#YesAllMen #NotAllMen #MaybeSomeMen How to be better?
I am honestly not sure making this post is a good idea, but I want to at least make an honest attempt at this topic and putting it in ~life.men - because it seems silly that this topic tends to get more discussed in ~life.women - and it obviously rarely ends well.
Please approach this with the best good faith intent and lets be civil.
I am 100% in the target group for that video, though I hope this doesn't end up being just another discussion of the same video but the topic in general, as I am a straight white man having worked in tech for two decades. And I am manager with women on my team, and I have been rightfully called out on certain biases and can recognize having glossed over problematic behaviour in the past.
I personally don't take much offense on the #YesAllMen thing, but I can understand why it can be irksome and there is a part of the me where it doesn't quite feel right to me, even though I know it isn't intended that way. It can feel like being lumped together in a "guilt by association" type of way, that we generally don't accept with other groups in society. And what I often have a problem with in these types of discussions, is how a very wide range of problems with very different severity is being lumped together - and I don't think that is fruitful. We see examples of open hostile sexism like "you fucking whore" or outright sexual assault, and most men of course don't recognize themselves in those sort of examples, and thus get defensive. Instead we should be more open to look at all the seemingly "minor" things that aren't as severe, but from what I think I understand from women on being a minority in a workplace is the "death by a thousand cuts"-effect. A constant reminder of seemingly minor things that just adds up, and is rightly being experienced as part of more severe forms of sexism.
Not sure where I am going with this - as I didn't write this as a well thoughtout thesis - just a quick way to try to start a hopefully healthy discussion in the right space, but I assume no men here on Tildes are outright sexually assualting women, but I would 100% believe that most of us still have blind spots that could be improved and is indirectly part of the problem.
Gay man here.
My experience with sexism is different from yours because I’m not part of the in crowd. I only get to see the worst of it when people forget that I’m not in it, and while I have been “straight-acting” enough to see it, I know I haven’t seen the worst of it. And what I do know is that when straight men talk about having sex with women they rarely ever talk about them in a way that brings up simple things like respect or even consent.
So if you want to be proactive in the fight against sexism, just do the things that women keep asking you to do. When you see people talking about women like they’re meat, when you see people making dirty jokes that reduce them to objects, cut them off and let them know they are being an asshole and that you will not tolerate that level of disrespect, and if you ever see them treating a woman that way you will take steps to intervene.
It’s hard cause when you speak up you get iced out. So often men have to choose between having friends or standing up for women.
I can never think of a way to just be like “hey guys, thats kinda gross, maybe let’s not talk about women like they’re meat” without actually offending the men in the group.
More than once I havent been the only one uncomfortable though and most of the time someone else also speaks up like “yeah that was pretty gross” so theres that
Cause it's rage bait. I feel like the intention was to bait people into posting hot takes.
Like, the point was to get people's attention and these days that's what it takes, but it seems like everyone arguing about it is totally unable to see past that and they're all arguing about the title or the really over the top things that she describes in the video instead of the actual problem, how women are actually treated in tech.
Anyone who's ever had a PR cut to pieces for no reason or a feature they've worked on totally overwritten by some hot shot hero developer 1 week later knows exactly what this video is talking about, and not a single comment said anything about this.
The top post got it right, if you see it, just call it out. Don't be part of the problem. You're in a position to say something. Say something.
I'll also add, if you're not seeing it, you're not paying attention.
True, but I think it is also a bit of a shame that the framing is something most can't outright recognize and thus easily dismiss it. The framing is someone calling her a whore, and I suspect many will just think "Okay, I don't do that", but then misses that they maybe also can have blind spots in like how they treat pull requests from different developers and if there could be an unconscious bias working there. I think that is why these type of topics often goes off rails, because the framing of the sexists examples that make people go quickly on the defense as "that is definitely not me".
Right like she opened with that?
I understand the attention grabber and also it wasn’t just a youtube video it was meant for a different setting with a live audience AND that did actually happen to her
But on youtube you’re gonna lose anyone who was on the fence with that opening statement. She said some really great stuff right after that which no one who needed to hear it heard.
I think we get so wrapped up in the message we forget that the people who need to hear it don’t want to hear it.
I really don't think her talk was aimed at the folks who are causing the problem, but rather for folks who are already allies looking for tangible ways they can effect things.
There's different audiences for every talk - the folks who need to hear this sort of stuff to change their behavior likely need to hear it from a conservative man that they already look up to (the Joe Rogans and such of the world) and needs to be spoon fed to them so as to avoid triggering their fragility.
I am not in the tech industry, at least not for a career. And I haven’t seen anything like this in my chosen career field (winemaking). But it is something I am going to be on the look out for even more after watching that video.
I welcome feedback from both men and women on how I can be a positive change, even when it isn’t something I really see in my industry.
I'm in the perhaps rather rare position of being a heterosexual man who has been seriously harassed by another man, so I don't find it hard to imagine what women have to face.
But that didn't help much in my 20s and 30s, because when you're in the situation where you might be the man who stops himself or another man from being a toxic moron, you mostly react from the gut. If you want to be able to do the right thing, you gotta have a strong foundation to push that action from. You have to be mentally strong, confident, most likely also physically strong, and you have to have your life in order. Having fuck you money doesn't hurt, in case you have to act against your employer or something like that. Perhaps a bit ironically, this is the kind of stuff Jordan Peterson talked a lot about when he was still sort of sane and not yet trapped by a culture war.
Now I have many of these things, and I've become pretty good at controlling myself, I think. But controlling others is still a thing that doesn't come easily.
#YesAllMen is ragebait and/or clickbait. Better just block them. This is also why I didn't watch the video, so apologies if I'm arguing against something that was never said.