The dirty little secret is that guys are often dicks to everyone:
- Dudes love to argue for sake of argument, when absolutely nothing is at stake – and will frequently argue to the point of anger / exhaustion about anything, no matter how tiny and irrelevant.
- Dudes generally suck at empathy in general, for all humans. (Also since we’re privileged, we don’t see much of the bad stuff that happens to people with less privilege than us, leading to… less empathy. Out of sight, out of mind.)
- Dudes have innate “who is above me, who is below me” alpha male tendencies. (See the excellent book You Just Don’t Understand for more on this)
- Dudes are not great at listening, because we’re aggressive and want to make our points aka “win”
Improving that (and simply getting more dudes to recognize when theyr’e doing it) is something I’m very interested in. But calling it a “feminist book club” or “feminist technical brown bag” is not the way to get it to happen, at all.
