"How I Explained REST to My Wife" taken down because of gender-oriented nature
tomayko.com
tomayko.com
I think people need to realize that there are differences between facts and being gender discriminating. Transcribing a conversation with your wife, wherein the wife in this case is the non-technical part is not discriminating - it is a fact. No-one would have said anything if a woman posted "How I explained REST to My Husband".
Please, stop this overreaction to the so-called gender issues.
I'm lucky enough to be married to an expert in her field so I get to learn lots of cool stuff just by asking!
Except it was not a transcription, it was some sort of Socratic dialog with the "wife" part being written just so in order to create the optimum amount of tech ignorance for the author to fill.
> No-one would have said anything if a woman posted "How I explained REST to My Husband".
Really? I'm pretty sure there would have been a lot of remarks about the reversal of the "normal" roles.
Really, I dislike overzealous feminism but I can understand this case. The point of the title was really to convey "this is an explanation of REST for non-programmers". Since approximately none of us know the author's wife and whether she lacks technical understanding, the real title actually doesn't convey this information unless you add the stereotype that women don't understand tech.
> There’s a bit of context missing from the beginning of the post: I had been busy at work and hadn’t seen her much in the past week or so. When that happens she starts getting jealous of the laptop and wants to hover over my shoulder — that’s a sign, it means: put it down and pay attention to me. If I don’t heel to that hint, she’ll start asking me about whatever’s on the screen. If I’m lucky it’s vim and a terminal running screen, which freaks her out and she leaves. Otherwise, I’m usually in the browser or my newsreader. It just so happened that at this time, I was reading Roy’s Bio so she saw his picture and says, “Who is Roy Fielding??!?,” using the exact the same tone and inflection you might when saying “WTF?”
> When this happens, I usually just say, “Oh, it’s nothing,” or something like, “it’s just some stuff about a thing.”
> Anyway, the funny thing is that I wasn’t really trying to explain anything at first. It started out as a bit of joke — a be careful what you ask for type thing. But then she says, “Oh, I get it.” and I so I kept on going and the next thing I know we’re talking about polymorphism and URL canonicalization and all kinds of crazy shit.
Wait, you:
1) Are not the author. You have no idea what the author had in mind when he wrote those.
2) BUT, you are accusing the author of sexism by presuming a sexist version of the event by YOURSELF and accusing the author for it, despite the author CLEARLY letting you know he didn't intend it to become so.
3) Are manipulating statements purposely to induce fiery discussions amongst an otherwise peaceful community.
>Since approximately none of us know the author's wife and whether she lacks technical understanding, the real title actually doesn't convey this information unless you add the stereotype that women don't understand tech.
This is enough proof that you are here to add nothing but controversy and promote nonconstructive discussion.
If you read the original article, which I recommend you please do if you haven't (looks like you didn't anyway), the Wife clearly asks
Wife: How does it work?
People like you who jump straight into conclusions like 'yes it's sexism! bury him alive!' are the reason why I feel uncomfortable sitting next to a woman from the tech sector with the fear of losing my job or being accused of being a sexist for no reason apparently.
I honestly hope that someday I can just sit next to a 'person' without being conscious of their gender..and that day is when this world will be a much happier place to live in, with trolls like you left aloof.
No more or less than you.
> 2) BUT, you are accusing the author of sexism by presuming a sexist version of the event by YOURSELF and accusing the author for it, despite the author CLEARLY letting you know he didn't intend it to become so.
I am not presuming a version of the event, I am describing what expression the text makes when paying attention to gender. Texts can make an impression not intended by the author. And no, that doesn't mean the person who gets that impression is "manipulating" the text. There is absolutely no need to presume malice for anyone here, as you seem intent to do.
> 3) Are manipulating statements purposely
No, I am not. The comment that comes closest to that is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5498284 , and you're calling me a troll for criticizing it.
> People like you who jump straight into conclusions like 'yes it's sexism! bury him alive!'
You're building a pretty big strawman there.
> I honestly hope that someday I can just sit next to a 'person' without being conscious of their gender..and that day is when this world will be a much happier place to live in,
I agree completely, but that is not the world we live in, and acting like it were is not necessarily productive.
> with trolls like you left aloof.
This could be a rational discussion if you could kindly refrain from resorting to insults.
You are right about the gender issue being a loss for the community. Now this article is taken down because people are stupid and lack nuance when their emotions kick in.
There was never anything misogynistic about this article, but now because of an absurd responsibility of authors to never possibly offend the ignorant, or the knee-jerk reactionaries, or the (I hate to say it) offended for the sake of attention people.
The professional victimization cult that has hijacked gender and race issues on so many fronts take away from real victims of real gender and race discrimination. These professional victim cults are easy to recognize: they will do absolutely nothing to help victims of discrimination unless they belong to one particular group that they identify with. How many parenting articles written by women discriminate against "bumbling men" who "can't handle the kids?" Where are these groups then? My mother bailed on my 4 siblings and I when I was 3, and left my dad to take all of us on. She never paid a cent of child support, but I had to grow up watching crap like "choosy mom's choose JIF" and "Dr. Mom recommends Robitussin." My mother was a drug addict, and a feminist organization paid her legal bills when she tried to take us away from my father after being gone for 5 years. They never once asked me or my siblings what we thought, for them there was a bigger battle to fight that was beyond the immediate victims.
The professional victim cults don't care about discrimination, they just care about the streams of funding they get from particular special interest groups. In the meantime, take a look at high school graduation rates of females vs. males, and ask yourself who needs more help these days.
Hyperbole and escalation is NOT the right way to fix this issue. Just accept that there's a problem, however small and partially subjective, and think about how to solve it constructively while being neither defensive nor giving in to unreasonable demands.
The concerns are not bullshit, but the way they are addressed is. But they're not addressing the issue as human beings but as ideologues whipping a fallen humanity into shape, so what do you expect?
I don't think that it was inflammatory. Maybe it's due to wildly unchecked privilege, but I read it as "A way to convey the REST metaphor to a nontechnical person". I didn't see it as "women are stupid and need handholding to understand technology".
* The dialog was entirely unrealistic- to the point that a 'dialogue' was clearly simply the wrong form for what Tomayko wanted to do
* the 'wife' was portrayed alternatively as infantile, naive and purely reactive.
I follow Ryan Tomayko vaguely and I'd be surprised if this was a reflection of his behaviour. From what little I know he seems to have some awareness of and sympathy with struggles that come under "left politics".
But my knowing that doesn't erase the issues with his original post.
My comment on the original posting was thus:
> So Ryan Tomayko's conversions with his wife are akin in tone and style to a language textbook aimed at tweens?
You can't have that coupled with "wife" and simply wave away the problematic implications, not in our culture as of stands today. It's admirable that Tomayko is mature enough to consider challenges like this - instead of just going on the ultra defensive MRA spiel like some Redditor.
I might try to pull it out of cache and then reconsider.
> p: Ugghh. I have to admit, this post does seem kind of sexist now that you mention it. It never occured to me that it might be taken as such. I didn’t mean to imply my wife was a layperson due to her being female. I use “explained to my wife” at work as a simple way of saying that something is being described in a way that you might be able to explain to layperson (like people who make buying decisions :) Of course, everyone at work knows that my wife is non-technical and also that she is one of the only people outside of work I get to have grown-up conversations with.
>
>> Dude, your wife must really love you to go through all that which was obviously of way more interest to you than to her!
>
> There’s a bit of context missing from the beginning of the post: I had been busy at work and hadn’t seen her much in the past week or so. When that happens she starts getting jealous of the laptop and wants to hover over my shoulder — that’s a sign, it means: put it down and pay attention to me. If I don’t heel to that hint, she’ll start asking me about whatever’s on the screen. If I’m lucky it’s vim and a terminal running screen, which freaks her out and she leaves. Otherwise, I’m usually in the browser or my newsreader. It just so happened that at this time, I was reading Roy’s Bio so she saw his picture and says, “Who is Roy Fielding??!?,” using the exact the same tone and inflection you might when saying “WTF?”
>
> When this happens, I usually just say, “Oh, it’s nothing,” or something like, “it’s just some stuff about a thing.”
>
> Anyway, the funny thing is that I wasn’t really trying to explain anything at first. It started out as a bit of joke — a be careful what you ask for type thing. But then she says, “Oh, I get it.” and I so I kept on going and the next thing I know we’re talking about polymorphism and URL canonicalization and all kinds of crazy shit.
>
> She gets me going on purpose just so she can see my arms waving and the vein pop out of my head while I’m trying to describe this stuff. I don’t think she really pays all that much attention to what I’m actually saying.
This also explains the tone that some have complained is unrealistic: She was not trying to have a serious discussion about technology, but to wind him up.
Maybe including that as an introduction to the article would have pacified some of the complaints, but the comment I've quoted above was posted in 2006 as the 6th comment on the post. It's really ridiculous that he kept getting complaints about this post.
I considered that an article that took a real discussion (I assume he did explain it to his wife) that wasn't recorded, wrote it up in a way that resembles a conversation in which the wife is the one the explanation is targeted.
The article wasn't about his wife, for all I care about. Replace it with 'son', 'father', 'drinking buddy' and the article format could've been the same. The author expands that train of thought that helped him explain the topic at hand in a recent conversation, the other party is merely a placeholder for the real thing that took place before.
Actually, it reminded me a little of teacher/scholar type of 'dialoges', not Socrates, not Master Wq from the vim koans, but something inbetween and related. It was a frame for the real content - and in my world not at all offending.
If I tried explaining REST to my mom or some of the non-technical guys at the gym, for example, it'd have taken vastly more explanation.
Frankly I consider taking it down like this cowardly. If he wanted to address these "concerns" then replace "(my) wife" with "Bob" or something else and add a line that "some people took offense to the original version, so I've changed it to avoid taking the focus away from the purpose" or something to that effect.
How exactly did you read it that way without any knowledge about his wife's background?
By implicitly assuming "wife => woman => nontechnical", that's how. That's really what makes the title work.
No, it doesn't. Could be a little brother who's just written his first PHP script. Could be a big brother who's worked for 20 years as DBA. Lots of articles out there trying to explain REST to such people.
But wife? That means "nontechnical" - just look at the comments here.
Making the subject "brother", "sister", "mom", "dad", or "husband" has the exact same meaning to me--they are all anonymous relations and so the "non-technical" implication still carries. The subject the author chose was "wife", presumably because this was based on an actual conversation with his wife.
The subject does have a chance to turn the implication around. If your brother worked for 20 years as a DBA then the title would have to be "Explaining REST to a DBA" to get the correct implication.
Because you can be technically inclined without perfect knowledge of REST? As I wrote: lots of articles do that. This article was very popular exactly because of the "totally non-technical" aspect.
> The subject does have a chance to turn the implication around. If your brother worked for 20 years as a DBA then the title would have to be "Explaining REST to a DBA" to get the correct implication.
And this article could be equally clear with the title "How I Explained REST to someone completely non-technical" or even "How I Explained REST to My (non-technical) Wife" - but that is not the title it had.
I know that people feel that using "wife" enforces stereotypes, but I really don't see it in this post. Sometimes picking on these very tiny issues makes it very hard to identify with your cause.
This. Because you're taking an informative, factual statement describing a particular relationship (husband working with technology, wife with limited relationship to technology), and saying that it's not any good to describe this fact, because other people who want to have a different sort of relationship might feel outnumbered or something.
People who are interested in actually doing something about gender-related issues in technology should consider that at a certain point, it's less productive to whine about something and more productive to ignore it and cope so you can fight bigger battles. I think we passed that point on the way to this article, and then went on to enter the zone where people stop even respecting that you're fighting...
I'm sure this wouldn't have been an issue if a woman had written 'How I explained cooking to my husband'.
One word - EGO. It's amazing how much it can screw up constructive processes within a community.
Well, so you expect me to sit silently in a corner and watch this happen? What happened to the author today is also what will happen to me tomorrow, so I'm no way going to give way for random feminist/extremist to screw me like that.
The only one here who is "on rage" is you.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110225075111/http://tomayko.com...
The conversation wasn't nearly what I expected, it goes into more detail than I expected but there are a few points, like the sweeper thing, that were probably big triggers.
I would never release personally identifable information about my wife on the Internet without getting her permission first.
At my first duty station it was much more tight-knit; we knew each other by first name, met off-hours as a group (including spouse and children), etc. So there it wasn't unusual to refer to someone's wife by first name.
Now I can see why people would be offended about referring to "the wife" (and it's less savory alternates), as if you were resigned to torturing yourself once you got home and not actually in a committed relationship with a human being. But that's not what is happening when talking about your actual wife, just as it's considered perfectly acceptable to refer to one's mother, brother, father, or sister by role instead of name.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0767920104 http://www.science.ca/scientists/scientistprofile.php?pID=10
Men and women have systematically different muscle masses, lifespans, even organs. Yet it is taboo to imagine that their brains might be different too, on average. Indeed Ryan is persecuted for the indirect implication that women, on average, might be less technically inclined! If this generalization was actually untrue it would not be necessary to scream at people like Larry Summers to "disprove" it. The zeal of people invested in the denial of biology is astonishing; they seek to personally destroy anyone who even indirectly endorses anything related to gender difference.
Despite the fact that fashion is a trillion dollar industry for women but most men could not care less if their sock are of a slightly different color.
If you want to fight "sexism", go fight Cosmopolitan. Or not -- ever stopped to consider it might be OK for women to like this stuff, like it's OK for men to like "Cars and Gadgets" magazines?
(OT, In general I think you cannot take research results published on journals for granted until they are at least 10 years old and have been included in undergraduate syllabus.
Else you get all the mixed "coffee causes heart attacks", "coffee is good for your heart" papers alternating every other week).
I understand there are issues of gender discrimination, but taking down a post from 2004 because it mentioned a "wife" is crazy.
By now women (thankfully!) have the right to vote, to study, to pick and divorce their partners as THEY see fit, they are allowed to drive, to drink, to be artists, to be engineers, scientists, to be anything they want, there are extremely influential political and economic positions held by very capable women. Now, I am NOT saying we are perfect and women should just stop complaining - but I AM going to say let's just be happy for a moment we made it this far because there are still quite a lot of countries in this world where all the aforementioned are denied to women and splitting hairs on comparatively petty subjects like the stereotypically non-tech "grrrls" seems like a waste of everyone's time and effort. Better focus on subjects that actually matter instead of wasting it on over-compensating and über-political-correctness.
I may not be working in the most hip and trendy kind of places so YMMV, in my own experience the IT industry I have seen so far definitely IS predominantly male to the point having 1/3 female colleagues would seem like the maximum I (n)ever (even) encountered. In the university where I studied they were trying hard to attract female students, we started with maybe 1/3 or so female; then came the programming lessons and unfortunately those mainly got rid of most of the girls. At the end, there were just a couple of girls left who finished their degree. IT is not for everybody and there are a lot of guys who just cannot do it either, why is it such an atrocity to say the same about girls? Nobody would cry murder if the article was explaining it to "my little brother".
Possible translation: after a lot of people with nothing better to do took offense at a tech article, I took it down because: 1) I don't want to be hated, 2) I don't want to lose my job, 3) I can't be bothered to even argue against the flock.
It might not be what Ryan means (I can't speak for him), but it sure is what many people mean when having to take down something because of PC complaints.
This thing is getting out of hand. It's the first world idea of a "cause" by people whose idea of "revolution" and "making society better" is blog posts and twitter snark.
The very first programmer was a woman. For a lot of time, computer operators were mostly women. There are not many things stopping women at entering IT, and sexism sure is not one of them. Women thrive at other places with much more deep and inherent sexism (or, to put it better, with actual sexism, instead of mere tit jokes, which is what is mostly mistaken as sexism in the tech community).
I attended uni 15 years ago for Comp Sci. On my year we were like 70% men and 30% women. Not because they feared for sexism (actually there was nothing of the kind -- students were either good or bad at lessons, regardless of sex). We all had fun together, in large mixed groups. Sexism never was an issue, and I've never heard any woman complain about it in the university. Other fields were like 70% women 30% men (Applied Math, Medicine, Biology, etc). Men mostly wanted to get into comp sci because they liked games, programming and this internet thing already. Women avoided the Comp Sci not because of some fear of sexism and such, but because it was considered to have bad work prospects (times/salary/etc), whereas biology was considered to be "blooming" at the time.
Which part of "reasonable complaints about the gender-oriented nature of this article [..] from people I respect very much" implies that to you?
> This thing is getting out of hand.
This isn't helping.
All of it. It's a public apology for something he did in good faith and was never problematic for him until the complaints forced him to take it down.
So I read the "reasonable complaints [...] from people I respect very much" as:
"some people I don't wish to annoy and otherwise respect have been bothering me with this shit, so, fine, I give up".
I was clear that it's my interpretation, it doesn't have to be what he feels. But, then again, it _could_ be.
I don't always take what people say at face value.
The same way when you read a politicians statement you sometimes just know he means the opposite or something different.
Really classy.
Yes it would have. Just because his partner is a woman this article can't be written this way. That upsets me.
I don't blame Ryan at all for not wanting to be part of that conversation. It's a huge toxic distraction.
Still, it was a valuable article. I hope he will neuter it and re-post.
Some overreacting (or say very sensitive), but very loudly "screaming" (aka blogging/tweeting/et al) voices (female and male) have hijacked a very legit discussion for womens rights, womens equality, womens chances in this world and made a mockery out of it.
what these voices did imho, was a disservice to the just cause for equality between all genders (perceived or biological).
I would have kept the article up purposely as my belief that it isn't offensive and that people are ignorant and arrogant.
That on the other hand just makes this case a case of misinterpreting fiction for reality.
Reminds me of a story the acclaimed author Umberto Eco once told about his book "Foucault's Pendulum":
His main character walks through a named street in Paris and sees a burning hotel ... and so on. Eco receives a letter, in which a reader accuses him of not getting the facts right, as there never was a hotel in this street.
So is Eco discriminating hotels in Paris with this book?
It was the author's choice, and he came to it after having arguments posed to him that made him rethink the way it came across and how he uses things like, "Explain it to my wife" in every day language. I for one, applaud someone him for being willing and open to criticism which he personally came to the conclusion he was not comfortable with.
No one hacked his site and defaced it and took it down, no one complained to his hosting company...It was his choice, because he apparently cares about how he comes across, and was moved by valid arguments from others.
Things like this that are more subtle are honestly the most important to address. Since people tend to not call other people out on them, they'll go on using latently sexist/racist/homophobic/etc. phrases and language and not understand what impact that makes. Many people, like this author, are really reasonable and it gives them something to think about - especially if you come to them about it in a reasonable way, which I'm assuming some people did.
As for the issue of the person in the dialog, perhaps it could be replaced with something like a kindergartener, generic male buddy, or even make things fun like Plato/Aristotle or what they did in GEB with Achilles/Tortoise.
I really applaud the author for making this change. The article was a bit uncomfortable for me as a woman in tech.
And as a side note: If you think this is an "overreaction" (which I don't think it is), there's way worse stuff out there to be outraged about. I got banned on a (biological) woman's health board for using the word "female" because not everyone identifies as female and apparently I offended some people. It felt like something from the Women's First bookstore sketch in Portlandia :)
I understand that woman feel discriminated and I see some pretty aweful examples where guys are doing all the wrong things. In the case of the woman who got fired, I felt it was unjust from sendgrid. It shows how badly some guys copy with the issue. So that doesn't help.
The baseline should be that we're all equal. What are the arguments against that?
I feel it's kind of sexist to assume that an article might be offensive to woman, because well, they might just take offense. That implies that woman are very sensitive to these articles, which reinforces the stereotype... Doesn't that belittle woman infinitely more? It just reaches the opposite effect.
The original author didn't think: "Let's belittle woman as much as possible just for the fun of it", that thought (I am pretty sure) never crossed his mind. The article could also have referred to, my father or my cousin.
Does it matter that the example he used was explaining REST to his wife? If the roles had been reversed would be in the position we are now?
Gender roles within technology wasn't the point of the original post, it was about explaining a piece of complicated technology to someone who had no prior understanding of it, it was circumspect that the person being explained to was a woman.
Again I find it sad that if the gender roles were reversed or if the other people was male that we probably would not be in this position as no one would object to a man explaining to another man about some technology that he does not under, is that sexism?
http://web.archive.org/web/20130116034443/http://tomayko.com...
Just the other day I was trying to explain the term "meta" to my wife and having a hard time of it. Trying to put it into terms that didn't involve programming was an interesting mental exercise.
This is just sad.
Of course, if Tomayko did not actually have this conversation with his partner, then that could explain much and make the decision to remove the content more understandable.
The whole argument that society is riddled with privileges is not supposed to be an indictment of individuals. By it's very nature, privilege means that you don't have it because of something you did or are as an individual. It's a systemic feature of society, not some personal moral failing.
So if Ryan's article evinces sexism (and I question that greatly) the proper response is not to harangue him into self-censorship. This just bullies him for something he is not personally responsible for while driving the systemic problem deeper down. What we should be doing is having an open conversation about it.
But now we can't, because it's so objectionable to reflect the sexism we all have within us that we must pretend we're beyond it. How is this in the interests of genuine egalitarianism?
Fixed it for you. I really liked the post. I even read it sometimes just to keep my mind fresh on the REST idea. I dont understand why people would be offended that you used your wife as the other person. Its perfectly normal to explane your wife what you do.
If someone writes about quantum mechanics and is a sexist, but he's the only one who can write it in a manner that I understand it, I'm SO gonna read it...
People who'd complain about this are typically "feeding the troll", and while it's not as bad as "trolling" (used here as an euphemism for discrimination) itself, we have a much better handle on that.
Edit: I am wrong, at least partly and possibly wholly.
I'd say it was good content and personally liked the article.
In addition this story shows that 'sexism' (think PyCon etc.) is not easy to identify and no objective rules seems to be agreeable enough. For me, this article wasn't even remotely sexist and even if the author himself got convinced, I fail to see a reason to take it down and cannot see anything offending about it.
In fact, I discussed that very article with my own wife multiple times.
"How I explained REST to My Spouse".
Anyone complaining is clear 'projecting'....
That, and people going with the flock.
They have some personal issues, from not having slept well to more deep rooted stuff, and they take it out on the internet on whatever attracts their attention and can justify some "hate".
I doubt if perfectly normal people care if Ryan used "to my wife" or "to my spouse" etc.
If someone wrote "How I explained Monads to my husband" I could not care less normally -- but on a bad day, I could take offense for similarly BS stuff, like "how dare you write that shit about Apple", etc.
Fixed. No need to take it down for trendy political correctness.
There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals."
"Yes, but what about the firemen, then?" asked Montag.
"Ah." Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. "What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me."
The door to the parlour opened and Mildred stood there looking in at them, looking at Beatty and then at Montag. Behind her the walls of the room were flooded with green and yellow and orange fireworks sizzling and bursting to some music composed almost completely of trap-drums, tom-toms, and cymbals. Her mouth moved and she was saying something but the sound covered it.
Beatty knocked his pipe into the palm of his pink hand, studied the ashes as if they were a symbol to be diagnosed and searched for meaning.
"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these."
"Yes."