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Comment by pdntspa | Hacker News Reader

How exactly does sexism (or lack thereof) signal confidence?

And on the word shit, there is a long tradition in various world cultures of curse words being named on bodily functions. But you are missing the obvious in that "curse" words are such because they were originally thought to bring a curse on the speaker or recipients from whatever god-entity they believe in. I suspect this is a manifestation of (ancient?) society's methods of trying to control the fuck out of everyone and it is a meme burned in our consciousness quite deeply at this point. But all that makes the entire notion of curse-words invalid; if their meaning is that which we attribute to them then they are meaningless and therefore harmless. But with morality unable to escape the shadow of primitive, ignorant times, they continue to be "taboo"

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>How exactly does sexism (or lack thereof) signal confidence?

I think the argument they're making is that in a sexist culture all men will present with more confidence due to the belief that women are lesser. So the average woman will find the average guy more attractive...

I can't say I'm convinced.

Not sure how you came away with that conclusion. It's the exact opposite.

In a culture where sexism is more common, casual sexism will not stand out at all. The average guy will not appear more attractive. In a culture where sexism is largely frowned upon, being sexist but not too sexist is an act that stands out. A man who is either not sufficiently sexist or is silently sexist (for fear of repercussion) will appear average, because that category describes the average man. The man who is only slightly sexist and is just charming and good looking enough will win out because being sexist in front of a woman is the polar opposite of lacking confidence or placing the woman on a pedestal. They reside in a cozy region between the silent/supplicant majority of men and the ones who are either disgustingly sexist or are too physically unattractive to make up for saying something sexist.

No one's saying you or anyone have to like sexism. Being offensive in spite of blowback is a confidence move whether any individual finds it toxic or not.

You are making a ton of assumptions about the nature of confidence, attraction, and sexism, which potentially reveal your own biases. For one thing, I don't think that confidence and placing someone on a pedestal are "polar opposites" of each other, rather they are entirely different and uncorrelated dimensions of personality that can exist in any combination.

There are models of behavior describing personality across cultures, like Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, that speak more broadly on the way a group behaves as a whole. You might want to give them a read.

They did not claim that "confidence" and "placing women on a pedestal" are polar opposites.

They claimed that "being sexist in front of a woman" and "lacking confidence" are polar opposites.

They also claimed that "being sexist in front of a woman" and "placing women on a pedestal" are polar opposites.

Do you disagree with their actual claims?

Apologies for possible pedantry. I think their actual claims are actually compatible with "confidence" and "pedestal-placing" being different dimensions.

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