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Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

i wonder if this was a man how the story would go.

much worse i'd imagine :/

I was thinking the same thing. It seems people are more forgiving of a woman's transgressions. For example, the bar manager who put her in a cab after four Manhattans. I'm trying to imagine a bar manager walking a drunk man out and putting him in a cab... unless this type of thing is common in New York?

I can remember the bar staff in Washington calling a cab for a guy, then noting down the taxi number as it drove off. They did this not once but regularly for this guy, a man in his 50s or early 60s. He was not staggering or sloppy drunk, but the bar staff, which dealt all the time with drinkers, thought this wisest.

Having done some work in my (relative) youth in situations where people got drunk sometimes, for me it was about self-protection. Some drunk people, when you try to help them out, get aggressive. Even if they don't get outright violent, that they threaten is just not pleasant.

So I would tend to be reluctant to help people that were above a certain size or physicality. Smaller people were much less of a threat, and I was exposing myself to less danger by helping them. Women, with their tendency on average to be both shorter, lighter and having a smaller proportion of muscle, happened to be below this "physical threat" threshold far more often than men.

Some regulars I'd see intoxicated enough to know that they weren't the violent drunk type and they'd often get a helping hand, even if they were twice my size. Conversely, some small people I knew were the violent drunk type and I didn't get involved.

As a man,

what?

I read the article a couple of days ago, but I don't recall anything here being particularly gender-specific.

Why, because she had that man that stuck around?

It sounds like he was an enabler to me, and that she would have done better off without him if he'd cut off contact with her at any point, even after she started AA.

Why do you think that?

It wasn't a man that wrote the article?

Kera Yonker. Brian Rea did the illustration.

I will admit, though, I assumed it was a woman just from the male romantic interest, which is my bad.

I will admit, though, I assumed it was a woman just from the male romantic interest, which is my bad.

What? There's something to be said for not being hostile to those with different proclivities, however, there is certainly no reason to apologize for assuming something that is true in the vast majority of cases.

It's also not at all unlikely that you would consciously or unconsciously pick up on things in writing that would allow you to make a better than random guess about the sex of the author.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0503/writing_styles.asp

http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php

i actually assumed it was a gay man until later for some reason.

no idea why... these kinds of first impressions are always hit and miss. it goes to show what terrible judges of character we all are. :)

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