I don't think that "my wife doesn't understand why I like technology" is a sexist comment. Substitute husband and it would read just the same.
The thing is, I've never heard a woman speaker make a similar joke about her husband/boyfriend or a non-heterosexual speaker make a similar comment about their partner. Maybe I'd feel differently if there was more of a mix.
Well, taking for granted the fact that there are more men than women in computer science and engineering / IT, presumably a higher percentage of women (and homosexual men) in tech have had success finding a significant other who shares their primary interests than vice-versa.
(Assuming you're the author of this blog) obviously much of what you mentioned in this post is flat-out sexism and needs to be addressed. But if I joke or complain that my $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER doesn't get my interests, and that $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER happens to be female makes you feel alienated... really, that's your problem. The fact that you have experienced actual sexism in some contexts is not mutually exclusive with the possibility that you are being oversensitive about this.
As for your comment about me being oversensitive, way to miss the point of the last paragraph of my post.
Just because you can predict a rebuttal doesn't make it wrong. Just because a rebuttal is wrong 90% of the time doesn't make it always wrong. Sometimes feelings ARE baseless. I don't want to get into the semantics of whether they're still 'valid', but everyone occasionally thinks things that are objectively wrong.
I do get your notion of 1,000 paper cuts, or at least I think I do. But let me rephrase that – why should you consider my hypothetical complaint, as a heterosexual male, that my coincidentally female significant other doesn't "get" my interests in technology to be one of those cuts in the first place?
Before I was a programmer I worked in K-12 education, where females rather than males comprise the dominant population, so I think I have the experience to comment on this. There was some actual sexism that I faced there, as a male charged with watching over students. But for all of that, I never allowed myself to feel discomfort about the fact that most of my coworkers were female. Nor that when they complained about their significant others during our lunch breaks, those SOs happened to be overwhelmingly male. It was just something I had to get over.
> The intent of my blog posts (there's a few in the series) was to share my personal experiences and feelings. Not to explicitly label them as sexism or say everyone must share those feelings or say "hey you, you better go fix this" or any other number of things you seem to be attributing to it.
I grant that I may have missed the purpose of your posts (I will read them from the beginning), but when you call these things "paper cuts" it is implied that these are wrongs that have been done unto you, whether or not they fall into the subcategory of sexism. If they are indeed wrongs, then they need to be addressed so that other people do not suffer them as well. Or if they are not wrongs, then they are your own problem, and why complain about them publicly in the first place?
If you think I have no right to say that, you would probably find yourself more comfortable on a private soapbox that in a discussion forum.
You are a special, special snowflake.
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"Suck it up and deal" is a common response to examples of gender discrimination. For example, suppose "Bob" asks "Alice" for an example of why female students may feel unwelcome in computer science classrooms, and "Alice" says, "Suppose you walk into a classroom and the first thing you hear is the lecturer saying 'we need to make our systems so usable that even your mom could use them'; would you feel more or less welcome?" It's common for "Bob" to respond that he wouldn't feel unwelcome in such a situation if he were a woman, because he would just suck it up and deal; after all, "Bob" would say, computer scientists frequently use "so easy your mom could use it" as a benchmark, and anyway, why would he let that stop him from being interested in computer science?
As a rhetorical device, "Suck it up and deal" serves as a double bind: if you fail to give examples of sexist comments or behavior, you're accused of inventing a problem. If you do give examples, almost any example can be dismissed as something women would be able to deal with if they weren't oversensitive / overemotional / not really interested in technology anyway.
"Suck it up and deal" is also a convenient way of disregarding the emotional labor required to, in fact, suck it up and deal (something almost any woman in a technical career already does frequently just to get through the day), the toll that such labor takes on a person over time, and the energy it drains that could otherwise go into work. Like the Male experience trump card, "Suck it up and deal" is a way for people who have never had sexist comments aimed at them to deny the reality that such comments have an effect.
Source: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Suck_it_up_and_deal
The real problem here is that the "my wife doesn't understand..." statement implies a camaraderie among men to the exclusion of women. And that type of exclusion over time will lead to feelings of unwelcome. Even if there is no direct offense or exclusion intended.
This particular issue likely wouldn't be an issue at all if there wasn't such a gender disparity in the first place because it would be more difficult to mistakenly imply exclusion when there is no hint of exclusion in the environment. And that's sometimes the problem with these difficult to appreciate minority issues. It's hard to even understand what the issue is without being part of the minority.
"My wife doesn't ..." is a simple descriptive (and presumably accurate unless there's some reason to believe otherwise) statement about a specific person, not a stereotype.
Complaining that your spouse doesn't understand/appreciate something that's important to you is very, very, common—regardless of their sex—because the opinion of one's spouse is something most people value and worry about.
If the person had said "my wife, being a woman, doesn't ..." then it would be a stereotype, and maybe the entry you quoted would be relevant...
[EDIT: reading the original quote in context, it actually makes more sense there: it's easy to imagine that a line intended as a speaker's joke at a conference really is intended to riff off of a common stereotype (and the assumption that the audience shares this experience), rather than being a simple complaint about the speaker's personal situation...]
One day someone was Wrong On The Internet and I really wanted to make my point and found myself making my point with a "mom" example that had never actually happened with her. Initially it made me a little uncomfortable, and I thought the discomfort came from representing my mother as less capable than she is. But I figured I'm anonymous, and since I could be anyone,I'm not really talking about my mom specifically. "My mom" could be any mom and I was conveying something I figured might happen to lots of moms.
So I posted it anyway. It wasn't until later that I realized how extremely obviously sexist and ageist it was. The ONLY reason I was using "mom" in that example was to enlist the stereotype that older women aren't adept with technology. That made me further realize that even when I was using true anecdotes from my life, I was likely motivated to do so because enlisting the stereotype strengthened whatever point I happened to be making.
When I read the girlfriend/wife line from the OP I thought the same thing as many responders here do: There's nothing wrong with someone sharing a true fact about their experience being in a relationship with someone that doesn't care as much about technology. But that can still be sexist if you are unknowingly choosing to share the fact because the point you are making is made stronger by enlisting a stereotype that women don't care about technology.