That post is older than I am and I don't know how I feel about that.
It’s been 24 years since that post
21 years since Simon Baron-Cohen published
The Essential Difference
18 years since Larry Summers left Harvard
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4738030.stm
7 since James Damore left Google
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-damore-google-memo-interview-autism-regrets
Just to say this is a minefield. And for good reason.
On the one hand I hope it is not an over generalization to say the kids are okay, more okay than back in my day
On the other hand there is still a clear gap between the “Overton windows” on either side of the divide not just in terms of content but in terms of style…
Like, this guy is being unabashedly crass, in a style that, more likely than not, will not age well. But he’s okay with not having that audience.
And a lot of us are okay with being his audience. It’s a bit like laughing at a sexist joke. Or do you not laugh? Do you call it out? Times change.
The dudes who roll their eyes at this whole thread and hit “ignore” are, ironically, doing the same thing, just at different granularity, as the ladies – and the lads – who roll their eyes at this whole forum and also ignore.
I don’t know if things will ever change for highly geeky and highly elective hobbies like knife collecting or (going by the comments above) retro-computing archaeology aka “the lost toys of my misspent youth”, nor do I know if change is what society is demanding here. There has been a ton of DEI progress in more impactful sectors of life; that train is continuing to gain steam; and arguably
change in those more important sectors can’t happen fast enough. We do see participation in the forums dropping around the time any newborns show up at home, and that is right and good; perhaps what we need is not more women on the forum, but men on the forum less
We can debate the harmlessness, or not, of allowing a traditional reservoir of masculinity some acoustic license in the direction of locker-room talk. This shades into an observation about a thread elsewhere—
There's a Reddit post right now where a guy can't feel a burr and everybody's questioning/suggesting everything *except* edge-trailing strokes
The gendered analysis of
that thread is interesting, because in the midst of all the guys shouting at the OP to just get better, sharpen less, sharpen more, just give up, don’t give up, there were a couple of redditors saying, buddy, let me drive over to your house and show you man-to-man, hand-to-hand, how to deburr. Which is both a wholesome affirmation of male-coded mission-oriented bloody-minded skills transfer, and at the same time an offer entirely impossible for a woman to accept. Unless it comes from another woman.
Which brings us back to the parable of the polygons.
https://ncase.me/polygons/
