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But as observers if we are cautious about what we are saying, it can be okay to point out that women are socialized a certain way and this can lead to certain conversational patterns. We need to be careful to realize this is not some biological thing (hormones make impressive changes but this isn’t one of them), but I think it’s okay to point out common socialization differences if we are careful to attribute them to socialization. At least it can be okay. Certainly it is a delicate subject.
Is it sexist to say that women seek out conflict less than men? Mens' brains are literally doused in a hormone that makes them aggressive for many years of their development. Isn't it sexist, or just weird, to suggest that testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior?
sometimes, this place. smh
Inherently? No. In practice, generally.
> Isn't it sexist, or just weird, to suggest that testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior?
It is erroneous to conflate the positive claim that "testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior" with not making the claim "women seek out conflict less than men", and that is particularly true in the context where "conflict" is specifically online debate.
Not to be a woke feminist culture warrior on main but, that seems misogynistic.
In short, it's not misogynistic, it's backed by a large amount of research.
Everyone is, of course, an individual, and their preferences and behaviors can vary wildly outside of "norms".
The claim was that women to a higher degree find "direct, robust speech" alienating. Disregarding whether it's true or not, and my own reservations against using "robust" as a descriptor, it looks like a fairly neutral statement to me.
I thought for a few minutes about what word to use there. Perhaps "direct" on its own would have been better; but I wanted connotations of "assertive" and "strong".
I used to participate in certain political mailing lists that had a much higher proportion of women participants than, say, Usenet (and I knew many of the participants in these lists IRL). My experience was that it was predominantly women that objected to the style of discussion that inline replies often led to. Inline replies being the Usenet norm, perhaps that explains why Usenet was such a male-dominated environment.
FWIW, I don't think it's misogynistic to say that on the whole, women have different attitudes from men, or behave differently. To what extent that's the effect of hormones or socialization, I don't care to speculate.
I gradually came round to the view that the objectors had a point, and I toned down my use of inline replies a lot.
Forget human beings for a minute here and just think in terms of masculine/feminine energy. Where the masculine energy is defined as the "breaking apart" and the feminine is defined as the "coming together". You can see how this describes so many aspects of reality. Also understand that all humans, both male and female, have aspects within them of both natures. Okay.
Now, is it just the case that the "threaded" reply style you see on Reddit and HN is just, simply, masculine in it's purest form. It branches endlessly. Dividing and sub-dividing forever. Destructive. Masculine. Not necessarily bad but, you know, masculine.
Whereas the inline nature of traditional forums is not that. The chronologicalness ensures that arguments are either resolved relatively quickly or become lost in the noise. There is no real opportunity to break down an idea. As a result, you don't see that extreme division take place.
So it may be the case that the structure of the site determines what sort of moderation you need to do. If the site is threaded, you're going to need to worry a lot more about divisive topics. Whereas, tradition-style forums will probably need to set out separate dedicated spaces for, say, "serious discussion" so that conversations with more depth are allowed to take place.
I would personally have stuck with just "direct" (which is neutral), and perhaps added "blunt" (which is neutral-negative).
You're right! (I don't think I considered the word "strong"). On further reflection, I think I chose "robust" as an evasive euphemism.
I think "robust" was applicable to the kind of communication I was referring to, in the sense in which some meetings of diplomats are described as "a robust exchange of views" (that's euphemistic too).
"Blunt" would have been less euphemistic; but it carries violent connotations that I didn't want to convey, as in "blunt instrument trauma". It's not one of the words I considered, and anyway "direct" covers it.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I'll assume that (1) you're not sexist and (2) you're asking why is this claim rooted in sexism.
The nature of this claim is rooted in an idea that any observable behaviors between genders is due to the nature of genders themselves. It is not worded to indicate that its root is, for instance, a commentary about how _external factors_ exert different influence on individuals due to their gender.
This is the nature of misogyny. The invalid logical implication that gender controls behavior. It's not actually a causal relationship. It's purely correlation.
> I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
Not trying to pick on what you wrote here, but I wanted to take a moment to break this specific sentence down to illustrate my message. Without surrounding context, this sentence appears to make the claim that all women dislike something. And specifically, the qualifier is _only_ gender. Worded this way, it starts to look like a statement about a causal relationship. (Again, my apologies, I know that you don't mean this at all).
It's a sensitive subject, so I think it always helps to wrap the message with language that attempts to really clarify whether or not there's an underlying implication of `if gender then behavior` that someone _may_ get from reading. (And that can be hard to do, because _sometimes_ a reader will decide to draw incorrect conclusions!)
Hopefully this was all actually interesting and something that you didn't already know beforehand (if not, apologies!).
I do think that there's a way to re-word sentences like this one to show that there's no underlying intent of `if gender then behavior`. For example,
> I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
Could be re-worded to show that it's a claim rooted in statistical averages of expected behavior (so, implicit assumption: it can just be correlation!) -- "On average, I suspect that women dislike inline replies more often than men."
Or, one could expand it by including the complete chain of logical consequences: `society creates gender norms` (expectations around behavior rooted in one's gender, inherently the crux of sexism) -> leads to `if gender then behavior`. This could lead to that sentence being written as, "Because of the pressure that society exerts on girls and women to be conflict avoidant and conflict resolvers, I suspect that women dislike inline replies more than men." Crucially, at least to me, this is a big difference because the `I suspect` part is _conditioned_ on the `Because of the pressure` bit.
This kind of wording also explicitly notes the existence of sexism and how that social phenomena can become the causal force that is ultimately observed through behavior and the correlations of that behavior with gender.
Well, I can qualify what I say; and then I can go back over my qualifications, and qualify them too. Your proposed rewrite is OK; it conveys my meaning. But it reads a bit like a sociology essay, when it was really just a tangential comment on an article about Wikipedia.
One of the Wikipedia rules is "Assume good faith". It's tedious to harden all your comments against people who assume malevolence, and it makes the comments over-long and hard to read; so I don't do it.
> This is the nature of misogyny. The invalid logical implication that gender controls behavior.
Why do you consider the very suggestion misogynistic (leaving aside whether it's true)? "Misogyny" means "hatred of women," in the literal sense. What you're stating is that biological essentialism implies misogyny, which isn't true. As a counterexample, there are radical feminists and self-described misandrists who argue that men and women act differently for inherent biological reasons, and they aren't misogynist.
It seems to me like people are just letting their own biases shine through. Perhaps the people claiming sexism falsely believe that a higher preference for direct/blunt speech is always superior somehow?
That is an absurdly strong claim that contradicts lots of evidence in many cases.
Citation needed.
> especially women
Citation needed.
But (semi-)jokes aside, "reply in-line" can be good for debate in the sense that you can dissect arguments point-by-point and argue them individually. It does however also mean you can derail the conversation more easily by attacking multiple irrelevant fragments of the post without addressing the actual point.
Replying in-line to multiple points is useful to you, the reply guy, when writing the first reply. It's completely useless to anyone else two replies in as you're basically forced to either maintain multiple different conversations in the same post or need to decide which ones to abandon.
It's trivial to overload any conversation using "reply in-line" with the shotgun approach of throwing a bunch of low-effort nitpick replies into one post and seeing which one sticks. This is the opposite of robustness. Instead of being forced to steelman the other person's argument because you need to reply to the post as a whole or risk being called out for nitpicking, "reply in-line" allows you to unravel the argument, pick out the weakest parts, ignore the rest and then derail the conversation by replying to an army of strawmen all at once. This is the conversational equivalent of bikeshedding.
In the general case, I try very hard to make no more than one point or ask no more than one question per email. It feels reductive and limiting, but it really does make comms with the median person work much better.
I'm not sure what work that weird, irrelevant gendered speculation is supposed to be doing, so I have no comment.