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Comment by lukev | Hacker News Reader

While I understand being annoyed at these neologisms, they do add information: the writer didn't just didn't just feel interrupted and patronized, she felt interrupted and patronized in ways that fit into specific patterns of gendered behavior.

That is highly salient to her experience.

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To be fair, the way that people in technical roles explain things to those with less technical knowledge can often feel condescending and 'mansplained' regardless of the gender roles in conversation. I ( male ) felt this in my first job out of college from everyone that was senior to me on the engineering team. When I was there, I worked with a girl that was both younger than I and more senior in many areas technically. She, albeit I think unintentionally, would effectively mansplain issues to me.

Point being, in technical roles and roles where you interact with technical people, you will undoubtedly have moments where you feel like information is being disseminated in a condescending fashion. Context is key here as it would be unfair to conflate the general 'prickliness' of many engineers with misogyny.

I personally dislike them for two reasons. The first is that they are inherently subjective; it assigns a motive to another person's actions, which the author almost certainly doesn't know. Maybe the motivations were sexist, maybe not.

The second is that those terms are untouchable in a sense. I skimmed it a bit and couldn't find anything more specific than using those terms. Unfortunately, that's generally acceptable today because questioning whether those terms actually apply gets an immediate response claiming that you are victim blaming. It cheapens the discourse to me, because the central premise of the article is held as unquestionable.

Then again, perhaps this category of writing just isn't for me. I don't disagree that her feelings are salient to her experience; but my interest isn't really in her experiences, it's in the knowledge that we can derive from her experiences. I.e. can her experiences reveal some insight into sexism amongst tech companies, or how victims are treated? However without a basis in objective facts, I fear there's not much knowledge to derive beyond her experiences in and of themselves.

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