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Comment by thewavelength | Hacker News Reader

The comment from bertilda-lovejoy just summarizes the first-world problems very well.

That account (bertilda-lovejoy) was made 10 minutes ago, so don't get too bent out of shape over it. Its likely a mens-rights red-pill-er intentionally misrepresenting feminist values by taking them to a tone-deaf extreme in a repo thats obviously not meant to be taken seriously.

The profile picture for that newly created user is a photo of the (in)famous feminist "Anita Sarkeesian". (via Google Reverse Image Search)

Actually pronouns is a more serious issue than what the profile pic feminist (Anita S.) actually complains about in real life, such as lack of men butts in videogames[0] (no, I'm not joking)

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujTufg1GvR4

Bertilda Lovejoy made a name for himself by writing outrageous YouTube comments. I don't know if this is the same person, but it's not coincidental that they chose that name here.

She has always been a manufactured character, including those YouTube comments.

I'm pretty sure it's one of those Reddit joke YouTube accounts. They don't have a political motivation, they're just trolling.

I actually thought that comment was (probably accidentally) great. On one hand it pokes fun at the current feminist discourse without being crass, while at the same time it's actually true: the thinking at the time was quite sexist and these documents are necessarily a product of that, and we shouldn't let admiration blind us to it.

I always thought the masculine pronoun was used when talking about people as a collective since we sometimes refer to ourselves as "mankind". They do that in this document, so we thus use "men", "he" etc to be consistent.

I wouldn't use "she" as a collective noun unless I also used a more neutral "humankind" or something. But really I prefer to use "they".

I suppose the time at which the US constitution was written was much more sexist than it is now, but I always thought it read fairly neutrally.

Oh, I'm not talking about pronouns, but about the underlying ideas, and the disregard for women as independent citizens. For example, the 19th Amendment was passed less than a century ago. And there's Scalia's argument[1] that the 14th Amendment doesn't prohibit discrimination by gender or sexual orientation; we find the implications appalling, but was he wrong?

In any case, it's mostly a matter of having caution when reading these works, since their importance might cloud our judgment.

[1] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/256401/does-constitutio...

I was taught to use masculine collective pronouns as well, but 'mankind' is perhaps not the best example. It dates to Old English, when 'man' was a gender-neutral term meaning 'human'.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=man&allowed_in_fram...

That's a well known troll account.

Edit: New to GitHub I guess, but that name is well known on other sites.

https://github.com/bertilda-lovejoy?tab=activity

That account appears to have only one comment ever.

Yes, that is "well known" in Internet time.

Same with new web frameworks.

Well known on YouTube and reddit.

I think the use of that photo of Anita Sarkeesian in troll accounts is typical, hence the confusion.