Dear HN: Stop referring to women as a monolith. Thank you

20 points by diN0bot 6 years ago | 5 comments

Today I read a handful of comments that included a sentence starting with “women” as if women are a monolith.

For example, there was an argument about whether “women like bodybuilders” or “women don’t like bodybuilders” — there are billions of women in the world, with dozens of intersections across race, class, culture, and sexuality to name a few. The argument doesn’t make sense.

“women” are people who read our comments. I roll my eyes when I see women treated as objects or stereotypes or monoliths on hacker news. Today I thought I’d do something more.

Thanks for reading this post. Now we all know that referring to women as a monolith, as if speaking only to other straight men (who we falsely assume are ok speaking about women this way), is as rude as referring to “the gays” or “the [not-whites]” and as eye-sore as writing “you’re [possessed object]”.

Anyone else feeling this way? Thanks in advance for the thoughtful discussion.

ronsor 6 years ago |

That happens to every group of people (e.g. "Silicon Valley," "investors," "Democrats," "reddit," "4chan," "politicians," etc.). It's not very logical, accurate, or effective, but I don't think it's supposed to be dehumanizing.

Edit: People like to find patterns, and use them to describe groups.

pier25 6 years ago |

Even better, stop considering genre/sex to define someone. Humans are complex, period.

CogitoCogito 6 years ago |

This isn’t bad advice, but it’s not really specific to women in particular. Essentially all generalizations we hear about different groups of people tend to be just as problematic.

KaoruAoiShiho 6 years ago |

Not even between individuals, the same person feels differently depending on day, mood, the last movie they watched, the last person they talked to, the last thing they ate. smh.

afarrell 6 years ago |

> Anyone else feeling this way?

Yes.

I strive to continually learn better ways to treat my fellow humans well. As a kid, I was told to treat others as I would like to be treated. That advice is better than nothing, but works extraordinarily poorly in many situations. Other humans have different desires and perspectives than I do.

I'm very aware of the weirdness and variety of humans. My grandfather is a black man who joined SNCC in the 60s, left because of anti-semitism, and now supports Trump. I grew up as a mixed-race kid who alternated between pride and loneliness at being weird.

I was later advised to treat others as they would like to be treated. That advice works better for personal relationships, but is missing a few key things:

1) Balanced Assertiveness for your own interests.

2) Clarity on how to learn how others like to be treated.

3) Mnemonics on how to remember how any given person outside your 100-closest relationships likes to be treated.

4) Prioritization of what habits to follow to prepare to treat others well while building relationships that meet your needs.

But earth has 7.5 billion humans who are way too busy to explicitly describe all their desires. So I've found it useful to make generalizations like, "Women I see at the gym strongly prefer to be left alone to focus on their workout". Sometimes I err in inappropriately applying a generalization. There's no ironclad 100% way to avoid that -- knowing when not to apply a generally-true statement requires fallible judgement of ambiguous information.

I think you know all of this.

----

I think the core of your objection is to situations where it seems obvious to you that a generalization is being over-applied and you'd like a way to say "Hey remember, not all women do/think X and this is meaningful in this situation because Y." and for HN to be a community which would habitually respond "Good point! We should account also for Z..."

I'd like that too.

I can only say that #notallmen here lazily throw around overbroad generalizations about women. But among those that don't, some of us find that the rhetorical tools we'd use to argue against those generalizations have been discredited.