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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

I'd like this article a lot more if it weren't sort of gratuitously about gender in a strangely jarring way.

The underlying point about spectatoritis is interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with what it means to "become a man" or developing a "manly 'philosophy of leisure'". Surely plenty of people of both genders are suffering from spectatoritis, and not only in spectator sports (and even there, there are plenty of female fans as well).

Nash's book is not explicitly gendered in that way, though it was written in 1938 and so does have a more implicit built-in assumption that it's probably addressing men (and it does use "man" and "men", but in the now-old-fashioned sense that's sort of gendered but ambiguously so and might also mean "people in general", depending on context). But it's not really accusing its readers of being insufficiently masculine; it's accusing them of being too passive, which seems more to the point.

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http://artofmanliness.com/about-2/

It's a gender-specific blog. A good one, too.

This article isn't gender-specific, though, except in a very lazy way that just gratuitously throws in the word "man" and "manliness" a few times in an article that has nothing to do with them, unless you count some vague reference to old-fashioned ideas about what constitutes a "real man". It would require changing about four sentences, and not even changing them a lot, to make this a completely gender-nonspecific article.

The blog overall, from a brief skim, seems about 50% sexist nonsense, and 50% obsessed-with-old-accoutrements-of-masculinity hipsters (I expect to find some fancy moustaches and pipes). If it matters, I'm a man, and I find this kind of stuff trying to tell me what it means to be a "real man" pretty offensive, backwards crap.

I recommend more than a brief skim. We appear to be looking at two different blogs.

Could you suggest an article for me to take a look at that does not reference some sort of normative idea of: 1) manliness; or 2) real men? I.e. that does not try to tell me what I have to be like in order to be a manly-real-man?

There's no point if you see "real man" and terms like it and assume the whole thing is sexist schlock. You're looking at the intentional usage of outdated language as a styilistic choice and inferring things around it.

I don't see any way not to extrapolate it that way, since the concept of "real man" is inseparable from an attack on men who don't conform to the author's perceived requirements of "manliness", as somehow not being "real" men, or defectively masculine. I.e. not just old-fashioned language, but old-fashioned ideas better left buried.

You are wrong. You can read a few posts without preconceptions to see why. I'm not going to pollute the thread with this tangent any more.

edit: http://artofmanliness.com/faq/

"1. What makes you experts on manliness?

We’ve never said we’re experts. In fact, the idea that there’s such a thing as an “expert in manliness” is sort of silly. We’re just two people who are passionate about helping men become better men. We want to provide an alternative men’s magazine for men who are tired of the crap that’s put out for men by most media outlets. We see our role as researchers and writers who try to dig up the best information out there and make that info available to readers. I’m learning right along with everyone else."

http://artofmanliness.com/2010/05/16/what-is-manliness/

I did take a look around and taking a trial run on my RSS subscription reader, but as far as research goes, i still think many articles are just plain opinions.

I suspect if you replace 'man' with 'human' and 'manliness' with 'humanliness' it might an easier read for you. The original author in the thirties was was writing in the style which was deemed 'proper' at the time, and I am sure that if they were alive today they would agree that 'women' are just as susceptible to 'spectatoritis' as men are.

For the original book, yeah; the quotes from there don't really bother me, and I read 19th-c stuff pretty frequently. It's this blog which bothers me more; it seems to be going out of its way to inject phrases like "manly 'philosophy of leisure'" when just "philosophy of leisure" would do. But I suppose it is the raison d'etre of the blog...

Unless you have a specific example, merely omitting mention of both genders hardly qualifies as "sexism" to me? There are plenty of gender-specific magazines for females that do the same thing all the time. I don't see why everyone must now pepper their prose with "he or she" and use an exact 50/50 proportion of examples using both male and female names (actually, you wouldn't need an equal proportion, as it seems that sexism only applies to men) lest they be labeled sexist?

Secondly, just because it's popular today to think of men differently than the "old-fashioned way" doesn't mean that modern thought is "more correct" as to what defines a man, nor does it mean that people who disagree with the modern idea are "wrong" (I'm not suggesting that the "old-fashioned way" is in anyway correct either, but still people have different opinions - and the popular modern idea is just one more).

But I digress, the blog is quite self-aware and I've always read it with a sort of tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; the "gratuitously" throwing in of "man" and "manliness" is part of the writing style.

It's ironic that many authors resort to using the blatantly sexist 'she' to avoid being called sexist.

I would love to see any evidence that the usage of 'he' somehow harms females, and I would support any evidence-supported solution that is suggested (for one thing, I wouldn't want it to harm my wife and daughters), but so far this whole issue seems to be completely locked in the realm of hypothesis, and it's without the feeblest suggestion of evidence.

It's not that using "he" is sexist, so much as it's an indicator of a society where being male is the "default" setting, and it's always a little bit surprising to see a woman doing something. So I would argue that no, it's not really sexist to use "she" as a pronoun, if you're doing it to be rebellious. It isn't about putting down men. It's about encouraging the visible presence of women.

The pronoun thing is probably a minor issue in the gender wars, though. That "he" is the default pronoun isn't a problem so much as, say, that the vast majority of scientists are men, which sends the message to young girls that science is not for them.

There's some interesting studies and anecdotes in this page: http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/pap/node6.html

Why is the small number of women in science a problem? To call this fact a problem good evidence is needed.*

Usually when this is called a problem it is done along with making the implicit or explicit suggestion that men in scientific fields are sexist and somehow discriminate against women. But I, like most men in science, would severely reprimand anyone who treats women unfairly. Therefore I find it extremely unwarranted and unfair that feminists think it is OK to accuse us of sexism without evidence. And I find it saddening that not more men have the courage to speak up against these accusations.

I'm sure there have been cases of discrimination against women in science, but this in no way proves that it's widespread, or that it's affecting the number of women in science.

[* The logic goes that since men and women are identical, there should be just as many women in science as there are men. But this conclusion is unwarranted because the premise is unsupported by evidence.]

Countries with more gender inequality have more female IMO contestants: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract

If you change the gender of a name and leave everything else constant on an academic CV, acceptance rates go down from 70% to 45%. http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=1...

If it were actually the case women were inherently less interested in science, sure, I wouldn't care, but discrimination exists. Much more subtly than it used to, but it's still there, and hence still a problem.

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