Yeah, sort of like the similar arguments over the dress color thing. I mean, I can understand people not picking up on the visual illusion, and I can understand trying to explain to them how to use software tools to analyse the image (and therefore break the illusion), but the arguments beyond that …? At that point, even if I disagree with someone and think they’re being a complete idiot, I generally find it’s just time to let it go. If nothing else, some people just don’t believe in an evidence based world view and there’s only so much you can do to convince them otherwise. (Actually, I strongly suspect it only makes them less receptive to a different point of view.)
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Ohmigosh, that was only the dumbest internet argument, ever.
Agreed, and I think that severe personal insecurity and overblown ego play a big part in such mindless and pointless conflicts.
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It also came up on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. They’ve been doing a bit called “Forgotten Superheroes of Science” where they do a short bio of someone who made an amazing contribution to science or technology, but who’s totally obscure. They got some complaints that it was “all women” or some such cry-babying. So they added it up and found, like Holly and Tracy, that they actually discussed more men. So the host, Steve Novella, said something like “We learned something from this - that we should feature more women.” Awesome.
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This is a phenomenon that is hard to understand. I was running into it recently on a twitch channel. It had nothing to do with gender in that case, but basically the chat was just overloaded with people saying the caster sucked, that the channel should shut down, etc. There were dozens if not hundreds of them. And then we have the people who appear to make boingboing accounts just to say that boingboing is shit.
Purposefully going to a space specifically to complain about that space and the people in it looks like either bullying or pure attention seeking to me.
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Part of it may be that constructive criticism isn’t taught much (in school) (anymore?). It’s a skill, and not an easy one to learn on your own.
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(the whole gifset and video can be found here)
And I also want to say that there is a bit of a problem with women’s history not being incorporated more broadly into history courses (at all levels), and instead being taught in women’s history or women’s studies classes. It’s runs the danger of becoming marginalized due to this. It’s “women’s history” so there is little to no need for people studying to teach history to learn it if it’s not there field. Also, if you do something that isn’t women’s history, you can still run up against resistance, because why aren’t you doing women’s history.
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As a philosophy major, I remember taking women’s studies classes and thinking, “This is pretty much a philosophy class, except apparently you need to give the whole discipline a different name just to be allowed to talk about women.” Now that I think back on it there was a lot of history covered as well.
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Yep. I think that’s pretty much the case.
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I read it put well long ago… They are sort of people who hit themselves in the head with a hammer because it feels better when they stop.
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Hey, people who self harm have the decency to take out their negative emotions on themselves rather than others and don’t deserve to be lumped in with these shit heads.
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These women are too logical and methodical for my emotional man-brain to handle! TIME TO TURN ON THE CAPS LOCK AND HEAD TO TWITTER FOR A BIG OL TANTY.
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Oh how I hate the phrase butthurt. Nothing immediately turns me away from someone faster than their use of that word.
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I was reading a “The Fifth Season,” by Jemisin recently, which is a really good book, and when I went to find some of her other stuff on Amazon I noticed that it was categorized as “women’s literature.” It is no more so than an sf book with a male protagonist by a male author is “men’s literature.”
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Particularly stupid when you look at the stats and discover that it’s women buying up all the fiction. Technically, it’s all women’s lit.
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It’s true:
Wimmuns gets all the attention!
Q.E.D.
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Well, but if it’s not listed as “women’s lit” how will men know to avoid it! 
But yeah, literature is literature…
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I’m sure it’s been said, but I’ll say it again, because it’s important. We have all already seen an enormous increase in this type of ignorance (and I only use the internet a few hours a week). This is the year of the ‘persecuted white male’. Trump has emboldened these hateful asshats, and many now believe that they are an oppressed underclass that is fighting a war against ‘political correctness’ and hostile takeover perpetrated by feminists, jews, black people, mexicans, muslims, the educated, the media, pretty much everyone that isn’s white, ignorant, and male. Protesters are ‘traitors’, muslims are ‘parasites’ and ‘vermin’, women are ‘whores, sluts, ovaries, and feminazis’, and Democrats and progressives are ‘communists, libtards, traitors, faggots, and worthless’. Spend an hour or two browsing Trump supporter gathering places, twitter feeds, etc. It’s absolutely terrifying,
I have begun collecting some examples of Trump supporters via screenshots for posterity, here are a few from the last bunch I capped (these mostly target muslim ‘vermin’, I’ll post the anti-women ones when I find them on my rathole-mess of a desktop):
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You should also hear what they think of White History!
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For me it’s ‘kool-aid’. As in ‘you drank the {insert random ideology} kool-aid’.
Nothing tells you ‘you are arguing with AM radio’ more succinctly and accurately.
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I can even potentially see “women’s lit” as a reasonable classification. I just checked the category in Amazon, and it has a lot of books that I think you could reasonably conclude that a vanishingly small percentage of men would have any interest in. It’s certainly not a good label to attach to this author, though, since she’s writing firmly in the best tradition of science fiction, and there’s no reason to think that pretty much anyone who likes sf wouldn’t like it. (Unless you assume that no man would ever want to read a book with a female protagonist, which kind of strikes me as the underlying assumption behind calling it “women’s lit”)
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