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Comment by rainbow | Hacker News Reader

Because your 'we' in this case assumes your reader is male. Again.

Well... I said "mate" for a reason. I didn't assume anything. But not everything can be written with those generic s/he or his/her notation. Sometimes... it just looks stupid. Sometimes a gender must be picked... and it will always be wrong to someone. Why does it have to be an issue all the time? Why do we have to assume that every time a person writes anything and they decide that a character is a male then the writer is sexist?

Besides... the poem said "a few girlfriends...". I am quite sure that this is a very accurate statement. Of the "Thousands of applications" that were submitted I imagine that enough of them were from men that a few of them had girlfriends that slept alone that night. Why does it have to be taken to the extreme and interpreted as "all these women sleeping away as all the men (and only the men) go off to start companies and get rich"?

I'm going to assume by your naive indifference you are not female, and quite likely are white, because you exhibit the ignorance of someone who's never suffered any type of indignity worse than the label of "dorky programmer".

I don't suggest you complain to your non-white, non-male friends about that...

#IngrainedPrejudice #DeathByAThousandCuts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose

If the OP had written the poem as "a few boyfriends slept alone..." nobody would have said a thing. If one is acceptable and the other is not... where lies the sexism now?

And not that it really matters since we aren't supposed to be looking at race/gender but yes... white & male. And just to round out the trifecta... from (what probably would have been considered at that time) a working/middle class family to boot. So maybe the worst indignity I've suffered was that when it came time to go to college there wasn't anybody looking to help me. Thankfully my grades were good enough because they don't give many grants and scholarships to middle class white males. But I'm getting over that the best I can. I don't complain about it every chance I get anymore.

But let's not get trapped by this silly notion that only white people are racist and only males are sexist. I've been labeled all sorts of things by all sorts of people. For instance... someone who doesn't even know me recently called me an indifferent, ignorant white man. I'm still standing.

There's an element of sexism in the poem. It's not hateful but it's pretty overt.

Would it be possible for you to elaborate on that a bit? Specifically, what part is an element of sexism and why?

The implicit assumption that it's the boyfriends that would be doing the startup and the girlfriends that would be sleeping alone in bed - the implication that obviously it would only be that way around.

It said "a few girlfriends" for carp sake. A few. Not all. A. FEW. The poem doesn't even begin to imply that it would only be that way around. The only thing obvious here is that some people are hell bent on finding injustice hiding behind every word. I feel sorry for those people. :(

Oops, you just projected. He said "mate" and "dorky programmers". Both of those stereotypes could mean female programmers as well so you assuming he could only mean males means that part is coming from you.

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