Nerds and Male Privilege - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/5868595/nerds-and-male-privilege <comment><USER2> One comment I wanted to make about this the last time this came up...

"Privilege" is a loaded word. It's a word that some people take great offense to, but it's a word that cannot rationally be ignored.

Success can be a pretty fragile phenomenon. I never fully appreciated the benefit of privilege until relatively recently. I was an unfocused teenager who slacked in college, but stumbled onto a good career anyway (so far, fingers crossed). I would like to ascribe it to turning myself around and working hard, but the fact of the matter is that privilege played a huge role. I got to work at a cool startup right out of high school, because I lived in the sort of relatively nice neighborhood where well-connected people launching startups from their basements might live. I never had to worry about credit checks for jobs because my parents had kept me on a small line of credit all through college to build up my history. When I quit my job to go to grad school, I never worried about running short of money just as finals were rolling around--daddy could always front me a couple of hundred to get me through the rest of the month. This is not trust-fund level privilege, just something pretty much any engineer or the like could provide for his (or her) family, but I'm pretty sure without it I would be working some below-median job today.

So... before you decry the article, remember that success, for most people, is at the margins. Think about how you got to where you are, and ask yourself: if people just found me 5% less credible because of my gender, race, etc, would life really have turned out identically?

PS) I was reminded of how uneven things can subtly be a couple of days ago during the SOPA hearings. One of the posts that made it to the front page of reddit was a photo of some woman giving testimony, where the photo had been edited to look like it was an x-ray shot through her shirt. I thought to myself how interesting that was. Not that it was so insanely offensive in and of itself, but rather because I've never seen something like that pop up on the front page when a man says something dumb on TV.

<comment><USER3> Credit checks for jobs?

<comment><USER2> Standard procedure in some fields, surprisingly common in others. I had a friend get hassled about an open collection before taking a job with the feds.

<comment><USER3> No credit as a 20 year old should be acceptable, no?

<comment><USER4> I would not worry about it.

Probably worth looking into establishing some credit anyway though, if you're thinking about buying a car or anything like that in the near future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a term for the ridiculous rhetorical tactic of insisting that any attempt to refute one's claims as being illogical is itself only further proof of the claims made? I stopped reading when he said this:

 _"I will pause now for the traditional arguments from my readers...Got all of that out of your systems? Good.

Because that reaction is exactly what I'm talking about."_

Why bother having a discussion with someone who sets up their argument to be that those who disagree with their argument are only proving the point?

<comment><USER6> I think the author has a good point, although it's tricky to make: You can spend all day making excuses for specific instances of sexism in comics and video games, or you can realize that your ability and need to do that is a sign of a problem.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be spending a lot of time making specific excuses to why you don't need to listen to an opposing argument. Perhaps you should realize that your inability to listen to logical arguments is a sign of a problem.

<comment><USER8> Or, perhaps you should realize that the "logical" arguments are not actually logical and have been repeatedly refuted.

<comment><USER9> If you're trying to win over rational people, and refutations are out there to be had, they need to be included. Anyone who thinks "everyone says this argument has the same glaring flaws, and that illustrates how _awesome_ the argument is!" is at risk of reaching conspiracy-theory levels of crazy.

<comment><USER8> The author explained why the people making the traditional arguments do in fact illustrate how accurate his observation is. It's true though that articles won't reach guys are so defensive or clueless on this subject that they're not responding rationally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lets not be sexist and respond in a fashion that anyone would respond to a male who whines: stop whining, get a life. Either put up or shut up. Can't handle the heat? Stay out of the kitchen. If male centered entertainment bothers you, make your own. Use your money as a vote to influence the industry. I guarantee that the industry likes money.

The arguments that women should be treated with silver gloves are by their very nature sexist.

"mouth-breathing troglodyte" pretty much immediately tells me what way the article is going to go. Which is to demonize male sexuality.

"And that was when I shot him, your honor." another sign of clear bias.

This is like reading straight from a feminist cookbook. Nothing new, nothing that would be worth any deeper thought.

I enjoy what I enjoy. It's not illegal so you may as well shut up. It's not up to you, dear author, to tell me how I should live my life.

There was nothing new in the article. It was the same tired argument that because men like boobs and they consume popular entertainment that contain boobs they are evil. Which makes no sense to me.

Maybe as the author grows up and lives a little he will see through the matrix.

We all have our biases. But it is a different thing entirely to confuse your shallow rationalizations with actual fact.

<comment><USER11> I have but one quibble, why is treating women like a men automatically not sexist? Your response follows the same line of logic as "gay people have equal right, right to marry the opposite sex"

I think there is a blind spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What a waste of time, this article. There is a great case to be made for treating every human as a person, and not a member of the class, but he did not make this case.

First, the author complains that women get treated only as sexual objects in most games/comics/etc. Ok, that could be. It's not in Halo or Bioshock, the only games I play, but let's look at the data. So then he mentions opposing view - that men get sexualized too, and then instead of addressing that objection calls it sexist and dismisses it. Really? I would expect some stats, not simply "only sexist would say that" kind of reply. He does this repeatedly throughout the article - not addressing an argument, but simply labeling it with an ugly label and moving on. FWIW, the picture of batman he posted looks sexualized to me, as far as I can judge those things.

Then he just goes to make unsubstantiated broad claims. But of course pointing out lack of substance would be sexist, reflexive and defensive of me :)

A few choice quotes: "A man who's strong-willed or aggressive won't be denigrated for it". In my neck of the woods he will. I did, and I saw others going out of line getting a talk.

"...nor are men socialized to 'go along to get along'." Same thing here, I've seen it all the time.

<comment><USER13> "It's not in Halo or Bioshock"

Not to take sides in this argument, but you might want to reconsider that specific statement: [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3449/3698998163_fe844856da.jp...](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3449/3698998163_fe844856da.jpg) [http://gamingsrapture.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2011/...](http://gamingsrapture.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2011/12/halo.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is built on a bunch of assumptions and stereotypes which is terribly ironic given the subject matter. Some of it may be true but some of it just very wrong.

 _Men can expect that their presence at an event won't automatically be assumed to be decorative or secondary to another man._

Not really. Ask the benchwarmers for a high school sports team.

 _Despite the growing presence of women in comics, as publishers, editors and creators as well as consumers, a preponderance of men will either treat women at conventions as inconveniences, booth bunnies or even potential dates._

I can't comment on comic books but in the books, movies and TV shows I want I've actually found the exact opposite is increasingly true. There's a strong temptation to make the female characters super-human creatures with a PHD and a shotgun. Always a witty comeback. Always the most moral and ethical characters.

 _Men are also not going to be automatically assigned into a particular niche just based on their gender._

Tell that to some straight guy who happens to like female-centric things. They're going to be assumed to be homosexuals most of the time.

 _And when they are seen as customers, they're often automatically assumed to be buying one of the designated "girl" properties_

Perhaps in the same way a man strolling around certain types of stores popular with females would be seen?

 _One of these is welcomed into geek culture with open arms, the other has to justify their existence in the first place._

Says who?

 _makes women feel unwelcome in fandom_

Tell that to all the rapid female Twilight fans.

</comment><comment><USER15> In other news, most comic book artists and writers are male, most readers are male, a big chunk are teens, and males like pretty/nude/curvaceous females, most teen males likes big breasts and many teen females want to have big breasts, and oh yeah, sex sells. And comic books don't exist in a bubble in their own universe. It's part of this larger thing called the human race. Whatever good/bad/natural things exist in the human race will also be present in the comic book industry. Men have been ogling and fantasizing over females for thousands and very likely millions of years. Clue up. Next topic!

And on a related note, I really wish "gender" submissions on HN would start getting banned automatically. Because they almost always end up a case of beating a dead horse over and over and over again, especially from the perspective of those who've been around long enough.

ps. The author of the OA needs to wander into the Romance section of a bookstore some time. He'll be shocked, _shocked_ at the level of sexual objectification and stereotyping that goes on there. But in the reverse direction. But since the college/PC/lesbian/feminist litmob doesn't care about that, then it's not talked about. It's considered perfectly okay. Quotes from the article like this are common with people who've been programmed with that mindset: "(Obvious disclaimer: I'm a straight white man.)" <\-- Oh you poor accidental oppressor you!

<comment><USER16> _most comic book artists and writers are male, most readers are male, a big chunk are teens, and males like pretty/nude/curvaceous females, most teen males likes big breasts and many teen females want to have big breasts_

The TV show Mad Men is set in the early 1960s USA, when the same thing could be said of the professional world. "Everyone who works here is men, our clients are men, our customers are men" etc. And yet there was a lot of discrimination and sexism then. And things have changed (in the professional business world) then.

 _the college/PC/lesbian/feminist litmob doesn't care about that, then it's not talked about_

Sure they do. Here's a series of blog posts about how twilight has terrible characters. <http://skepchick.org/2011/11/twilight-breaking-wind/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really enjoyed this article. Harris O'Malley seems to _actually see the real problem_ , and expresses it with a hell of a lot more nuance than most other treatments of the subject do.

>> And when you check back on Friday, I'll provide you with some concrete applications on how being cognizant of male privilege will improve your relations with women.

I'm excited about the possibilities of the "practical applications" - there is an awful lot of "identifying the problem" and "raising awareness" (as Helianthus refers to in another comment on this thread), however, not a lot of solutions. Obviously they're not simple, and they're not easy, and they're imperfect, but I'd like to see some other people's ideas about them.

<comment><USER18> At first, I enjoyed the article.

However, I lost all respect for the author after reading some of his responses in the discussion thread.

One post of his in particular caught my eye :

"...And the first thing you did when confronted with this topic was to defend, counter, argue, and resist.

And by doing so, you immediately lost based on the rules set forth by the article..."

The notion that an argument cannot be refuted because of some preemptive ban on counter-arguments is, frankly, ludicrous to the point of being offensive.

This doesn't invalidate the contents of the article, but it effectively ends my interest in reading anything else by this author - including his follow up piece.

<comment><USER19> Probably the worst feature of modern feminism is the idea that any and all disagreement with modern feminism is sexism and thus deserves no consideration or response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While I agree this is a problem, I think it's as much one of society in general both polarising and demonising. (Context - IT nerd guy, single.)

I've known similarly female-dominated groups where men are automatically regarded as good-for-nothing troglodytes who will lazily eat, drink and watch sports all day with no positive contribution to wider life, while the intelligent, capable, hard-working and long-suffering women get on and do the important things the men simply can't, because they're men. Indeed, this will sometimes be seen openly in popular culture - advertising, sitcoms, soaps etc. I've done quite a lot of voluntary work with children, particularly younger children over the years; in some contexts there is still mild incredulity about the idea that a man can understand and cater well for small children, because that's What Women Do Best.

Sure, we need to watch out for ourselves and try to respect all on their merits, not objectify and stereotype. Equally there's plenty of women who _don't_ fit in with the group I outlined above. But - work to address this problem on all fronts. Fix it when we see it in our behaviour and those of us around us, whether we're the aggressor, the victim or neither.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't think this is limited just to video games, comics, and such - a lot of TV and sporting events are full of "beautiful people" often wearing less/tighter things than they ought to be wearing.

How is this different/worse than having cheerleaders on the side of a football field? Or Baywatch?

Not that I'm defending poor or sexist behavior, but singling out "nerds" as being the worst troglodytes out there seems a bit much.

<comment><USER22> _a lot of TV and sporting events are full of "beautiful people" often wearing less/tighter things than they ought to be wearing._

"Ought"? The feminist position is that women should be able to express themselves however they want. And it turns out that given the choice, many women actually do want to wear revealing outfits. Exhibit A: Halloween.

<comment><USER23> Halloween is a bad choice to prove anything. Using your logic, I could prove that most people would prefer if our standard wardrobes were a choice between zombies, pirates or ninjas.

I saw someone with a really great Two-Face costume this Halloween. Does this mean that that person would rather spend their entire life in a Two-Face costume?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article makes some interesting points, but permit me to play devil's advocate when it comes to the way women and men are portrayed in geek media. All media, really.

Men: Serious. Women: Sexy.

Okay, no arguments there. But what does this difference in portrayal of the two sexes really mean? However much some might believe otherwise, humans are hard-wired by evolution to have gender roles. Homo sapiens has been around for roughly a hundred thousand years. Our species evolved from older hunter- gatherer species and has existed for almost its entire history as hunter- gatherers. What little we know about hunter-gatherer societies suggest that they were relatively egalitarian, but with definite gender roles.

Men: expendable risk takers. If half the men in a hunter-gatherer band are wiped out by a mammoth hunt gone wrong, the next generation can still be just as large, only with slightly less genetic diversity. So what makes a mammoth hunter popular with the ladies? Well, he has to look like he's going to be one of the guys who will actually come back. i.e. A badass.

Women: non-expendible reproducers. No matter how many men are around, the number of women who successfully bear children are what defines the reproductive success of a band. If you're a man, you don't want the woman who goes out mammoth hunting with the guys, you want the woman who picks berries (gathering was probably even more vital to a band's survival than hunting!) and who has hips made for making babies.

In this light, what we might really be seeing in geek media is portrayals of both males and females that cater to our perception of desirability to the opposite sex. Powerful, serious, badass men are desirable to women, so they are what we see in comics. The same goes for sexy, fertile, women. Men and women are being portrayed differently because different things set them apart as elite or superior to others of their gender, thanks to our hunter-gatherer wiring.

If this interpretation is correct, then media that portrays men as badass and woman as sexy isn't necessarily showing evidence of pandering to males. It may simply be reflecting evolutionary gender roles. It may be that this is one thing males should stop all the self-flagellation over.

<comment><USER2> > If this interpretation is correct, then media that portrays men as badass > and woman as sexy isn't necessarily showing evidence of pandering to males. > It may simply be reflecting evolutionary gender roles. It may be that this > is one thing males should stop all the self-flagellation over.

It's not about self-flagellation or who is pandering to who. The article makes a broader point about how the perception of gender roles affect's our collective judgment about women's' contributions in geek society.

Your point about the basis of roles in biology is well taken, but:

1) It's not really clear how it's relevant to the larger point of the article. Batman is surely the epitome of sexual desirability in a man (rich, smart, attractive, crime fighter!) but what about the Joker and the Doctor? Skinny guy with disfigured face and pudgy dude with a neck beard? Those portrayals have nothing to do with sexual desirability. The Joker is supposed to convey manic-scary, and the Doctor precise-scary. Meanwhile, all the female portrayals are sexy-something. Sexy-crazy, sexy-eco terrorist, etc. Indeed, the point you make really reinforces the point in the article: we only portray women in terms of their sexual attractiveness, while we're willing to entertain a full range of human traits in men.

2) You can't say how much of these perceptions is rooted in culture versus biology. We're genetically predisposed to be skeptical of people not from "our clan", and slavery of not-like-kind people has been a feature of human society since antiquity, yet here we are in 2011, with massively different perceptions than even 60 years ago.

Perceptions aren't just abstract subjects of self-flagellation. They matter. Heck, geeks should be all too aware of this. As a born loudmouth, I've noticed countless times where people would take my opinion more seriously over someone who was more socially cautious. My girlfriend and I went through a pretty extensive recruiting process in our field in the last year, and you couldn't pay me to switch places with her. She assiduously avoided mentioning me, because it always lead to people trying to figure out if she was a flight risk, while my mentioning her always made me seem more stable. Even if the difference in perception gives women a few % handicap (though I'd postulate, without evidence, it's a heck of a lot more than that, especially in fields like tech or finance), that's a pretty substantial liability when you factor into account the level of competition.

<comment><USER10> >but what about the Joker and the Doctor? Skinny guy with disfigured face and pudgy dude with a neck beard?

Yes, I'm sure no woman found Heath Ledger sexy in Dark Knight. Also the Doctor being an imposing, dominating, taking the control type, surely kills any and all appeal he might ever have on women.

Both the Joker and the Doctor are still very masculine, powerful characters no matter how you look at things.

If you use male criteria for judging the attractiveness of a man to a woman, you are using male criteria for judging the attractiveness of a man to a woman. It is also called projection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _Remember the example I mentioned earlier with my then-girlfriend in the comic store? Her opinions were deemed mistaken and she was told she didn't "get it"… because she was a girl._

i'm not sure how that had anything to do with being a girl. she was told she didn't get it because she didn't get it. if a male walked into that comic shop looking out of place, picked up a book and said something disparaging outloud, he'd probably get mocked just the same for being a newbie.

my girlfriend is into comics and i'm not. if i went into a store with her and started saying shit about comics, i would completely expect to get called out for it. the only difference is that i wouldn't storm out and never return like the author's girlfriend.

<comment><USER6> <http://www.derailingfordummies.com/#butbut>

<comment><USER26> Not really sure whether that applies. There is a rather combative part of geek culture when it comes to defending either your own or the established view of your immediate peers. In that regard, geeks can indeed be astonishingly egalitarian in their derision of somebody with a perceived inferior viewpoint or understanding of the matter at hand. At that point, really all bets are off and if it is a battle between geeks, it is often a competition for who can be the most emotionless asshole.

This piss taking is something that _most_ people would find offensive and it is this area of geekdom that is often perceived as the prime example for the emotional and social inability of geeks, particularly when a non-geek or a very fresh geek gets into such a fight. Put differently - the inability to understand that an argument about viewpoints can have limits that are deeply hurtful to other people when crossed is something that is often lost on geeks. In that regard, it is easy to conclude that the geek in question was simply being sexist. But it is also true that it was just an example for a geek not understanding that he didn't win additional points by venturing into the area of gender.

The problem is that the article really doesn't do much to qualify the "because she was a girl" statement. Was that an actual quote? Was it heavily implied? Or did it just fit the narrative closely enough that it would be accepted as another example per default?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Part of the problem is that the OP is concentrating on a game targeted specifically at guys who can't relate to women.

You can't say that Angry Birds is misogynistic, nor could you say the same of Bubble Bobble, Spy Hunter, Tempest, Centipede, Strider, Tetris, Farmville, and thousands of other video games throughout the ages. One thing Facebook, iPhone and Android have FINALLY brought is "casual" gaming for the masses, by demonstrating a market that nobody could see due to the social stigma of the geeky loser gamer.

The crazy shit only comes with heavy action games, mostly FPS (but even here there are numerous exceptions, such as Left 4 Dead).

But then again you see the same thing in TV and movies; they cater to different audiences, some of whom are offended by things the other audience likes (usually what the other audience finds sexually appealing). But when it comes down to it, it's escapist media. People don't care that it's unlikely, and they most certainly don't assume that it in any way reflects real life, any more than someone playing a FPS is likely to take a gun to work and start shooting up the place.

The comic industry in America on the whole has never grown up beyond male adolescent fantasy. That's unfortunate, as there are much richer possibilities (the Japanese manga industry, for example, caters to so many segments it's mind blowing).

But make no mistake: The American comic industry is not an example of male privilege, or any unconscious attempt at keeping women down; It's a vicious cycle of social stigma against comic READERS, and the resulting lack of market for a wider audience. Maybe someday the "iPhone of comics" will come and save us.

</comment><comment><USER28> When an article about the problem is published on a gaming site, after it makes the point, it's got a couple of gratuitous chick images stuffed in it, with captions like "Bet you're paying attention to what I have to say now!"... Hmm.

I have always hated "You are male, YOU WILL LIKE THIS CHICK" flavored messages, and this _still_ bothers me. Especially in an article like this.

</comment><comment><USER29> What a load of crap. Female comic book characters are scantily clad? You don't say. But let me suggest that has not much to do with "privilege" and everything to do with the fact that teenage boys are hard-wired to appreciate this kind of thing. No, it's not a "social construct" or an effort to keep the oppressed in her place.

Where do I sign up for the privilige of having members of the opposite sex fall all over themselves doing things for me in order to get my attention?

<comment><USER16> _Where do I sign up for the privilige of having members of the opposite sex fall all over themselves doing things for me in order to get my attention?_

If you're an attractive man, then you can get gay men (esp. older gay men, _especially_ older, ugly, gay men), to do this. If you want people falling all over you, and doing things, there are ways to do that.

<comment><USER29> Well, you see I specified "opposite sex".

<comment><USER16> What you meant (i presume) is "i want people who I want to sleep with to fall over themselves to please me". What women actually get lots of time is "people I don't really want to sleep with, but want to sleep with me, falling over themselves to try to please me". As such I think the analogy of 'ugly gay guy hitting on straight guy' is apt, and similar to what a lot of women face.

<comment><USER29> It's not really the same. The thing is gay guys don't actually constitute a large percentage of the population, but straight guys do. Women get all sorts of preferential treatment without even realizing it.

I once went to Vegas with a friend and his attractive wife. We showed up without any kind of plans, and she decided she wanted to go to one of the more exclusive restaurants. I wandered over to ask if they could squeeze us in. Nope. All booked until we were gone. So I went back to the casino and broke the bad news, at which point she went to the restaurant to talk to them herself. We were eating there a few hours later.

Now, she didn't give them a big tip or promise sex or anything like that. She just asked (well, "wheedled" is probably a better word). And she knew to ask when they said no to me because that kind of thing happens all the time. Why? Well, according to her it's because men just don't know how to ask. I have another theory, which is that (straight) men are wired to do things for attractive women even when there's no chance of a relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The other day I was shocked to see this:

<http://twitpic.com/7to6eb>

An article referring to females working in technology as "tech totty".

This isn't some obscure insider tech publication, it's the cover for the industry journal for graduate recruitment.

I find it shocking that a mainstream HR journal would use such a term, and I think it's a sign that it's a wider issue than just the geek community. Society as a whole needs to become more accepting of girls in geek culture.

</comment><comment><USER31> Want to see less sexism in games? Stop buying shallow and commercialized titles and support developers who actually try to express their ideas via the medium. Seriously.

I'm not saying you should switch to a different kind of games and ignore the trends in the rest of them, but I see that a lot of people decrying "sex and violence" in various types of media are also validating the exact same works that are fundamentally based on sex and violence. That doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER16> Yes vote with your wallet. "Money lets you effect the change you want to see in the world".

But that doesn't mean you aren't allowed to give out about sexist stuff when you see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I thought there were some interesting things that he missed in his assessment of comic books, presumably because of a specific cultural lens he was looking at.

The commic book male figures he mentioned fell into two types: The deadly serious, strong, _sexy_ Batman and two not particularly sexed supervillains. In other words, while the women are all about sex, for men, only the good guys-- the superheroes-- are. This may still make a case for male privilege but it's not as clear-cut I think as he wants to think.

The second thing is that men tend to stare at boobs. This is not unique to geek culture.

This being said, I do think that it is important not to dismiss people's views because of gender. Some of the most talented programmers I have ever met were women. In fact I would take that further and say the most talented programmer I have ever worked with is a woman. I learned a heck of a lot about security audits, programming secure code, and also general algorithms and good software design, development, and engineering practices from her (including her starting IRC dialogs to call me on the carpet for mistakes on my part). To the extent women's views are ignored because of gender that's pretty bad.

But another thing I have heard from women in open source is that one of the most annoying aspects of gender in open source is to be asked over and over "so what do you think we need to do to get women involved in open source?" I have seen plenty of replies of "Do you have ANY idea how annoying it is to be constantly asked that?"

</comment><comment><USER33> One thing to note is that it only takes _one_ obnoxious person to ruin it for all the other well-informed and well-behaved people in any given room/server, because good behavior, by definition, does not draw attention to itself.

<comment><USER34> We don't _know_ he was even an obnoxious person (see also, the Actor-Observer bias <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_bias> ), we only have her boyfriend's third party account of the interaction.

Other options:

\- What she said was stupid and noobish, and he replied bluntly - rudely but not sexistly.

\- What happened was misinterpreted as sexist because the interpreter is her boyfriend and jumps to her defense easily.

\- The man in the comic book store interpreted her as being mocking and hostile and retorted in a similar fashion, when she didn't mean it that way.

\- The man in the comic book store intended his comment to be a mocking imitation of a sexist, thinking he was being witty, but was taken as being literal.

\- The shop manager agreed with the complaining customer because he was complaining and not because he was right.

\- The man in comic store is normally nice and was temporarily more sexist than he usually is for some dull and specific reason, like he saw a very-near- miss in the carpark by a female driver.

<comment><USER33> I think your comment is much stronger if you take out the last one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've had a serious interest in comics/animation for about 45 years. I've had a professional interest for about 30 years.

I can't really comment on video game culture, from a personal point of view; obviously there were no video games when I was growing up. And the only video game that ever held my interest, other than for their graphics technology, was _Myst_ ; and it hardly had any people in it at all, objectivized or otherwise.

(I _have_ been doing some work learning Blender the last few weeks. And a lot of the tutorials I've been working through have a definite gamer design aesthetic to them. I swear if I have to work through another youtube video about how to create an inappropriately under-clad-for-the-forrest elf girl, or sullen, post-apocalyptic hooker/warrior, I'm gonna barf...)

American animation has always been stuck at the grade school, pre-puberty level. So its gender problem is less objectification than it is the whole princess thingie.

However, for American comics the primary audience has pretty much always been sexually maturing males. (Historically, with a few notable exceptions, comics aimed at girls were created by men with little insight into what a female audience might like.) So it's not particularly surprising that the successful comic market caters to power fantasies, rebellion, and sexual objectification. And the fact that comics, again in the U.S., have usually been considered a third rate art form, means there's been no real incentive to conceal or domesticate the raw, naked id on display a lot of the time.

Now I actually have no real problem with that. Geeky teenagers who can't get a date, or have gender empathy issues are people too. I can relate. And a little misogyny, and misandry, can be fun at times. (There's nothing particularly uplifting and socially relevant about the Three Stooges either; but I still enjoy the occasional Nyuk and eye poke.) And certainly the over-the-top, operatic story lines would seem to require picaresque, allegorical characters, ripped from the collective psyche.

But, _damn_ , a little variety would sure be appreciated.

If I accidentally wander into a comic book store these days I'm surrounded by little else but 40-60 year old S&M archetypes, minute variations on characters created years before most of the current audience were even born. And with a bipolar range of emotions, angry dominatrix to submissive sex kitten, that would make an anime/manga tsundere blush.

I lost interest in most American mainstream comics around 1975, mainly through boredom. Now there has always been higher quality work floating around. It's there if you look for it. But Sturgeon's Law applies, with the added characteristic that the 90% case is almost indistinguishable and frozen in time; and at adolescence. Sure the technology is getting better; we've got better reproduction and the distribution system is no longer random mafioso magazine distribution. But the literary style and moral compass is provided by Frank Miller, with art direction by Eric Stanton. It's an insular culture, with little cross fertilization with the rest of society, that keeps telling the same story over and over. Now the base story and its archetypes are not without their merits, but it's certainly not the be-all, end-all of the medium. It just seems that way sometimes.

A year or so ago, when the _Scott Pilgrim_ movie out, I really enjoyed it. After seeing it I immediately ran out and bought the graphic novels. I had almost nothing in common with the characters, the music and video game references were largely lost on me, but it was so nice to have something a little different than the dull thudding of the mainstream American comics Ur- legend. It was light, fluffy, with a novel, to me, storyline. And it had engaging characters. I found it very manga-like, both in its visuals and its approach to storytelling.

Which brings us to manga.

I got re-interested in comics around 10 years ago when the Japanese manga and anime started to become easily available. Now everything bad and/or chauvinistic that you can find in U.S. comics, and by extension, game culture, you can find in spades in the Japanese product; and that's what you usually find imported and bought by the U.S. comics companies and distributors. However, if you look at the bigger picture, at the market in Japan, there's much more variety and a generally higher level of literary and visual quality than you find anywhere else in the world for visual media. I'm not really sure why this is. Partly it is because there is much less stigma in their culture directed towards comics; but that doesn't explain the problems with video game culture over here. Over there not only boys read comics, but girls do too. And young adults, and even 40 year old salarymen and OL (office ladies). They have comics aimed at insurance salesmen, golfers, pretty much any kind of genre you can conceive of. The Onion would have a hard time parodying the variety of Japanese manga.

Now Sturgeon's Law still applies, but the absolute numbers are so much greater that the absolute numbers of the good 10% is much higher than over here. And the distribution of non-juvenile, male oriented material is much healthier. The anime and video gaming industries seem to be less so, but they do seem healthier than ours. And don't many of "our" more popular games come from Japan?

One big difference in Japanese comic culture, in addition to its size, is that it is much more of a participative one. Non-professional, fan created comics, or Doujinshi, are a major "craft industry" over there. Comiket, the biggest non-professional sales and marketing convention, routinely has half a million attendees, twice a year, with _30,000+_ author circles, or groups, selling their often high quality amateur comics and visual novels. Now admittedly, the "adult oriented" Doujinshi get the most press, and a substantial percentage of the audience, but there's a lot of alternatives for those who want it. One of the alternatives is a form of erotic literature, some quite pornographic, and much of it quite good, created by women and aimed at women. I don't see _that_ kind of thing in large demographic U.S. comics. Other than the Japanese imports, of course…

Maybe the solution to the U.S. game industry's geek image has to do with smaller scale, more diverse, more specialized gaming creation companies. With games aimed at demographics who aren't 14 year old males or those who were once 14 year old males and have never had an easily available and well marketed alternative. I'm not really qualified to speculate intelligently. That market may well exist and I'm just unaware of it.

If it does exist, I may be interested.

<comment><USER36> There's a lot of diversity in North American comics, just not in their sales. All the diversity gets shoved into the back corner of the store, where only those already "in the know" would dare venture. Check out Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly and their decades-long output of original, reprint and translated material, on about as many different subjects as you can name.

<comment><USER35> I'm well familiar with the non-mainstream American comic market and literary scene; said as much in the post. But as you said, demographically it is very small, though it does poke through here and there in the mainstream awareness.

Frankly, I find more diversity in the comics/graphic novel section at Barnes and Noble than I do at the local comic book shops. And I'd say about half of that was manga and manga oriented material.

Something I didn't touch on in my previous post, which is kind of ironic considering our current venue, is the diversity found in U.S. web based comics. (The 800 pound gorilla there is Penny Arcade, which is a sort of sympathetic deconstruction of gaming culture.) But since the barrier to entry is essentially zero, there's a lot of diversity in web comics; diversity in style, themes, maturity, ... and quality.

Without really trying I've had the opportunity to meet dozens of web comic creators. Their fan bases range from dozens to thousands; with the largest rivaling mass media audiences. There is certainly much more exploration of specialized interests in this arena than in any other western, English language comics.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of commerce involved. Only a few are able to make a full time living at it. In some ways that's healthy for an art form. In others it can be very limiting. We can hope this aspect will change over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I object to the connections drawn in this article. I am a tech professional which means it is not terribly uncommon to have the nerd/geek label placed upon me, but I have never and will never have anything to do with the comics/videogame culture being described here.

<comment><USER37> That doesn't seem to be the important part of the article? I think the title (ought to) imply "Some nerds..." anyway. Some people understand privilege better than others, often due to their own circumstances. Being gay has given me an interesting insight into privileges that span sexuality and gender issues and having a close female friend who tells me about her daily experiences repeatedly shocks me into new realizations of how good I have it as a male, even if not a straight male.

<comment><USER4> That seems to be the entire focus of the article. A modified headline would have saved me my time.

An article about male privilege in the tech industry, which is what I expected seeing as this is HNs, I would have appreciated. This however meant nothing to me.

<comment><USER37> I guess I took it as more of a general intro to privilege for the lay-person or 'lay-nerd'. I mean, take the basic concepts of privilege and extend them to almost ANY females-in-tech-industry topic and you'll see it fits.

It's just like the thread a few weeks ago about women asking for raises or more competitive pay with a shocking number of HN users saying "it's their own fault for not asking for more", ignoring the research, discussions and psychology behind why women don't ask for raises (they're rejected, shunned in the workplace and often later let go).

(For the "record", I agree that there is a potential for a better discussion of male privilege that would be more appropriate for HN that would probably foster a more directed, specific discussion.)

<comment><USER4> As an outside observer, I'd say that speaking about male privilege from the context of comic book stores is like speaking about racism from the context of 19th century Alabama. It's just _so blatant_ to anybody disconnected from it that it is very hard to make comparisons to other contexts.

<comment><USER38> How fortunate for the slaves of 19th-century Alabama that the abolitionists of 19th-century New England did not think this way.

Though I'm sure plenty of people tried to convince Frederick Douglass to stop talking about Alabama all the time. It must have made for more than one uncomfortable dinner party.

Anyway, back to the point. Yes, this is a particularly blatant example of a male-privilege subculture, used in part for educational purposes. [1] You would prefer to begin a conversation about male privilege by discussing much more subtle examples? So that we can be treated to the usual two hundred pages' worth of denials that the examples are even real?

\---

[1] Though in gamer and comic culture this is not an abstruse academic exercise. And these are not small subcultures, even if they apparently aren't quite big enough to encompass everyone.

<comment><USER4> You are intentionally misrepresenting my comment. I vehemently disown any meaning you apparently see in it.

What I am saying is that if we attempted to talk about, say, allegations of racism in the YC process (a fairly popular discussion around here), it would not be effective to talk about 19th century Alabama.

 _If you did_ , everyone would just say, _"well hell, we're not lynching slaves for sport, there clearly isn't actually a problem here."_

Trying to base a discussion about sexism in the tech industry on something talking about comic book stores is similarly flawed. The tech industry _is not_ the comic book store community. Everybody outside that community _knows_ they are disgusting sexist pigs. It therefore bears little insight.

You may as well try to base the discussion on something about sexism at truckstops or stripclubs. Either would be equally effective starting points for a serious discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> [warning: slightly offensive]

I really would hope, that women in video games are in fact judged by how attractive they are. I certainly wouldn't want an obese woman superhero saving the world, just as I'm sure the gay males and the straight women wouldn't want to see a tub of lard (excuse my language) in a male, who is supposed to epitomize the superhuman virtues that we lack.

Yeah, it's shit easy to wave a finger and say "omg u guyz objectify womenz!!!" but honestly, stop for a moment and think about it. This isn't unique to nerd/geek/whatever-you-want-to-call-it culture.

This is spread through the ENTIRE western world. Why? We like beauty. We (and I speak as a straight male - feel free to adjust the context to your preference) like the way those subtle curves meld into a girl's hips. And why shouldn't we? The female body is a thing of beauty - it's delicately crafted, given form by years of grooming and attention. You'll be hard pressed, even among the straight-female population (at least the 18-25 age group), to find many people who think likewise about the male body.

When I told pg about my idea, he told me to consider how females would react; this is very much the same situation. Try dressing a video game girl up in a trench coat, with green hair, and ugly classes, and ask a girl if that's a character she'd like to play. No, it's not.

Who am I to speak? I've been in the gaming industry for a while, and I've probably passed my 10,000 hours of MMO development/management. Give most gaming girls a choice, and they will CHOOSE to dress their characters in slutty--or as they call it, "sexy cute"--clothing. Can you almost see most of their legs? Yes. Should their nipples probably slip out once in a while, if there was a realistic physics engine? Yes.

Do they care? No. Just as I would not like to play a male character whose genitals are almost falling out, females would not like to (in general) play female characters who are covered by obstructive and unattractive clothing. Why do my friends adorn themselves in dresses that barely cover their underwear when they go to clubs? I used to think it was because they wanted to attract males, and while that may sometimes be the case, many of them have loyal boyfriends and won't even dance with other guys.

Want to know the real reason, why there are so few girls in gaming? Well, I don't know - though here's one (partial) guess:

Most "nerds/geeks" are disgusting. I have a _terrible_ sense of smell, and sometimes I'm forced to recoil from my more nerdy peers. If everyone took the time to shower daily, use proper body wash, shampoo (and watch out of dandruff) and condition separately, exfoliate, and shave, I'd bet way more women will enter the gaming phenomenon.

Remember - gaming isn't always a solo affair. Much of the time, directly or indirectly, it's a social activity.

<comment><USER40> > Give most gaming girls a choice, and they will CHOOSE to dress their > characters in slutty--or as they call it, "sexy cute"--clothing.

I think there's a subtle point being lost here. Female characters designed to appeal to women look different than female characters designed to appeal to men. For example, if the characters are designed to appeal to women, you can pretty much guarantee that they will not look like they have had basketballs implanted in their chests.

Likewise, massive male characters built out of a mountain of muscle are designed primarily to appeal to male power fantasies. Relatively few women will find this especially attractive, and male characters designed to appeal to more (straight) women would be built more along the lines of Ryan Gosling or Ryan Reynolds.

<comment><USER41> "For example, if the characters are designed to appeal to women, you can pretty much guarantee that they will not look like they have had basketballs implanted in their chests."

I am not a woman.

I live in Southern California.

I see quite a large population of women here who choose to implant what appear to be basketballs in their _own_ chests.

One could debate whether or not this is due to a negative society influence or whatever other factors, but clearly there is a segment of the female population that embraces the "basketballs on the chest" look. Enough so that they choose to participate in the look personally.

So be careful speaking for an entire group, especially when it is as big of a group as "women".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Sexism isn't exclusive to nerds, and nerd hostility is about more than females. This is the golden age of the geek, his once scorned subculture has been universally vindicated across all domains. In TV, movies, music, fashion, gaming, and of course business, being a geek is now the _in_ thing. The geek's meteoric rise into the mainstream has caught the culture off guard. Suddenly, everyone _wants_ to be seen reading comics, playing games, and tinkering with computers, and now the once ostracized "true scottsman" nerd must account for the burgeoning interest of the general public in "his" world.

</comment><comment><USER43> Please just Google images for "romance novels".

<comment><USER44> .. or look at the way men are often presented in chick flicks. Rich, handsome, without any own personality whatsoever apart from magically mirroring what the female character needs at that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I agree with the commenter who points out that the culture is not dominant, and if it's that bad, it won't have much acceptance.

And all who care of the sexism in IT, geek culture, etc., should turn themselves to the core problem. Use the Japanese method: ask 5 questions "why?"

Why are geeks so sexist? They see women first of all as a sexual object.

Why they do this? Because this is what they want. They are sexually hungry young men.

Why are they sexually hungry? They don't have much dating and sex. I admit that some guys are ok in this area and just misbehave.

Why do they have issues? Because they're geeks, and geeks are uncool, not sexually attractive.

Now, start curing this issue, not telling them to behave.

If a person is depressed, up to having no appetite, it's a common complaint from the relatives that the sick person is mistreating them, doesn't want to talk, closes the door, etc. Do you think a depression can be solved by telling that person to behave? Or by telling "life goes on", "birds are tweeting, ha ha"? No. It still doesn't make that person's needs met.

Yet when it comes to social phoenomena, the treatment that is zealously promoted is to treat the outcomes, not the source.

So, I suggest to the IT industry managers: start making your nerds' needs met. I don't know how. Hire a prostitute? May be valid in some special cases. Make a dating event? Maybe. Hire a psychologist? Can be useful. Make a party with a most-women company? Maybe.

Basically, I think it's worth trying to let them have more dating and learn some social skills. (This all has to be in a very delicate way, of course.) But stop teaching people how to live. If you don't like how they behave, fire them, don't try to become a father who dislikes his son but keeps living together. (This is exactly what the article says: I hate this, but I stay!)

Solve the real issue, make their needs met.

<comment><USER46> The point of the five whys is to elicit insight and fact, not stuff you just make up.

It turns out that guys who get laid are also often sexist, so your theory is bunk. There are also plenty of guys who don't get laid who aren't assholes to women.

When you got to the notion that IT managers should create a culture of respect for women by hiring prostitutes for their most sexist male employees, you should have realized that you had approximately no idea what you were talking about.

<comment><USER45> We did hire a prostitute for a depressed friend to make him feel better. Not openly. I have no idea how it works for your company, that's why I wrote "maybe".

Your trying to be judgemental and look down on everyone around completely discredits your arguments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Comic-book culture seems to me very tangentially related to nerdism, computing, what have you. Al Capp was drawing remarkably endowed women in "Li'l Abner" a decade before ENIAC appeared. I doubt he was the first cartoonist to do so, as he very definitely wasn't the last.

</comment><comment><USER48> TL;DR version: <http://xkcd.com/385/>

</comment><comment><USER49> This site still looks blank with Javascript off.

How hard is it to provide content in 2011?

<comment><USER50> If you turn javascript on, the text appears but it is still pretty blank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Hi! It turns out that discussions about privilege are not entirely novel. If you would like to avoid making an argument that is a) missing the point, and b) common enough to be listed in a catalog, start here:

<http://derailingfordummies.com/>

Arguments of that form are already all over this thread, so you can also use this as a bingo card.

</comment><comment><USER51> Author writes "A man isn't expected to be a representative of his sex in all things; if he fails at a job, it's not going to be extrapolated that all men are unfit for that job", yet he seems to draw an awful lot of conclusions from some random guy in a comic store coming on to his girl-friend.

</comment><comment><USER52> Anyone remember Perfect Dark? There was a female protagonist that could kick some ass.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, but she was attractive and therefore a tool of the patriarchy, or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm not sure why the author of this article somehow thinks that geeks deny the existence of sexism in geek culture. The reality is that it's widely known and accepted. If the author wants to find something to rail against, he should have chosen the fact that _everybody knows, but nobody cares_.

I'm not going to defend the treatment of women in geek culture, as much of it is indefensible. but it seems that few people bring up one of the most important factors in its existence, one which has nothing at all to do with objectification. It has more to do with envy, anger, and an amazing ability to hold a grudge.

Many HN readers are from a younger generation than myself. Many of you grew up always equating geek with "cool", and have no conception of what it would be like to be treated as nearly subhuman for liking computers. Some of us, however, remember the torment, the humiliation, the violence, the scorn and the ostracism of finding science, electronics, and computers fascinating. There was, indeed, such a time. Many nerds who endured poor treatment at the hands of their peers developed deep emotional traumas that, to this day, exist to some extent or another. One of these traumas is borne of the experience of being not merely rejected, but openly mocked by girls during the most critical time in a young man's life when he is supposed to develop his sense of social status and sexuality. Frustration and humiliation is quick to turn to anger, and from anger, a deep rooted misogyny.

The result of this kind of upbringing is often a socially stunted man who, despite all his powers of logic and reason, finds it difficult to reason away the anger that he knows shouldn't be there, but is. He witnesses sexism and mistreatment of women around him, but he lacks the empathy required to say or do anything about it.

This concludes my armchair psychologist's analysis of _one possible dimension_ of a hypothesis of why many of my generation permits geek culture to allow rampant sexism.

Caveats: I have no data or training in psychology to suggest this is at all a significant factor. But I am quite familiar with the phenomenon, and I know several other nerds who experience the same thing. I mention it only because it seems the zeitgeist is that men don't even see the sexism. I posit that many do see it, but it doesn't matter to (a good portion of) them. And that a possible cause of this in geek culture specifically is latent adolescent anger at women.

<comment><USER54> "Some of us, however, remember the torment, the humiliation, the violence, the scorn and the ostracism of finding science, electronics, and computers fascinating. There was, indeed, such a time. Many nerds who endured poor treatment at the hands of their peers developed deep emotional traumas that, to this day, exist to some extent or another. One of these traumas is borne of the experience of being not merely rejected, but openly mocked by girls during the most critical time in a young man's life when he is supposed to develop his sense of social status and sexuality. Frustration and humiliation is quick to turn to anger, and from anger, a deep rooted misogyny."

The irony here is that the stigmatization of "nerds" was/is a product of males falling outside acceptable gender roles as well. Calling these males "privileged" is a way to dismiss and marginalize them.

Why is it that the majority of feminist articles I run into feel the need to dismiss the problems of "privileged" in making an argument for their perspective? They are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps it's selection bias and only controversial articles float to the top but it really seems like this is the norm.

<comment><USER40> This is a pretty good starter inventory for what feminists mean when they talk about "male privilege".

<http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/>

You may disagree with the analysis behind the list's construction, but I see little if anything on that list that obviously gets crossed off the list by virtue of being a geek.

Social justice theorists also talk about different kinds of privileges, so the idea that geeks have male privilege does not exclude the possibility that there is another form of privilege that they lack that others have. Some other types of privilege that are sometimes considered are white privilege, class privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc. You can have male privilege but not white privilege, etc.

In other words, privilege isn't simply a binary have/don't have thing such that geeks have it and women don't.

You could make an argument that there is some sort of gender-stereotypical privilege that, say, football players share in but geeks do not. Is that where you were going?

<comment><USER55> Wouldn't it be trivial to create a female privilege checklist? For example, while women may be asked to smile by random people (44), they are murdered by random people far less often than men, representing only 21% of victims. Or, while females spend more time grooming than men (27), they are much less likely to have their genitals mutilated as infants by mothers who do not like the way they look.

There can be some things in society that do not appeal to women. There are certainly things that women find appealing that most men are not at all interested in.

I always kind of thought that young geeks used comic books to escape their reality. This is just a guess, but could it be that some geeks are awkward around women because females weren't nice to them during their adolescence? Sex hormone levels peak at around age 17 for men, senior year of high school. Is it really that unexpected that men that get no positive female attention during their sexual prime don't embrace women exploring geek hobbies?

Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people. I would be willing to bet that if geeks were more accepted at an earlier age, many of the perceived gender issues would disappear.

<comment><USER56> > _they are murdered by random people far less often than men, representing > only 21% of victims._

Murder is an incredibly rare occurrence in most countries and social environments. On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims, and this is not exceptional: 5 to 10% of all women are sexually abused at some point (depends upon the country, again).

> _Perhaps the focus of all these stupid gender articles should be on > encouraging young women not to alienate a large subset of people._

Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close- mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too.

<comment><USER55> _Murder is an incredibly rare occurrence in most countries and social environments. On the other hand, women are a huge majority among rape victims, and this is not exceptional: 5 to 10% of all women are sexually abused at some point (depends upon the country, again)._

Rape makes up only 6% of violent crimes, and men are much more commonly the victim of violent crimes than women. In fact, excluding rape, as the severity of violent crimes increase, so does the probability that the victim is male.

And couldn't I also say that, while rape is relatively rare, men are over twice as likely to be the victim of severe physical domestic violence (the ratio of murder to rape and rape to severe physical domestic violence is the same). Or that perpetration rates for physical violence as a whole are significantly higher for women than men.

I personally think that these are all bogus arguments because they trivialize rape. At the same time, trivializing murder is no better than trivializing rape, unless you believe that men are expendable.

 _Perhaps the focus of people like you should be to think about your attitude, just like this article conveniently talked about? Your arrogance and close- mindedness are astounding. Oh, before you ask, I'm a white, straight male too._

Nice ad hominem.

<comment><USER56> > _Rape makes up only 6% of violent crimes, and men are much more commonly the > victim of violent crimes than women._

Most victims of violent crimes are known offenders or their relatives. An overwhelming majority of offenders are male (see the proportion of male vs female in jail).

> _Nice ad hominem._

It's _ad personam_ if you want. You go straight to the usual tactic of pretending that it's the victim fault. Take some time to imagine yourself in the situations represented before being a judgemental jerk.

See this post for a good explanation: [http://hugoboy.typepad.com/hugo_schwyzer/2004/09/guilty_unti...](http://hugoboy.typepad.com/hugo_schwyzer/2004/09/guilty_until_pr.html)

<comment><USER55> You say that I am blaming the victim, then in your link, the related story is as follows:

 _First of all, the obvious point is that women's intuition, while not entirely the stuff of myth, is not so powerful that it can automatically separate "good guys" from the bad. No woman can walk down the street and as she passes a man, know with certainty that he isn't a threat. Given the high incidence of rape and assault and harassment and other forms of mistreatment, a woman would be a fool to leave herself continually vulnerable. The old adage "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" seems to apply here. When a simple smile is so frequently misunderstood and construed as a sexual invitation, American women generally do have to operate on the assumption that men are guilty until proven innocent._

Is this really an acceptable story that somehow illustrates your point? It seems like it could trivially be rewritten into something incredibly racist. If that is the case, than isn't this actually very sexist. But really, why would anyone expect random women to smile at them?

And how are women the victim? Because some products are not designed for them, but are instead designed to appeal to teenage boys? What if I feel bad because the quizzes in Seventeen magazine do not appeal to me, and instead give teenage girls ideas about the way men should be that I disagree with. Do you think this quiz ([http://www.seventeen.com/fun/quizzes/celebrity/summer- movie-...](http://www.seventeen.com/fun/quizzes/celebrity/summer-movie- boyfriend-quiz)) is sexist?

<comment><USER56> OK, I give up. I won't convince you from across the oceans and through the internets that white patriarchy is a reality; you apparently live in the nice world where oppression of the poor, the black and women doesn't exist or at least doesn't matter, and I must live on a different planet than you. That won't be much more than a sociological experience I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Is it problematic that I'm sick of gender on HN? "Raising awareness" doesn't mean much when it essentially provokes the same inconsequential firefights. Can we just agree that men are pigs, women feel entitled, everyone's an asshole, startups need good engineers, and stop it?

All this article really shows me is that the girlfriend was correct to avoid going into a comic book store.

You cannot control culture you cannot control subcultures you cannot make people think "right."

You can be selective about which subcultures you expose you and your friends to and which you'll allow into your home.

Waxing eloquent about how we're unaware of male privilege has become preachy.

<comment><USER58> Step back and look at the big picture, if you will.

Nobody can force someone to change their mind about anything. That's entirely up to you. Most readers here are probably pretty damn smart and capable of creating incredibly detailed justifications for believing what they want to believe. So in that narrow sense, you're totally right.

But on the other hand, it's pretty curious to think that you can't influence culture with ideas. How did we end up where we are, with a constitutional republic, human and civil rights, and so on? How did we abolish slavery or give women and minorities the right to vote? If you can't change culture with the strength of your arguments, the only answer left is that it just changes on its own, as if by magic.

So if you think it's preachy, fine. Don't read about things that piss you off. It's a fine strategy that's worked for far dumber people than you. But try to recognize that without the "inconsequential firefights" there would be no social progress at all. I for one don't really care if it takes 50 years, as long as we don't kid ourselves into thinking that if we can't change everyone's mind with one single blog post there's no point to discussing it.

And above all, have a nice day.

<comment><USER57> I think what I'm proposing is that we take local control of our subculture, which Hacker News tends to do overtly on a regular basis by defining moderation; for instance, blatant political slogans are discouraged because they're likely to provoke flamewars.

This is exactly the sort of thing that's likely to provoke an unproductive flamewar in my book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> we invented an awesome playground, and girls are mad cuz they can't dominate it

<comment><USER60> I know it's Hacker News, but there's really only one response to this. Rest assured I'd say it to your face:

You're an idiot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> We should stop conflating the term 'geek' with the term 'nerd'. I think most people familiar with the cultures in question would agree that there is an increasingly clear difference between the two (although membership in the two is certainly correlated.)

<comment><USER62> I don't think there's a concrete, universally accepted difference. Pretty much everyone has their own definition of "geek" and "nerd," and how much they overlap, and most of those definitions are mutually incompatible.

Also, <http://xkcd.com/747/>

<comment><USER61> People can have different, mutually incompatible definitions of the two, that's fine. All I'm saying is that very few people who have any opinion on the subject think the two refer to the same set of values and behaviors.</comment></comment></comment>


In Defense Of The PhD - <AUTHOR> http://soundandcomplete.com/2011/01/09/in-defense-of-the-phd/ <comment><USER3> I'll defend the PhD for different reasons.

It educates you further. You acquire knowledge you don't get elsewhere. You get a range of skills and learning opportunities you don't get elsewhere - some of which are very useful when trying to discover new human knowledge. Research labs in universities do - and have traditionally - discovered much new human knowledge; they are good at it.

Using earnings as the sole measure of the worth of a PhD - while maybe what you'd expect The Economist to do - is a little simplistic.

If getting an undergrad CS degree didn't lead to higher lifetime earnings than, say, doing data entry, would you do data entry?

I wouldn't. I put a premium on acquiring knowledge, and doing work I consider interesting.

Research is very interesting work. Having a research degree can lead to more interesting jobs. Like maybe working on the algorithm design team, as opposed to the web development team. A lot of corporations do have labs doing research activities, where people with PhDs work. This should be factored in to any analysis.

Of course, if you view a PhD purely as training for academic positions, then clearly something is broken, because there are very few academic positions.

But if you see the PhD as an educational experience which broadens knowledge, and teaches the skills necessary to break new ground in hard technical problems, that's a different story.

<comment><USER4> My dad has worked at a grocery store for almost 33 years, and he's 50 years old. He always made good money (especially for not having a degree), and did a good job, but I never felt like he actually liked his job, especially with all the crap he has to go through from both employees and bosses. He's been salary for a long time, and has worked probably an average of 60+ hours a week for the past 12 years.

This always had a profound effect on me. A long time ago I decided that I would always strive to have a job that I truly liked, something that payed enough but didn't suck the life out of me. I'm in a job that I love now with only a Bachelors, but I kind of got stupid lucky with it. A PhD is really the best ways to secure a job that you'll likely love. You may get paid lower than you'd expect for someone with your skills, but money isn't everything.

I don't know anyone who has gone to school for a PhD just to get a better paying job when they get out.

<comment><USER5> "I don't know anyone who has gone to school for a PhD just to get a better paying job when they get out."

Now you know of one.

<comment><USER4> What are you going to school for?

PhDs open up a lot of jobs that you wouldn't be able to get in with only a Masters, but they don't typically pay that much more (most my background is with Physicists)

I do know lots of people who go for a Masters in order to make more money.

<comment><USER5> "What are you going to school for?"

I got a Ph.D. in engineering; the program was in essentially the mathematics of operations research. So, the emphasis was on optimization and stochastic processes. The work was fully careful mathematically, especially in measure theory. My dissertation research was on stochastic optimal control (yup, with careful attention even to 'measurable selection').

"PhDs open up a lot of jobs that you wouldn't be able to get in with only a Masters, but they don't typically pay that much more (most my background is with Physicists)"

Eventually I concluded that for a 'job', a Ph.D. was from nearly useless down to less good than a serious felony conviction. The main reason is that for a "job", the people hiring are still almost entirely stuck in the 'job hierarchy' model of 120 years ago on the factory floor where the supervisor was supposed to be older and know more than the subordinate, and the subordinate was supposed to be there mostly to apply labor to the ideas of the supervisor. So, since there are nearly no supervisors with Ph.D. degrees, the situation is as I described.

I was misled: My early career was around DC on mostly military problems. There a technical Ph.D. would have helped a lot. During that work, at times I wanted to know more about optimization and stochastic processes, so I selected such a Ph.D. program.

But then I drifted away from such DC-DoD work. Dumb move.

I never had even for a milli, micro, nano second any desire for an academic job.

But in the US now, technical "jobs" are essentially a joke. So, major US employers have often been nailed due to lack of ability to change. So, 'globalization' nailed GE and Detroit, both of which at one time tried to do highly technical work. IBM and AT&T were nailed by changes in microelectronics. Of these four, in my career at times I interviewed at all of them and worked for two of them -- NOT a good situation.

Broadly, the chances that a person can, in their 20s, get a technical 'job' in a company and then hold that job until retirement are next to zilch.

So, somewhere between the 20s and retirement, the technical person will be out of work. Then they can send a few thousand resume copies, get help from all their friends, etc. and still be out of work.

They will discover the crucial importance of geographical barrier to entry and conclude that an electrician's license is a MUCH better foundation for a good career than a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. The Ph.D. of 35 who gets fired from a technical job in some big company can conclude that, literally, in his neighborhood, while he still had his house, the guy cutting grass who started 15 years earlier and now with, maybe 10 employees actually has a much better career. E.g., the grass guy has customers from the broad economy of people who have grass; the grass will keep growing; grass mowing just cannot be 'outsourced' and has a terrific geographic barrier to entry; do well in a radius of 50 miles and can do well. Just mowing grass. Shrubbery, etc.? Maybe still better. Landscape architecture? Maybe still better. Also own a nursery and be 'vertically integrated'? Maybe still better.

I mowed grass, etc. as a teenager and had more happy customers than I could serve. I actually had an opportunity, basically better than a Ph.D., but didn't know enough about the economy to see it. I was also good at repairing cars, e.g., clutches, radiators. That was another good opportunity I didn't appreciate.

Net, in the US, a technical 'job' is a fool's errand, and anyone needs something MUCH better.

Broadly there are good examples of what to do on Main Street in each village, town, and city all across the US.

So, net, one of the main, good career directions is just to be a sole proprietor. So, can be an electrician, plumber, landscape architect or run a driveway paving company, a roofing company, a dry cleaning service, a few pizza carryout places, etc. Just look on Main Street.

Basically trying to have a career from a 'job' just sucks and is usually less good than just being a Main Street sole proprietor. Being a successful Main Street sole proprietor is not always easy, it's just that the odds are that it's a much better direction than being a technical 'employee'.

Note: The employee just can essentially never have a better job than the one provided by their supervisor. Unless the supervisor is doing fantastically well, the employee is on a long walk on a short pier. E.g., look at a TV biography (go to Clicker and follow biographies) of Carnegie: Early on he was an assistant to a big shot in the Pennsylvania Railroad when rails were likely having better growth than the Internet now. So, he had a good start. He accumulated some cash, made an investment in a competitor of the Pullman railroad sleeping car company, did well enough to buy a long yacht, and then just kept making investments, especially in steel. He finally sold the steel to Morgan who took it public and cleaned up big time. The key was for a while he had a really GOOD 'job', but these are rare.

Assuming want to be a sole proprietor, besides a geographical barrier to entry, so common on Main Street, with a Ph.D. and some targeted research can also get an advantage and a technological (intellectual property, 'secret sauce') barrier to entry. So, do that. So, such applied math research "Isn't just for peer-reviewed journals anymore.".

So, start a Web 2.0 company, derive some applied math, use it as the crucial, core, intellectual property 'secret sauce' to give results a few hundred million people will like a lot and can't get elsewhere, use info on the users to do ad targeting, and get revenue.

Notice the Canadian romantic matchmaking Web 2.0 company Plenty of Fish: One guy, two old Dell servers, ads just via Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. Nice sole proprietorship, maybe worth $1 billion. Nice pay for writing a little routine software.

An advantage is, while some pizza guy is tossing these flexible disks in the air one at a time, a Web 2.0 guy can have some $500 servers sitting there pumping out dozens of Web pages and ads per second.

Uh,

3600 * 24 * 365 = 31,536,000

A few dozen ads per second from each of a dozen or so servers, with a little targeting, and multiply it out.

If the Web site is really popular, then get a nice house, car, yacht, and IRA brokerage account in a big hurry. Else, use the same Web site and software 'skills' to do another Web 2.0 site.

Here the Ph.D. can be crucial, a huge advantage.

But, net, in the US now, a technical 'job' is a really dumb career direction. Instead, it is just CRUCIAL to OWN the enterprise that are going to count on to keep paying the bills for several decades.

Employers: You're screwed; no one with any good sense will work for you without one heck of a salary, golden parachute, or founder's stock.

Technical guy: Learn programming, data base, system and network management and administration, Web site development, etc. and go for it.

From all I can see, for likely all the rest of this century, the opportunity is from (1) processors with many cores for less than $200 per processor, (2) optical fibers for 1 Gbps or so to/from each IP address, (3) from (1) and (2), wide, deep, rapidly flowing oceans of data, (4) software to process that data and deliver valuable results, and (5) some original math to make the processing more powerful. So, it's 'automation', third millennium style.

Automate what? As much as possible of all the work there is to be done. Why? Because we already know what people want in the famous one word answer, "More". So, use (1)-(5) to deliver more for less cost -- that's called 'productivity' and the key to economic progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As it happens, I'm defending my dissertation tomorrow (neuroscience, U.S.) and this post pretty well sums up my sentiment.

I particularly agree with the ending:

        Oh you're saying I'm a dreamer, and that simply never
        happens? Well what about those thousands of internet
        start-up companies? They waste their time as well, trying
        to become another Facebook or another Google. Yet they
        still do it, because it's their dream to pursue.

        And so is academic career ours.

I think there are two modes one can do research in: one is a conservative, do- what-you're-told kind of incrementalism; another is higher risk, swing-for- the-fences, and entrepreneurial. I think there is a similarity between doing research in the latter mode and a technology startup, which is why I got sucked into Hacker News when it was still called Startup News. Nearly everybody on it was a _maker_ , swinging for the fences. I felt a lot of affinity for the attitude if not the methods.

Anyway, enough HN procrastination, I need to practice my talk!

<comment><USER7> Break a leg! I defended mine last month, and let me tell you- the sense of relief afterwards is amazing.

<comment><USER6> Thanks very much for the well wishes you guys. I am _very much_ looking forward to that sense of relief. In the coming week or two I will probably post a 'Show HN' of my project (wiring diagrams of neuronal connectivity).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm happy I'm currently in the middle of my PhD, but this article makes a bunch of errors. It generally strikes me as the naive impression that undergrad have of grad school until they spend some time talking to post-doc and professors. I'll just identify a couple of obvious ones.

1\. "We all read the PhD Comics and we all hear about how many hours of coursework or admin-duties a typical US grad student has. I don't know how does it look like in other countries, but in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium this is definitely not the case. "

The Economist article doesn't say anything about there being too much non- research work. It says there are _very_ long hours, and part of it is non- research. The OP has simply misinterpreted the Economist article. I don't know any grad students in the US who spend more than 25% time on teaching, and the OP lists this maximum as some sort of great aspect of the Nordic system.

2\. "Apart from all that, a little bit of teaching looks good in your CV, especially if you want to apply for post-doc or other academic positions after finishing a PhD."

For most grad students, than this is just plain wrong. No one cares how good of a teacher you are ( _especially_ not for post-doc positions) unless your end goal is a teaching position at a small liberal arts college. But most most grad student's end goals are either research positions or industry.

<comment><USER9> I don't know where you're getting 2 from. To throw one anecdote out there, my advisor, who has experience with hiring committees, has told me that for academic positions, they're looking for a wide range of things - <USER2> demonstrated teaching ability. And for professors (even at a research facility), poor student reviews of classes you've taught can get in the way of being awarded tenure.

<comment><USER8> > I don't know where you're getting 2 from.

I'm in my 4th year of grad school, and I tend to pick the brains of professors and post-docs a lot. I have never _once_ heard them (a) recommend that I get more TA experience than is strictly required ("get on a fellowship or a grant as fast as you can so you can completely absorb yourself in research"), or (b) mention that a professor was granted/denied tenure for anything besides research.

Don't get me wrong, departments pay a lot of lip service to this stuff. And yes, at many places the professors have to write a (brief) essay explaining how incredible they are at inspiring young students. But as a determining factor in advancement at research universities, my strong impression is that it's practically insignificant.

You'll probably think that Sean Carroll speaks with more authority than me, though. Here is how he puts it:

"When was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer 'never,' the question itself is somewhat laughable."

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/the- purpose-of-harvard-is-not-to-educate-people/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh please, guy says linked articles are crap because they are only about US and UK and there is still rest of the world where the situation looks different. But he himself says only about Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands which are at the very top of the richest countries in the world list (he mentions also Slovakia which apparently has good PhD programs funding) and excludes poorer European countries such as Poland and Ukraine because they are too poor. I am sorry, but what kind of argumentation is this? Article is bad because it is only about US and UK but his blog entry is OK even though he compares only three richest countries in the world?

</comment><comment><USER11> I am also doing a PhD in Norway, but in the humanities (ABD now). I agree with a lot of what is said here: PhD students in Europe, and especially in places like the Netherlands and Scandinavia, have it unbelievably good (not that you'd believe it if you followed the debate here, with "PhD oversupply" and "temporary contract abuse" a prominent topic; to be fair, most graduates from my program have found academic jobs both in Norway and elsewhere, though there is a tendency for people who have spent over ten years in temporary positions to call it quits). However, places like the Netherlands and Scandinavia, even if they punch above their weight in many fields, are not too big in the grand scheme of things. Again, I don't know that the situation is like in the hard sciences or in CS, but certainly in my field the fact that Europe has well- funded PhD programs and jobs does not help the pretty dire (as far as I can see) situation in the US. There are relatively few people who go on to positions in Europe after US grad school, and even fewer the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER12> The comparison between startups and PhDs is not esp. appropriate. The entrepreneur often is willing to assume greater risk for greater pecuniary reward, whereas the PhD often is not assuming any greater risk but willing to accept likely lesser pay to do what he loves.

Which isn't to say that there is a class of entrepreneurs that start companies simply because they love starting companies, but that this isn't unique to entrepreneurs (e.g. there are lawyers who love doing lawyerly things).

<comment><USER7> I agree that it's not a perfect comparison, but there are undoubtably similarities. In both cases, you're working mostly on your own, on a project that you have to define and that is entirely dependent on your personal level of self-motivation. One of the biggest challenges to running a startup seems to be correctly defining the problem on which to work, and the single biggest hurdle to finishing a PhD is coming up with your dissertation topic.

<comment><USER13> I have long thought like this. I think the key similarity isn't in the particulars, it's that both are self driven, creative works, and in most cases, no one else will care what you're doing until you succeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe that most of the articles that been posted to HN that are negative in regards to doing a PhD are referring more to the liberal arts types of degrees, and the author here points out some reasons that these people are going on to do PhDs in the first place.

Sure, getting a tenure track professorship in English or the Humanities would be great for a lot of these people, but isn't doing a PhD better than the alternates that most of them have available? I would rather pursue a PhD than go do phone marketing, myself.

</comment><comment><USER15> While I think this article makes some decent points, I have to say that in all the recent discussion around the value of a phd and whether or not the system is broken the only really strong defenders of the way things are have been those who are currently pursuing a PhD.

As someone who has been able to swing a faculty position without one (wanting to remain anonymous I'm not going to say what exactly is the case, but I will say it's definitely not because I'm particularly clever). It saddens me to see friends who were brilliant PhD students at very good schools, doing post doc work at mediocre schools that don't even do research in their area of interest (and these are some people in the math and sciences). Almost none of the people I know with PhD work in the humanities are doing anything even close to what they studied.

I don't think the people who are pursuing PhDs are necessarily the ones who are broken, but there is definitely a problem with the system, and I don't think most phd student will realize it until they've graduated.

</comment><comment><USER16> I completely agree with this. I've just gotten my PhD, and could have gotten some commercial job with a higher paying salary. Yet I've chosen to stay in academia, doing something I love, travelling all over the world and having fun doing it.

I should also note that, at least in the Netherlands, young researchers will be on a temporary contract for quite some time. Circumstances (laws, funds, budget cuts, etc.) are against us and unfortunately create a very bad situation for us.

<comment><USER17> Same here. I recently started a PhD after working in consulting for a few years. It's less money, but I'm much happier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18>
        Normal people don't study philosophy, and if they're into computer science,
        they don't care whether P!=NP — they just learn Java, Objective-C, Python or
        whatever else they find useful for becoming a successful software engineer.

I resent that. Most programmers I've met find theoretical CS interesting, and learn things simply for the intellectual value of it. They just want to build things people use.

<comment><USER19> My experience is almost exactly the opposite. Most programmers care little to nothing about any sort of CS or theory. I've met successful programmers with years of experience who'd never even heard of even the simplest CS concepts like linked lists. How their language of choice actually works below the surface is a complete black box to them, and they're quite happy to keep it that way.

If you meet a programmer who cares in any way about theory, then they are with all likelihood comfortably in the top 50th percentile and probably also in the top 25th.

<comment><USER20> I think what you're saying can easily be extrapolated to any vocation...

There are people who are passionate about what they do, and then there vastly more people who are doing it simply because it's a job.

<comment><USER19> Exactly. My point was that programming isn't too different than most other fields in this respect. This is easy to forget if the only other programmers you actually meet are top silicon valley hotshots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To add to the discussion, the ability that the PhD gave me was the confidence to "roll my sleeves up" and delve into the muck to try and figure out how to get something working, or figure out why something is not working.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Normal people don't study philosophy

Well, I don't want to sound like a douche or anything, but they really do know how to pick their words, don't they? Following the same logic only Plato would qualify as a true philosopher (he's the evil mind behind all this "academia" concept anyway), while Democritus, one of the few philosophers who actually knew what he was saying, would just be seen as an amateur.

</comment><comment><USER23> After weeks of PhD bashing here is one article which successfully defends it against a lot of arguments against a PhD.

I especially like the comparison of an academic career with the startup track.

<comment><USER24> While it is true, that BENELUX and Norway have more budget for research as it stands, opposed to say the cutbacks in the UK, but I would still be interested in the blog entry _after_ he has _finished_ (the last small piece is more than 90% effort). It is just like mountain climbing: you can only state that you made it if you make it home. Everest is littered with - I guess happy - bodies.

btw .no, .be, .nl are among the richest in Europe (petrol, gas, trade, EU admin. overhead etc).

<comment><USER16> Universities in the Netherlands are getting hit by budget cuts pretty severely as well. This means that permanent contracts are getting harder and harder to come by in academia.

Three main reasons for this in the Netherlands: * A permanent employee of a university is considered a civil servant, which means that it is impossible to fire him. * A temporary employee is "protected" by law; after three consecutive temporary contracts, the next contract is by law a permanent one. * Most funds at the university come from limited time projects.

This means that universities are very hesitant to hire people on a permanent contract and labour protection laws sort of turn against you.

<comment><USER11> Wow. In Norway, there is a similar problem with the "four-year" rule, which means it becomes very hard to fire someone who has worked for an employer for over four years. Now the PhD of course also takes four years, and PhD students are employees. In practice, almost no-one claims the four-year rule following, say, the PhD and a short-term research-assistant engagement (there was a recent case where two people in Oslo did something similar, and the university settled out of court, hiring them permanently, but it was quite unprecedented), but this means that universities much prefer the fixed-term contracts to be shorter than that, again reinforcing the glut of temporary positions; but if we had the three-contract rule, quite a few people I know would have been permanently hired already.

<comment><USER16> The PhD contract is just a single contract, and a position only becomes permanent after a third contract in a number of years I think.

Once you get your PhD, and you're rehired at the university, you get a different position, starting the counter from 0 again.

But no, if Norway had the three contract rule as I described, the people you know would have been fired already.

<comment><USER11> > the people you know would have been fired already.

I guess you're right, though who knows what those pesky unions might have said.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>