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via anon ask
this is a common sentiment in a couple of the reblogs so let us consider it generally
i don’t have any significant internet fame, but a couple thousand nerds follow me on twitter where i mainly yell all day, and i have written some well-read things
that blog post is a thorough unabashed deconstruction of a programming language and why it is worthless. it has 1741 comments. a great many of them are from people who felt personally insulted by the article. not a single one of them tells me to be nicer.
you might contest that programming and art are different disciplines: programmers are expected to be loudmouths and artists are not. that’s true. it’s a funny coincidence, then, that programming is almost exclusively male-dominated, and art is far closer to female-dominated.
is it the fame, then? where is the cutoff for fame, the point where people treat you differently based on how many other people they assume are aware of your existence? nobody ever mocks the us president for being passionate or suggests he should be nicer, and he’s generally pretty well-known.
meanwhile, rachel maddow, a woman with a political talk show on msnbc, says:
“I wanted to say, ‘Are you saying I’m cute when I’m angry?’” she recalls. “But I didn’t, because when you’re a woman on television, you can’t even say the word angry.”
the political talking-head landscape is overflowing with white dudes whose popularity largely derives from how angry and sarcastic and biting they can be. one of the very few women in this ecosystem feels she must go to great lengths to avoid all of this, partly because it makes a mockery of political discourse, but just as much because she has to to be taken seriously at all.
women’s emotions are “emotions”. men’s emotions are “how people talk”. (this is a great article btw)
i have seen other subcultures rag on mel for how she talks. i have seen other female artists get the same treatment despite being far less fiery than mel. i have seen male creators of various sorts stand on soapboxes and get nothing of the sort. (at best, they are called assholes. so if a boy is raucous something is inherently wrong with him, but if a girl is raucous something is wrong with how she acts, i guess?) i have seen exceptions to all of this, as well, but they are far less common.
granted, the plural of anecdote is not data.
i freely admit i am bad at understanding persons. but i like to notice patterns among people, and on occasion have been told i’m not entirely awful at it. ragging on girls to be polite and respectful far more than on boys is merely a pattern i feel i have noticed across a wide variety of people over a long period of time. it doesn’t mean you, or anyone, specifically is doing anything wrong. it doesn’t mean sex is the only factor dictating how people interact. it only means that in aggregate, people appear to me to have this particular bias.
(via lexyeevee)