Being a feminist is incredibly hard.
In the same way being a rationalist is hard (i.e., it's cognitively difficult.)
If a man at a LW meetup said something objectifying, misogynist, or racist, would another male LWer call them out for it?
My mental model says yes, and I have actually seen it happen twice.
I doubt most of them would speak up
I think this is strictly correct, but I predict better outcomes in the case where one person says to the offender "Hey, that's out of line" than when everyone in the room castigates the offender in unison.
imagine the irony of a "feminist" man telling a woman what feminism is!
Maybe you meant "what oppression is"? (And maybe that would be a helpful distinction to make in general.)
arguments about feminism or anti-racism on Less Wrong commonly come to a feminist stating some widely-accepted notion from feminist theory or feminist psychology, and a LWer stating that the notion must be false because of some intuition.
Do you have some examples for this?
I generally agree that there are problems with how SJ issues are addressed around here, but my experience as an Actual Female On LW doesn't correspond to the picture you are painting of it being a bunch of intellectually snobby dudebros.
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.