princess3000

National Security Letter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

What's private about a conversation taking place in a busy ballroom at a convention, within full earshot of (probably) dozens of people?

> Think of how men are marketed to and you'll see the difference.

Keywords being "marketed to." Marketing is a perverse beast and should not really be taken as proof of anything. I mean, the DeBeers story which eventually lead to the article here is specifically about how you can create, from whole cloth, a societal tradition simply with quality marketing.

I think you assume masculine things are functional while feminine things are not but that's not entirely true. You're completely overlooking, say, cleaning product and vacuum cleaner ads directed straight at women, and that masculine marketing is just as vapid in as many ways (e.g. Monster Cables, energy drinks). While diamonds don't really "do things" in the way that a car or a TV does, there are incredibly rational social reasons for buying the former and incredibly irrational, marketing-driven reasons for purchasing the latter.

I also think it's incredibly silly to assume we can learn anything about how men and women are wired by looking at marketing. A century or so ago pink was a color for boys and blue was for girls, and at that time you could have made some assumptions about what each sex innately prefers and you would have been just as wrong.

Disagree, there's a fair amount of "social janitorial work" that goes on here at HN. I mean, I just signed up to comment here today (have been reading for a while) and the community here is based on something similar:

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

People here are pretty strict about the types of comments that fly; for example, memes and dumb jokes are not something that the community here accepts. Personally I think that's great and the site is better for it, but it's not censorship to hold the other people in your forum or message board to certain standards of communication.

It's a legitimate subreddit. There's some humor involved (the bird, the silly Archangel names, and pretending that misogynist conspiracies are real) but the core of the subreddit is pointing out sexism, racism, and violentacrez-style exploitation on the rest of reddit.