Danikat wrote: »

ZeroXFF wrote: »

Osteos wrote: »

From my experience meeting and playing with lots of different people, most players have both. I am female and most of my characters are female, when I have the option I usually take advantage of it. I do have 2 male characters though simply because that is what I envisioned when making the character.


Oh and the "there's no women on the internet" joke isn't funny and just makes you a beef wit.

It's not really a joke, it's a philosophy. One of the great features that the internet provides is anonymity. By telling your gender you are reducing the anonymity you enjoy, effectively diminishing one of its great features.

Furthermore, saying you're a woman and then presenting an argument will give you more support than your actual idea deserves, because there will inevitably be some white knights who will want to show you that they are the good guys that you should let in your pants (regardless of whether they have a chance). This results in discussions being derailed, and in the early days of the internet (i.e. when this meme was created) was justifiably seen as a manipulative tactic to win an argument, because if your intent was not to manipulate, you wouldn't mention your gender, as it's irrelevant to most discussions taking place.

On top of that there is a safety concern. People (both male and female) are more likely to want to help women and more likely to trust women. So anyone posing as a woman (even if it's a man) has an easier time exploiting or defrauding someone online. So to protect yourself it's best to assume that anyone who claims to be a woman is actually a man, unless you can verify it.

In essence the main reason that this meme is singling out women, is because most internet users at the time when this meme was created were indeed men. But the essence of this meme is that what you have between your legs is irrelevant, what's relevant are your arguments.

It never meant that there are literally no women on the internet, it was just the desire to create a perfect meritocracy where factors determining social status IRL (like gender, but also wealth, family background, race, education etc) would not influence the discourse, and ideas would stand on their own merit.

Now I can of course see why you would think it makes one a "beef wit" by making that statement. You've been told since the 60's (with increasing intensity as time went by) that men are superficial and shallow, only think about one thing, and that everything men do is an assertion of male dominance over women. Hence this statement must be a territorial claim like "internet belongs to men" to be in line with everything you've been told all your life, so it's not surprising at all that you resort to outrage and insults, as you perceive it as nothing but misogyny and chauvinism. But it would do you good if you did learn about the meaning of the memes before stating your opinion on them, because then you would show the men who are actual misogynists and chauvinists that the stereotypes they hold about women are not true.

So yeah, there are no women on the internet.

That's interesting, I always thought it was pretty much the exact opposite. If you say you're a woman you're opening yourself up to some people (no not all, but enough that it's annoying) immediately dismissing your contributions to absolutely any discussion as uninformed or irrelevant so if you want to be taken seriously it's best to keep quiet on that point.

Likewise it tends to lead to any request for help being derailed with irrelevant comments and decidedly unwelcome 'offers' which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual request so if you actually want help with anything it's best to just let them assume you're a man and therefore assume you are otherwise fully capable and not an object of interest for them so they'll just answer the question and move on.

I once walked into a shop in real life and asked one of the staff "What's the largest capacity USB stick you sell?" simple question right? (And incidentally the answer was 20GB - it was on the wall right behind him.) He lead me over to a display and started telling me about how they've just got this brand in which is available in 12 different colours, and he can order in any they don't have. I said "But these are only 6GB, is that the largest you do?" and he started telling me that if I went to their website I can order ones with custom designs...

As far as I could tell he was incapable of seeing a female customer as being interested in anything except the appearance of the product, even when I had clearly told him what I wanted. In the end I walked out, went to their competitors, asked a female member of staff and got a straight answer immediately.

And that's a relatively innocuous example. As far as I could tell he wasn't flirting and I don't think he was intentionally talking down to me (and I was alone so he couldn't ignore me and talk to a man I happened to be with instead, which is another common problem when buying any kind of tech) he just let his assumptions about women completely over-rule the actual question.

Online I suspect it's also that most people tend to assume everyone else is like them unless told otherwise. The other common example of this is people who assume everyone is American. For example giving prices in dollars on an international website without specifying they mean American dollars, or assuming everyone has to pay for health care and can't drink until they're 21.

vometia wrote: »

ZeroXFF wrote: »

Women nowadays look for sexism everywhere ( #NotAll , but enough that it's annoying). I had a conversation once with a woman in the same class, studying computer science. At some point I asked why she decided to study computer science, and I couldn't accept the answer "I just always found it interesting and wanted to learn how to do it", so I kept trying to get details out of her. The reason is, everyone else I ever asked about it had a story to tell, either they were already doing something in that field and wanted to get better, or they wanted to do something and they needed the skills to do it, or they were spending all their time at the PC screen already, so they wanted something that would allow them to earn money doing it. But of course she became defensive and accused me of being sexist and assuming that women cannot be interested in computer science, even though that thought had never crossed my mind.

So to loop back to the "there are no women on the internet" meme... If the conversation was online and I didn't know she was a woman, the accusation of sexism would not have made any sense, and the discussion would not have been derailed.

Why did you insist on what seemed to be a more comprehensive explanation than you might expect from anyone else? I'd probably react in much the same way. I went into computing almost by default as I had some experience of it and didn't really know what to do with my life otherwise. If someone kept saying, "but why, but why, that's not a good enough reason" I'd likewise tell them to GTFO. I imagine the same rationale is true of plenty of guys in computing too.

What is interesting is that there were way more women in computing when I started in the late '80s. Back then it was just another career so if there was an opening that resulted in a bit more money or was less boring or had better prospects or any of the usual reasons, people would move into it, male and female. The lack of women in IT seems to be a more recent problem and if I had to name a single cause I'd blame the awful management that became especially toxic in the '90s: long hours, aggressive work environments, job insecurity, offshoring, constant on-call, endless other nonsense that stops a person doing their job and often completely tips over the work-life balance thing. I know the guys don't like it either but they tend to try to tough it out but it shouldn't be like that.