how is what he said a "sweeping and dismissive generalization"? he's complaining about women with 'golden uterus complex', which is not a phrase i've heard before but i know immediately what he means. some women derive a sense of superiority from the existence of their reproductive organs, and it can get pretty annoying. he is specifically complaining about those women, not all women.
the tech community has a severe case of male guilt when it comes to things like this. Mark has done nothing wrong, and there's no reason for other male software developers to be apologising for his actions. he complained about annoying people - there's nothing wrong with that, and there's no reason for women in general to be getting up in arms about it.
When you complain about annoying people by making their gender the primary basis of identification, you are most definitely making a sweeping generalization.
You are part of the problem.
You are correct that there's no reason for other people to apologize for him, because he needs to do that himself, if he can be convinced that his sexism is a problem. There is also no need for other people to be defending his sexism.
Here's a hint: a complaint about "annoying people" should aim to be more specific than 50% of the population.
That's just it his complaint isn't about 50% of the population. He even gave the criteria for determining what type of person it is.
While I don't know exactly what Mark Jaquith's response was to, there is a small but seemingly vocal segment of women who do act as if them being women means that they deserve to be given special treatment because they are women. I know in my experience very few women are like this. I also know that there are men who are the same about themselves.
There was a reddit thread somewhat recently about this kind of thing too. [1]
EDIT:
I'd like to clarify that what I believe this whole thing is about is women who are overbearing to an extreme because they are women. A cliched phrase that I think would fit would be a woman saying something along the lines of "I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it" without trying to be funny, ironic, or some other non-serious message to it.
If I say guys who run out on their newborns are dicks, that doesn't imply anything about the male gender as a whole.
When this guy categorizes women with a "golden uterus complex", whatever that means, he's not grouping all women. Yes, all women do have a uterus, but that isn't what he is saying.
As for apologizing... I'd be sad to see him do it, as a man, of course.
You really can't use the word guys as they are not being discriminated in this world (in the majority of cases). Copying and pasting from another comment of mine.
Imagine if instead he said: "I hate black people who steal". Of course he does! But he must also hate white people who steal, in fact, he hates people who steal. There's no need for specifying race.
did you read my comment at all? the complaint is much more specific than 50% of the population. it's about a very small subset of women. nobody here is claiming that all women are annoying, just a very small group of women who are annoying in a very specific way. the gender is not the basis of identification, the source of annoyance is. the gender is almost incidental.
It’s not so hard. It’s probably best to quote what the author wrote in the comments of her post:
“‘Golden Uterus Complex’ is a slur against women. It‘s not even a real psychiatric term, just slang. It dismisses all women who have real life experience of things men don‘t go through first hand—like child birth or sexism. In short, when guys don‘t have a dog in the fight but they still think they have an important perspective, they whip this baby out to cry foul instead of giving a woman credit for her experience and respecting her opinion.
Maybe it‘s annoying to you, but it‘s legitimate to the women involved.”
>It dismisses all women who have real life experience of things men don‘t go through first hand—like child birth or sexism.
Putting these out there as exclusive only to women is absurd. I shared
the experience of child-birth with my wife and have experienced sexism at many points in my career (I work in a female dominated field). The notion
that these things only happen/are experienced by women is just wrong.
What you're arguing for is that certain topics be restricted to a women's only perspective which is about sexist as it gets.
Who cares? The point is not that he's calling women names.
If you want to say that then fine but you should read the rest of what you quoted which makes a different point entirely.
So if he had left out "Golden Uterus Complex" then it would
be ok?
I think the problem is that he could have said that people who feel superiority for their reproductive organs (or whatever) are annoying. The thing is that he seems to say that women who have that problem are annoying, which completely overlooks the problem. What I mean is that it doesn't matter if it's women or men who feel this superiority, so there's no need for specifying gender.
Imagine if instead he said: "I hate black people who steal". Of course he does! But he must also hate white people who steal, in fact, he hates people who steal. There's no need for specifying race.
>When you complain about annoying people by making their gender the primary >basis of identification, you are most definitely making a sweeping >generalization.
Not if the people you are complaining about are doing the same exact thing by making their sex the primary basis on which they should be listened to. What's good for the 50% of the gooses is good for 50% of the ganders.
>You are part of the problem.
So the problem is that men are not allowed to point out inconsistencies
in the way men/women are allowed to use their sex as a source of authority?
Once we're debating the political correctness of a statement someone made of Twitter, we've already lost. Mark's comment shouldn't harm female developers, because they should be busy working on something with other female and male developers and not having fights on Twitter.
She’s calling it like she sees it and even ignoring the right or wrong of it for a minute, seeing the less than subtle mysogyny in some (if not most) of these comments I’d say she’s right. In gender as wel as in race issues you don’t go around telling people they’re wrong to feel they’re being singled out. Instead of being dicks about it we should strive to build a friendlier atmosphere for everybody so women, gay people or whoever else doesn’t feel they’re being targeted as a group when conflict arises.
Mark Jaquith here. Happy to clear some things up (and would appreciate it if you could make this comment visible on the thread).
Here is the text of my tweet:
> Imagine if men talked like women with "Golden Uterus Complex" do… "Excuse me, but which one of us has a penis? That's what I thought."
First, the definition of "golden uterus complex". This phrase was brought to my attention by Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, a doctor of Clinical Psychology. Dr. Palmatier assigns a great many attributes to this personality, but the one most related to my point is:
> the golden uterus believes that having birthed a child makes them better and more knowledgeable than others; e.g., the “Well you don’t have kids so how would you know anything?” woman
This phrase doesn't apply to "women". I wasn't making any kind of blanket statement about women. I wasn't even making a blanket statement about mothers. I was referring to women who have carried a pregnancy to term and who exhibit specific behavior characteristics. I sure hope that how people behave is an aspect upon which they can be judged.
For context, it is a picture on Facebook of a mother feeding her newborn baby solid food — a seriously dangerous, ignorant, and irresponsible thing to do. Someone in the comments tells her that you shouldn't feed a baby that little solid food. The mother responds "Well it my kid not Yours so what I do with him is none of your concern thanks" [sic].
It didn't matter to her that the commentator was correct, and that what she was doing was potentially lethal to her baby. She gave birth to the baby, so in her mind she's the expert and the ultimate arbiter of what is right for the baby. I've even seen this complex be applied to matters other than child care, as if the act of giving birth confers all manner of sagacious powers.
I'm not discounting the power of personal experience. I was present for the births of both of my children, and even as a mostly-spectator, it was a unimaginably transforming experience. What I am objecting to is the idea that childbirth automatically makes a woman the ultimate authority on child care or anything else. This is the sort of attitude that has contributed to the anti-vaccine nonsense that has been plaguing some Western countries in recent years.
My tweet contrasted the way that mothers with this behavioral complex openly talk about the utilization of their reproductive organs for childbirth being the source of their claimed superiority, and I pondered what it would be like if men claimed and talked about their reproductive organs as the source of their supposed superiority. It was a reductio ad absurdum, clearly. Men (well, most men post high school) don't bring up the use of their sex organs in polite conversation as a trump card. Some (nota bene: SOME) women do. Sexist men usually exhibit a sexism that is much more closely tied to feelings of mental superiority and greater physical strength. I find it to be an interesting social sexual difference to how some women express a sense of superiority over men.
People do reductio ad absurdum comparisons about social sexual imbalances all the time. Like how it's weird to imagine women yelling things out of a car at an attractive male jogger. Or making a joke about how if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament in most religions. I guess I made the assumption that my Twitter audience would get that (a) I was proposing a ridiculous scenario, partly for comedic effect and (b) that I also did it to provoke thought about quirky social sexual imbalances. Maybe that was too much to assume for such a constricting medium such as Twitter.
But in any case, my intention and meaning could have been discovered by Ms. Nabors by either asking me for clarification, or doing a simple web search for the phrase, either of which would have immediately made it clear that the phrase refers to a behavior exhibited by a subset of the subset of women who have given birth, and it is not in any way a slur against women or mothers (I will grant that it is a slur against people who exhibit this behavior, behavior being an acceptable thing to criticize).
Instead of seeking out my meaning, Ms. Nabors quite publicly called me an "ass", accused me of making "sweeping and dismissive generalizations" about women, implied that I was socially inept (while also making her own sweeping generalization about the social skills of developers), called me openly hostile to women, and called my remarks a symptom of a boys-club attitude within the developer community.
I'll leave it to you to decide whether she fairly judged my actions.
The fascinating part here, to me, is that actually it's the "this is my child therefore butt out" argument - which isn't even the golden uterus complex thing - that would be "you haven't given birth to a child therefore butt out".
I can imagine a similarly stupid male saying exactly the same thing except perhaps for saying 'our kid' rather than 'my kid'.
How you jumped from there to your Golden Uterus Complex joke, I don't know.
What I do know is, had you typed out the text of your tweet into one of many of the private chat rooms of various sorts that I'm part of, I would probably have laughed.
However, I don't believe it had any place in a public twitter feed that also contains technical-related stuff and therefore may get followed by people who don't know you personally. My public twitter account is somewhat restricted in what topics I cover on it for pretty much precisely this reason.
> How you jumped from there to your Golden Uterus Complex joke, I don't know.
Someone else's comment on the photo bridged that gap. Don't recall the comment. But you're right, there's a difference between "my child, butt out" and "you haven't birthed a child, butt out". The former can definitely be done by any parent. In practice, the latter is exclusive to mothers. And I can somewhat relate to the former — people can be too nosy with other people's kids. So that doesn't seem to bother me as much, as long as they aren't endangering the child. But the latter is really arrogant and dismissive. Furthermore, it perpetuates the idea that child care is the mother's job. If we want to address the issue of women being underrepresented in the workplace, we have to get away from that "Daddy works, Mommy is a mommy" vestigial 1950's attitude. Male dominated workforces need to be friendly and more welcoming to women, and at the same time female dominated parental arrangements need to be more friendly and accommodating of other caregivers.
> However, I don't believe it had any place in a public twitter feed that also contains technical-related stuff and therefore may get followed by people who don't know you personally.
I don't want to play a persona on my Twitter account. It's not like there are two people — WordPress me and personal me. It's just me. If you follow me on Twitter, you get it all. May FSM have mercy on my followers if Rick Santorum wins the GOP nomination, because it's going to be all "oh HELL no" all the time on Twitter. :-)
That’s an impressive explanation. And it entirely fails to address the point. Like the other commentor said, your remark has no place in the public forum. You can find my opinion a bit further in the thread. Main point is: your supposed intention has little to do with it.
I'm not responsible for her refusal to educate herself on what the term means before she publicly insulted and libeled me for a twisted and incorrect interpretation. If you can't bother to use Google on any words you don't understand, then you shouldn't follow me on Twitter.
Again, missing the point. Seems like we're walking 2 different paths here and they're not likely to cross any time soon. Best of luck on yours in any case. Cheers.
Imagine the kind of world we would be living in if people felt so entitled, by their identities and the things they do and have, that they felt justified in dismissing the needs and opinions of other people as unimportant by comparison.
I love how people seem to have trouble with the idea that Golden Uterus Complex isn't an offensive term to use.
It's the genderedness. If he'd called it Golden Genitals Complex I might've been less bothered.
But really, it's "argument that superior experience guarantees superior knowledge", and whether that is on the basis of the ownership of a vagina, a penis, a marriage license, a car, or really anything else, it's the same type of stupidity, and I'd like to see it called out as that.
These are positive statements, one however has a racial implication, and the other has a "genderedness" aspect.
It isn't offensive to realize they're are differences between us. Unless, of course, we really want to bring the "smooth area" from kid's dolls into the adult world.
I've actually never heard the phrase "golden uterus complex", but I seriously wonder if it's any different from calling a black person "uppity". Which is also not cool.
I have in fact been in the room when someone has actually said this. It was intended as a joke and the lady to whom he was addressing his query (who just happened to be his boss) was also in fact highly amused by it.
All the other men just sat there with their mouths literally hanging open.
Nail a huge, purple dildo to your office door, and enjoy the quiet solitude of a nag-free, gossip-free, rage-free, single-gender work environment, where you can get stuff done, and in which you may occasionally stroll without pants. Seriously: Either you are qualified for the job, or you aren't. If you are, then stop claiming offense over gender or race or whatever, because all that does is create further division, and not the enlightenment which you expect. What matters is not what the other person says, but rather, how you respond. Every minute that you spend being negative, is a minute you could have spent on a project that will get you that raise or promotion.
Clearly you've never worked at an all-male environment if you think that would necessarily by nag-free, gossip-free and rage-free. In my experience, an environment without women devolves into some "Lord of the Flies"-type shit pretty quickly unless you're super careful about who you hire, personality-wise.
Seriously, all research done on the matter indicates that women are just as effective as software development as men, so the lack of women in software development indicates it's far from the meritocracy you seem to imagine it is.
This "either you are qualified for the job, or you aren't so it's ok to act like an asshole" bullshit has gotten pretty old in 2012. Here's a clue: if you're a lead developer creating an environment that's hostile to a large pool of potentially highly skilled developers, you're not fucking qualified, regardless of your coding skills. Otherwise, what's the point of the word "lead"?
Not that it might matter to your reply, but FYI: I added a couple of sentences just as you were posting.
Clearly, your experiential matrix is not the same as mine. I'm 45, and I've worked in many different environments since I was about 15, when I was at a boys-only school, which, by the way, functioned quite well without devolving into anything resembling Lord of the Flies.
The lack of women in software development indicates that there aren't enough women who can "take it like a man", so to speak. Whatever men dish out is merely a social filter, designed to rid their environment of those (men and women) who can't handle pressure. If you are much shorter than me, and I want you gone, the first thing I'll do is to repeatedly call you "shorty", because that's an easy way to start, as it's the low-hanging fruit in the insult aisle.
Either you are qualified, or you aren't. That wasn't bullshit a hundred years ago, and it shouldn't be today. You make the assumption that women can be highly skilled. My experience is that, in general, they are not, and most of the few who are, have a personality which clouds their judgment. Knowing how to program is not enough for the job. You need to have non-related life skills, such as dealing with people who don't like you, or who are otherwise in your way.
There were teachers at your all-boys school whose job it was to prevent the Lord-of-the-Flies scenario and if yours was anything like mine, they expended a lot of energy on that task :-).
You're attempting to rationalize the mostly-male situation you find yourself in, but it's pure conjecture. Women are (in general) just as capable as men (in general) at software development. My own belief is that there are a host of poorly understood factors that tend to push women away from software engineering careers. One of them is the fact that it's a "boys' club", but it's mainly a boys' club because it's mostly boys—if there were more women, cheerful misogyny like that exhibited in your "take it like a man" comment would be less acceptable.
In other words, we can't fix the problem (and it is a problem) of gender imbalance in software engineering just by not being asses to women, but it's a place to start.
the tech community has a severe case of male guilt when it comes to things like this. Mark has done nothing wrong, and there's no reason for other male software developers to be apologising for his actions. he complained about annoying people - there's nothing wrong with that, and there's no reason for women in general to be getting up in arms about it.