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Comment by jona-f | Hacker News Reader

I did not mean to insult you, i actually tried to make an argument. Nor was I looking for maternalistic. That's a different thing and i meant the negatively connoted one. Also reading again I realize I went too far saying all the helping, which is an unfortunate generalization, surely, being compassionate is a good thing.

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I'm a woman. It's pretty well established that lack of rights and education for women is a root cause of high birth rates and other negative factors being discussed here.

"Paternalistic" implicitly assumes I'm male and that's kind of a problem if we are wanting to treat all people with respect as a baseline means to make the world a better place.

We absolutely shouldn't be interfering in a colonial sort of fashion, but the reality is that "not interfering at all" is not a realistic goal. The only way you get that is by not interacting at all and that amounts to calling for not trading with poorer countries which is an excellent means to ensure they remain poor and can't develop.

The reality is we already do interfere and often in ways that make the people going in to "help" feel good more than really helping. Real help does, in fact (as you suggested), require one to have some kind of baseline respect for people that many people lack generally.

I will suggest that if you think maternalistic has positive connotations but paternalistic has negative, you should spend some time examining your implicit assumptions about men, women, parenting roles, etc and wonder exactly why you think the female-coded version of that word is not negative but the male-coded version is.

FWIW: I'm an environmental studies major (as background for wanting to do urban planning) and I'm far from ignorant. If you weren't intending to insult me, leading with calling me paternalistic and ending with saying "...so people like you can keep ignorant..." seriously fails to achieve the stated intentions.

I’m pretty sure they were using the term to refer to the concept of paternalism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism

not as a gendered term targeted at you.

Just a heads up: paternalism or being paternalistic is a concept unrelated to the user’s gender. It means advocating for action that limits a groups freedom or autonomy. Maternalism has a different meaning. You being one gender or another has no bearing on whether it was the correct word for the argument. It wasn’t quite the right word, condescending would probably have been better given the context of their phrases.

Thank you. I stand by my opinion that gender issues are a factor in global poverty, so someone insisting the cure for such is to respect people and not think you know what's best for them should find gender-neutral terms to make that point in line with their stated values or at least check the gender of the individual they are attacking and insulting (in violation of HN guidelines) and use gender appropriate insults if they insist on getting personal.

Totally agree with your statement that gender issues are a factor in global economics, and that we should strive to use gender-neutral phrasing whenever practical.

The euphemisms are insufferable

I'm actually not someone big on insisting we say "humankind" instead of "mankind" or similar. I did check the link talking about paternalism and I can understand where the practice of using the word that way comes from, but it implicitly smears fatherly behavior and implicitly reinforces an assumption that men have political and economic power and women don't.

Gendered language is kind of a thorny issue for the English language. Not all languages are like English. Japanese and Farsi default to gender-neutral pronouns and cultures that default to calling people by their family name instead of their given name also sidestep a lot of these issues.

The US had a women-only baseball league during World War II and someone said (or somewhere I read) that it was the era of radio broadcasts and baseball defaults to referring to players by their last names, so listening to a game of baseball with women-only was experientially nearly identical to listening to men's baseball:

"And Smith is up to bat and knocks it out of the park for a home run, winning the game!"

It's probably a fiercely fought battle with English because it's the default lingua franca for the world and doesn't play well with a lot of cultures that feel forced to use it. Various proposals for fixing it come from interest groups rather than arising naturally in an emergent fashion and strike people as unnatural, top-down solutions to a problem they personally may not have, so see no reason to pursue.

/off-topic tangent, oops, because linguistics and social issues are both interests of mine

There’s no reason you can’t address a mixed-gender group as something like “hey everyone” or “hey folks” rather than something like “hey guys” or “hey gentlemen.” It’s just common courtesy we should feel a duty to perform it as members of a society, in my humble opinion. The point I was making a couple replies up was that some terms aren’t fungible, like paternalism and maternalism, because also they seem superficially to be different genders for the same topic, they mean totally different things, so we should use paternalism to mean what it means, despite the gender connotation.

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