Awful lot of words you used to avoid typing "sexism". Hide behind whatever phrasing you prefer, but automatically assigning a person gender roles out of intellectual laziness embodies sexism.
It's thoughtful, and while he's using different language, describing his approach here as "hiding" is pretty ungenerous. I'd guess that you're used to people being kinda shitty about this stuff, and so you saw someone say something that could be part of some ugly apologetics and just went with your heuristics.
(edit) Also, let me add, sometimes it's easier to talk about the mechanisms of sexism rather than the phenomenon. Ideologically I'm super anti-racist/homophobic/sexist/patriarchy/capitalist blah blah blah but talking about those things straight out often feels like the worst place to have a productive conversation from. Compare "The prison industrial complex is a function of white supremacy", vs, "dang, it's messed up that people of color on average get way harsher sentences for the same crime." Context is very important, of course, but sometimes using a lot of words is better communication.
Like it or not, our brains are wired to be able to ignore unusual cases and save complete analysis of each and every situation. This course of evolution may be why you and I are able to post on this website, after all. Sexism, racism an any other form of discrimination are made of this. That's very sad, yes.
I want to make another point. Sexism is refusing to aknowledge the possibility for a woman to be technical, for exemple. Assuming she probably isn't is not sexism, it is an often-correct assumption. This doesn't make the man (or the woman) who makes this assumption a monster.
So I understand women's frustrations very well as I can be the one discriminated in various other situations, but don't blame it too quickly on people. Blame it first on evolution, the same evolution that allows you to not think to much about it when you have to breathe.
It's both.
related - one of the things I hate about hn is people whining "that's an appeal to authority, that's a logical fallacy, how dare you say you would believe a 50 year old hr manager about workplace customs over my 13 year old sister!" Technically they're correct, if I were invested in the argument I should follow up both proposals equally and not just dismiss one. But in real life, ain't nobody got time for that, and we use heuristics instead. The trick is identifying the biases I'm using as a heuristic, and also identofying which of these heuristics are hurting other people and when it is worth doing the long route of checking each argument - for the cocktail party example, would it kill people to just ask a woman what she does, even if they probably aren't in tech?
Having intent behind it just makes it worse, really. And "intent" is difficult to define.
https://medium.com/best-thing-i-found-online-today/8178b2794...
Here, I'll even save you the trouble of clicking:
To be direct: Pattern recognition is bullshit voodoo pseudo-science masquerading as objectivity and meritocracy. It’s sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and xenophobia dressed up as science. It sickens me.
"So pattern recognition is a useless heuristic made up by a group of rich white men as a way to quantify something"
If that statement isn't racist, biased, and, well, just quite mean really, then I'm not sure what is.
Racism (sexism/classism/etc) is not about race (sex/class/etc). It's about power. For this reason alone (let alone all the other good ones), there is no symmetry in these biases (e.g. the false equivalence of misogyny and misandry).
The popular, and dictionary, definition of "racism" is "hatred or intolerance of another race or other races".
there is no symmetry in these biases (e.g. the false equivalence of misogyny and misandry)
It does not mean that there is never a case of sexism against men or racism against whites. What it means is that you cannot simply flip mysogyny and misandry, or racism against minorities and racism against majority. One major reason is the power imbalance - you can read more about it online but the simplest example I can offer is that of sexual harassment where the power imbalance is essential to the problem, i.e. a lowly employee asking for a date with their boss is a fundamentally different problem than a powerful boss asking for a date with their employee. Another reason is systemic vs. individual discrimination - again, other people explain it better than I ever could but a very simple example would be that everyone across the board, meaning men and women both, discriminate against equally-qualified resumes with female names on them, evidencing that our whole culture is systemically sexist in one direction.
And if you read carefully what that parent was responding to, it will make even more sense.
It never goes well because it goes into a corner of academia, takes a relatively new and by no means universally accepted redefinition and decides to not only add that definition to the word "racism" society-wide, but replace the existing definition entirely.
My personal opinion on the terms has gone back and forth so much that I don't even care about this pissing match anymore, but it's become clear to me why people aren't getting on board.
As if redefining instead of just adding a 2nd definition wasn't enough, what it attempts to define is already better known as "institutional racism," a subset of racism (where racism is just racial prejudice). If you don't see a new category being defined, it's hard to see the purpose of splitting these hairs as anything other than to redefine racial-prejudice-minus-power as something without the baggage the term "racism" carries around. It smacks of conversation re-framing through linguistic prescriptivism.
Or, occasionally it is interpreted less charitably. Someone does see a new category being codified, just not the one you want. They see it as a category of below-"racism" racism emerging that gives a pass to expressions of racism from traditionally disadvantaged groups, even in circumstances where the institutional racism isn't at play.
That's, frankly, bullshit. It about allocating power by race, etc., and is, therefore, necessarily about race (or whatever else defines the -ism in question) and power.
> there is no symmetry in these biases
There is a difference in effect (in a short time window, but see below) between whether the group favored is the currently in-power group or whether its an out-of-power group.
But there is a symmetry in essence. And, furthermore, the long-time-window effect of accepting racism (etc.) from below (or redefining the terms to exclude it) is a reversal in power structure in which the group whose bias has been licensed becomes the power group -- and is unlikely to suddenly renounce the bias that established that position in favor of the formerly-dominant and now subjected group.
That's pretty much exactly the case! Thanks for the great quote.
What motivates this toxic revanchist mindset that every single white man has homogenous and equally distributed power, simply due to being part of a group due to their skin color?
This type of identity politics is no different than Luce Irigaray claiming E = mc^2 is a "sexed equation" and that it privileges the speed of light. It is postmodern, Western-centric and extremist lunacy.
Ultimately though, most distressing is your sociopathy.
So it's not so much to ask that if you're a white man and you think something crappy about a woman or minority, that you might stop and ask yourself to validate that, or find a better way to explain or phrase it.