Crake

As a gender and sexual minority, I try to stay clear of feminists. (At least, when someone says they are one, I get wary.) They're some of the most GSM hostile people I've met.

>The whole idea of feminism is inclusion, which means including trans, queer and other genders and YES including men too.

Mainstream feminism doesn't agree, except for when someone wants to start an equal rights movement for another demographic, like men or GLBT. Then they start acting like patent lawyers.

I would suggest looking into egalitarianism, which lacks the gender supremacy aspect of feminism. You can continue to identify as a feminist, that's fine and 100% up to you...but you're going to spend more time fighting other feminists about what "feminism" means than doing anything else. :/

I like the term "false poverty effect." It'd be nice to have something to describe all the annoying people I've met who think they are "poor" but can hit their parents up for an interest free $100,000 "loan" they never have to repay or a brand new 2014 car. Then they make fun of you for struggling to afford (or being unable to afford) college tuition or rent when they clearly had no problems affording it on part time minimum wage.

Saying "and deal with the girls" would get a lot of guys in trouble these days. Women too if you're on the internet where your gender is indeterminate, since feminists will get mad at you and assume you're an Oppressive Male.

Makes it a lot easier to get personalized letters of recommendation, too. My first year science and math professors all remember me, since the class sizes were small and enthusiastic students are easily noticed. I doubt that would have been the case at a university, where I'd have been crammed in with several hundred people.

Feminism doesn't know what it is. For every feminist who thinks it's about everyone, there's a feminist who thinks it's only about women. All of the legislation? The policies enacted and enforced? Created and aligned to the views of the latter. Feminist laws kept me in an abusive situation as a kid. Maybe if feminists didn't bully, send death threats, and kill the dog of the person who created domestic violence shelters for everyone, or never passed laws based on models saying that only men abuse, I'd have a different opinion.

Actions speak louder than words.

>The only thing I'd like to point out is that we should all be feminists, because the only alternative is sexism.

I have chosen to identify as an egalitarian. Please don't remove my agency. I have very good reasons not to identify with an ideology that cannot even agree on what it is, and has done considerable harm to both myself and many others in the past and present.

I think you can be a feminist and still be a good person. I think it's silly to imply that in order to be a good person, you have to be a feminist.

They have equal opportunity. (Actually, no, women have greater opportunity than men do these days.)

That's not a guarantee of equal outcome, though.

I want to move to Europe someday (possibly), but while I love how liberal a lot of the place is and admire their strong social safety net, the tendency to shift discrimination around from one demographic to the next instead of trying to eliminate it completely is something I find quite alarming. :/

As a minority, I've always felt that "affirmative action" discrimination policies do me no favors. I wish more people understood how harmful they are.

As a person in the demographic they claim to be trying to help, I'm confused too. I'M definitely uncomfortable with it, but according to these guys I'm too stupid to understand anything about my life.

>a person disagrees with GFK >"must be one of those evil MRAs"

>Rather than being blinded by preoccupation with historical "recognition" of hate, focus might instead be placed on justice in one's everyday life.

Good luck getting feminists and other sjws to agree to that. :/

Pregnancy?

More opportunities these days for women than in the 1960s--they're off enjoying too many other things, in a lot of cases. If we expanded gender roles for men to encompass the same spread that women now have, maybe we'd see a bit more equality. You can try to convince women with a ton of options to come, or you can try to expand options for men, so that they aren't trapped into certain things because many others are closed to them.

Damn, I knew science was a tool of the patriarchy!

Oh good. I finally found a feminist who'll admit that their rivals are nicer to egalitarians than feminists are.

I agree it's cultural.

Theory:

Women have more options now. They're choosing them.

Men have the same options now as they did then. They're choosing from a much more limited selection pool.

That might be because a lot of women prefer other fields. If you pick a random female and a random male, chances are the female has far less relevant tech experience than the male. Even in "tech," they're more likely to be HR, graphic design, or a paid tweeter like Adria Richards was before her lack of basic git hub knowledge led her to try to bully people out of their jobs.

I like how being a man is considered an insult these days. Woman who disagrees with feminism? Damn men!

>This thread is 100% nerdy dudes feeling offended

"anyone who disagrees with me is a man! "

There are plenty of women here. You're just choosing to ignore and erase their existence because it invalidates your religion.

You disagreed with him, there's no way you could be anything BUT a young white male! Stop appropriating your own oppression!

(I also hated the disability metaphor.)

Ah, the good old "whoever disagrees with me MUST be a man" argument.

Pro-tip: women are capable of independent thinking. Some of them are not going to agree with what you decree is best for them.

>I've rarely experienced that

I've often experienced that. I'm experiencing it right now, in multiple places in this discussion.

>And if you start looking at what earns people respect and power and what invites derision...

...you would find that as science predicts, class privilege is the greatest factor in success.

>When you go and talk to people who are women or brown or some intersection of these, one thing that's clear is that they feel much more comfortable when interacting with other folks whose lives and paths look like theirs.

I agree completely. I'm way more comfortable with my tech friends (of any race, sex, or ethnicity) than I am with people who have a single or multiple exterior characteristics in common with me.

It's HOW and WHAT you think that matters, not what you look like. Being subjected to the discriminatory policies people like you keep forcing on us "for [your] own good" only reinforces our desire to both perceive and be perceived for our minds, not our bodies. This was once readily available in tech; thanks to your efforts, it is now a much rarer experience.

At least with my own disability/disabilities, I much prefer people to act normally around me. I absolutely feel othered if people go on forever about it.

Able-bodied people can use ramps too. If I were in a wheelchair, I'd prefer my friends to walk beside me without talking the whole time about how tragically victimized I am by the existence of stairs and other devices employing 90 degree angles of oppression. I'd definitely be even more annoyed if "well meaning" "activists" tried to ban my able-bodied friends from using the ramps alongside me.

Also, you just compared the relative ability of men and women to succeed in the tech world as the former being like a person who can walk unassisted and the latter being like a person who is significantly crippled. Given that success in the tech world is largely due to mental ability instead of physical ability, you might want to find a different way to word it to avoid unpleasant implications.

I'm confused by the way you mention class privilege and then assume that somehow this means that women are disadvantaged. Women control 70% of global [consumer] spending. Are you proposing men-only scholarships to fix this?

>"how dare women get their own classes"

When even ACLU says you're on the wrong side of a civil rights issue, it may be time to reconsider your stance.

Oh geez, what was I thinking, you're totally right. You've convinced me, I'll shut up and check my white cishet male shitlord privilege.

>You'll learn about the blind spots. The exclusion.

>you'll learn how toxic it is when monocultures form

>The lack of productive conflict

Said the SJW to the minority, with absolutely no self-awareness at all.

There isn't any blatant inequality except for the sex based discrimination being pushed on the field by feminists, which won't be corrected without pushback from egalitarians.

I feel deeply uncomfortable with it as well. Getting paid $5,000 for having a vagina is usually something associated with, err, other industries. I'd feel much better if it were on the basis of financial need rather than which set of genitals you have (and as a non-cis person, makes me wonder what they'd do with a trans person...).

Yeah, same. :/ Funny, isn't? All the Adria Richards of the world claiming to want to increase the exposure of women in tech are actively discouraging exactly that.

I usually don't bother with links to things that are phrased in such a way as to suggest support of segregationist policies. I don't care about women in tech. I care about people in tech.

It's always amazed me that some people get to pick which colleges to go to. I never had that option. Until I turned 24, the maximum financial aid available to me was a measly $5,000 stafford loan. There aren't many places you can attend with only $5,000. That won't even pay for an in state public university in virtually every state. The colleges I spoke with told me that if I didn't have the money, I should wait until I turned 24 and try again. That was a long half decade wait.

You have to have a rich relative available to cosign for all those private loans--federal loans for dependents are capped at about $5,000/year, and independents get about $10,000/year. The total lifetime amount is capped at about $60,000, which is why I'm sometimes skeptical of "I have $200,000 in student loan debt! I'm so poor and oppressed!" stories. It's very likely that these people are just fine because their family will eventually bail them out no matter how many bad choices they make--they're legally obligate to. Student loan companies don't loan money to people without collateral.