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Comment by anticristi | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else think the title is sexist by today's standards?

I thought the pop-culture references were both extremely funny and well-played. It also seems that the author of the post is both a woman and alive in 2020, so no, not at all sexist by today's standards.

Would you like to elaborate how?

Or are you just being pre-emptively offended on someone else's behalf?

Maybe I am a bit over-protective and extrapolate too much, but here is what research says:

"Davies et al. (2002) showed that women experience stereotype threat when they are reminded of existing stereotypes about women in television advertising. In this study, participants watched commercials in which women were very excited about buying cosmetic products or trying a new baking recipe. After watching these commercials, women performed worse on a math test compared with men who watched the same commercials and compared with women who watched gender-neutral commercials."

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0243...

I just think a more cautious analogy would have made sense.

Stereotype threat is probably not a thing https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23743603.2018.1... - publication bias

It's quite sad that this oppression olympics is now poisoning HN's comments section.

It's kinda nerdy and very clickbait-ish but sexist? Probably not, but who am I to judge. Old, white and male means I am not entitled to any opinion on such matters, by today's standards.

Old, white and male — we are probably both plenty entitled. But life is generally favorable to us, so we are often better off listening to those actually affected by this.

Is that to imply less privileged people should feel less obligated to listen or is that to imply more privileged people have less to contribute so they should default to listening? It seems highly unnecessary to devalue large categories of people based on the situations they were born into just to get across a point that listening to others is important.

The principle was merely that people who are not directly affected by X can particularly benefit from listening to people directly affected by X. It was even a supererogatory framing of the recommendation. But enjoy your high horse!

Just because you’re “old, white and male” doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have an opinion. Don’t let anybody make you feel like that.

I think it was obvious that he doesn't believe that and he's just playing the victim. Nobody in the comments has mentioned anything about white males not having an opinion, and this is a typical argument (and a strawman) that people use to derail the discussion.

No, it's not obvious. You should look at people with a more generous eye and with the benefit of doubt instead of throwing accusations left and right.

Sadly, he's quite on point.

Unless the person believes that old white men literally are not allowed to hold any opinion whatsoever on matters of sexism and that's the most plausible and popular view, then it clearly is both false and a strawman argument, so interpretation doesn't have much to do with it.

There are of course times when modern conversation around this devolve to people saying white men should just shut up, their opinions don't matter, etc. But since there are more defensible, reasonable versions of this (e.g., white men should be more tentative in opinions about discrimination given their relative lack of direct experience of being discriminated against, there are contexts when offering such opinions are inappropriate, etc.), it clearly is a strawman.

The title, I didn’t get. But the sub titles as references to St Paul’s letter to Corinthians? That was slick.

It's a stupid title. Connecting the concept to a movie was unnecessary.

But it's not any more sexist than making a movie called (and about) Mean Girls in the first place...

It seems like a decent way to engage women in the content of the article to me. I think that is one of the aims, and why not? The article was written by a woman after all.

True, it just brings back bad memories from EU's "Science: It's a girls thing" campaign.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/jun/29/science...

That initiative is indeed cringeworthy and pandering. But this article feels more organic and genuine, to me. This article was written by a woman software engineer in her own time, and not commissioned by a boardroom full of bureaucrats, maybe that is why.

For me personal? No.

I think it's a pop culture reference Andi don't think it is sexist.

Err, no? The article is written by a woman, by the way.

not specific to this situation/thread, but women can be sexist too.

I have strictly no idea why OP is using women nor in the title or illustrations

It's a jokey reference to the movie Mean Girls (a comedy).

Is mentioning women off limits nowadays? Come on. It might as well been "Kindness for Mean Boys" and the meaning and implications of it would not change a single iota, except losing the movie reference and light tone the author wanted to go for.

I dont have this reference. Kindness for mean boys would have certainly be less controversial but still off topic. Never said that mentioning women is off limits. I don t get why you ask this as an amswer to my statement. Thanks for the movie reference

He's drawing a comparison between Haskell kinds and concepts shown in the (once) popular teenage movie "Mean Girls".

It’s still pretty popular, it does have kind of a cult-movie status.

s/He’s/She’s/

It reinforces the stereotype that only women are mean. I would dislike a title reinforcing stereotypes about me: "Detox for Alcoholic East Europeans: Haskell type enforcement".

No such stereotype says only women are mean.

I've never heard a stereotype that suggests only women are mean. Perhaps it's a cultural trope?

They are referencing the old idea that men handle disagreement with violence while women handle it by being mean to each other. Saying "only women at mean" is hyperbolic, but they likely are stereotypes.

For what it's worth, I've never considered meanness to be limited to non-physical attacks. I'd venture to say a bully punching a kid is just as likely to get labeled mean as a bully that makes fun of a kid.

It's funny how often the people "fighting" a stereotype are the people that bring them up in the first place and thus spread them.

I don't know the movie, so I agree with the title being a bit strange, and I probably could have done with a slightly more factually oriented article, but I appreciate the effort to keep it light. And the stereotypical girls' cliques the article seems to riff on do exist... Girls are known to be more relationally aggressive than boys, who tend to be more physically aggressive than girls. Girls also behave in a more pro-social fashion, so girls' cliques are often larger than boys' cliques, creating more complicated power dynamics. That said, I don't really get what you mean. That's like saying a book called "Good Habits for Incompetent Managers" reinforces the stereotype that only managers are incompetent.

Never heard of a stereotype according to which only women are mean.

It’s just a reference to the Mean Girls movie. Works well with haskell’s kind → mean.

ok I do understand why I didn t understood

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