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MBlume comments on Religion, Mystery, and Warm, Soft Fuzzies - Less Wrong
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Comments (112)
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.