She was in a tech forum where a woman was complaining about her experience at a company. It amounted to this woman having a perception that she was not being valued as much as a male colleague and was immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was sexism. My wife jumped in and suggested that from the sound of things, it sounded like there may be some other things going on that this person could work on and that it may have nothing to do with sexism etc..
The other people in the forum, including men, crucified my wife for those statements. This along with her daring to suggest in other women in tech forums, groups etc. that not every piece of feedback that is not positive is sexist led her to be banned from several women in tech organizations. Many would not even tell her why, but if they did it was for "being harmful to women" and "suffering from internalized misogyny" among other things.
Given her experience alone, not to mention other things we have all seen in the community none of this is surprising to me. Ironically, one of her concerns when she saw the "micro-agressions" etc. trend take hold, beyond the fact that she felt it was trying to fix one wrong with another, was that it would lead to this...and here we are. [edited for clarity]
If you wait for other people to spontaneously agree with your outlook on like then the wait will be exceptionally long time even when measured in millennia.
It's also quite geographic - in this case I mean US-centric (and spreads to rest of the western countries). Ie in eastern europe/former eastern bloc, there wasn't so much sexism, all women had to work and generally things were way more balanced. Not saying it was perfect, almost nothing there was, but to see current trends from that perspective looks like a bit as western world going slightly cuckoo.
We as a society only step in collectively when these things happen at an egregious level (what was going on in Hollywood), but if you think you won’t face some degree of it in your daily life then you are just not covering your bases. One must have the resiliency to deal with some of it, and that is fair and reasonable to expect because the contract is we are tolerant of imperfect humans as a society (that those who are sexist and racist have a flaw but are not evil, and we tolerate this imperfection through patience). It’s never going anywhere.
What I do personally is to just avoid all of these people.
I have the impression it's harder to avoid them in California because people are particularly brainwashed over there - which is one of the reasons I avoid California as well.
The big topics like violence against women have not been properly addressed and feminists focus instead obsessively on minor topics like abuse of Hollywood actresses or gender imbalance in software engineering.
The strategy has also changed - such factions are focusing less on equality and more and more on taking something for themselves, transforming the dialogue into an us versus them and turning it hostile. The problem with this thinking is two-fold:
1) One can take only so much before the ones that are being taken from push back, especially since there's no shortage of groups that want to take.
2) Other factions also want a piece of the pie and don't care about female victimhood. Feminism has for example failed to tackle both culturally influenced violence against women perpetrated by misogynist immigrants and the zero sum game they play with transsexuals.
> It's also quite geographic - in this case I mean US-centric (and spreads to rest of the western countries). Ie in eastern europe/former eastern bloc, there wasn't so much sexism, all women had to work and generally things were way more balanced. Not saying it was perfect, almost nothing there was, but to see current trends from that perspective looks like a bit as western world going slightly cuckoo.
have spent the past half a decade living in various countries from the former Eastern block mostly working for local companies and not much exposure to the outside. Over here women are generally more comfortable with choosing jobs in STEM and the male reaction to them isn't seen as competition or as toxic as it seems in US. idk what's the reason but perhaps they are not allowed to behave like princess barbies by their parents. But as you indicate the whole cuckoo from the US is spilling over to this region as well. Thanks to Instagram (beauty standards and trendsetting) and US propaganda that tells people how to apply any kind of norms (which is compared to "old" countries massively divisive).
I'm not saying people in the Balkans are less sexist (OMG no :D) but they seem a lot more chill in dealing with this issues. The number of times I had women use the most profane insults hurled at the opposite sex simply because this is how they speak (they swear a lot over here) often balances men's mysogonystic remarks.
edit: clarity
I wouldn't say that the Eastern Bloc had it better. Based on the experience of my own mother and others from her generation, women both had to work and take care of the children. But the roles were very well defined and people didn't waste time debating everything ad nauseam, for better or for worse.
Exactly, probably more sexism, but the discourse around it and life in general is not venomous. My theory is that when you have real (economical) problems you tend to focus first on what matters.
There’s a saying “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
No, what’s happening there now is indistinguishable from a religious movement. You’ve got prophets, holy books, commandments, taboos and shibboleths, confessions, original sin, the whole works.