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Comment by portmanteaufu | Hacker News Reader

"Emasculating" was a very strange and evocative choice of words for this. Most of the article describes Google's significance and direction, with only this snippet at the tail end having anything to do with the title:

> ....I can tell you from experience that it is really awkward and emasculating to try to interview someone who doesn’t want to talk. You feel like a big dork.

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I assume the NYT headline was a reference to a few years back when Page was talking about how great Glass was and by way of comparison described looking down at a phone screen as "emasculating".

I assume he (Page) was just meant that using a phone a lot felt awkward and took your attention away from the rest of the world around you, but made a poor word choice while improvising in front of an audience. The tech press had a little tisk tisk field day about though, especially since this was well past the point where Glass was looking like a silly boondogle.

In most newspapers though, someone besides the author writes the headline for an article, so I'm assuming whoever wrote this one for the NYT thought they were being clever here in referencing that faux pas.

edit: Just checked it was actually Brin who said the emasculating thing, so who the fuck knows what the headline writer was thinking. Maybe they remembered wrong too.

If only tech blogs had access to a dictionary.

The idea that "emasculate" was a bad word choice was a foolish media bandwagon. The secondary meaning of emasculate is "make weaker or less effective" and holding a fragile and valuable object does do that...

That's not how language works. Words have implications and subtleties that go beyond a straightforward reading of a dictionary definition.

Especially with that definition, you really can't escape the roots. It's just a metaphorical twist on the word.

Many people think "a series of tubes" was a hilariously bad analogy for the internet too. It has always seemed reasonable to me, and some others. [1] Maybe I'm just too interested in actual communication rather than mockery. But "Be liberal in what you accept" etc.

[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/taking-stevens-ser...

The difference is that "series of tubes" is merely wrong/silly/awkward/clueless, whereas "emasculation" reinforces decades of toxic masculinity, which is a societal ill.

Well, it's a series, but also a collection at the same time, right? Unless you conceive of the internet as one long line of tubes connected one to the other (series) rather than a number of tubes, some connected in series but others running in parallel.

That's the subtlety of language the parent was referring to.

Actually the original context is something like "the internet is not a big truck, it's a series of tubes" which makes it clear that he was referring to what was involved in sending data down a single connection.

It would be absurd to infer that Stevens thought real-world truck haulage consisted of "one big truck" rather than a fleet.

Maybe the author felt emasculated by the experience, and didn't realize that modern humanity demands attention to all manner of bizarre sensitivities because of a rabid desire to take offense where none is intended.

I do have to admit, I stereotype reporters as absolutely swimming in that particular lagoon, so it's unlikely, but hey, you got to speculate too.

"He treated me as if I were a not-man/woman!" Now who could take offense at that?!?

Not just the PC, but perhaps others as well. It was a poor and awkward choice of words.

I guess if you get to a) impose your own definitions and b) judge how others feel based on those self-definitions, then you've reached the "crawling up your own ass" stage of looking for ways to be offended. Congratulations! You're ready to join a variety of Twitter and tumblr groups who spend so much time in their own asses they believe such things to be important.

Agreed. I read the word "emasculating" with the meaning "deprive (a man) of his male role or identity", and was imagining that Page was calling into question his manliness during an interview like some kind of bro, which is funny to imagine considering I don't hear any accounts of him being the kind of guy who would do that.

Managing your public image is something I imagine can become pretty draining, so I'm not surprised he parcels out his comments to simple, controlled, one-way exchanges.

We took that distracting word out of the title and put in Larry Page's name, since everyone here knows who he is.

I agree. It's terrible to choose a gender binary-reinforcing adjective for the supposedly-neutral meaning of the term. Shame on NY Times.

It got you to click. (Me too.) Win for NYT.

Especially since there would be absolutely no difference at all in this story if the author were a woman.

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