Is that a serious question? 'Cause I can think of enough ways women are made to feel unwelcome at these events without the added bonuses of envy and/or resentment.
No, because I don't get to tell you what to do. All I get to do is tell you what I think, and I think you cried "Troll!" at someone's honest attempt to participate in a discussion.
By all means, disagree. Just try not to freak out when other people disagree with your disagreement.
Everyone has hormones, most people have sex drives, and a lot of people drink. It's only the douchebags that attribute their awful behavior to the mysterious power of physiology and depressants that doesn't seem to bring out the inner creepers of anyone else. Indeed, the douchebags would claim that everyone else is a douchebag, they're just hiding it. A charming lot.
Your comment should get downvoted to oblivion for its sheer lack of originality, panache, and basic human empathy, but let me humor you with a response:
When 1 in N women can serve in the military without being raped by their fellow servicemen, then we can talk.
And then can we have the conversation wherein you attempt to defend your apparent belief that people dying in service of their country is superior to people being RAPED BY THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN in service of their country.
I don't regard rape as a fate worse than death. It should be regarded as a crime worthy of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, and right now it isn't.
If people in the armed forces were killed by their fellow soldiers at the rate women in the armed forces are assaulted and/or raped (which would mean a Fort Hood massacre every _week_), it would get a lot of attention, and the perpetrators would actually be prosecuted instead of shielded from consequence. But when a victim of assault reports it in the military, the consequences usually fall on the victim and the perp gets to walk. I think any rational human would find that sickening.
I also take umbrage with your sugarcoated characterization of rape as "involuntary sexual intercourse," as if it could happen by accident. There is no such thing as "involuntary" sexual intercourse. Sex requires consent. If consent is not given or is revoked, it immediately becomes assault and/or rape, and the person who disregards that becomes an assailant and/or rapist. Your use of dismissive, diminishing rhetoric to describe (or even excuse) the traumatizing act of sexual assault/rape is a lame and misguided attempt of political correctness of your own preference. Which is a nice way of saying that you're propping up rape culture.
I don't know you, but based on your comments you seem to have very little to no empathy for victims of assault. I would implore you to examine why that is.
As a longtime Apple product fanslave I've got to say, something like this would be welcome competition. Apple's obsession with sickly-sweet sentimentality (seriously, who uses FaceTime with any regularity?) grates on the nerves. A cold sci-fi revamp is exactly what I'm expecting from Microsoft in the next few years.
It's obviously started to dominate their product line and is slowly permeating their flagship UI. The dubsteppiness of the Surface commercial wasn't an accident. It will take a long while before the company has earned itself a rebrand, because a rebrand without actual, significant and, here's the kicker, successful change to its entire product line (including Windows, that poor magnificent demented bastard of an OS) is an empty gesture and deserving of contempt and mockery.
Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle with itself, but it has one advantage on its side: technology rapidly changes and improves, and it's only accelerating. As long as the company doesn't fall too far behind, the shifting landscape of mobile platforms, touch surfaces and desktop v. small screen conventions will be a perfect excuse to retire its failed products entirely, rather than endlessly iterating and mutating them beyond reason.
If they can scrape by long enough to let the features rot fully and throw the garbage out the window, and finally shine some sunlight on their promising new seeds, they will be able to justify a new brand.
I appreciate the attempted compliment. It's nice to consider myself interesting and clever.
Unfortunately, it's not so nice when I'm unmedicated to lose my train of thought constantly, be totally distracted by small noises (think Doug the dog: "SQUIRREL!"), be totally manic and creative for two to four hours only to be beset by a terrible fog of malaise for the next few days or even week. But with a boost extra norepinephrine and dopamine, however, I can actually function as a human being and feel like I have control over my life.
Whatever peculiar chemical mixture I have, whether you'd like to call it ADD (or ADHD-PI) or some sort of minor bipolar disorder or depression or hypomania, has very real consequences on my life. Without medication, I am miserable. With it, I feel some semblance of what I would presume "normal" feels like. It doesn't fix all of my problems - my memory recording and recall skills are still very poor and my ability to manage my time is a challenge, which has taken years of practice to compensate for - but it stabilizes me emotionally and mentally so that I can actually focus on living my life vs. using all my faculties up struggling to do basic things like dishes or laundry.
Now I'd like to turn the discussion back to you: what's with your hostility to people who aren't like you?
"Oh my little darling could never sit down and read that 1000page book - it's not because he's lazy boring and stupid - it's because he has ADD".
You can sit down and read a 1000 page book? when Jersey Shore is on? You must have Aspergers.
Little "moonflower cherub" doesn't do well at school. It's because she's too delicate, fragile and artistic for math. She can't read either, she just sits in class eating crayons - she must be dyslexic.
That wasn't really aimed at the comment above. It was that the majority of "behaviour disorders" are 'diagnosed' by teachers or parents.
In the US I have known children who were medicated for ADD on the word of a teacher or classroom assistant. Basically it becomes the socially accepted alternative to making the disruptive kid sit in the corner.
The rather more laughable but harmless affect is the middle class parents who have decided that any deviation from perfection in their assumed to be perfect little offspring is obviousness a medical disorder
I think kids (usually boys) with behavioral problems getting misdiagnosed with ADHD is more due to the conformist structure of our godawful school system than delusional parents. Parents want the best for their kids, and if the child is underperforming by the metrics of grades, focus and class participation, then naturally they will want to figure out how to compensate. The answer could be tutoring, better impulse control, change of diet or (gee!) learning environment, or the introduction of a psychiatric evaluation, and sometimes the last option is considered first.
I was actually diagnosed with ADD when I was in second grade. My mom refused to acknowledge the diagnosis, claiming it was bunk and that it was the Montessori school's ability to run a classroom that was lacking, not my ability to focus. She reasoned that I could draw for four hours straight, so I must not have ADD. (This was back when all studies on ADD were on boys with hyperactivity as the main criteria - "hyperfocus" and "low arousal theory" were barely off the ground then.)
My mom moved me to a public school and, wonder of wonders, the focused group environment of second and third grade was much more engaging for me. Then I got to the more rigid structure (separate desks, "all eyes on the blackboard" style classroom) and I started to slip. My mom made a little sign for my desk that said "PAY ATTENTION," as if that was going to magically snap me out of my daydreams. My poor performance continued all the way till high school - every report card insisted that I was bright, but not trying hard enough. Finally, when I got to high school, the challenges of AP classes and college prep got me motivated and goal-oriented. But once I was at college, all my old problems came back. It was like I was back at Montessori, totally lost and dazed and losing credits.
Then I got RE-diagnosed with ADD, started medication and group therapy, and voila! I graduated. Had I tried medication in middle school and high school, who knows what I might have been capable of.
For every diagnosis that you may think is unnecessary, I guarantee you there are kids (mainly girls) out there who are humiliated constantly by their mysterious "laziness" and "flakiness" who suffer in silence and parents who are frustrated and sad for their kids' unexplained struggles. Had I known that there was truly something about the way my brain worked that gave me these challenges, I wouldn't have gone through the shameful years that I hated myself for trying twice as hard as anyone else to do half as much as they could do without trying.
The problem isn't cut and dried and your insistence on belittling the choices of well-meaning parents undermines those of us who are fighting to be understood.
> Apart from that, saying that women did not contribute enough to the Internet, is like saying black people did not contribute enough to the invention of cars; it's mostly true, but it could be argued that that's because they were an oppressed group.
That is indeed an interesting juxtaposition, and I'd particularly note the use of the word "enough." That would suggest that in discussions on the history of technology, it is implied that there is some arbitrary threshold at which mentions of the contributions of a minority group (not necessarily an identity minority; i.e. in a women-dominated field you'd say the minority is the men, etc.) will be disqualified.
For instance, it is indeed "mostly true" that black people did not make many contributions to the automotive industry or its technological development. Richard Spikes' contribution of turn signals (http://www.snopes.com/business/origins/blackinv.asp) is perhaps notable or even significant, but not necessarily critical, so this could serve as an example of that statement. Does that mean that the hypothetical phrase "White men invented the modern automobile" in a hypothetical article about a black man being ostracized from the auto industry in 2012 is racist? Or is it merely an acknowledgment of the fact that white men get the credit because they structured the industry to give it to them, by excluding everyone else? Or is it both?
That would suggest that in discussions on the history of technology, it is implied that there is some arbitrary threshold...
But there's nothing arbitrary here, we know who invented the Internet. None of them
where women. The argument that women could have contributed but didn't "because they were an oppressed group" is just an absurd couterfactual. Who knows what would have happened?
You can say anything you want...
Richard Spikes' contribution of turn signals...
Richard Spikes invented the turn signal. Full stop. Saying he contributed
to the invention of the automobile is as absurd as saying that Edison or Tesla contributed
to the invention of the turn signal. No one would say that because the turn signal stands
on it's own. Using your line of reasoning, Richard Spikes invented the turn signal
with contributions from who knows how many women and other minorities.
Or is it merely an acknowledgment of the fact that white men get the credit because they structured the industry to give it to them, by excluding everyone else?
That doesn't mean women should get a historical "participation trophy" just for being somewhere and doing something in computing while the actual inventors where developing the Internet. It's insulting to them and women (and Al Gore...).
No, it's not racist. When you use it to say that black people don't know anything about cars or that they can't influence the future of that, then yes, it is.
> For every woman who contributed in some way to the founding of the internet, there were hundreds of men. That's just reality, and to use that fact to argue any point about the state of the technology industry today is retarded.
How is it retarded to remind readers that women made critical or at least significant (if not necessarily numerous) contributions to the evolution of the technology we have today? The work of these women has been overlooked, overshadowed, ignored and discouraged throughout history so much that there is a whole month relegated to reminding US school children of that fact. You may have heard of it.
I agree that one blundering sentence does not an endorsement or thesis make, in the case of the New York Times piece. Perhaps the intent was to satirize the "lore" that it's all about men, men, men in tech, which is why women (in this case, Pao) get so much shit for even trying. Xeni took it literally. I can see where you might see that as an overreaction, but frankly the way that opening line is written doesn't instill much hope in me that the average NYT reader will catch the knowing wink, if it is in fact buried in there somewhere.
Finally, no one's saying men shouldn't receive credit for their work because they had the misfortune of being born into a gender fraught with examples of the underqualified being showered with recognition. What is being said is that women should receive credit for their work because they had the misfortune of being born into a gender fraught with examples of the perfectly qualified being mocked, ostracized and all but forgotten. If that frustrates you, I would be curious to know why.
Edit: original comment deleted. I'm a little disappointed because it indicated the writer felt a very potent irritation with the dialog on feminism/sexism in reaction to Xeni's response and I do wish we could engage each other when those difficult feelings rear up.
