Most people, regardless of whether they are men or women, want attractive partners, and yet, in my experience, only men are accused of being alienating or superficial or even sexist when they are honest about their desires.
I've seen "superficial". As to the other two, I believe the party line is that sexism requires both prejudice and institutionalized power in order to function, that males are uniformly more socially powerful, and thus that male-directed sexism is impossible. In itself that's little more than a definitional quibble, but in practice this shakes out to a belief that otherwise identical behaviors are less alienating when directed at men.
How seriously you take that probably depends more on your politics than on your observed experiences. That being said, I imagine I'd feel pretty alienated if I'd wandered into a 90%-female community that frequently discussed men in terms of status potential, and I further imagine that that sort of thought experiment should screen off most of the information we'd get from discussing which accusations are more common.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, I think it's generally much easier to convince a group to stop doing something because it's bad than to convince them that its okay when others do it, but only bad when they do it.
...As to the other two, I believe the party line is that sexism requires both prejudice and institutionalized power in order to function, that males are uniformly more socially powerful, and thus that male-directed sexism is impossible. In itself that's little more than a definitional quibble, but in practice this shakes out to a belief that oth
Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.
For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says
As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.
My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.
So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support, but usually after I or, more rarely, someone else sounds the alarm, and usually without much persistence or apparent investment. There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems, which does nothing to disincentivize being piggish around here - some people seem to earnestly care about the problem, but this isn't enforced by the community at large, it's just a preexisting disposition (near as I can tell).
I would like help reducing the incidence of:
We could use more of the following:
Thank you for your attention and, hopefully, your assistance.