[steveklabnik]

Sexism is socially systemic sexual discrimination.

Racism is socially systemic racial discrimination.

Classism is socially systemic class-based discrimination.

This is why you'll find people who say "You can't be sexist against men." You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm. When the discrimination becomes routine, ingrained, and pervasive, that turns it into an 'ism.'

[philwelch]

Incidentally, this is exhibit A in Orwellian political redefinition. Instead of using the plain meaning of a word, you load it with political assumptions based on your manichean worldview so any word with a bad connotation cannot be applied to your side.

"You can't be sexist against men" is a classic Orwellian contradiction in that (by the plain meaning of the term) it itself is a sexist statement while simultaneously reinforcing this redefinition. It is so blatantly self-refuting that I'd long assumed it to be some kind of straw man, not something feminists actually said.

[benblack]

That you are unable to distinguish between an instance of sexual discrimination (called sexual discrimination) and systemic sexual discrimination (called sexism) does not mean anything political or Orwellian is afoot. Words have meanings. Ignorance of the meanings of words is easily solved. Stubborn refusal to recognize your own errors is rather less so.

[philwelch]

I don't accept redefinitions of words that pack in political assumptions. Lots of people use "socialist" to mean "anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan" but we have no problem dismissing that as biased hyperbole.

What you're essentially doing is trying to pack into the word "sexism" the notion that everything in society is systemically biased in favor of men, at the expense of women. But rather than establishing and defending that notion, you pack it in as an unquestioned assumption so that you don't have to defend it explicitly.

As a result, you deliberately minimize any injustices suffered by men to the benefit of women, implicitly saying that it doesn't matter as much when a man faces sexual discrimination. Again, you could simply argue this point explicitly, but for some reason you're trying to pack it into your language.

Steve Klabnik's point, stated explicitly, would be something like this: "that instance of sexual discrimination against men, in favor of women, doesn't really count for much, because on aggregate, society still discriminates against women in favor of men." As far as I can tell that's what he meant, and it's even a defensible argument from a feminist perspective, but it also lays bare a lot of assumptions that not everyone might agree with, so it's couched in the superficial form of a semantic argument. This not only makes the controversial premises of the argument easier to swallow, but renders them in a form of a simple factual claim giving the illusion of certitude.

As far as the scope of this discussion is concerned, I don't have a problem with Mr. Klabnik's point, but simply the dishonest way he expresses it.

[king_jester]

The term sexist has its roots in talking about systemic forms of inequality: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/feminism-...

Since you claim that there is a redefinition, what exactly do you think sexism meant in the first place?

[philwelch]

"Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex" (Google)

"prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women" (Merriam-Webster)

"prejudice or discrimination based on sex; behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex" (Wikipedia)

I think these are all perfectly acceptable "plain English" definitions of "sexism".

Definitions are nothing but arbitrary convention anyway--my point is that when you explicitly unpack the feminist definition of "sexism", seemingly semantic arguments like Mr. Klabnik's are packing in a lot of assumptions that deserve to be unpacked. Generally, I don't favor definitions that pack in tendentious assumptions for political purposes.

[king_jester]

As you noted, those definitions are all arbitrary, but needless to say they leave out the entire history of the origin of the word, an origin which seeks to critically describe both individual instances of sexism as well as the systemic, social factors of sexism. It should be noted though that the Wikipedia definition does include something about more than just individual instances of sexism.

I disagree that there are extra meanings being packed into the word sexism beyond the meanings you cited. That you are unaware of the origins and issues that go into sexism doesn't remove the meanings of the word. To be fair, no mainstream outlet or publication tends to talk about things at that length and level for a variety of reasons, many of which are due to systemic sexism, but don't confuse common understanding for the only understanding. Common understandings that lack depth or more rigorous information are what contribute to a common understanding that promotes racism, sexism, and other issues.

For more on sexism as a definition, see: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/sexism-de...

[svlasits]

+9000 Cause upvoting this comment just isn't enough.

[jeffcutsinger]

Incidentally, this is Hitlerian argumentation style. Instead of making a straightforward argument, you load it with emotional baggage to support your Stalinesque worldview.

[philwelch]

Admittedly, if you haven't read 1984 the Orwell reference probably went over your head. "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful.

[jeffcutsinger]

> Admittedly, if you haven't read 1984 the Orwell reference probably went over your head.

Thanks for pointing this out. I did go through high school, so I'm hip to your extremely erudite reference.

> "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful.

Really. I don't find much use for it. Maybe if I just spent more time virtuously casting my opponents as evil users of "Orwellian" tactics, I could also point out that _their_ worldview is manichean.

[philwelch]

I guess I should have known you wouldn't have anything useful to say when you started off by comparing me to Hitler.

[cobrausn]

Hitler and Stalin reference in one comment! Surely there is some kind of achievement for that.

[steveklabnik]

Cool story bro. (I've seen you comment on these stories before, and I know I'm not going to get anywhere with you, so know that I'm just choosing not to respond to you.)

[philwelch]

It's fine if you don't respond--the strange thing about ideologies is that any two followers of them are largely interchangeable due to the lack of original thought involved.

Given recent events though, I'm surprised you're still going around setting yourself up as some type of moral authority. Someone who bullies women programmers doesn't really have much credibility on this issue, does he?

[qohen]

> Someone who bullies women programmers

Whoa...slow down there, hoss.

Steve explained that his tweet about @harthur's replace utility was not meant to disparage its author, or its code, but was meant to express his feelings about Node (i.e. the ecosystem for which replace was written). And, he apologized, "unequivocably", for the fact that his tweet had caused pain to @harthur:

http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

And, @harthur then said this in a followup to her original post,

http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/open-source-rocks-fo...

My last blog post was quite a downer, so I want to do a short follow up for posterity.

First of all, there were some nice responses to it from Steve Klabnik and especially Corey Haines, who gave a very sincere straight-up apology. Several people have told me they are usually very nice, so keep that in mind.

So, your characterization appears to be incorrect and unfair.

[qohen]

(In fact, the only thing Steve perhaps can be criticized for, in my view, is for using the word,

"unequivocably" -- which is non-standard -- instead of, "unequivocally",

when writing his apology. :-)

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69930/unequivocab... )

[steveklabnik]

Thanks. I just can't type. Fixing.

(I didn't even know that people said 'unequivocably.')

[philwelch]

Intentions don't matter. I'm glad harthur was magnanimous enough to accept the apology, but that doesn't really change much.

[gd1]

I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. So if a Japanese person discriminates against me on the basis of race in Japan, it is racist, but do it in the US and it is "racial discrimination"?

[steveklabnik]

Can you expand on why you find this ridiculous? When discussing social groups, the make-up of the group is obviously important.

[gd1]

How do I explain this... it is quite odd talking to someone who thinks your way. I know you exist but I struggle even to wrap my head around it.

Racism/sexism/whatever... a wrong is a wrong. Fight it wherever you find it. My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups". Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same. Recursively. All I have seen the left do in the last 40 years is carve up society into ever smaller and more specific groups with associated victim-hood points and it doesn't get us anywhere. All you are doing is entrenching division.

[steveklabnik]

> Racism/sexism/whatever... a wrong is a wrong.

Sure. Sexual discrimination is bad, no matter who is being discriminated against.

It's about false equivalencies. You might want to see the last part of my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178799

> My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups".

Two people aren't a group?

> Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same.

You might actually really like Latour, who's a sociologist who argues that his entire field is wrong because of too much abstraction. I've been reading 'Reassembling the Social' lately, and it's fascinating.

That said, I actually disagree that the cause is 'thinking of people as groups,' but you of course are entitled to your opinion.

> All you are doing is entrenching division.

I'm not sure how advocating that we have more women in computer science is 'entrenching division.'

[king_jester]

Talking about experiences and pointing out issues that are driven by more than just individual encounters is very important for groups of people. to gain control over their lives and to break free from the kinds of violence and oppression they face. By definition, racism and sexism is discriminatory to whole groups of people, talking about the collective experience of that doesn't make those oppressions stronger.

[dradtke]

> You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm.

I would argue that many of the pressures men face, such as those to "man up" in difficult situations rather than freely express their feelings, counts as a routine, ingrained, and pervasive form of sexual discrimination. Even if I fully agree with your definition of sexism, that doesn't mean that sexism against men is nonexistent.

[gd1]

Are you going to let the dictionary makers know?

[steveklabnik]

Are you going to let them know that they don't have the Computer Science definitions of 'object' in there?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/object

According to this line of argumentation, anyone doing OOP is calling it the wrong thing.

(This particular dictionary has a reference to a 'computing dictionary' waaaaay down at the bottom. But if you picked up an actual dictionary, or went to a different one, it wouldn't be there. Dictionaries have different things for the same words!)

[benblack]

They've known for some time http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ism .

[papsosouid]

Yes, we understand that you wish to redefine words to make them more suitable to you. It is not ignorance of your dialect, it is a rejection of it. Those words already have meanings in English, and people are not wrong for continuing to use those meanings. You are welcome to use whatever meaning you wish, but saying "my clique uses a totally different meaning for those words, so you are wrong now" is not a constructive activity.

[flaviusb]

You are aware that disciplines exist, right? And that within those disciplines, words often are used as technical terms, with meanings that do not exactly map on to colloquial usage? For example, when physicists talk about 'energy', they are not talking about a state of mind that people can have (eg "I'm really full of energy today"). That doesn't mean that physics is wrong or orwellian, it just means that you need to get an education before making pronouncements about it. In the case of "sexism", when we are talking about it here we are usually talking about it from within the disciplines that actually deal with it (either sociology, gender studies, modern history, philosophy or etc). Within all of these fields, sexism is a technical term that means (with slight variations between fields) exactly what steveklabnik above summarised it as.

[papsosouid]

>In the case of "sexism", when we are talking about it here we are usually talking about it from within the disciplines that actually deal with it

No, we are not. That is the entire point. We are not in a women's studies department. We are not women's studies majors. We are not talking about women's studies. So the terminology of women's studies is not relevant.

>Within all of these fields, sexism is a technical term that means (with slight variations between fields) exactly what steveklabnik above summarised it as.

No, it is not. History and philosophy do not use sexism that way. Only a minority of sociologists do. The only example you listed that is actually correct is women's studies.

[flaviusb]

As I have said elsewhere, the terminology is relevant because it is the terminology of the disciplines that deal with this stuff. I can accept that people will want to talk about this stuff without knowing anything about it at first - that makes sense, and without already knowing that it has already been studied how would they know? When people learn that there is actually a prior literature and well developed disciplines that deal with this stuff however, then deliberately turning their back on even the most basic part of the literature and the discipline when there are people who are literally explaining it in front of them is rank anti-intellectualism worthy only of contempt and scorn.

When looking at issues of gender in history, modern history does use the language of privilege - ie sexism might be talked about as manifest in terms of what records or history is recorded and treated as important by the people who are being studied. When discussing issues of gender, modern Philosophy has to deal with system level analysis - hence the use of ideas of systemic sexual discrimination as sexism. Recent sociologists seem to non-controversially use this terminology also.

[steveklabnik]

It's not 'my clique,' it's people who study social groups.

You're of coure, free to reject an entire branch of science, but that doesn't seem very hacker to me.

[papsosouid]

There is no branch of science which defines the words that way. And even if there were, rejecting a redefinition of a common word is not rejecting an entire branch of science. If everyone involved in astronomy suddenly decided the word large only applies to things greater in size than the sun, people continuing to use large to refer to their soda would not be rejecting astronomy as a consequence.

Also, you appear to be deliberately misrepresenting a small subset of sociologists as being representative of the entire field. That redefinition of sexism isn't even universally accepted in women's studies and feminism, much less sociology. It is in fact a clique that uses those terms that way, not a branch of science.

[bitcrunch]

You are wrong. These terms (and the definitions steveklabnik gave) are very important in sociology, and were coined in large part by sociologists looking for a way to describe social phenomenon that they'd observed.

We've used them in the vernacular (which is the dictionary definition) to describe individual offenses, but when sociologists and academics use them (the field the terms came out of), it is very useful to describe a power structure and things that happen within that power structure.

I'm sad to see that steveklabnik has been downvoted so much on this board for saying something that is so very correct.

[papsosouid]

>are very important in sociology

No, they are very important to sociologists who also happen to be into women's studies. Pretending all sociologists go along with that is dishonest.

>and were coined in large part by sociologists looking for a way to describe social phenomenon that they'd observed.

No they were not, see the rest of the thread.

>but when sociologists and academics use them

Which is relevant to lay-persons using them here on this forum and then being told they are wrong when they are not wrong?

>I'm sad to see that steveklabnik has been downvoted so much on this board for saying something that is so very correct.

I suspect the downvotes were more due to the way he told people their correct use of a term is incorrect, simply because there is a second correct use of that term.

[flaviusb]

If we were talking about astronomical phenomena, and we said that these formations were not very large (because they were smaller than the Sun), and you said that they were super large (because they were bigger than a breadbox), you would be obviously trolling. It is similar here; when discussing this stuff, we do it with the vernacular of the fields that study it, and objecting that it doesn't match up to colloquial usage is just trolling. Please stop being a troll.

[papsosouid]

If we were astronomers, you would have a point. This is not a women's studies department, we're not discussing women's studies. We're non-experts, discussing ordinary daily life. The field specific meanings are not appropriate, and telling people who use the general definition they are wrong is not constructive. Please stop accusing people of being a troll for no reason. It is also not constructive.

[flaviusb]

I'm not calling people trolls for no reason, though I take your point that in some cases (such as perhaps this one) it is not the correct response. So, my apologies.

However, we are still discussing the subject matter that things like Women's Studies and Sociology deal with, so using the terminology makes more sense than not using the terminology, especially when people who are going to actually be able to say anything useful about this will mostly either already know the terminology or quickly learn. Getting exasperated at people who will not use the correct terminology even after it is explained to them seems justified to me, in the same way that if some people kept saying that a "page" obviously only refers to either a piece of paper or a trainee knight or a trainee legislator, "because common English usage and anything else is Orwellian psyops" (quote marks indicating aggregate ranting of the hypothetical other), when we were talking about single page applications in the context of webapps, and they resisted correction, exasperation would be justified, and accusations of trolling would not be remiss.

So, I think that insisting on using the correct terminology from the disciplines that deals with something makes sense where we can, whenever we want to actually talk about something in a useful way, and people who insist that using the correct terminology is somehow a conspiracy or evil or whatever (to be clear, you have not suggested that, but others in this thread have) are totally trolls.

[king_jester]

Sexism has its roots as a term to talk about systemic inequalities revolving around gender: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/feminism-...

[papsosouid]

Your link does not support the idea that the term sexism means what the poster claimed it means. In fact, it contradicts it:

>Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn’t matter

[king_jester]

Did you even read that post? Not two sentences after the one you cite does Caroline Bird say:

> [Sexism and racism] have used to keep the powers that be in power.

A direct statement about the systemic, power imbalance nature of sexism. Sexism is both those individual instances of discrimination and the overall systemic and social issues that allow it to perpetuate.

[papsosouid]

>Did you even read that post?

Yes. I even understood it, which appears to be what's bothering you. The quotes you refer to, once again, does not support the claim. The statement "sexism has been used to do X" does not mean "the definition of sexism is X". Paint has been used to cover walls. That does not mean the definition of paint is "stuff that covers walls".