imagine the irony of a "feminist" man telling a woman what feminism is
Why? Does being born with a wrong chromozome prevent a person from understanding feminism?
A few lines sooner, you said "Being a feminist is incredibly hard." Is it hard only for men, or also for women? If it is also hard for women, then wouldn't a man who succeeds somewhat in being a feminist be qualified enough to tell women what feminism is?
Read the following sentence and try to think what is wrong about it:
imagine the irony of a "mathematician" woman telling a man what mathematics is
You know, there used to be people who believed it to be just as self-evident as what you said.
By the way, some feminists do disagree with other feminists, so even disagreeing with some feminists does not contradict being a feminist.
the reality of the LW environment being simply uncomfortable for women to inhabit.
So how do you explain the women who are here? I guess they must be white or otherwise inferior...
I've tried to introduce LW to several of my friends, partners, and comrades, as I believe its lessons to be useful, but nearly all of the people without male privilege have been turned away by it.
Nearly all of my friends, regardless of their gender, were not interested in LW. I would guess that even most of your male friends weren't.
It must be unsafe to say objectifying or misogynist things.
Let's add misandrist things to the list. Oops, now your comment would violate the rules...
(yeah, yeah, I get it; I didn't read Dworkin, therefore I am using completely wrong definitions, and furthermore I am a white man which means I can't understand anything)
At this point probably the best option would be to start a new rationalist site with the following rules:
all members are assumed to be "white male" (WM), unless personally verified by moderators;
a WM user is not allowed to see non-WM user's username, only their comment; unless the non-WM user flagged their comment as "private", in which case WM user sees nothing;
any non-WM user can delete any comment made by a WM user; maybe even trusted WM users can delete any comment made by a WM user.
I guess this would be enough for a version 1.0; in version 2.0 you can add intersectionality and more complex rules of evaluating privileges. There are probably many people believing that this is a good way to have discussions, so you could cooperate with them to create this necessary software.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.