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Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

> "of course"?

You say this as if a foregone conclusion, a statement of fact.

There's zero wrong with considering what it means to be a man. Just because I don't address what it means to be a woman doesn't make me sexist. It's not toxic to consider who you are and what values you hold dear.

Perhaps the wince that's induced in you is projection on your part? It doesn't make me wince. Nor do I apologize for it. I don't look at this poem as sexist. It addresses who I want to be as a man, no more, no less. It has no bearing on my thoughts of women. I'm not a woman, therefore my thoughts and feelings about what women should be are largely irrelevant... at least as irrelevant as to Rudyard Kipling who didn't address this topic at all in the poem.

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This is what I have a problem with; one cannot even share a simple poem without it degenerating into a virtue signalling debate. Now you're forced to defend something that you had nothing to do with. Yuck.

Unfortunately, that's the world we live in at this moment where too many people need to find validation by belonging to some virtue group or another because they care what other people think. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I even cared enough to defend my position. Perhaps I'm not so different as I'd like to hope.

No, you're alright.

Letting people know your honest thoughts in a straightforward manner is important. I know plenty of folks who hold opinions along the same line as the person you replied to. They are usually various degrees of shocked when I give them civil yet straightforward pushback, and more often then one may think, when done in person, it leads to real discussion, and ideas outside of normal worldview enter both our minds. It is a good thing.

That Kipling poem is flawless. Injecting virtue signalling dilutes its beauty. They don't even go together.

This is personal for me because it is the most profound thing I've ever read. For someone to come and refer to it as sexist is demeaning.

Savor it and quit being so wound up is all I'm saying. There's a place for everything and this was ill-placed.

I agree wholeheartedly. I've always loved this poem. I think a lot of the values it presents are sadly lost in today's culture - we're in a post-chivalric era alas. But these are the values I grew up with and as a result form the man I am today. This is what happens when your childhood heroes and role models come from the pages of Robin Hood, Les Miserables and The Three Musketeers.

As with all though, you either evolve or you're doomed to irrelevance. This should be a familiar concept to any programmer in the past 20 years :P

> ...sadly lost in today's culture - we're in a post-chivalric era alas. But these are the values I grew up with

Exactly this. It can be tough but you pick up your load and move valiantly forward.

I think it's very possible to read the last few lines in a non-gendered light. You have to want it to be misogynistic in order to interpret it as such.

Absolutely. It's incredibly innocuous.

I'm not sure I agree, madam.

There is a gulf between "misogynistic" and "being part of a culture that largely ignores women". It strains credulity to claim that the words "son" and "man" don't draw males closer and push females away. Any one poem is a "micro", but it adds up across the culture.

I'll play the historical context card here. At the time the poem was written, that language perfectly evoked the image the author was going for.

‘Of course’, it does lead to the obvious absurdity that a woman who fulfills all the good qualities of the poem is a man! “The Female Man”, perhaps...

I'll be honest, I think you'd be surprised just how many women are more of a man than most men are.

Having grown up as the child of a single mother, I don't think many men ever stop to think where we'd be without them. It's not a place I'd care to exist.

Most men are only as successful as they are because they had a loyal and dependable partner at their side to help propel them there - if by nothing more than taking care of all the shit they have no time for while they're so busy chasing their success. I wonder how many men would be half as successful without their partners supporting them and encouraging them forward.

> 'Of course’, it does lead to the obvious absurdity that a woman who fulfills all the good qualities of the poem is a man!

But...it doesn't. While the fictious direct addressee is the “son” (whether literal or in the figurative sense of an protege of an elder mentor is neither explicit nor important, since the whole impact of the poem is in its general applicability not in it being specific to an addressee) of the speaker from whose POV the poem is told, the son/man pairing necessarily states that the qualities are tied to adulthood/maturity, but is just as valid if they are not inherently tied to gender as if they are.

Just change the last line to "you'll be an adult, my child" or "you'll be a woman, my girl" and move on.

If you can't make a trivial fix to a simple problem, you aren't paying attention to the poem's message.

I can't understate how bad changing "you'll be a Man, my son" to "you'll be an Adult, my child" would be.

It would be like, in the pursuit of lowering your sodium intake, making bread without salt. Is it healthier? Maybe. What does it taste like now? Cardboard.

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