If I claim I'm a victim in a way that you're not, it becomes literally impossible for you to prove me wrong. If I go on to claim that we need new policies to protect me from (and/or compensate me for) that victimhood, you can't disagree. You can't do anything other than supplicate.
I hope you fail, buddy.
This is a very ungenerous reading. (Ungenerous readings are very common in 'discussions' like this, on both sides.)
You're translating the claim to a nebulous sense of victimhood, but that's not really the context, is it? Instead, the example should be that you're claiming to be subject to discrimination that I am not based on a quantifiable categorical difference between us -- you are gay and I am straight, you are a woman and I am a man, you are black and I am white. Given that context, the question becomes whether I should give you a benefit of the doubt in your claim based on that experience.
When a woman claims that "brogrammer culture" is insensitive and indeed exclusive to the point where the phrase "bro pages" really does come across as twitch-inducing, she's not making that claim based on "self-proclaimed victimhood." She's making it based on experience that you not only do not share, but that it is literally impossible for you to share. You can't be subject to the same kind of discrimination she is.
And yes, it's patronizing for men to come in and make that claim on her behalf. But isn't it even more patronizing for men to come in and say that she has no basis to make that claim? It seems to me that a lot of comments here are on the edge of (or over the edge of) "women who want to be treated equally to men shouldn't complain that language can ever make them feel unwelcome." And that sounds uncomfortably like we're saying to women: you can't disagree. You can't do anything other than supplicate.
> This is a very ungenerous reading. (Ungenerous readings are very common in 'discussions' like this, on both sides.)
I think you're misunderstanding me, because you the rest of your post precisely describes what I'm talking about (up until the final paragraph, which I'll get to later).
If I claim that I'm a victim in a way that you're not, it means that there must (in some way) be quantifiable categorical differences between us. Otherwise, of course, we'd both be victims.
For example, we could have different different cities of birth, different ages, different ethnicities, different religions, different specific houses of worship, different visual appearances, different heights, different friends, different incomes, different hobbies, different offices, different voice pitches, different teachers, different childhood fears, different parents, etc. We could be different people with different brain chemistries and different life experiences. So even if we are at the same table together at the same restaurant, you could not tell me how I experienced the waiter speaking to us.
And you could not judge how I experience being told, "You are not allowed to reason with a woman when she claims victimhood on the basis of her sex. You are not allowed to point out any problematic aspects of her claims. You are not allowed to say that you as a man are equally affected by the phenomenon she is describing. She knows that you are wrong. Somehow."?
> But isn't it even more patronizing for men to come in and say that she has no basis to make that claim?
No, it's not patronizing at all disagree with a woman and explain why.
> And that sounds uncomfortably like we're saying to women: you can't disagree. You can't do anything other than supplicate.
Saying to women "we are allowed to disagree and reason with you" is completely different from saying to women "you aren't allowed to disagree and reason with us".
Ah yes, empathy is the enemy of intellect! Truly an argument made by a well-adjusted person.
> If I claim I'm a victim in a way that you're not, it becomes literally impossible for you to prove me wrong.
That's now what they're saying at all, and the fact you somehow extracted that from their point really shows how irrational you're being.
And yes, the grandparent poster did say that if you're on the Geek-Feminism-Privileged™ side of a given issue, you have a "vanishingly small" chance of being right, so "you're better off holding your tongue".
#1 - When I sit down and really take the time to weigh everything, I consistently find that my first reasonable-feeling judgment was way off. So I've tried to stop trusting that gut feel, and I advise others do the same.
I'm offering practical advice, but it's obviously not for you.