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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

> conversation ends due to their inflammatory pronouncements.

Where are you? In the US, most of us still have these conversations about gender, relationships, and life dynamics all the time. (If anything, this is arguably 70%+ of everything we talk about, among friends and acquaintances in the community).

> although despite assurances of maturity and openness conversation ends due to their inflammatory pronouncements.

Is there a common thread here? Can you imagine what might prompt such a response?

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> Is there a common thread here? Can you imagine what might prompt such a response?

What tends to prompt such responses in my experience is saying anything along the lines of "In my experience, I've noticed there is a tendency for (insert gender) to..."

Actually, in hindsight, the inflammatory responses mostly only happen when the inserted gender is women.

I'm sometimes the one firing off the "inflammatory response", and it's usually in a group of men where someone says something blatantly misogynistic, not just stereotypical.

Is your response coming from a kind of guttural, purely emotional place of having your values trampled on? Or is it meant to serve a purpose?

In these situations my default is to just observe as dispassionately as possible. If I'm in a cheeky mood maybe I'll troll a bit or try to find a humorous way to point out how the shoe could be on the other foot. And sometimes, although very rarely, the mood is just right that I feel safe enough to be earnest.

If I got all up in arms every time someone says something misogynistic or misandrist, I think I would end up being a very lonely person. I've seen a lot of these people. They either end up brainwashed on one end of the gender war spectrum (and usually just so angry and spiteful -- this is the polarized archetype), or get cast out of all possible ingroups if they make the mistake of attempting to be too consistent with their criticism (nerdy and socially unaware archetype).

Right, that's the sort of Problem People that are being discussed here. Without a doubt you use the term "blatantly misogynistic" in ways so far removed from the actual meaning as to be both useless and unpredictable. I've seen people use this term to describe hiring people with specific skills, for example.

99% of the time something is described as woman-hating, which is what that word means, it's nothing of the sort. But feminist extremists react so extraordinarily over the top, and our culture unfortunately forbids firing people for this type of OTT reaction, that everyone else lives in fear of triggering them.

So help everyone out here. Next time you think you've heard something "blatantly misogynist", stay out of it. Let people talk.

I think 70%+ might not be the right proportion for all or most people in the US. It's hard for me to estimate, but irl conversations I've had mostly skew towards media, computers, and gossip. Gender dynamics is in there for sure, but I don't think it's what most people I've met want to talk about most of the time. It's kind of a depressing subject.

> , but irl conversations I've had mostly skew towards media, computers, and gossip.

Same, but like, how do you talk about any of that stuff, without also touching on "gender, relationships, and life dynamics".

Like, I have no idea how a group of friends would talk about, say "that cool new Spider-Man movie" without also talking about gender / race / life dynamics / etc. Those topics are so fundamental, they're a part of almost everything.

For me that movie was mainly about how creative the effects artists were honestly.

What’s the average age of people in your social group? I’m guessing over 35. It’s a very different story if you try talking to people in their 20’s or younger.

We're "millenial-ish" (in that, we're all between 25 to 40yrs old). I myself am not over 35 just yet.

> It’s a very different story if you try talking to people in their 20’s or younger.

Is it? We're old enough that half of us have kids, and some of us have teenaged kids (13-19yrs old), and they also have friends and such. It doesn't seem that different to me. (They're less willing to tolerate arbitrary BS, but otherwise, don't seem wildly different than we were at those ages)

Teenagers who haven’t gone to college yet won’t be that different. When they move out and live among peers and take courses from professors with views very different from home, you’ll see how things change!

> When they move out and live among peers and take courses from professors with views very different from home,

Why would professors have "views" all that different from home? Professors are regular people too.

(Two of us in our friend group / community, are literally employed college professors, others are elementary teachers, software developers, IT folks, one designer, one electrical engineer, two in marketing, one who is in HR, one is a city bus driver, one who works in an automotive parts plant, one is a nurse, etc)

You guys like, have friends, right? Like, people who you see semi-regularly and are from your community, but who aren't necessarily from your employer or in your career / direct field-of-work? Friends that aren't also LinkedIn contacts?

I have lots of friends, of different ages! I'm in my late 30's and a mature (undergrad) student at my local university. I am telling you from first hand experience that the views of my classmates (all in their 20's) are very different from those of my age group (in their 30's).

Professors are on average much more progressive and liberal than the average person and have a high amount of comfort and consequent belief privilege, so no I wouldn't say they're regular people. (Source: I'm a professor.)

IIRC, there is a strong correlation with higher education (rather than the job itself) - it's just that most professors have PhDs.

It's not so much level of education but lack of real world experience. PhDs in industry or outside of the Academy are very different.

> PhDs in industry or outside of the Academy are very different.

...but they all skew more liberal than those who have master's degrees, who in skew more liberal than those with honors degrees - and so forth until you get to those who are barely educated. This trend persists even when the individuals involved are not in academia.

I’m in my 40’s and I don’t know anyone at all around my age who talks about gender at all, let alone often. Many in my generation grew up with the view that those are just a bunch of stereotypes which are not helpful and should be ignored.

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