[flatline]

I agree that the guy is probably suffering from his own insecurities, but the bottom line is that he allowed his issues to place him in a situation of antagonizing a co-worker, probably without any repercussions, which speaks to a general climate of discrimination against women in the workplace. Still, some of your other points are interesting and I feel are valid in a larger context. Zen monasteries in Japan were segregated - women were a minority anyway, probably to a very large extent, but there were women monks, and they were generally not allowed much interaction with the male monks. All discipline among the males fell apart when a woman was in their presence, as the culture really gave them no background for normal interactions between the sexes. The head monks chose to sidestep the problem -- what could they possibly do to address the ills of the society at large?

[yelsgib]

My point is that there is no "bottom line."

Your analogy to a Zen monastery is a good one. For a lot of men (myself included), programming/chess/mathematics/etc. is an ESCAPE from women. I feel like what has happened in the past 10 years (note I'm not saying this is "wrong" - just that it's what happened) is that these monasteries have been invaded by women and that men have been acting very awkwardly.

Here's the real issue, I think - these men are acting AWKWARDLY. They are dealing with their emotions poorly. They are not good at dealing with their emotions, especially towards women. But when did they ever say that they were? Did we stop to think whether this is the reason that they went into a profession which (for a long time) was almost 100% male? To not have to deal with women and their emotions towards women? Do you think that a man who has trouble interacting with women in a relaxed social setting will be able to deal with them well in a professional setting?

The real pain for me is that this awkwardness is being recast as evil, sexism, etc. There's a lot of hate directed towards it, whereas what it needs (paradoxically) is love.

[sadface]

There are many problems with your post. First of all, women used to be far more represented in programming than they are today, with nearly 40% of CS degrees going to women in the early to mid 80's. These rates have been declining ever since and are continuing to decline. This is not a case of "women invading the man's space" as you seem to think, this is a case of women fleeing it. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html?_r=2

Secondly, you pass off these crass remarks by male programmers as mere awkwardness from poor social outcasts. How then do you classify the same type of remarks when made by, say, construction workers to attractive passers-by? Are they merely sad social outcasts, or are they brutes for taking advantage of their social setting to harass and demean women?

Women are harassed regularly both in and out of the workplace, and the responsibility needs to be on the harasser to change their behavior, not on the harassed to "find compassion".

[yelsgib]

Yeah, I guess I was factually wrong about rates of women/men employment in tech. I'm not sure this is crucial to my original point, though...

---

Construction workers are basically social outcasts. They have low social and economic status. I am very sad for them and I don't think of them as "brutes" (which term is part of their oppression).

Don't get me wrong - I think of capitalism as more or less fundamentally oppressive. Pretty much everyone is being shat on by the system and we need to keep this in mind when we talk about justice and ethics. People are under stress. These problems are not easy to fix.

---

I'm really not saying that the harassed has to find compassion - I'm saying that we all do.

The issue here is that you can treat a single harasser as a problem to be fixed, but when "harassment" becomes a systematic/structural phenomenon you can't think about things in terms of changing individuals anymore. You have to start thinking about policy decisions and social movements. I'm merely saying that when the social movement takes place which tries to fix this problem, I hope it takes into account the idea that the people doing the 'wrong' are not brutes, evil, etc. but mostly sad and awkward.

[tptacek]

If you seriously feel a need to ESCAPE from women, I think you should consider seeing a therapist of some sort. A lot of the things you're asking people to feel sorry for do deserve sympathy, because they are signs of mental illness.

[ht_th]

It is not that simple to equate a (perceived) need to escape from women to a mental illness. Female groups do behave differently than male groups in that they assert dominance and rank by psychological means whereas in male groups this happens more via physical means. It can be very hard for both women and men to enter a 'different-gender group', let alone to get accepted and feel comfortable. Especially in fields dominated by one gender, like, for example, construction, programming, education and child care, or health care this lead to problems and strengthens the trend of one-gender dominance.

In the last decade or two primary education has become a primarily female field even to that extend that male teachers (and teacher students) have chosen to leave the profession because they didn't feel at home in that environment any more. If you talk to them you'll hear stories about, basically, psychological war-fare among their female colleagues that they didn't want to get involved in but were forced into nonetheless. In these instances feeling the need to escape from women is quite natural.

[mindstab]

So women who are demonstrably and statistically still suffering under male oppression now need to treat you softly and with love while you are accidentally crappy back to them? Nurture you back to health?

What was that you were saying about men not being puppies?

[yelsgib]

I do not feed trolls.