[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.

[papsosouid]

>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

No, it doesn't. The vast majority of people do not recognize the other meaning of the word. So in a discussion among ordinary people, like the one here, using the ordinary word's ordinary meaning is appropriate. The response from SJWs that everyone is wrong for using the word correctly is not reasonable.

[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".