Comment by CDSlice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CDSlice | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>> (Why this gendered insulting is okay when it’s aimed against men, I don’t know.)

> Men collectively have enough power to handle a funny critical term without risk of being marginalized.

What does men collectively have enough power even mean? It's not like all the men in the world work together to decide the fate of all the poor, powerless women. Where is black men's power? Where is the homeless white men's power? And why should risk of being marginalized factor into it? Insulting a very large fraction of humanity for the actions of a small subset shouldn't be OK no matter who it is. Would insulting all Muslims for the actions of a few fringe sects be OK? I mean, they should collectively have enough power to handle it, they even run whole countries!

Decry the actions of bros all you want, but why expand that to saying all men do this as "mentrification" implies? Doing so is both inaccurate and hurtful to many people for no reason other than feeling smug that some man (who most likely isn't very privileged) finally got their comeuppance.

I don't think it implies that all men do this at all. It also seems like a much more palatable expression/term than "dick-measuring contest".

But it seems to collectively place the blame on all men, rather than the minority who are interested in dick-measuring contests.

And not only is this unfair, it’s silly. Brewing has always been an almost exclusively male hobby, the rise of the hop nerd is nothing to do with sex at all, contrary to what the word might imply.

I would also be willing to believe that the, for lack of a better term, dick-measuring, isn't something that men inherently do more; we're just primed to see it that way due to sexist stereotypes. And/or they get away with it more easily 'cuz hegemony.

Evidences:

At quilting shows, numeric boasting is also common - number of hours, number of pieces, number of spools of thread, I've even seen a count of the number of broken quilting needles.

Carbon fiber knitting needles are a thing. I own some. The packaging talks about how carbon fiber is also used in aerospace. (In case, I dunno, you need to get those puppies moving through the air really fast, maybe?)

My grandmother's approach to baking Christmas cookies.

(That said, MENTRIFICATION is a hilarious term, I chuckled out loud, and I will be using it in the future, with only moderate fear that doing so will emasculate me or invert the patriarchy, and minor hope that people who like to complain about political correctness will be offended on political grounds.)

The point is that this is a general trend in culture not specifically brewing. That’s why they ended with the example of knitting, they even included the parenthetical disclaimer that it’s not always men.

Mentrification is just a clever play on words.

The actual observation definitely rings true for me. I remember as a middle schooler not wanting to admit i was learning guitar until i was ’good enough’.

I think this is definitely tied to identity. Something that you can work at and see demonstrable progress is comforting in a way, but i can see how it easily leads to passion as competition.

Is this the "men is short for bogeymen and thus not the same as any other collectivisation"-argument or an argument that they did not mean what they said?

Seems like being a man is necessary, but not sufficient to be a part of mentrificafion. Just like gentrification doesn’t imply that all the gentry are involved in it.

But mostly it’s a pun.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com