[bluedanieru]

It could be that her awfulness has a female quality to it rather than a gender-neutral or male one, in which case a female-specific insult could be appropriate (to the extent any insult would be appropriate to the listener, that is - the tone of this discussion is quickly heading toward the case where it is not appropriate to insult people at all, ever).

[LaGrange]

Female quality of the awfulness? You know, why it's mostly okay for you to decide against continuing a relationship if some physical quality of your partner disturbs you beyond the point when you can deal with it. It's sad but it happens. But I can't really imagine when such a situation would qualify someone as a horrible person.

And, I think that it's okay to insult people, for example it's okay to call someone who assigns "femininity" to character flaws a male chauvinistic pig.

[bermanoid]

And, I think that it's okay to insult people, for example it's okay to call someone who assigns "femininity" to character flaws a male chauvinistic pig.

Do you really believe that there are no linkages between sex and certain character flaws? Or is it just that this is one of those things that people should know better than to talk about when being polite? [I'd probably agree with the latter, FWIW]

Because in my life, the character flaws that I've seen in people absolutely tend to cluster based on sex. The stereotypes of the violent alcoholic boyfriend and capricious hypersensitive girlfriend come to mind as patterns that I've seen played out way too many times for the correlation to be a statistical anomaly, given that the inverse situations are very rare. I'd never say that women can't be abusive drunks that cheat on their SOs with 20 year olds and pay more attention to their jobs than their kids, but if you heard that a person of unknown sex was described that way, where would you put your money? Is it really so unfair to make that assumption?

In the end it doesn't really matter w.r.t. the current debacle - it's flat out wrong to refer to people as "bitch", and even more wrong to do so at a professional conference, and I just won't stand up for that. I do, however, think that it's fine and proper to consider certain personality traits to be more prevalent in women than men and vice versa, as long as the correlations are real (whether or not they're to blame on genetics or culture); to do otherwise is to pretend to live in a world that only exists in our imaginations.

[cipherpunk]

rolleyes

[bluedanieru]

And what is it about my chauvinism that is peculiarly masculine?