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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

>But after a lifetime in service of the feminist cause, she took on the case of a friend whose son she came to believe had been wrongly convicted of rape and won his acquittal on appeal.

This is one of the big ways in which sexism is a much more tractable problem than racism and less potentially explosive. Women and men both have members of the opposite sex that they genuinely love. I have heard that fathers with daughters make for a very tough jury in rape cases. A lot of the opposition to these title ix courts has come from mothers worried about their sons being falsely accused.

With racism, there is a pretty good chance that in some areas, a person of one race has virtually no one of another race that they genuinely love. This allows racial discrimination to last longer, and has the danger that when base emotions get appealed to by demagogues, there is less resistance.

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How would bias toward gay people fit in with that? A lot of people don't know (or at least aren't aware that they know) anyone gay, but bias toward gay people has dramatically fallen over the last couple of decades.

There was a recent episode of "Hidden Brain" on NPR that talked about this [1].

This part is particularly interesting:

> In a thought experiment, Mahzarin and her colleagues have extended the trend lines of the data to see how long it would take for bias to be entirely eliminated. To be clear, this isn't a prediction about what is going to happen. It just shows you the speed at which different biases are changing.

What they found is that this would have anti-gay bias all but eliminated in 9 more years. By contrast, it's about 60 more years for anti-black biases to be eliminated, 140 years for skin tone biases against darker skin to go away. Biases against the elderly and the disabled and the overweight do not go away within the next 150 years.

Most families include the elderly and the overweight, so the idea that familiarity breeds acceptance would predict that those biases should be going away quicker than biases against gays.

(To reiterate, the timeframes aren't predictions of what will happen. They are just comparisons of the rates that those biases are changing right now).

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709567750/radically-normal-ho...

> A lot of people don't know (or at least aren't aware that they know) anyone gay

This is becoming increasingly less true because it is becoming safer and more respectable to be out. This creates a tight feedback loop of acceptance which makes people feel safer coming out.

This didn't happen by accident, either: If you read i.e. Harvey Milk's "you must come out" speech, you'll see that the explicit intention of campaigns to get gay people to come out was to educate the public that they do in fact know people who are gay.

>Most families include the elderly and the overweight, so the idea that familiarity breeds acceptance would predict that those biases should be going away quicker than biases against gays.

What I'm about to say is not meant to provide a justification for discriminatory behavior, it's just an armchair-anthropologist's attempt at explaining this discrepancy. We might have a very deep bias against old people; if a group of animals has to decide who gets a split of food, and some of them have a dramtically shorter life expectancy, I could imagine there being a biological tendency to care about the young over the old. A similar calculation might be made about the disabled, since a wounded companion is less helpful than an able-bodied one. Weight, I have a number of ideas about. There's a disease correlation, of course. We also might ostracize overweight people because overweight people were more likely to be hoarding food in our deep past, and sharing with those who don't share back is a bad strategy. Even if the specifics of my armchair-anthropology are utter horseshit, I could see factors similar to these out-weighing the familiarity bias without discounting it.

The bias against overweight people is probably less about them hoarding and more about them being unhealthy.

We probably have a bias against unhealthy people because they'd drain the time and resources of a tribe. And they'd be less likely to help with physical activities like hunting, gathering and war.

Obesity is a very new phenomenon but not wanting to include or associate with people who seem sick or unhealthy is probably pretty old.

Bias against overweight people isn't about them being unhealthy, plenty of other unhealthy people have public sympathies, the problem is they are mostly "voluntarily" unhealthy - they want accommodations for conditions caused by their unhealthy habit. It's similar to drug addicts' plight in both the cause and reaction.

The counter to that is that the elderly and the overweight haven't always been the subjects of negative bias. There are plenty of inversions of that bias throughout history and across cultures. It's honestly just fashionable to be young and skinny at this point in history and this part of the world, hence the bias against the opposites.

That's a pretty good counter, actually. I was aware of those facts, but hadn't considered them in this context as far as I recall.

I wonder at want point a gentle pressure to change unhealthy eating habits becomes "discriminatory behavior"?

but bias toward gay people has dramatically fallen over the last couple of decades

Online dating has proven to help gays with successfully finding relationships. Gays can be openly gay online while protecting their privacy. This has helped give people some exposure to gays and their problems who wouldn't otherwise have similar exposure in meat space.

I also think the trend to identify as asexual where such people were probably historically viewed as committed bachelors has probably helped take some of the discomfort out of the equation. Historically, not being interested in sex was not a sexual identity. Now it is.

And that takes the concept of sexual identity into new territory that I think makes it less threatening because it casts light on the fact that sexual identity can be about you and not about other people per se, if that makes sense.

Do you think? The 'trend' for asexuality is very recent, (or if it's not, I haven't noticed, which still kind of undermines your point) not enough time to make much of an impact.

I would turn it around and say that the acceptance of homosexuality has created the space for a spectrum of sexuality.

I don’t think confirmed bachelor means what you think it does.

Could you define bias against obesity and elderly here?

If I were to categorize the elderly as generally less capable than say, a man in his 40s, I would also generally be right. Age comes with it's demerits, and recognizing this would not be anti-elderly bias.

From what I gather, bias is an issue when it unfairly penalizes people for factors outside their control that do not significantly impact their capability.

Bias is more about assigning judgments to a person based on visible qualities rather than actual capabilities.

IOW - Elderly people who can actually code get discriminated against all the time (for basic coding jobs, but obviously everyone thinks they got the next Microsoft brewing). This gets justified in many ways around 'agility', 'flexibility' etc. but in essence it is bias.

In some cases there might be actual reasons like you say, problem comes when it is a summary judgment. In general people don't like being judged I guess, and when necessary - like to be judged based on their actual impact. (Granted there are probably also folks who will cry discrimination when there are actual reasons ... I guess we just funded hr eh :).

I have heard same goes for overweight people.

Might have to do with where a bias stems from. Bias against elderly has to do with deterioration with age. That remains true today. Bias against gay people had to do with the need to protect against disease. This is not true today because education, condom usage and improved treatment have cut down on the impact of stds, eliminating societal need for homophobia.

"it's about 60 more years for anti-black biases to be eliminated, 140 years for skin tone biases against darker skin to go away"

Why the distinction? Will black people still be facing skin tone biases in 61 years? What even is a skin tone bias? I'm pretty sure this isn't a bias against people who come back from holiday with a tan, which suggests it's not about skin tone, so racism?

Skin tone bias is independent of race, because it often manifests inside the race boundaries.

Among Indians https://theconversation.com/bleached-girls-india-and-its-lov...

Among African-Americans https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1988-35485-001

Among East Asians https://nextshark.com/east-asian-pale-skin-beauty-standard/

Difference Between Racism and Colorism: https://time.com/4512430/colorism-in-america/

Ok fair enough, I was thinking about this from a western white person perspective.

I still question whether this should be an ism though. The West kind of has/had these divisions. Pre 20th century having a tan was looked down on because it indicated you had to work in a field for a living. In the 20th century that kind of reversed because the rich could afford foreign holidays, now we have a situation where half of people wear fake tan, the other half look down on it. That all appears to be classism to me, rather than colourism?

And if the colour difference is genetic, is that not racism? If I treat a black person differently it's racism, if I treat a person of mixed origin differently, that's also racism? If a black person treats a mixed origin person differently, is that not equally racism? It's tempting to think of all Indians or Africans as the same 'race' but I as a western European can be racist towards Eastern Europeans, and Jews, and Gypsies, if I were racist towards an Italian because they had a tan, that would be racism, not colourism?

Is there something I'm missing?

I'm not sure the scenarios "some of my best friends are of the opposite sex" or "some of my best friends are of another race" have much bearing on sexism or racism. Loving someone from a different category doesn't automatically dissolve all antagonism or prejudice—it might just override it in a specific case. Relationships are multidimensional. You would need to provide evidence that these bonds of love/affection somehow erode prejudice toward a given 'other' in general. There are many historic cases of celebrities who have been widely accepted despite massive ongoing prejudice against the group of which they are a member. Affection for celebrities is not the same as familial love, but I do think this suggests that the way people feel about individuals doesn't translate in a simple way to their attitudes to whole groups.

As one potential example, though I'd want to see more data on actual relationships, regions with more immigrants tend to have warmer feelings toward immigrants, even among the non-immigrant population.

Because the non-immigrants who don't want to live among foreigners tend to leave and/or not move in. Simple self-selection.

Real life example of someone like this would be John Cleese, who moves from London to Bath after London lost its English identity.

Compare: People who eat burgers like burgers more than people who don't. Is it because eating burgers makes you like burgers, or because only people who like burgers will choose to eat burgers?

John Cleese lived in the US for 10 yers and married three Americans.

I think it's clear he's fine with foreigners, and that London quote got way overinterpreted.

> Real life example of someone like this would be John Cleese, who moves from London to Bath after London lost its English identity.

That seems more like an example of how easily statements get exaggerated and take on a life of their own. Cleese said something that was way overinterpreted, but he didn't move because of what he claimed. I'm not sure where you got that idea.

Counterpoint to you last example just for fun...people who live in places with a lot of highly rated burger restaurants eat more burgers because they are surrounded by good burgers, not because of an inherent love for ground beef patties.

I think the general sentiment was more about the neutral people who hold a view but could be accepting of something different, rather than the people who are staunchly against something.

> Loving someone from a different category doesn't automatically dissolve all antagonism or prejudice—it might just override it in a specific case.

Well-put. One need only think of how many men love their individual wives/sisters/mothers while otherwise being deeply misogynistic.

I think that it's likely not that having affection for someone of a different race or sexuality means that someone isn't or won't be bigoted. Rather its that it provides an opening for someone to re-evaluate their beliefs.

Exactly. For example Thomas Jefferson fathered 6 children with a slave of his. The millions of men who believed their wives had no right to vote, that it wasn't their place. The parents who shame their kids for their sexuality or gender identity. Prejudice and love can co-exist.

There were also women that were nonchalant, or even the large female anti-suffrage movements as well. Suffrage was seen by some (yes, women) as a threat to the family structure, amongst other reasons for oppision. Framing this as "prejudice" alone ignores the culture/opinions of the people of this era.

Yeah, we call that internalized misogyny

Not everything needs to be structured in oppressor-victim dynamics so you can slap a label on it. That's like calling the male-only draft externalized misandry.

Thomas Jefferson raped a woman because he was a wealthy slave-owner in a white supremacist, patriarchal society and could do so with impunity.

If you want to understand how to overcome prejudice, it begins with acknowledging historical reality for what it was and not trying to bend your understanding of events to correspond to foundational myths and deifications.

It's more nuanced than simply a wealthy slave-owner doing whatever he wanted with impunity.

When Jefferson was appointed has the US envoy to France and spent over two years living in Paris, he took Sally Hemings with him. This was before he started having sex with her.

France had abolished slavery, and under French law at the time if you brought a slave into France they had the right to leave slavery and remain in France if they wished.

Jefferson and Hemings started their sexual relationship while in Paris. When Jefferson went back to the US, she agreed to go with him (and thus return to slavery) in exchange for his agreeing to certain conditions, including that any children they had together would be freed.

Exactly, racism is much more of a fully-stable equilibrium than sexism, since full dehumanization of the other sex is always going to be impossible, if only due to adjacency. And adjacency can be critical to rights movements: one of the big successes of the gay rights movement was combating the stereotype of evil deviants through a strategy of positioning gay people as neighbors, brothers, sons, etc; regular people who just happened to have a different sexuality.

By contrast, there's nothing stopping racial groups from tending towards being fully segregated from one another, to the point that people stop thinking of the other race as full humans instead of fuzzy stereotypes.

> full dehumanization of the other sex is always going to be impossible

<gestures to entire history of sexism> .. I mean, the Saudi king has lots of wives but until recently wouldn't allow any of them to drive?

For a closer example, there are plenty of married Republican politicians who are willing to make statements on abortion that imply they have no idea how the reproductive system works.

> For a closer example, there are plenty of married Republican politicians who are willing to make statements on abortion that imply they have no idea how the reproductive system works.

If you think the abortion issue as simple as men oppressing women, you're horrendously misinformed, in a bubble of ideological ignorance, or both, given that women skew a decent amount less pro-choice than men.

(I say that as someone who's strongly pro-choice and, to my knowledge, has never met someone who's pro-life. I just don't think my bubble comprises the world or even the country)

> <gestures to entire history of sexism>

I'm not even sure where to start with this unsurprisingly unnuanced response to my model. Again, if your model of gender roles throughout history is as simple as "men lording power over women because they were able", you should pick up a history book. This middle-school model of history fails to explain the historical imbalance in torture, mutilation, violence, and early death (with corresponding imbalances on the other side in sexual violence, lack of agency, etc). There's no such two-sidedness inherent to racism, historically or theoretically, no analogue to things like "women and children first" that belie, as I said, "full dehumanization".

(I'm not remotely interested in comparing the levels of gender role oppression, historically or currently, because it doesn't have anything to do with my point, which was that there's no corresponding force pushing towards humanization of the victims of racism)

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018...

> For a closer example, there are plenty of married Republican politicians who are willing to make statements on abortion that imply they have no idea how the reproductive system works.

Such as?

The "way to shut that down" comment was the one that I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Akin#Controversial_commen... , but I'm sure people can find others.

That's definitely one, for sure.

One is not plenty, last time I checked.

> full dehumanization of the other sex is always going to be impossible, if only due to adjacency

No surprise, then, that it shows up in the segment of men who are not "adjacent" to any women.

Nor is it a surprise that it shows up in any segment of children not exposed to healthy male influences. That knife cuts both ways.

Why leave out the symmetric case of women who are not "adjacent" to any men?

Right, that's one source of sexism, but not by any means a complete picture. The stereotype of the lothario who thinks of women as inferior is yet another one, as is the feminist who mocks both toxic masculinity and male tears.

You're never going to entirely escape from those who are just shitty people, but at the societal level, sexism is unique in that the groups of potential victims and potential perpetrators are intimately forced together, ij a way that isn't necessarily the case for racism or homophobia (when gay people are forced into the closet).

I have heard that fathers with daughters make for a very tough jury in rape cases.

Generally speaking, if you want to nail a rapist to the wall, you should fill it with middle aged men, whether they have children or not, and actively avoid women.

Middle aged men remember what Randy jerks they were capable of being. Even if they have no daughters, they have mothers, sisters, wives or girlfriends and they want their women protected.

Women will say to themselves "I wouldn't have worn that outfit/gone to that bar/been in that part of town after dark." Women will try to convince themselves it was somehow the victim's fault so they can feel safe and in control of their lives.

Or so I've read.

That's very insightful.

And yet those men are still sexist, but in a protective way.

I recovered from being sexually abused as a child in part because I actively sought out protective male friends.

I've long believed the antidote to "bad men" is "good men." In contrast, a lot of rape victims simply conclude all men are evil and it becomes a barrier to recovery.

I think they don't know another way to feel safe. It seems like the safe bet to them: just don't trust any men.

That wasn't my reaction.

The example you gave about 'all men are evil' falls under similar pretext to a lot of the racism that has existed in history. For example "One individual from X group killed someone from 'my group', now every time I see someone from X group, I perceive them to be killers and thieves".

Humans try to rationalize a world full of unknowns most often with their own lenses.

A family friend raped one of my nieces. She was 15 at the time, and got pregnant. This was a religious community, and the rapist was married. But another family friend, who was single, married the young woman, and they had a long and apparently happy marriage, with two more children. So I guess that it all sort of worked out. They did forgive the rapist father, and he contributed to my niece's family.

It took me twenty years to conclude that the individual who raped me honestly thought there was consent on my part. And then I was able to make my peace with it and move on.

I think we desperately need to work on the societal problems that foster situations like that. Far too often, there is a crucible of social baggage involved.

My takeaway: Have private relationships and don't let the world butt into them. It's hard enough for two people to agree what's okay. It gets vastly harder when other parties get involved.

I read one article where two college students hooked up, everything was initially fine, then the girl's mother basically talked her into charging the guy with rape.

If you weren't there, I don't want your opinion of what happened to me. You can apply your personal baggage to your own sex life/experiences. Keep it out of mine.

Sounds good to me. Maybe with some neutral expert mediaon.

She was quite lucky then that she did not had to marry her rapist. That would sux more.

She did not had choice in whether she can stay in contact with her rapist, tho, despite the money. But it is nice she did not had to marry him, have children with him and be dependent on his income.

that's both insightful and sexist

> She asked if it mattered to them that she believed the acquitted to be innocent. The answer she received made it clear that the guilt or innocence of the accused was a matter of indifference. What mattered was that she had sided with the enemy.

I see this in a lot of forums, such as r/twoxchromosomes on reddit

The outspoken members there are women who assume their negative life experience is all women's experience. That they are speaking for the injustice of all women. Disagreeing with that version of reality is the worst sin of all. Offering a different perspective is at best tacit consent for the status quo or at worst advocating for the victimhood of women, intentionally(?) ignoring any other possibility. Offering a different perspective if you do not have two X chromosomes is mansplaining, no matter what the content is.

This is called an echo chamber. People don't realize they don't have as much consensus on reality as they believe.

I think one way to short circuit this is to reveal that the lack of consensus perpetuates the oppression of women. There are men willing to be allies and help create a gradient of collaboration, but given the censorship it is equally as entertaining watching a fragmented cause get nowhere due to its own balkanization that the echo chambers doesn’t even even seem to notice.

And this is all exacerbated because people aren't treating each other as individuals, and instead trying to speak for entire groups. The irony is that you can't even address this conundrum without grouping the people who do this together.

Your thesis presumes some democratic mechanism, as juries ultimately are.

Unfortunately, an increasing number of the laws we are subjected to in the United States are bureaucratic edicts removed several levels from democratic checks and balances. It appears to me that these are more readily steered by lobbying groups -- which by their nature agglomerate polarized supporters.

How else can you explain this Title IX perversity?

True in the sense that it creates a "floor" for the depths to which people might sink. But this process can still sink pretty low.

Consider how women couldn't vote in the US until 1919 -- a half century after blacks.

And a more modern example that was on display for all to see: the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. There were not a lot of facts available -- no date, no place, no witness that could remember. Yet millions were ready to brand him a rapist to the whole nation and pressure him out of political office.

> Consider how women couldn't vote in the US until 1919 -- a half century after blacks.

Not letting women vote is arguably not necessarily a marker of sexism. It is more a marker of the relationship between a country's military leadership and institutions.

Originally originally (~400BC) voting was basically for the army to decide when and where it would fight; hence male-only because men are the physically big ones who can fight. I don't know exactly how it changed over time, but the linkages are probably quite sticky. This modern concept of a government heavily invested in daily life wouldn't have been practical before modern communication and transportation, so needs and viewpoints on what the government is would have been radically different.

1 - I'm doubtful of your claim there was nothing to vote on except where/whether the army fights.

2 - That's irrelevant anyway unless you're suggesting that it was still the case up to 1919.

3 - Even if it was, why does women not fighting imply they can't have opinions and thoughts on when and where the army fights? For sure it still affects them.

And yet 1919 is the closing year of WWI, which as I recall was the first major war where women's labour could be deployed directly as a proactive and systematic part of the war effort on foreign soil. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm no military historian.

There is a massive link between being involved in the military and having political power, even without suffrage. There are 2,500 years of history and women got the vote around the time that the repeatable firearm was perfected.

The original bill was to be voted just as the war ended and it included a critical detail: female military draft. The world war 1 machine was running out of men to send to the war and the volunteer system for women did not turn out enough people to fill the ever increasing demand in the war factories. Something had to give.

Creating a female military draft raise some major concerns in 1918, one being that women had not voted to enter the war in the first place. It was seen as a bit unfair to then demand them to help fix the situation. Thus the right to vote.

Then the war suddenly ended and the bill got postponed. The female draft part was dropped but the idea of women vote continued with force and a year later it passed.

Most historians agree that the world war 1 was the catalyst for the women suffrage movement, through there are some disagreement. Some points to the fact that the movement existed before the war, but how significant their political influence was at that point is far from clear.

> Originally originally (~400BC) voting was basically for the army to decide when and where it would fight;

This simply isn't true, since other topics were definitely voted on. For example, rather famously, there were votes on whether a person should be exiled from the city in ancient Greece.

There was a lovely quote from that era that said "A city with a navy become democracy, with an army a tyranny". I can't find a reference, but what I can find is this choice quote from Wikipedia [0]:

"Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens."

I was a bit vague in my original comment, but the point I'm going for is that this looks lot like the army being in charge. The criteria wasn't "men because we like men". The criteria was questions like "are you going to be lining up to fight the Persians with me?" and "Can you build ships?". And a hint of nationalism/classism. If it were feasible to field women on the battlefield in 404BC they would have been voting too.

And indeed, as soon as we reach a level of technology where it is feasible for women to be policepersons and military contributors they start getting suffrage. It was still a battle, but the timing is highly suspicious.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Participati...

My understanding is that women didn't want to vote due to, amongst other things, not wanting to "mix the spheres" of domestic and public life, wanting the government to have no say in domestic life: https://herandrews.com/2015/03/01/women-against-suffrage/

Not voting doesn't have a huge effect on people's lives, which is why millions don't do so.

A number of witnesses came forwards?

The evidence that any particular accusation was accurate was very thin.

Perhaps more importantly, the accusations were impossible to defend against.

None of this means the events didn't happen. They might have. But the process was fundamentally unfair, and we need a better way to deal with uncertainty.

Lining up on party lines -- a kind of "vote for the truth" -- is ridiculously unfair to the accused. We need to agree on a process, including standards of evidence. When that process plays out, we should be able to basically come together on the outcome.

I think that may be because, at least in America, ethnic minorities are over represented in crime and the "under class" in a way that isn't true of gay people.

I'm not saying its right to draw the conclusion "black people are overrepresented in crime therefore black people/culture must be bad", but I think it is human nature to do so. Going further, if an individual has had a negative experience with a person of another race (e.g. being mugged, living next to an addict, etc.) then there is also likely to be an emotional component that is difficult to overcome.

Again, I want to emphasize that I'm not saying that this is right, just that it's human nature.

The notion that fathers who have daughters can't be sexist towards women is taking a really narrow view of sexism.

You can think that women aren't responsible enough to vote, or to hold certain jobs while still loving your daughter. You can kick it back with your black friend on the weekend while still not wanting black people in your neighborhood, your friends is just "one of the good ones".

Most of human society throughout history has been profoundly sexist by modern standards, and we still have entire countries that are structurally sexist by the standards of the west. None of that was destabilized because everyone had a mother, and most fathers had daughters.

>> Women and men both have members of the opposite sex that they genuinely love. I have heard that fathers with daughters make for a very tough jury in rape cases.

> The notion that fathers who have daughters can't be sexist towards women

You're misrepresenting what the person said.

Am I? The GP seems me to to be proposing the idea that jurors will be more fair to members of the opposite sex if they have members of that sex as part of their immediate family, something that isn't as likely to be the case with different racial groups.

I don't see how that has anything at all to do with the issue. The durability of sex-based discrimination in throughout the history of human societies demonstrably has nothing to do with that.

Yes, you are misrepresenting what was written. You are correct that, "the GP seems me to to be proposing the idea that jurors will be more fair to members of the opposite sex if they have members of that sex as part of their immediate family".

It is a massive exaggeration, if not an outright fabrication, to expand this to "the notion that fathers who have daughters can't be sexist towards women" - what you wrote your original comment in this chain. The grandparent comment stated that fathers with daughters give deference towards women in a very specific situation. No reasonable reading of this comment can be interpreted as denying the ability of fathers with daughters to be sexist towards women.

The GP mentioned this in the context of sexism being a "tractable problem", that means it's a problem that can be solved, as opposed to an intractable problem.

It can be inferred that they're proposing a mechanism by which sexism can be eradicated, not just marginally improved. Otherwise it wouldn't be a tractable problem.

Perhaps I'm still misreading it, but I can't see how it can be understood differently, and how I'd be misrepresenting it by rephrasing the idea as "the notion that fathers who have daughters can't be sexist towards women".

If we suppose that fathers only became marginally less sexists towards women by having a daughter, then it follows that sexism really isn't a tractable problem. Even if we were to follow the GP's logic that sexism or racism can be narrowly understood as the sort of discrimination that would cause discrimination by a jury.

What I'm pointing out is that even if we follow that argument that's taking a very narrow view of those -isms.

> The GP mentioned this in the context of sexism being a "tractable problem", that means it's a problem that can be solved, as opposed to an intractable problem.

> It can be inferred that they're proposing a mechanism by which sexism can be eradicated, not just marginally improved. Otherwise it wouldn't be a tractable problem.

Once again you're misrepresenting what they said. They said:

"This is one of the big ways in which sexism is a much more tractable problem than racism and less potentially explosive." which contradicts your claim that "they're proposing a mechanism by which sexism can be eradicated"

Certainly for the benefit of doubt of the GP I'll concede that at this point, now that I seem to have two commentators disagreeing with me.

I'm not a native English speaker, my understanding of the word "tractable" is "solvable". E.g. arranging some blocks on my desk with the tower of Hanoi algorithm using chopsticks is a tractable problem, doing so with my hands is more tractable, but the end result is the same.

In any case, whether the GP meant "completely solved" or "partial progress can be made" I think the point I was trying to make stands regardless.

That point is that even if you say achieve 100% equality of justice among jurors regardless of the sex of the defendant, you can't say you've achieved much if any progress on sexism in general.

They said much more tractable. That's a qualifier. And, they were saying it was much more tractable in comparison to racism. This says nothing specific about the degree to which it is tractable, nor that it is completely tractable.

It is misrepresenting them to claim, as you're continuing to do ("even if you say achieve 100% equality of..."), that what they said is somehow an absolute statement, or that it was some statement just about juries.

> The notion that fathers who have daughters can't be sexist towards women is taking a really narrow view of sexism.

Nowhere was that written in the above comment

Quite an optimistic view. Hope you are right.

What exactly is optimistic about the post?

Given the popularity of social justice causes, I have a hard time believing this is a material factor. People seem rather up in arms about racism or even just adverse impact on this day and age.

Up in arms is very different from understanding/empathizing. IMO, it's generally an indication of the opposite.

Seemingly not rascist and being rascist are two distinct qualities. It has been my experience on the receiving end of rascism that it is done quietly with plausible deniability

If it’s plausibly deniable, how do you know it’s racism?

Presumably you can’t in any one case, but may be able to when looking at them in aggregate.

Social justice causes are popular to talk about, not to actually do something about.

    "No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy."

    --- Henry Kissinger

(Not actually by Henry Kissinger)

The great quotes rarely are said by the right person :)

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