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.