Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

So, was this article about the student's experience or the mother's? Because it reads like it's about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their peer go make a sandwich. That's the only accusation actually made against the class and the teacher. While I don't endorse such teasing, it's certainly in no way specific to computer programming, and it's not anything like the intensity one would expect when trolls find an article.

Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. We can continue to attempt to stop the teasing altogether, but in the meantime we have to live in the Real World, and if this child quit programming because a few guys made a kitchen joke, the mother is really misdirecting her efforts by writing a letter to the teacher.

It's hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore, and if you read carefully, you'll see that it doesn't appear to have occurred. It appears to me that the author is attempting to use some clever wording to create an impression that the "harassment" was much more intense than it actually was by subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.

View on HN

>It's hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore,

Zero tolerance tends to create situations in which schools/teachers/administrators do nothing since they don't want to get someone expelled. This creates an environment in which students say/do terrible things with little or consequence. Best case the teachers look the other way but often the teachers will harass students as well (I saw two teachers in my Junior High School sexually harass students). Occasionally the school will overreact and have someone arrested for using the word gun in an essay. The general rule is to expect them to do completely the wrong action, every time in every situation. At least that was my experience.

I agree. While gender-related issues in the software industry are important and worth talking about, this article seems to have pretty little justification.

I was in high school a few years ago. Put that many teenagers in a room and of course they're going to fuck with each other.

I've heard sandwich jokes made in liberal arts classes, biology classes, even a badminton class--which also had only one girl in it. The takeaway is not that the badminton industry is misogynistic or that the Phys Ed teacher is failing womankind; the takeaway is that high schoolers are dicks.

> the takeaway is that high schoolers are dicks.

High schoolers grow up. When they grow up, do they remain dicks, or do they change? I finally watched 42 the other day. There's this scene where a white dad is screaming at Robinson to get off the field, that they don't want him there, calling him all sorts of names. His son is hesitant at first, but starts following suit. The implication was clear. What you see as acceptable when young can stick with you for a long time until you have a shocking wake-up call. And seriously, who in society has really seen these wake-up calls happen more often than not? Especially given the amount of evidence we see of it not happening.

>the takeaway is that high schoolers are dicks. //

Sure. But not exclusively [which I know you weren't claiming].

I had some pretty degrading and misandrist remarks made about me in situations with lots of women in; where I've been the only man (mothers, women of an age to marry and more mature women too).

I think these things are a lot about group dynamics.

> I think these things are a lot about group dynamics.

I think that's right, particularly male group dynamics.

I'd say all guys are bullied, except most of us wouldn't call it such - it's the establishment of hierarchy, and bonding.

Is that right? Is that right when they don't differentiate their bullying towards girls? I'm not even going to wade into that. However, I feel (through personal experience) masculinity is being more and more removed from young men, and at a high cost.

> Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well.

Yeah? So this high school programming class isn't so much a programming class as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment?

Please. It's the educator's job to create a safe space for, you know, education--for every student in the class, not just the privileged majority. It's their job to track their students' education and interest level, and make adjustments if either starts dropping. It's not their job to facilitate a hostile environment and let minority students flounder in the interests of 'real world training'. It's not their job to decide that since it's hard for women in tech in real life, it should be hard in their class. Education isn't about maintaining the world we already live in, it's about shaping the world our kids will live in.

You want real world training? Show me an HR department in a software company that's fine with comments like "get in the kitchen and make me sandwich". Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?

Thank you. If we accept discrimination of minorities as inevitable, then it will be.

I agree with the thrust of your comment. But as a member of the "privileged majority" who did not have a safe learning environment for most of my school years, I'm tired of getting dumped on online and being told my experience is not valuable or valid in these discussions.

School sucks for nerdy white boys, too. Yes, I'd like to see a safe and healthy learning environment for everyone.

>Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?

The real world where HR thought police aren't sitting in every room of every company. The real world where even HR people try to "make jokes" and be funny. The real world where HR people generally judge the severity of a harassment complaint by favoritism, which reality a blunt HR person (not employed at my current employer) just relayed to me recently. The real world where real humans, not perfectly politically correct robo-trons, must work, play, and engage.

I don't endorse teasing that harms a person's feelings. But I also think we shouldn't be so thin-skinned that we shrivel up and quit the first time a trite, cliched joke is thrown our way, because that happens all the time to everybody (your peers _will_ find a difference to comment upon no matter how mainstream you think you are), and if you can't handle it, you'll have a lot of difficulty handling more serious emotional situations, like getting passed up for a promotion.

It'd be great if the programming teacher first, was made aware of this problem, and the article never claims he was, and second, was able to stop the problem, but there's no guarantee he could've effectively done so even if he tried (and he may have), just as corporate HR departments can't stop all incidents of "harassment" even though they "try".

I believe the author probably wrote the piece primarily as a hypothetical, but I also believe it was bad taste to do so since this supposedly is traceable back to a real person who may not deserve that type of criticism, and I don't believe her fundamental complaint ("someone said something that made my daughter sad, so you all should feel bad :( ") is very worthy of the community's attention.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why 16-year-old girls leave programming. Remember, guys ganging up on you and telling them to make them a sandwich is just funny! You're so thin-skinned, ladies! thought police!

http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110218.9512/sexist-joke-bingo/

...almost got bingo... good work, cookiecaper.

I didn't say it was funny or that being offended wasn't an OK response. I simply believe that we should handle potentially "offensive" situations wisely, instead of curling up and quitting. It is more than fine to voice your complaint and indicate that a so-called joke makes you uncomfortable and expect your peers to respect those feelings. It is also an effective requirement to recognize that you aren't always going to be able to get people to stop saying things you don't like, and that you can't let it cripple you.

And I only see hits in two squares on the "sexist joke bingo", not that it matters.

kaltai quite specifically called you out for the trope "you're so thin-skinned!". Quoth you:

> But I also think we shouldn't be so thin-skinned that we shrivel up and quit the first time a trite, cliched joke is thrown our way

that's the most PC thing I've seen all week.

and I mean that in the worst possible way.

It's just an easy algorithm for detecting trite arguments! Makes some of these discussion more amusing for those of us who get to hear 'em a lot, and Lord knows we need some amusement.

> Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true. Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358263

>is just funny

Why is it that people misreading comments to call them out almost always come off as bigger asses than the people they're replying to?

The post I was responding to did refer to the sandwich comment as a "joke" and jokes are generally defined to be "funny." I would not consider the sandwich comment a joke, myself, since it doesn't fulfill the criteria I have for a joke, but apparently the poster I was responding to does consider it a joke (even if not one he likes, per se). Thus to the poster it does fulfill the criteria for a joke, whether good or not, and thus it is not inaccurate to rephrase those criteria, including funniness.

The poster characterized it as a joke, but did not say that that excused it. Your reading of the post as defending every aspect of the situation is what I object to.

And unfunny, bad-taste jokes are still jokes. I can talk about the KKK member's standup routine and call his words jokes without saying that I found them funny.

Fine members of the audience, I give you the Myers Shuffle.

http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html

Will you take the free space kaltai, or can we stop trying to use rhetorical tricks like talking dismissively about(rather than to) and trying to out-meta the other?

I think we're evaluating the circumstances with different criteria. You're looking at the story and relating it to a thin-skinned woman who can't handle non-politically-correct humor in the workplace. I'm relating it to a 16-year-old kid who hasn't had the time or experience necessary to develop the thick skin and snappy retorts that would shield her from her peers' disrespect. She's not getting passed up for a promotion; she just wants to learn programming. It's entirely within the job description of a teacher to notice, step in, and set standards for behavior in the classroom. Even when they're not met, they communicate more than tacit acceptance of bad behavior.

I completely agree that people in general, and women in tech specifically, have to be thick-skinned to survive professionally. Nobody's advocating HR thought police--they'd be unnecessary in this case anyway--or politically-correct automatons. We're talking about kids. Kids! Surely it's not totally out of line to suggest that they could learn better behavior than "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich". Surely there's a better response to the whole situation than "that girl needs to suck it up and learn how the world works".

For what it's worth, I remember the first time those trite cliches were thrown at me, and they felt neither trite nor cliched. They hurt. I thought I was part of a team, among equals, brothers-in-arms, friends, and I wasn't. I was different, I was other, I was less, I was not welcome. It's a paradigm shift that happens in an instant, and it can be pretty shattering--great for killing enthusiasm and developing thick skin in the future, maybe, but not for learning things in a programming class.

People can talk about how the real world is without endorsing it or thinking it should continue to be that way.

Do you understand the statement above? If not, I'll quit wasting my time.

Seriously, you can get fired for making the sandwhich joke? Sorry, but the US is really fucked up.

No, you can't. It's not that bad yet.

She went off on some tangent about comments on an article she wrote - what the hell does that have to do with her daughter's computer programming class?

This was a rant about the mother's issues directed at a seemingly innocent teacher.

This article disgusted me.

There were no rape jokes in the classroom. The article mentions the author had comments in reply to another article she wrote.

Child gets bullied (shock horror), mother assumes it's sexism (it ain't, it's bullying. I'm a dude. Got bullied at high school. Does that make my tormentors homosexual autosexists?), rants.

I'm so bored of this sort of thing. Yes, there are man-children who post stupid and hurtful crap on the internet. Yes, there are cretins who make dick jokes on stage at conferences. There are also women who are complete and utter asses to all men because "all men are rapists", which IMHO is a far more misandric view than the kind of offhanded misogyny of "sudo make me a sandwich" shit nerd guys come up with.

People are dicks. People do stupid crap. People hurt each other.

People who use gender as an emblem and weapon are also dicks, because they create a line of demarcation and balkanisation where there IS NONE. We are PEOPLE. Not "Men" and "Women" who are some kind of antagonistic polar-opposite species.

Edit: Rape jokes. Interesting one that. I recall being 12, on a school bus on a trip to some camp in Michigan (am mostly schooled in the UK, spent a year in 7th grade in the US, loathed it), and being astounded at the fact that the gaggle of girls sat behind me were all cracking rape jokes. I actually couldn't parse at first what they were talking about "rip? ripe? rope?", until I clocked the macabre subject of their humour.

It took the (male) bus driver to ask them to all kindly shut the fuck up.

I sorry you had a bad school experience and absolutely agree with your point that things shouldn't improve and we should do nothing to help.

"We have to do something! This is something. Therefore we must do it."

... hello wilful misinterpreter? You don't fix a gas leak by buying a new sofa. I'm just saying that the thing being posed as an issue isn't the actual issue.

Your comment boils down to, "It was this way for me. Life's tough. Suck it up."

How can a situation where a child enters a classroom full of enthusiasm and leaves a year (term?) later depressed not be an "actual issue"?

Either you have serious reading comprehension issues, or you make a habit of deliberately misconstruing others statements - or you're a troll, and I'm stupidly feeding you.

I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks - and you can't combat it purely on gender lines as all you're doing is treating a symptom rather than the disease.

The problem in and of itself is a valid problem that can be worked on. By lots of small, manageable efforts we can make the world a better place. Abstracting problems away - making them more generalised - only turns manageable problems into philosophical debates.

Btw, you need to get away from the habit of directly attacking the author and focus instead on attacking the argument.

Oh, pot, kettle! C'mon already.

You're right that by abstracting things away you can just create a philosophical point with no path to resolution, but you can also actively inflict harm by tackling an issue in isolation without evaluating and understanding the root cause.

This is the same philosophy (general problem, specific problem within that general problem that we think we can act on, so act, without looking at the general problem) that lead to rampant mercury poisoning and insanity across the globe in the late 19th c., as a poultice of mercury nicely clears up the sores from syphilis - but does not cure syphilis.

I don't understand your point. The syphilis example is, as you say a specific cure to a specific problem. Good. It's also good science. This is the opposite of what you were arguing earlier.

>I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks

Wrong. You're assuming that all forms of bullying are equally bad. This is patently false. Bullying based on traits that already set you apart can reenforce imposter syndrome. Specifically in the case of programming, a woman in a male-only class will already feel isolated and like she doesn't belong. Being bullied with gender-specific insults is much more harmful to this persons potential as a programmer than being bullied with gender neutral ones. So addressing specifically the sex-based bullying is necessary in addition to bullying in general.

All bullying is based on traits that set you apart. People don't bully "one of the crowd". They bully the outliers, the different ones, the ones who are female, or fat, or thin, or clever, or stupid, or black, or white, or old, or young, or even the kid that wears last season's "cool clothes".

It's not about gender. It's about ostracism. You don't have to be female to be ostracised. You just have to have something, anything, that sets you apart from the crowd.

This is the societal control mechanism we have culturally evolved to ensure conformity and "strength" in groups. It is really, really, really fucking dangerous, and leads to fun shit like Nazism. It's also really powerful, and is the basis of nation states.

Ergo, the problem needs treating at its cause, which is a cultural illness, and is far from simple to treat. You cannot simply resolve one emergent aspect of it and then expect to treat each aspect the same way. You do not cut down a tree by plucking at its leaves.

>All bullying is based on traits that set you apart.

This is certainly true. What I meant to convey was that in the context of a programming class, being bullied for a trait that is itself already suspect within oneself reenforces it and thus is more damaging. If that girl had been bullied in the programming class because she was fat, it may not have had as much of an impact on her decision to pursue the career. Being bullied because she's a girl on the other hand, had the secondary effect of reenforcing the idea that she doesn't belong in tech.

That's a fair point, and I agree that in the circumstance due to the framing of the situation it could be more harmful - but it doesn't change the fact that the root cause is bullying.

We as a species have a remarkable proclivity to be very unkind.

Your deliberate misrepresentation of the posts you are replying to is simply dishonest. There is no way for a constructive conversation to come out of that.

What?

"Life's tough." is a truism, whining about it or demanding everyone "be nice" is fail. You have control over yourself, believing you have/can control others is delusional and dangerous (to society).

The way to deal with it is "Suck it up." i.e. have self-confidence and act you, yourself, personally, better than others. Lead by example, not legislation.

This is fundamentally wrong. During development, security and self-confidence come from the environment you're brought up in.

Two things stood out in particular: Bullying and sexism can coexist and feed off each other; and 'all men are rapists' feminists are actually extremely rare - far, far rarer than the 'man-children' you reference.

It is about the student's experience reflected in the eyes of a mother. Parents are not known for their objectivity when it comes to children, but in this case the (rather far fetched) idea that the evil boys and their sandwich jokes made her daughter dislike programming found fertile ground in the whole "designated victim" narrative of women in online environments.

There is no violence and rape in this story, there's only a mom with an axe to grind and a daughter who might not be interested in programming.

This is a learning moment for you, Mr stefantalpalaru. What you've just said, although I know you meant it sanely and sensibly, has been interpreted as lacking in compassion. This is not your fault; what happened is you have made a comment from a position of unrecognised privilege. For your own good, and the good of any women you may have any kind of relationship with now and into the future, it would be a very good idea for you to read up on the concept of privilege, with an open mind. You will find it uncomfortable, and you will probably prefer to fight back rather than acknowledge a flaw in yourself, but in the long run it will prove to be the best thing to do, and you'll be glad you did.

Best wishes, and good luck!

If your goal is to increase the acceptance of women in the tech community, this post is very counterproductive.

Not at all! My goal is to respond to someone who is unkind with something close to kindness. If he goes on the way he has been, he'll do himself as much damage as he does to the people around him. The reasonable response to that sort of privileged blindness is anger; I was aiming for something a little more compassionate.

You, however, don't get the same consideration, because I strongly suspect you're a pillock.

It's probably safe to assume that you're parodying the nakedly Orwellian nature of third-wave feminists, but I'm going to respond just in case this is a serious post.

This use of "privilege" as a targeted weapon to silence specific demographics has to stop.

Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged people on Earth. This entire thread, in fact, has been a shining example of female privilege.

No one cares that women soundly outnumber men in university admission, and university graduation, and even high school graduation. Heck, no one cares that it is men who overwhelmingly make up the bottom of society.

Instead, we're having a collective anxiety attack because a hyper-privileged white woman is upset that her hyper-privileged white daughter might have had her feelings hurt in high school. This is surreal.

Another apologist on HN, what a surprise.. Let me guess.. you are a white male. Nice. So am I. We have no idea what its like..

Gender equality in America has come a long way. However, there are still many occupations and places in America where equality is not the norm at all.

The best example of an occupation where women are not welcome is the military.

The best example of inequality in the courts is this recent case: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/hacker-faces-more-jail-time...

Inequality is all around us.

Oh dear. No help for you either, is there?

For reference, hacker789 repeated this comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360113 where it attracted more attention.

You must have had one horrific childhood if your bar for "nothing wrong at school" is "no violence or rape". If you ever have kids, I hope you aim a little higher for them.

A school with "no violence or rape" wouldn't be just nothing wrong, it would be extraordinary. Even elite schools in developed and rich countries are filled with bullying: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/swedish-school-... Maybe you really ought to think about which school you went into in which neighborhood, which social clique you were a part of and if you still think no bullying happened, maybe it's time to think back on school and reevaluate some of your actions (hint: pranks and teasing might not be seen as that after all).

I went to an all girls school, and while I'm sure there was bullying, there was definitely no violence or rape.

Although I'm not really sure why your defense of rape as normal high school experience managed to turn into a subtle accusation that I may have been a bully myself, and I probably should have ignored that.

It wasn't a subtle accusation, because in my experience people who say school violence doesn't happen or they never saw it happen are/were actually bullies themselves. This post just confirmed it with the nice twisting of words, 'defense of rape as normal high school experience', oh really?

I was pointing out how much, much worse stuff happens in schools than just being told to 'make a sandwich' and trust me, I would have been a very happy little boy if only that had happened to my friends and me. To be honest, starting from the author of the article, this entire thread displays just how sheltered of a life many of this community must be living to start an Internet crusade (because this is what it is going to end up when the social justice warriors get wind of it) because of a boring class with an unqualified teacher.

I think you may be using violence to mean any kind of bullying, which is a little vague. Teenage girls certainly engage in a lot of bullying, but very little physical violence, perhaps even less so in the rich private school environment I was in. I'm sorry you don't believe me. And I think claiming that not-rape would be extraordinary is pretty solidly in line with saying that rape is normal, yes.

To me the thread illustrates that for a community that gives so much lip service to disruption and progress, a lot of people are really unwilling to put up with the idea that high school shouldn't have to be the pit of misery that is apparently common in American public schools. But über is solving real problems!

But there isn't a problem to solve for this community, because bullying isn't actually seen/acknowledged as a problem. Education officials are also only paying lip service and even that only after some very horrible case hits the newspapers and teachers are very underpaid for the amount of work they do. And the people who were bullied either won't get into any position of power with the capability to enact changes or are truly trying to forget it all.

Bullying is violence, and I wonder how you know there was no rape.

Bullying can be, but it isn't necessarily. Please don't trivialize real violence.

You're right, i completely discounted the possibility of female-female rape. I'm still pretty confident, but I take back the definitely. And I was using violence to mean physical injury, sorry if you were confused. I think it shouldn't be an unrealistic goal to have high schools where no one is raped or physically assaulted, I'm very confident i was at one, and I think that people who consider that so outlandish a suggestion that I must be an unwitting monster must have some sad backgrounds.

And now I should apologize, because I realized I was thinking only of the student body when we did have some male teachers. So although I would be shocked to learn of any incidents, it is not as impossible as I said.

Well, since almost everyone else completely discounts the possibility of female-female rape - probably including the teachers at your school - I wouldn't be so confident. After all, how would you know?

I feel like I should come to the defense of mixed-gender schools here a bit, even though I realize your comment doesn't necessarily advocate gender isolation (but it does sort of imply the benefits of it).

I went to a mixed-sex high school, albeit you might choose to take this anecdote with a grain of salt since that was 20 years ago in Germany. There was certainly some bullying, although not on the scale I discovered much later in life was common elsewhere. There was almost no intra-school violence. I feel pretty confident in saying this because these things were taken very seriously by both staff and students alike, and the few cases where there had been confrontations between students quickly became very public and a matter of much water cooler talk afterwards. I can also say with about the same level of confidence as you that there was no rape, or other forms of gender-based violence. And coming back to the article's subject, CS class was mandatory for everyone at first - and even though in later years the course became one of those that could be voluntarily dropped, the gender balance stayed the same after that.

That said, school wasn't ideal for me as I was in it. CS class wasn't exactly great, mostly due to utter disinterest by 90% of the students who took it. At the time I had the feeling the school was a bad choice for individualists like me, though in hindsight I would revise that conclusion a bit (as a humanist-themed middle/high school it was actually much better than any other school I could have gone to).

I think it's important to bring young people up together and not artificially separate them into two groups. Of the many social problems present in my time studying there, gender issues were not one of them. There was no us-versus-them mentality, and informal social groups were almost always mixed. I can't help but wonder if that sort of normalcy is something single-gender schools actively campaign against.

I also went to school outside America, ten years ago. I don't have a decided opinion on mixed schools either way - there are definitely benefits to single sex education, but they need to be weighed against the artificiality of the environment, as you say. Its worth noting that many of the straight up academic benefits of gender separation appear to be stronger for girls - higher participation in STEM subjects, more participation in class, better performance in general - but there is some evidence that boys perform better academically with girls in the class. (this might be a little out of date, I am less interested in the theory of school since I left it myself). I got the impression that the idea was basically to reduce social distraction during school: one could always hang out with the opposite sex after school (and most people did).

Whenever the topic of K12 .edu comes up, two loud and inherently conflicting arguments always percolate to the top:

1) Either we need to make school even less like the real world, by separating the sexes as per the above suggestion, or turning the school into the chronological opposite of a work release prison,

2) We need to make school more like the real world by banning unnatural things like homeschooling, because obviously no human beings work are home or own their own businesses and self direct themselves. Or no human beings carry a tiny swiss army knife on their keychain, so we need to ban that too, etc etc.

I read this comment as normalizing violence and rape - saying that it is expected, as a matter of course.

I disagree with that characterization. Bullying, violence, and rape should never be normalized, nor acceptable, regardless of the age of the perpetrators. This is aberrant, immoral behavior and should never be treated as anything else.

I was obviously referring to the starting lines:

> trigger alert

> (violence and rape references)

This is not Slashdot, you're supposed to read the article before commenting ;-)

It's not as much about "evil boys" in general, like other commenters have pointed out similar jokes are heard in all classes. But it's much harder when you're the only girl, guy, white kid, black kid, ect. Even if it's an innocent joke it starts a me against them mentality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com