclude me - he really should change the text to something that I like."
I would have thought that category d) is tiny.
Note to Emily: I am really not trying to exclude you or pick on you! I just find it really surprising you would feel excluded by a (positive, and relatively uncontroversial!) comment about women from a male author.
I agree with your main point,* few people will be bothered by such an example, BUT its easy to use more inclusive language, so in my opinion the benefits still outweigh the costs. So it takes us white hetero males from middle/upper class backgrounds a few extra seconds to come up with examples. I think we can handle it.
*I don't quite agree with your categories... people may find it complimentary, or at least not believe that the author is trying to exclude them, but still be distracted from the point of the sentence or be reminded that they are a minority in our community, a reminder some prefer not to have.
Don't worry, I don't feel picked on or excluded -- actually, I've been pleasantly surprised to see how willing people are to have these discussions frankly. But you haven't quite got the issue right, not from my personal point of view anyway. What I think when I run across something like the "women are alluring" statement isn't too similar to d). It's more like: "Women are alluring, ah yes they sure are to many people (possibly even insert a little of b) here). Cool. I hope this isn't one of those people who thinks we aren't good for much else... Hey, you can really tell this post is written by another het guy, can't you? And that he didn't stop to consider any viewpoint other than his own on this particular issue. Not that I blame him particularly, but does this ever get tiring when it happens all the damn time. I wonder if there's anywhere else this guy has forgotten to account for other valid perspectives in this article? What the heck was this piece all about anyway?"
I've noticed a couple of people saying that it wouldn't bother them if the situation was reversed. I have to admit to a twinge of impatience with this opinion, although I'm sure those expressing it are not being deliberately obtuse or condescending. No, of course it wouldn't bother you, because you don't have to put up with this crap all the time. It's called privilege. Being male, you have the privilege to ignore that sort of thing on the rare occasions when it does happen to you. This is why it's an issue. Just like it was an issue that my friend was asked by her supervising professor yesterday whether she's ever considered that there might be something seriously wrong with her "because most girls have really neat round writing and yours isn't". That's an idiotic remark that deserves to be simply ignored. But we can't afford to ignore these little silly things because they happen so ridiculously often.
Emily:
I have heard this argument before, and I don't think it carries quite the same force as you apparently do.
You seem to vastly underestimate the kinds of remarks that men hear constantly that tell them that because they are men, they must be a certain way. The general culture is full of notions, some loud and some winking, that men are terrible, evil, violent, lazy, stupid, inept, and on and on. Turn on any American primetime television show and observe the male characters with a dispassionate eye. Try to discern which gender is more often portrayed as truly malevolent (on dramas) or incompetent (comedies), and which gender most often carries the torch of moral rightness, or has to clean up all the messes made by the bumbling idiot.
You are using a "stop sign" (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/semantic-stopsi.html) in your argument when you say that a man couldn't possibly understand what it feels like. You are heading off disagreement at the pass, signaling that anyone who proceeds with disagreeing nevertheless is therefore insensitive and unfeeling. This is poor form (though of course quite common), and it has the added vice of being untrue. I can understand it just fine, thank you very much.
There are differences between the situation of men and that of women, that I can see that might support your argument. One, supporting your sense that women literally feel these comments in a way that men can't, is that there are vastly more men in positions of power (although, of course, men pay much more in taxes to a government that redistributes that wealth disproportionately to women, and of course that there are also vastly more male victims of violence, men that die on the streets, die in wars, rot in prison, live as shut-ins, go untreated for severe drug and alcohol dependency... but this rarely enters into discussions about gender privelege because the answer to this question has already been determined before the discussion even started... to even question the premise is purest heresy). But let's say for sake of moving on that men are indeed in a position of privelege. So that's one thing that I can think of that might support your assertion that I, as a man, can't possibly understand the feeling you have, that the power dynamics infuse your internal mental experience with a special category that anyone outside the in-group cannot ever hope to understand.
But you are flat out wrong when you say that gender-typing is only a "rare occasion" for men. It happens constantly, all day every day.
Other than that, I would assert that just because you know what it feels like to be a woman does not mean you are really all that qualified to understand what it feels like to be not-a-woman. I think that as a human you are qualified to understand other humans relatively well. But if you insist on making it a gender thing, then I must object to your characterization of what men do or do not feel inside.
You are certainly right about one thing, that men in this culture do not generally complain about this stuff. But it's not because it doesn't happen, but because we have not been trained to be on hair-trigger alert to every tiny perceived slight.
I must confess, I am somewhat dismayed that an individual who would say something that inane and obtuse is a professor.
Wow, you certainly got a lot from "Women are alluring"! Thanks for clarifying, this is very interesting.
I would be very interested to hear what was your reaction to the phrase "Michaelangelo's David will still be beautiful". Was it anything similar?
Is this an expression of your prior about the size of the category, or your posterior? Have you updated your prior on learning (to your surprise) that people apparently do feel excluded/get distracted by this sort of thing?
I can't claim to speak for anyone else, but to me, your focus on "positive, and relatively uncontroversial" seems to miss the point. The problem is that the original statement: (a) assumed that the relevant agents are exclusively male, and that women are merely passive objects that men are attracted to;* and that (b) it did so in a context where this implicit assumption is fairly common, which probably gets a bit frustrating after a while.
As an aside, would it surprise you if people felt excluded by your telling them that you find their concerns "really annoying"?
* While it was technically compatible with the agents being bi/homosexual females, it seems fairly fairly clear that this wasn't really a factor in the choice of wording.
Prior. I have updated very slightly towards Emily's position, but this is balanced by the responses from every female I have personally asked about this, all of whom fell into the a) or b) response. Of course, we all know that comparing two very small samples is far from ideal :-)
No, but excluding people is certainly not the intent. Every time I write something I assume that someone, somewhere will find it really annoying.
I can't speak for others, but I was in category d).
Fair enough. I have updated my estimate of the size of the d) population.
Is it really reasonable to equate something that applies intrinsically to half the population to something that applies to very few people, or to something that is a matter of non-intrinsic taste?
This sems like an unfair argument from absurdity.
I totally agree that this situation would be awful. But it's certainly not what I'm advocating, and I don't see anyone else advocating that we force everyone to "talk like women". (Do you realise just how disparaging that sounds, incidentally? Because women are obviously just a homogenous bunch who all talk in exactly the same way.) Surely there's some middle ground here where no one feels excluded?
"Do you realise just how disparaging that sounds, incidentally? Because women are obviously just a homogenous bunch..."
-- The original statement is offensive to women, doesn't that also mean that you assume that women are "just a homogenous bunch"? You seem to want to homogenise women for supporting points, but consider them heterogeneous for opposing points.
She didn't specify that it sounded offensive to women only, let alone to all women.
Hi Alicorn, Thanks for the response. But if we interpret that only she is offended by it, or any nonspecified group, then I think scotherns' examples such as
""The touch of another person's skin will still be wonderfully sensuous" - you can't say that - you are discriminating against those without a sense of touch!"
also are valid. It seems to me that we have to assume that she bases her case on some sizeable homogeneous group (that gets offended). Women? - perhaps she can clarify.
Writing as a male is very different from writing to males.
Be reassured -- no one's going to detach your balls if you write in the style of, um, the negation of an emasculated husk. Just be aware of the forseeable consequences of choosing that style (or any strongly identified style): people who do not identify with you will have a barrier to get over to understand what you want to say.
And don't be surprised if, as a result, said people conclude from your choice of style that you're not interested in communicating with them in particular.
I can't help but wonder whether this was an intentional pun, or just a Freudian slip. ;-)
Ooh, that sounds fun! Do mine first!
how about "lover"?
I can't say I recall any instance of your doing something like that, no.
While I completely agree, I find it strange that you get distracted by this sort of thing. Not wrong or weird, just interesting. Do you really feel like you are an outsider from five words?
It is good for me to hear how important things like this are. I have been trying to become more abstract in gender assignments but find it difficult to catch them all and keep wondering if it really matters. Apparently it does.
I didn't mention it myself because I don't want to turn into the feminism police of Less Wrong, but I'll put in my two cents since Emily brought it up. I found it distracting too - and I am bi, so it's not like I don't find women alluring, so I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience. It would have been trivially easy to cut the example or replace it with a nice inclusive "members of the relevant sex(es)", and it would have demonstrated that there was conscious consideration of the full audience going on instead of thoughtless assumption.
Of course, including the example at all excludes asexuals. Do we have any of those here?
When I write I generally do not consider the gender of my audience one way or the other. Since I happen to be male I would think, "Oh, females are alluring," and use the example. I expect I would do this even talking to a room full of nothing but hetero-women.
But thinking about it as addressing the audience makes more sense of the distraction. I guess I am not so much male-centric as self-centric? Silly me, generalizing from one example and assuming everyone else writes the way I have been.
Well, thanks for the input.
Well, there is that one commenter who keeps mentioning that he's an eunuch. Do they count as asexuals?
Hi.
Excluding half your audience when there's an obvious counterpart for the other half is silly. Excluding a small minority is inevitable. That's part of the reason you use a cluster of examples -- you hope that each reader will identify strongly with at least one.
I think the best fix here is "Women will still be alluring, men will still be [insert-adjective-here], food will still ..." etc.
Preserves the specificity of the original while making clear that you're to take what you like.
Therein lies the problem. I was aware of the gender bias when I wrote the example. But "alluring" does not seem like an appropriate adjective to describe men. I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression that the quality in a man that elicits the analagous experience that an alluring woman elicits is best described by another adjective, and I frankly have no idea what it is.
I chose the original phrasing because it was the simplest, clearest, and most elegant way I could think of to express that point. Of course, since people seem to take special notice of it, it clearly wasn't worthwhile in any practical sense, so I've edited it to be more inclusive, though I think it flows slightly worse as a result.
I am curious as to whether drawing attention to the author's gender is purely undesirable, or only undesirable where that gender already makes up a substantial majority of the readership/authorship.
But you weren't speaking in terms of the author's gender. The preceeding sentence ends with "(...) no matter what you say or think about them.", creating a second-person context, hence the implication of projecting the author's gender onto the audience.
If you had phrased the following sentence in first person, or as an acknowledged-to-be-male third person, it likely would have bothered people less.
Not sure I disagree in principle, definitely would have used a sex-neutral phrasing in the original post, but calling women "half the audience" is off by an entire order of magnitude.
(If anybody's keeping count, I'm a-curious, don't enjoy food, think David is just some random naked guy made out of rock, and was more distracted by this comment thread than anyone was by the thing the comment thread was about.)
Entirely true, but they're still half the potential audience. Writing with a mostly-male audience in mind is a good way to maintain a mostly-male audience
They quite obviously aren't anywhere remotely close to half the potential audience, because to be part of the potential audience, you need certain background knowledge, interests, personality features/bugs, and other things that apparently are very lopsidedly distributed between genders. I assume you're not actually claiming that 90% of one gender was chased away because once in a while someone makes an off-hand comment that, if implicit disclaimers are removed, seems to assume a heterosexual male audience.
Of course not.
Honestly, I don't think we're disagreeing on any significant point of fact or policy, so if it's all the same, I think I'll leave this here.
OK. Sorry if I sounded testy, random bad mood or something.
on both our parts, I think -- sorry for trying to defend more than I needed to.
There's also a much greater history of women being excluded from male groups than the other way around, so it's unfortunately not unreasonable for women to subconsciously draw stronger conclusions from such phrasing.
Of course, including the food example alienates those who don't enjoy it, and using David as an exemplar of beauty alienates... me?
This actually gets to something interesting...perhaps there are some objects of beauty we could agree on...the sun, the human form, etc...but these things are so primeval that their beauty is continually contextually mediated by "truth" (the thrill of science, EY's space expansion) or "lies" (religion et al.).
If it were one single set of five words (on LW or in the world in general), I very much doubt I would notice at all. But sadly, this sort of thing happens a lot, and the effect really is cumulative, at least for me.