The Unit of Caring

kaminiwa:

shieldfoss:

I feel like the word “screed” used to mean more than “text I disagree with.”

Engineer: *writes a very level-headed, well reasoned essay, even if I might not agree with all of it*

Management: *responds with zero substance*

Media: “Engineer writes zero substance creed!!!”

I get the sense that this person has not heard any feminist/social justice thinking about gender. This is weird because they speak about being saturated in it and stressed out by the impossibility of disagreeing with it - and I believe them! And nonetheless it feels like they have never heard it clearly enough articulated to disagree with. It’s like some things have filtered through, such as ‘saying men and women are different are bad’, but without any of the underlying intellectual work like ‘we acculturate men and women differently, and aggressively so, and they are more different in places that demand more difference of them’ and ‘men and women get rewarded and punished socially for different behavior’ and ‘there might, even if you stripped all that away, be actual differences on average, but the gender balance of fields swings a lot off cultural factors and the mapping from innate differences to career choices is probably very messy’.

I think there are lots of people who get some sort of conclusions section of feminist thought and none of the argumentation for it and end up filling in their own, confusing and terrible, arguments for how to reach that conclusion, and thinking feminists think something like ‘there are no differences between how men and women socialized in America act and behave’.

 Also, Googler, it might make sense to have girls’ tech education programs even if there would be a gender imbalance in tech even in a perfectly egalitarian society, because if you are right that there are differences between men and women, there might be differences in the best way to teach them to code, and the insistence against gender-specific classes goes badly with the rest of your argument.

But I do think the right way to answer this is with those counterarguments, not with ‘you’re making women uncomfortable’, because when someone is both wrong and making women uncomfortable and you only point out the second thing they’re going to decide they’re right and being silenced.

(Source: argumate, via cromulentenough)