Being handed that sense of outsider-ness is really distracting from the rest of your post. Which I will now read more carefully in an attempt to focus on your actual point instead of petty details.
While I completely agree, I find it strange that you get distracted by this sort of thing. Not wrong or weird, just interesting. Do you really feel like you are an outsider from five words?
It is good for me to hear how important things like this are. I have been trying to become more abstract in gender assignments but find it difficult to catch them all and keep wondering if it really matters. Apparently it does.
I didn’t mention it myself because I don’t want to turn into the feminism police of Less Wrong, but I’ll put in my two cents since Emily brought it up. I found it distracting too—and I am bi, so it’s not like I don’t find women alluring, so I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience. It would have been trivially easy to cut the example or replace it with a nice inclusive “members of the relevant sex(es)”, and it would have demonstrated that there was conscious consideration of the full audience going on instead of thoughtless assumption.
Of course, including the example at all excludes asexuals. Do we have any of those here?
I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience.
When I write I generally do not consider the gender of my audience one way or the other. Since I happen to be male I would think, “Oh, females are alluring,” and use the example. I expect I would do this even talking to a room full of nothing but hetero-women.
But thinking about it as addressing the audience makes more sense of the distraction. I guess I am not so much male-centric as self-centric? Silly me, generalizing from one example and assuming everyone else writes the way I have been.
so I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience.
And that is perhaps a key point. Were I to read “men will still be alluring” I would get a sense that the author is a woman. I’d be briefly distracted by some cognitive dissonance and cringe slightly at some imagery that doesn’t mesh well with my own desires. But I wouldn’t get a sense that I was being exculded from an intended female audience.
I’ve both read and observed that women tend to be more interested in meta-communication and in particular to implications of ‘belonging’. Perhaps because when women use exclusion to bitch at each other while the male equivalent is one-upmanship. In any case, communicating across that cultural divide creates enough confusion that we can expect self help authors to remain employed more or less indefinitely.
There’s also a much greater history of women being excluded from male groups than the other way around, so it’s unfortunately not unreasonable for women to subconsciously draw stronger conclusions from such phrasing.
Of course, including the example at all excludes asexuals. Do we have any of those here?
Excluding half your audience when there’s an obvious counterpart for the other half is silly. Excluding a small minority is inevitable. That’s part of the reason you use a cluster of examples—you hope that each reader will identify strongly with at least one.
I think the best fix here is “Women will still be alluring, men will still be [insert-adjective-here], food will still …” etc.
Preserves the specificity of the original while making clear that you’re to take what you like.
I think the best fix here is “Women will still be alluring, men will still be [insert-adjective-here], food will still …” etc.
Therein lies the problem. I was aware of the gender bias when I wrote the example. But “alluring” does not seem like an appropriate adjective to describe men. I could be wrong, but I’m under the impression that the quality in a man that elicits the analagous experience that an alluring woman elicits is best described by another adjective, and I frankly have no idea what it is.
I chose the original phrasing because it was the simplest, clearest, and most elegant way I could think of to express that point. Of course, since people seem to take special notice of it, it clearly wasn’t worthwhile in any practical sense, so I’ve edited it to be more inclusive, though I think it flows slightly worse as a result.
I am curious as to whether drawing attention to the author’s gender is purely undesirable, or only undesirable where that gender already makes up a substantial majority of the readership/authorship.
I am curious as to whether drawing attention to the author’s gender is purely undesirable, or only undesirable where that gender already makes up a substantial majority of the readership/authorship.
But you weren’t speaking in terms of the author’s gender. The preceeding sentence ends with “(...) no matter what you say or think about them.”, creating a second-person context, hence the implication of projecting the author’s gender onto the audience.
If you had phrased the following sentence in first person, or as an acknowledged-to-be-male third person, it likely would have bothered people less.
Not sure I disagree in principle, definitely would have used a sex-neutral phrasing in the original post, but calling women “half the audience” is off by an entire order of magnitude.
(If anybody’s keeping count, I’m a-curious, don’t enjoy food, think David is just some random naked guy made out of rock, and was more distracted by this comment thread than anyone was by the thing the comment thread was about.)
Entirely true, but they’re still half the potential audience. Writing with a mostly-male audience in mind is a good way to maintain a mostly-male audience
They quite obviously aren’t anywhere remotely close to half the potential audience, because to be part of the potential audience, you need certain background knowledge, interests, personality features/bugs, and other things that apparently are very lopsidedly distributed between genders. I assume you’re not actually claiming that 90% of one gender was chased away because once in a while someone makes an off-hand comment that, if implicit disclaimers are removed, seems to assume a heterosexual male audience.
I assume you’re not actually claiming that 90% of one gender was chased away because once in a while someone makes an off-hand comment that, if implicit disclaimers are removed, seems to assume a heterosexual male audience.
Of course not.
Honestly, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on any significant point of fact or policy, so if it’s all the same, I think I’ll leave this here.
I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience.
What makes you think the audience factors in at all? I’d think this phrasing would be much more an indication that the writer is male. Why would I feel excluded by someone writing about the world from their own perspective? If I had written this post, I would have written “Men would still be alluring”; and I would have written it that way because I am a woman attracted to men, not because I expect my audience to be mostly women attracted to men.
This actually gets to something interesting...perhaps there are some objects of beauty we could agree on...the sun, the human form, etc...but these things are so primeval that their beauty is continually contextually mediated by “truth” (the thrill of science, EY’s space expansion) or “lies” (religion et al.).
While I completely agree, I find it strange that you get distracted by this sort of thing. Not wrong or weird, just interesting. Do you really feel like you are an outsider from five words?
If it were one single set of five words (on LW or in the world in general), I very much doubt I would notice at all. But sadly, this sort of thing happens a lot, and the effect really is cumulative, at least for me.
While I completely agree, I find it strange that you get distracted by this sort of thing. Not wrong or weird, just interesting. Do you really feel like you are an outsider from five words?
It is good for me to hear how important things like this are. I have been trying to become more abstract in gender assignments but find it difficult to catch them all and keep wondering if it really matters. Apparently it does.
I didn’t mention it myself because I don’t want to turn into the feminism police of Less Wrong, but I’ll put in my two cents since Emily brought it up. I found it distracting too—and I am bi, so it’s not like I don’t find women alluring, so I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience. It would have been trivially easy to cut the example or replace it with a nice inclusive “members of the relevant sex(es)”, and it would have demonstrated that there was conscious consideration of the full audience going on instead of thoughtless assumption.
Of course, including the example at all excludes asexuals. Do we have any of those here?
When I write I generally do not consider the gender of my audience one way or the other. Since I happen to be male I would think, “Oh, females are alluring,” and use the example. I expect I would do this even talking to a room full of nothing but hetero-women.
But thinking about it as addressing the audience makes more sense of the distraction. I guess I am not so much male-centric as self-centric? Silly me, generalizing from one example and assuming everyone else writes the way I have been.
Well, thanks for the input.
And that is perhaps a key point. Were I to read “men will still be alluring” I would get a sense that the author is a woman. I’d be briefly distracted by some cognitive dissonance and cringe slightly at some imagery that doesn’t mesh well with my own desires. But I wouldn’t get a sense that I was being exculded from an intended female audience.
I’ve both read and observed that women tend to be more interested in meta-communication and in particular to implications of ‘belonging’. Perhaps because when women use exclusion to bitch at each other while the male equivalent is one-upmanship. In any case, communicating across that cultural divide creates enough confusion that we can expect self help authors to remain employed more or less indefinitely.
There’s also a much greater history of women being excluded from male groups than the other way around, so it’s unfortunately not unreasonable for women to subconsciously draw stronger conclusions from such phrasing.
Well, there is that one commenter who keeps mentioning that he’s an eunuch. Do they count as asexuals?
Excluding half your audience when there’s an obvious counterpart for the other half is silly. Excluding a small minority is inevitable. That’s part of the reason you use a cluster of examples—you hope that each reader will identify strongly with at least one.
I think the best fix here is “Women will still be alluring, men will still be [insert-adjective-here], food will still …” etc.
Preserves the specificity of the original while making clear that you’re to take what you like.
Therein lies the problem. I was aware of the gender bias when I wrote the example. But “alluring” does not seem like an appropriate adjective to describe men. I could be wrong, but I’m under the impression that the quality in a man that elicits the analagous experience that an alluring woman elicits is best described by another adjective, and I frankly have no idea what it is.
I chose the original phrasing because it was the simplest, clearest, and most elegant way I could think of to express that point. Of course, since people seem to take special notice of it, it clearly wasn’t worthwhile in any practical sense, so I’ve edited it to be more inclusive, though I think it flows slightly worse as a result.
I am curious as to whether drawing attention to the author’s gender is purely undesirable, or only undesirable where that gender already makes up a substantial majority of the readership/authorship.
But you weren’t speaking in terms of the author’s gender. The preceeding sentence ends with “(...) no matter what you say or think about them.”, creating a second-person context, hence the implication of projecting the author’s gender onto the audience.
If you had phrased the following sentence in first person, or as an acknowledged-to-be-male third person, it likely would have bothered people less.
Not sure I disagree in principle, definitely would have used a sex-neutral phrasing in the original post, but calling women “half the audience” is off by an entire order of magnitude.
(If anybody’s keeping count, I’m a-curious, don’t enjoy food, think David is just some random naked guy made out of rock, and was more distracted by this comment thread than anyone was by the thing the comment thread was about.)
Entirely true, but they’re still half the potential audience. Writing with a mostly-male audience in mind is a good way to maintain a mostly-male audience
They quite obviously aren’t anywhere remotely close to half the potential audience, because to be part of the potential audience, you need certain background knowledge, interests, personality features/bugs, and other things that apparently are very lopsidedly distributed between genders. I assume you’re not actually claiming that 90% of one gender was chased away because once in a while someone makes an off-hand comment that, if implicit disclaimers are removed, seems to assume a heterosexual male audience.
Of course not.
Honestly, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on any significant point of fact or policy, so if it’s all the same, I think I’ll leave this here.
OK. Sorry if I sounded testy, random bad mood or something.
on both our parts, I think—sorry for trying to defend more than I needed to.
Hi.
What makes you think the audience factors in at all? I’d think this phrasing would be much more an indication that the writer is male. Why would I feel excluded by someone writing about the world from their own perspective? If I had written this post, I would have written “Men would still be alluring”; and I would have written it that way because I am a woman attracted to men, not because I expect my audience to be mostly women attracted to men.
Of course, including the food example alienates those who don’t enjoy it, and using David as an exemplar of beauty alienates… me?
This actually gets to something interesting...perhaps there are some objects of beauty we could agree on...the sun, the human form, etc...but these things are so primeval that their beauty is continually contextually mediated by “truth” (the thrill of science, EY’s space expansion) or “lies” (religion et al.).
If it were one single set of five words (on LW or in the world in general), I very much doubt I would notice at all. But sadly, this sort of thing happens a lot, and the effect really is cumulative, at least for me.