7 Comments on “A Web Entry I Could Not Write”

1. *claps loudly*

   Hear hear! To contrast, there’s a lot of guys out there that I would never be friends with or even hang out with, because they’re arrogant, overaggressive, meathead pricks. Nobody has a problem with me calling them that because it’s what they are.

   But hoo boy, say anything about the 3 women in the row behind me yammering away about what guy text-messaged whom and when and ohmygawd your highlights look AWESUM! during the first 20 minutes of the movie… and I’m the sexist a-hole.

   Funny, that! *winks*

2. What’s funny is that it’s the hardest social thing in the world — and I mean that, literally, it may be the hardest — to forget or ignore what gender somebody is.

   To think that anything’s that hardwired, that you can’t turn it off for the space of a conversation regardless of how engaged you are on an intellectual basis… Well, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, I guess, but it’s also sort of spooky.

3. We are wired differently: there’s no getting around it. But each sex is a continuum of behaviour, from the girliest, frilly, pink, dismayed-at-nail-chips female to the hardest-partying, most skirtchasing belching male.

   And there’s a fair overlap in the middle. I’ve always been a male who is comfortable in the company of women, and who, frankly, finds football intensely dull. My wife is someone who was as mythago describes, but it isn’t because she’s a sexist, it’s because she’s oblivious to all that stereotypical female stuff.

   I suspect that someone (who is more social than I am, which wouldn’t be hard) looking back from the male side of the mixed part of the spectrum could say some very similiar things to what mythago said. What men see as ‘straightforward’, women will often see as ‘bull in a china shop’, and what women see as ‘consensus gathering’ is often thought of as ‘gossipy wasting of time’ by men. Mythago, I think, is terming someone with a preference for one type of behaviour over another as ‘sexist’, when the charge could (on her terms) be made equally in the other direction.

4. Because I would get in trouble, what with the Y-chromosome and all.

   There is a little irony here: because you are male, you don’t feel that you can write something accusing some women of being sexist when they engage in certain kinds of counter-stereotypical behaviour.

5. More, I think, that John *gets* that saying “You girls knock it off!” would be more than a little sexist. Kind of like a white person pulling a Bill Cosby.

6. It seems to me that if you talk during a movie, you’re an inconsiderate asshole no matter what you’ve got between your legs – and also no matter what you’re talking about.

   Similarly, I took the point of Mythago’s post to be that saying “I can’t make friends with women because they’re so [unflattering generalization]” makes you a bit of a misogynist twit, also regardless of plumbing.

   Steve Eley – I don’t know if I agree with you that a person’s gender is the single hardest thing to forget or ignore, but it certainly seems to take up a lot of head-space. As someone who’s concerned with avoiding sexism, I don’t so much try to ignore someone’s gender as ask myself why I think it’s especially important.

7. I’m a little… sketchy on the premise of Mythago’s post. Only to the extent that I feel pretty non-sexist when I say, “There aren’t many (enough) girls who are geek-friendly and/or geeks themselves.”

   If a girl is a geek, and laments having not enough girl friends, it’s a symptom of the same underlying cause of a boy who is a geek and laments not knowing enough girls who aren’t repulsed by his hobbies. The girl may regret whatever girl-like tendencies she has being stifled by the lack of girls who get HER (much less the boys she calls friends). The boy probably laments booty, but that’s neither here nor there.