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