Reverse-sexism undermines and hurts the anti-sexist and female-friendly atmosphere that most of the tech community would like to foster. Gender discrimination and sexism need to be called out and stopped everywhere, but "crying wolf", without reason, weakens the very moral ground we purport to defend.
Indeed - I find Ryan Singel's attitude to be completely and utterly baffling. From his Wired post:
"Soghoian suggesting that if Quinn Norton ever wanted to write about about encryption tools in the future, she ought to “step back, take a deep breath, and pull the power cord from your computer” isn’t just rude and obnoxious, it’s border-line sexist"
Out of context, I can't really see what he's getting at. In context, the idea it's 'border-line' sexist makes no sense at all. Singel has chosen to infer sexism under the mis-guided impression it's targeting one of his writers, but in fact the quote is pretty clearly intended to be read as a criticism of all technology journalists.
"Borderline" anything does not make any sense to me. It seems to be nothing more than a way to call somebody something with plausible deniability, I guess to protect against libel/slander suits?
The way I see it, being "borderline" to something means that it is "close" to something, but not actually something. I guess an octagon could be a "borderline" circle? The issue here though is that if you are pointing out that something is "borderline sexist", you are basically saying "it is not sexist, but it is close to it". What the hell does "close to sexist" mean? Is being "close to sexist" wrong? If yes, why isn't it just called "sexist"?
> Reverse-sexism undermines and hurts the anti-sexist and female-friendly atmosphere that most of the tech community would like to foster.
It may be that the tech community would like to foster anti-sexism, but reality shows that it does anything but that. Also, reverse-sexism isn't a thing, there is just sexism (which men, as a gender, are largely not affected by).
> Gender discrimination and sexism need to be called out and stopped everywhere, but "crying wolf", without reason, weakens the very moral ground we purport to defend.
Soghoian's original paragraph about Norton's tweets are sexist as they don't add anything to his original blog post except to taint Norton as someone who is biased against men, which Norton's tweets don't even support. Soghoian knows his audience is primarily men and even if he didn't intend to show Norton in that light he sure did.
