9 ms·

I find posts like this extremely frustrating. Yes, I feel sorry for this woman. However, I also feel sorry for all male programmers. A lot of male programmers

by yelsgib 15y ago

I find posts like this extremely frustrating. Yes, I feel sorry for this woman. However, I also feel sorry for all male programmers. A lot of male programmers I've met have extremely pent-up sexual drives. A lot of them do not feel comfortable with women or society. The prototypical male programmer was extremely nerdy in adolescence, had minimal interaction with women, and sex life - forget it. Now they are working in a job where they can just do what they like - program - and a woman comes along with all those pheremones and everything. And yes he acts awkward and crazy because holy shit there is a WOMAN who does what he does. I fucking hate all of this talk about "manchildren" and "brogrammers" and whatever else. Stop essentializing the problem. Stop the man hate. Fucking hell. Do you really think the man who said: "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!" is a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Hmmm? Where's the compassion for him? Why is our reaction to superficial wrongdoing so fucking immediate and moralistic? As if he's not a person with his own problems? I'm at a loss for words, this whole clusterfuck makes me so angry.

InclinedPlane 15y ago
Being a victim is no excuse to victimize others.
- yelsgib 15y ago
  There is no "nexus" of victimhood. I'm saying that we're hyper-focusing on one particular form of suffering.
flatline 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - mindstab 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      I do not feed trolls.
  - sadface 15y ago
    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 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".
mattdeboard 15y ago
What. Are you... are you serious? I hope to god there's a rational point that you're trying to make, you're just making it very, very badly because you're so angry at the "man hate."
j_baker 15y ago
What makes you think Jeffrey Dahmer was a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Where's the compassion for him?
- dmor 15y ago
  A serial killer
- yelsgib 15y ago
  I have great compassion for Jeffrey Dahmer. And do you realize that you just compared making an awkward joke to killing loads of people?
  - j_baker 15y ago
    I made no such comparison. It's called Reductio ad absurdum: http://www.iep.utm.edu/reductio/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/reductio/ My point was that if we accept your argument, we must also accept the patently absurd (at least to me) argument that one must have compassion for Jeffrey Dahmer, and it doesn't sound as though you disagree.
    - yelsgib 15y ago
      Why is it abdurd to have compassion for jeffrey dahmer?
- strangetimes 15y ago
  I have a lot of compassion for him.
mindstab 15y ago
Too bad. Programing or any place in the world isn't some special place for poorly socialized men to hang out and ... what... hide? You know what would be good? Learning social rules and improving. Them maybe his life wouldn't suck and he could get a date. And you know what would help that? Being forced into social situations with women and being slapped when he steps out of line. If you have a puppy and it pees on the floor, you don't feel sorry for it and lock it in the house so it can pee on the floor forever, you train it not to. If we "just give up" on these men and leave them alone they will be miserable forever. If they are forced to learn (at a later age, you know what, all the rest of us learned this a long time ago) they maybe they can get on with their lives and not be miserable.
- yelsgib 15y ago
  Yeah, wouldn't it be great if everyone was just totally psychologically normal? I bet everyone can just fix everything that's wrong with themselves. Everyone has a surplus of love in their life available to help them overcome their problems. Men are not puppies, asshole.
  - beedogs 15y ago
    So you're saying that anyone who makes misogynist remarks at work has some sort of "mental issue", and that because of this we should just let it slide, or at least be sympathetic? Give me a fucking break. Calling out negative behavior tends to be very effective.
    - yelsgib 15y ago
      No. I am not saying that. I'm saying that in this particular case a lot of the "negative behavior" stems from extreme internal pressures.
      - eropple 15y ago
        It's not the author's job to serve as a target for those negative behaviors. The responsibility lies with those whose behavior is unacceptable to find a way to operate, for lack of a better phrase, within expected parameters.
wpietri 15y ago
Sure, he has problems. We all have problems. But when you make your problems somebody else's problems, you're still an asshole. It would be great if one of his colleagues would pull him aside, explain some things to him with a LART, and suggest that he get a therapist and an Ok Cupid account. But that's not obligatory, and is definitely not the problem of the person to whom he's being an ass.
theorique 15y ago
I fucking hate all of this talk about "manchildren" and "brogrammers" and whatever else. Stop essentializing the problem. Stop the man hate. Fucking hell. If you're experiencing this pushback from women in the profession as 'man hate' that's certainly your right. I view it more as listening to a professional colleague telling a story from her perspective. I'm not experiencing it as hate, more as hearing from a woman 'this is my perspective'. Do you really think the man who said: "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!" is a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Hmmm? Where's the compassion for him? Perhaps he's a victim too - none of us know the full story and we can speculate until we're blue in the face. But wouldn't you agree that his actions are highly unprofessional, creepy, and personally discouraging to one particular woman, and part of a broader pattern of discouragement toward women in technology overall? I'm at a loss for words, this whole clusterfuck makes me so angry. So what do you recommend to fix the problem? Where will you direct all that energy that your anger has activated?
- Strallus 15y ago
  Maybe the problem can't be fixed. As long as techies remain predominately male, this problem will persist. And why are they predominately male? Either- A: Men, for some unknown reason, like programming better. B: The sexist environment drives women away. Whichever one it is, the problem will not resolve itself. For A, as long as men like it better, and there are more of them, women will be seen as outsiders. For B, as long there are more men, some of whom are sexist, the women will be driven away and the ratio of m/f will stay the same.
  - cellularmitosis 15y ago
    A or B? Consider this thought experiment: if it is the case that there is a ton of interest by women in programming, but that interest is frustrated by the "star wars" factor, that would imply that there's a huge pool of untapped female programming power. Why hasn't an enterprising business person realized this and created the next facebook-killer or google-killer by assembling a team of all-female ninjas? My first reaction to this experiment would be "Because they were frustrated before they had the chance to graduate with a CS degree". And the response to that would be to examine what the rate of CS enrollment is at all-female universities, if such things (still) exist. (I don't know that data looks like yet. lazyweb, can you answer this for me?)
tomkarlo 15y ago
Thanks for perpetuating stereotypes in the name of excusing unacceptable behavior. Many of these same comments could probably also be applied to stock traders and construction workers as well. While it's unfortunate that some people fail to develop appropriately and learn to interact in an appropriately professional manner in the workplace, I don't know if that means folks have to feel sorry for them any more than if they failed to learn the appropriate technical skills to do their job. Interacting appropriately with the opposite sex and other ethnicities, etc., is a reasonable expectation of someone who wants to work in a modern workplace (and I don't limit that to the office or technology jobs.)
- yelsgib 15y ago
  I think of stock brokers/financial workers as particularly miserable people - you can be rich AND miserable! I don't know any construction workers, but it really doesn't seem like a happy job. It's not about excusing behavior, it's about talking about the reasons behind that behavior so that those reasons can be addressed properly. The proper way to address issues whose source is pain and suffering is compassion. Not "feeling sorry for" a person, but understanding that they too are suffering and including that understanding in your analysis of the situation. The point that I find very frustrating in all of this is that the suffering which causes "inexcusable behavior" is not being talked about. We're not talking about -why- men act in this way, except in flippant ways - calling them "manchildren," etc.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    Having worked in both finance and software, I don't think either group is particularly happier or more miserable than the other. Both jobs have tradeoffs. Neither is truly stressful in comparison to say, being a soldier, EMT or policeman. (I can't speak to construction - but it does have a high injury rate.) We're not talking about grossly inappropriate behavior here. We're really talking about behavior that's sufficiently in the margins that an otherwise "okay guy" might do it because they just don't understand why it's problematic, or they don't realize they're doing it. (As opposed to really blatant sexual harassment or misogyny, which is still common in lots of other industries.) It seems to me that the issue with most of what the OP relates is simply rooted in ignorance and/or insensitivity, rather than any kind of suppressed suffering.
mithaler 15y ago
I have sympathy for the outcast with poor social skills because of mistreatment by society. But such an outcast ceases to be sympathetic the instant s/he makes someone else's life unpleasant. This isn't about "man hate"; this is about someone who made an offensive comment that made someone else uncomfortable. That's not OK, and we reasonably expect better socialization in our peers than this. If the person who made this remark is not a "happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being", then no matter how much compassion his condition might reasonably engender, he should get help. Furthermore, by equating a lack of compassion for a man who is "not healthy" with "man hate", you implicitly claim that "men are naturally unhealthy". To me, this comes across as a greater denigration of men than any harsh reaction leveled at the oppressor.

by yelsgib 15y ago

InclinedPlane 15y ago

Being a victim is no excuse to victimize others.

yelsgib 15y ago
There is no "nexus" of victimhood. I'm saying that we're hyper-focusing on one particular form of suffering.

flatline 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.
- mindstab 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    I do not feed trolls.
- sadface 15y ago
  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 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".

mattdeboard 15y ago

What. Are you... are you serious? I hope to god there's a rational point that you're trying to make, you're just making it very, very badly because you're so angry at the "man hate."

j_baker 15y ago

What makes you think Jeffrey Dahmer was a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Where's the compassion for him?

dmor 15y ago
A serial killer
yelsgib 15y ago
I have great compassion for Jeffrey Dahmer. And do you realize that you just compared making an awkward joke to killing loads of people?
- j_baker 15y ago
  I made no such comparison. It's called Reductio ad absurdum: http://www.iep.utm.edu/reductio/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/reductio/ My point was that if we accept your argument, we must also accept the patently absurd (at least to me) argument that one must have compassion for Jeffrey Dahmer, and it doesn't sound as though you disagree.
  - yelsgib 15y ago
    Why is it abdurd to have compassion for jeffrey dahmer?
strangetimes 15y ago
I have a lot of compassion for him.

mindstab 15y ago

Too bad. Programing or any place in the world isn't some special place for poorly socialized men to hang out and ... what... hide? You know what would be good? Learning social rules and improving. Them maybe his life wouldn't suck and he could get a date. And you know what would help that? Being forced into social situations with women and being slapped when he steps out of line. If you have a puppy and it pees on the floor, you don't feel sorry for it and lock it in the house so it can pee on the floor forever, you train it not to. If we "just give up" on these men and leave them alone they will be miserable forever. If they are forced to learn (at a later age, you know what, all the rest of us learned this a long time ago) they maybe they can get on with their lives and not be miserable.

yelsgib 15y ago
Yeah, wouldn't it be great if everyone was just totally psychologically normal? I bet everyone can just fix everything that's wrong with themselves. Everyone has a surplus of love in their life available to help them overcome their problems. Men are not puppies, asshole.
- beedogs 15y ago
  So you're saying that anyone who makes misogynist remarks at work has some sort of "mental issue", and that because of this we should just let it slide, or at least be sympathetic? Give me a fucking break. Calling out negative behavior tends to be very effective.
  - yelsgib 15y ago
    No. I am not saying that. I'm saying that in this particular case a lot of the "negative behavior" stems from extreme internal pressures.
    - eropple 15y ago
      It's not the author's job to serve as a target for those negative behaviors. The responsibility lies with those whose behavior is unacceptable to find a way to operate, for lack of a better phrase, within expected parameters.

wpietri 15y ago

Sure, he has problems. We all have problems. But when you make your problems somebody else's problems, you're still an asshole. It would be great if one of his colleagues would pull him aside, explain some things to him with a LART, and suggest that he get a therapist and an Ok Cupid account. But that's not obligatory, and is definitely not the problem of the person to whom he's being an ass.

theorique 15y ago

I fucking hate all of this talk about "manchildren" and "brogrammers" and whatever else. Stop essentializing the problem. Stop the man hate. Fucking hell. If you're experiencing this pushback from women in the profession as 'man hate' that's certainly your right. I view it more as listening to a professional colleague telling a story from her perspective. I'm not experiencing it as hate, more as hearing from a woman 'this is my perspective'. Do you really think the man who said: "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!" is a happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being? Hmmm? Where's the compassion for him? Perhaps he's a victim too - none of us know the full story and we can speculate until we're blue in the face. But wouldn't you agree that his actions are highly unprofessional, creepy, and personally discouraging to one particular woman, and part of a broader pattern of discouragement toward women in technology overall? I'm at a loss for words, this whole clusterfuck makes me so angry. So what do you recommend to fix the problem? Where will you direct all that energy that your anger has activated?

Strallus 15y ago
Maybe the problem can't be fixed. As long as techies remain predominately male, this problem will persist. And why are they predominately male? Either- A: Men, for some unknown reason, like programming better. B: The sexist environment drives women away. Whichever one it is, the problem will not resolve itself. For A, as long as men like it better, and there are more of them, women will be seen as outsiders. For B, as long there are more men, some of whom are sexist, the women will be driven away and the ratio of m/f will stay the same.
- cellularmitosis 15y ago
  A or B? Consider this thought experiment: if it is the case that there is a ton of interest by women in programming, but that interest is frustrated by the "star wars" factor, that would imply that there's a huge pool of untapped female programming power. Why hasn't an enterprising business person realized this and created the next facebook-killer or google-killer by assembling a team of all-female ninjas? My first reaction to this experiment would be "Because they were frustrated before they had the chance to graduate with a CS degree". And the response to that would be to examine what the rate of CS enrollment is at all-female universities, if such things (still) exist. (I don't know that data looks like yet. lazyweb, can you answer this for me?)

tomkarlo 15y ago

Thanks for perpetuating stereotypes in the name of excusing unacceptable behavior. Many of these same comments could probably also be applied to stock traders and construction workers as well. While it's unfortunate that some people fail to develop appropriately and learn to interact in an appropriately professional manner in the workplace, I don't know if that means folks have to feel sorry for them any more than if they failed to learn the appropriate technical skills to do their job. Interacting appropriately with the opposite sex and other ethnicities, etc., is a reasonable expectation of someone who wants to work in a modern workplace (and I don't limit that to the office or technology jobs.)

yelsgib 15y ago
I think of stock brokers/financial workers as particularly miserable people - you can be rich AND miserable! I don't know any construction workers, but it really doesn't seem like a happy job. It's not about excusing behavior, it's about talking about the reasons behind that behavior so that those reasons can be addressed properly. The proper way to address issues whose source is pain and suffering is compassion. Not "feeling sorry for" a person, but understanding that they too are suffering and including that understanding in your analysis of the situation. The point that I find very frustrating in all of this is that the suffering which causes "inexcusable behavior" is not being talked about. We're not talking about -why- men act in this way, except in flippant ways - calling them "manchildren," etc.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  Having worked in both finance and software, I don't think either group is particularly happier or more miserable than the other. Both jobs have tradeoffs. Neither is truly stressful in comparison to say, being a soldier, EMT or policeman. (I can't speak to construction - but it does have a high injury rate.) We're not talking about grossly inappropriate behavior here. We're really talking about behavior that's sufficiently in the margins that an otherwise "okay guy" might do it because they just don't understand why it's problematic, or they don't realize they're doing it. (As opposed to really blatant sexual harassment or misogyny, which is still common in lots of other industries.) It seems to me that the issue with most of what the OP relates is simply rooted in ignorance and/or insensitivity, rather than any kind of suppressed suffering.

mithaler 15y ago

I have sympathy for the outcast with poor social skills because of mistreatment by society. But such an outcast ceases to be sympathetic the instant s/he makes someone else's life unpleasant. This isn't about "man hate"; this is about someone who made an offensive comment that made someone else uncomfortable. That's not OK, and we reasonably expect better socialization in our peers than this. If the person who made this remark is not a "happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being", then no matter how much compassion his condition might reasonably engender, he should get help. Furthermore, by equating a lack of compassion for a man who is "not healthy" with "man hate", you implicitly claim that "men are naturally unhealthy". To me, this comes across as a greater denigration of men than any harsh reaction leveled at the oppressor.