I guess it would be politically incorrect to point out the actual ratings demographics of DWTS are about 2/3 women?
First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse, and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error.
Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches DWTS" is part of the problem (as anigbrowl identified) is that it implies that (watching DWTS) is to women as (checking out 1130 sims) is to men. It implies that in situations where men do interesting tech things, women watch TV (I assume "DWTS" is some kind of TV?). It's basically a put-down against women collectively. Note that if someone were to be putting down humanity collectively, I wouldn't complain.
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.
That's a lot of incorrectness for one 20-word sentence.
Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive.
Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Of course they would react unkindly to being called out on it but I would advise you not to take their defensive lashing out at face value.
In response to the second, I don't understand your point at all. Help me out here?
As to the third, I agree that there certainly exist some fools, most of them white and liberal (and maybe prigs?), who have a mental pattern wherein they make knee-jerk complaints about certain behaviour being offensive, without having a well-considered ethical system that justifies this complaint, instead using these complaints to signal their belonging to a certain social clique. If that's what you mean by political correctness, I agree that it exists, and is odious. Whether or not such fools object to your remarks should be entirely beneath you, however. So raising the potential political incorrectness of your remark appears, to me, to be saying "I'm going to use this straw-man argument to attack those who disagree with me". And this is why I brought up the fact that it's a lowbrow dismissal, and suggested that on those rare occasions when the label does fit, you can instead construct an independent explanation of what's wrong with the political correctness.
Second point was pretty easy to understand - if a household has 2 adults and 1 TV, only one Adult at a time can watch their preferred TV shows. If there is a second TV, possibly more, the Adults stand a fair chance that they will be able to watch their shows.
Okay, fair enough, understood, and I'll direct my response to my disagreement about the math of it.
Why would it matter that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female? Suppose that I publish a fanzine called "jh's dumb stuff", for which 100% of the readers are female (that's right, my mom is the only reader). Would it make sense to say "you can look at this awesome thing while your wife reads 'jh's dumb stuff'"? No.
The relevance, here, is that original oafish-seeming comment was "while your wife watches DWTS", which appears to imply that it's typical for wives to do that. And, based on the stats I could find, it is NOT typical for wives to do that. Over 90% of American women do not watch the show, right?
Mathematically, the fact that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female is just not relevant.
Also, I didn't call you a reactionary dullard. I see that your literacy is as poor as your numeracy. What I said was that such was the principle use of referencing political correctness, and advised that you could do better yourself. If I was sure, at that time, that you were a dullard, I wouldn't have bothered getting into it.
So it wasn't, at that time, a lowbrow dismissal. By now, you're getting a dismissal. I guess that the collective audience can judge for themselves whether it's lowbrow or not.
I didn't say that you did.
Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code, which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropriate in the context of a discussion about sexist stereotyping.
Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time.
???
Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.
Oh noes, you have outed me! I shrivel up in the face of your freethinking ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
I happen to enjoy watching the same shows and movies my wife watches on TV, and I somehow assumed it was true of the majority of couples.
If you've defined it that way, of course that'll be how you see it and nobody will shake your conviction. This makes conversations with you on the topic as dull as someone who doesn't grasp enough statistics to understand trivial errors, but so be it.
The rest of the world has a more nuanced take on it, which begins with the idea that being rude to people who lack relative power in a given situation is still morally wrong and tactically quite stupid.