Comment by theorique | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theorique | Hacker News Reader

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The whole bro humour is deliberately exclusionary, it is an in-joke for tying together small groups of (mostly) young males. That is what it is for.

It's important to draw the distinction between the usage of the term to

(1) describe oneself and one's peers and create an ingroup

as opposed to

(2) describe (and often criticize) others

I don't see a lot of unironic usage of (1), aside from the odd tone-deaf fratboy.

I see a lot of criticism of "brogrammers" and "dudebros" by self-styled "progressives" on the internet and social media.

The question is, what is the actual intent of this project name - is it just a "ha-ha, man refers to male people, bro is a different word to refer to male people"? If so, then there's no problem with it and people offended by it are overreacting.

If it's intended to exclude females from contributing or participating (though I don't see how), then that's a problem. It's not clear that this would actually be an issue - a man who didn't want to participate in a project because the gem was called "estrogen" or "sister" or something would rightly be criticized for having some issues.

I agree with (1) and (2). I know the first thought I had when I saw "bro pages" I thought is was a pun on "man pages." Turns out I was right. As others have noted, no one seems oppressed with "/sys" or that since jewelry is mostly a feminine product, that using "gem" is hostile. Or Julia. Etc. I'm sure the argument is something akin to being that because we are in a male dominated space, that feminine gendered words cannot be exclusionary.

What I really came here to post is that I am curious to hear from the _women_ who are offended by it and why. I am under the impression that most (all?) of the comments are from social justice white males picking up on something that they feel bolsters their ability to say, "look, I support woman in tech!" without actually doing anything real and concrete to, you know, actually support woman in tech (like working to get young woman interested in coding, working towards hiring practices that don't bias resume screening by removing names, or something similar).

I'm sure that I have phrased something completely sans sensitivity above and will be thoroughly lambasted. Hopefully it will be from a woman who can explain it to me, though, if we are to believe some of the comments above, then woman are actively avoiding this site due to sexist comments. Perhaps there is something so overtly sexist in what I wrote that I am part of the problem. However, I don't _think_ so. /me braces for down voting.

If I understand the outcry, it's something like this:

- programming is a male-dominated field

- that's not a good thing - we need more women because of some reasons

- to get more women, we need to show women that they are welcome

- a package name like "bro" references male things, and possibly even unfortunate stereotypes like "brogrammers"

- this is a bad thing

- therefore, we shouldn't call it "bro" because women in CS and programming will think of brogrammers and other male stereotypes in programming and feel unwelcome

Frankly, this sounds like quite a stretch to me too, but it's my best guess about what the problem is.

I think there are definitely package names that one could imagine that were sexist and truly inappropriate. This isn't one of them.

Nah, you've got it about right. It's not offensive at all, and the contortions people are performing to make it so are quickly becoming quite mind boggling.

(1) is exactly the context of bropages though, which is the topic of this thread, so it definitely exists.

No, it isn't. It's a pun on manpages.

Well, that was my question.

I'm assuming that this was a double-entendre pun on "man" (short for manual) also meaning "human of male sex", and using a word related to the second meaning to give "bro".

It's similar to the situation of how "rake", derived from "ruby-make" gave rise to "hoe", riffing off the meaning of "rake" as a garden tool.

It's not clear to me how a woman using the "bro" tool at her computer would somehow be marginalized or excluded. Puns aren't automatically sexist just because they reference some aspect of maleness/femaleness.

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