To stick my oar in for a minute, as I am wont to do, I didn’t find your comment offensive. That which is true should never be offensive, and those are some real metrics by which gender inequality can be measured.
However I didn’t get “humorous”. I thought it was intended to be serious, though I could interpret the intended message in several different ways—interpretations to which my responses could range anywhere from “total agreement” to “not even worth engaging”, so I decided to see where the discussion went before joining in anywhere.
I think if the humour was intended to arise from “this is not the type of list you expected”, you might be underestimating how frequently points about “gender inequalities which disadvantage males” are made in public discussions of anything related to gender equality.
I’m not criticizing your tone—I think tone-policing is rarely useful unless someone’s being an egregious dickhead—so I guess I’m just criticizing your comedy.
Regarding tone specifically, you have two strong options: one would be to send strong “I am playing” signals, such as by dropping the points which men’s rights people might make, and, say, parodying feminist points. Another would be to keep the tone as serious as it currently is, but qualify things more; in some other contexts, qualifying your arguments sounds low-status, but in discussions of contentious topics on a public forum, it can nudge participants towards cooperative truth-seeking mode.
Amusingly, I emphasized the points of your comment that I found agreeable in my first reply, both since you’re pretty cool, and also since I didn’t want the fact that I’m a hardcore feminist to be obvious enough to affect the discourse. However, to the extent which my reply was more serious than your comment, this could have made me look like the less feminist one out of the two of us :D
Fair enough! I am readily willing to believe your statement that that was your intent. It wasn’t possible to tell from the comment itself, since the metric regarding sexual harassment report handling is much more serious than the other metrics.
Yes, I probably should have omitted that one. My information bubble keeps discussing cases in which men are treated horribly in college sexual harassment disputes, but I should have recognized that other peoples’ bubbles don’t and so my including it would send an unintended signal.
I was trying to humorously point out a common false assumption: that improving gender equality would necessarily benefit women relative to men.
I’m not good at tone (and this does get me in trouble) so could you please explain why what I wrote might be considered offensive?
To stick my oar in for a minute, as I am wont to do, I didn’t find your comment offensive. That which is true should never be offensive, and those are some real metrics by which gender inequality can be measured.
However I didn’t get “humorous”. I thought it was intended to be serious, though I could interpret the intended message in several different ways—interpretations to which my responses could range anywhere from “total agreement” to “not even worth engaging”, so I decided to see where the discussion went before joining in anywhere.
I think if the humour was intended to arise from “this is not the type of list you expected”, you might be underestimating how frequently points about “gender inequalities which disadvantage males” are made in public discussions of anything related to gender equality.
I’m not criticizing your tone—I think tone-policing is rarely useful unless someone’s being an egregious dickhead—so I guess I’m just criticizing your comedy.
Regarding tone specifically, you have two strong options: one would be to send strong “I am playing” signals, such as by dropping the points which men’s rights people might make, and, say, parodying feminist points. Another would be to keep the tone as serious as it currently is, but qualify things more; in some other contexts, qualifying your arguments sounds low-status, but in discussions of contentious topics on a public forum, it can nudge participants towards cooperative truth-seeking mode.
Amusingly, I emphasized the points of your comment that I found agreeable in my first reply, both since you’re pretty cool, and also since I didn’t want the fact that I’m a hardcore feminist to be obvious enough to affect the discourse. However, to the extent which my reply was more serious than your comment, this could have made me look like the less feminist one out of the two of us :D
Thanks.
Fair enough! I am readily willing to believe your statement that that was your intent. It wasn’t possible to tell from the comment itself, since the metric regarding sexual harassment report handling is much more serious than the other metrics.
Yes, I probably should have omitted that one. My information bubble keeps discussing cases in which men are treated horribly in college sexual harassment disputes, but I should have recognized that other peoples’ bubbles don’t and so my including it would send an unintended signal.