I agree with you in some cases, but sexism can be plain-old rudeness directed by men at women -- it's the quantity of it that makes the difference. Racism can follow the same pattern, or it can come in the form of a comment that wouldn't be racist if said to a non-minority.
There's no universally agreed-upon definition of rude, and sexism and racism are very hard to define objectively. They're very context-specific and subjective, for the most part.
First, being rude can mean pushing someone's buttons. People have easy buttons to push regarding their gender, orientation, race, etc. So even if your primary motivation wasn't to express hate for their whole category, you can contribute to * ism that way.
Second, a more frequent expression of rude behavior to people of a class that you don't like is *ism even if you aren't using the forbidden slurs normally associated with whatever prejudice you're expressing.
> People have easy buttons to push regarding their gender, orientation, race, etc. So even if your primary motivation wasn't to express hate for their whole category, you can contribute to * ism that way.
Sexism and racism aren't dependent upon another person's buttons being easy to push. That just means they're more sensitive than others.
> it's the quantity of it that makes the difference //
Surely not, surely it's the reason for the rudeness - if the reason is based [at all] on the sex of the person one is being rude to then it can veritably be called sexism. Otherwise it's just being rude to another person.
I think the argument is that if people tend to "just be rude" to women more often than to men, then that is evidence of sexism. Even if there isn't a conscious reason for the rudeness.
There clearly isn't any easy way to measure "aggregate rudeness" to be able to prove that women receive a higher quantity of "just being rude", but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't there.
Oh indeed, it's possibly impossible to measure objectively - certainly in any given situation, even if sexist epithets are used, it's largely impossible to tell if a person is being sexist.
I wasn't suggesting that it was a necessarily conscious thing either; just that it either is or isn't sexist based on other things than quantity. Aggregate rudeness won't even do, if you happen to see a woman you don't get on with every day and are rude to them then your aggregate rudeness towards women could be huge without you being sexist; equally you could hate and avoid women and so have a very low aggregate rudeness towards them.
You would think so. But the reason for rudeness rarely comes up. To those on the receiving end, the damage has been done and in the case of racism or sexism it is falling into a pattern that screams "You are not welcome here" to the person.
It's like the people who get arrested while walking home from work because they happened to enter a protest area. The reason for their being there is totally unrelated to the protest yet the effect of their being there is to increase the size of the crowd by one.
We can argue until we're blue in the face that this is unjust and the truth is that it is: it's unjust for everyone involved. It creates further entrenchment and higher barriers between people.
> it's the quantity of it that makes the difference.
But as many people have pointed out, quantity can have, well, quantitative reasons. I remember a blog post stating that being the only woman among 100 men at conferences, the author always got at least one stupid comment/question.
She even turned it into a formula:
#(women at a conference) = inversely proportional to #(times I talk about women in tech) [1]
Of course, that formula has simple quantitative reasons. Let's say that constant 1% of the 100 men there want to talk about women in tech. If there is 1 woman, you're it. If there are 2 women, 50% chance, 3 women 33% chance etc.
Same with rude people. Let's say there's an even 1% of women and men who are rude to the opposite gender and they are equally prolific. If there are 10% women at the conference/company/..., a woman has a roughly 100x greater chance of encountering that type of behaviour. Even though the level of rudeness is exactly the same.
Considering that "badness" of rude behaviour is likely going to be on a bell curve, you not only get more bad behaviour, you also get worse behaviour. Just from he numbers.
So you can have outcomes that look subjectively sexist (women encounter much worse and/or much more bad behaviour) without there actually being any sexism.
There's no universally agreed-upon definition of rude, and sexism and racism are very hard to define objectively. They're very context-specific and subjective, for the most part.