Gender and the LÖVE community (A Community-Culture Problem)

[Plu]

Nevermind. If you don't understand the concept of a hypothetical situation, you'll never get it.

[Azhukar]

Nevermind. If you don't understand the concept of a hypothetical situation, you'll never get it.

I understand the concept, I don't see how such an example is relevant. Of course it's not good that you are discriminated against in certain situations. What I'm asking is what is preventing women to become good at programming, that is also not preventing men to do the same?

[Plu]

I tried to explain that, but you either don't get it or don't want to get it. I'm sorry, there's nothing more I can say.

edit You'll be waiting a long time because I've nothing more to say to you.

[Azhukar]

I tried to explain that, but you either don't get it or don't want to get it. I'm sorry, there's nothing more I can say.

I'll wait until you're able to articulate your argument.

[JovialFeline]

First of all: "male" and "female" are adjectives, not nouns, when talking about humans. Talk about "a male" and "a female", you verbally take away people's agency (their free will). Speak of "men" and "women" instead.

If you produce sperm, I call you a male.
If you produce eggs, I call you a female.
If you're a male human, I call you a man.
If you're a female human, I call you a woman.

I'm curious which country you attended school in, since you seem confused about basic sexual education.

Part of what Robin may be trying to say is there's a number of physiological anomalies and such that make an assignment of gender using that criteria a pain. (Though more than that, there's humans themselves.)

From that view, it might be more useful to speak of people as the gender they express. That is, most people would agree to call a person with female characteristics born with XY sex chromosomes or who otherwise does not produce eggs as female, despite not fulfilling your above criteria.

[Azhukar]

Part of what Robin may be trying to say is there's a number of physiological anomalies and such that make an assignment of gender using that criteria a pain. (Though more than that, there's humans themselves.)

It's called being infertile.

[notencore]

Robin not to undermine your argument or anything but the Feminists are using the terms male and female and they seem to be okay with it.

[Inny]

Oh boy, powder-keg thread. Lets throw a few sparks in.

I want to start with a strawman question which is kind of off-topic but helps demonstrate a point. I've seen this asked in several forms, especially on Reddit, "Why are there still Gay people if they can't have children?" The question is ridiculous because it stems from false assumptions, ignorance of basic hereditary science, and baked-in institutional intolerance. So, lets use this. (incidentally, the answers are 1. gay people do have children, 2. gay is a high level trait that emerges from different combination of genetic factors, and 3. because even if there was a low-level gay gene then 50% of humans would carry the recessive gene)

So, lets now talk about Gender and Culture Problems in light of these regressive memes that need breaking.

1. Gender Roles are cultural. Gender is biological. It's important to distinguish the two, because everything that we consider to me masculine and feminine are Human-Assigned categorizations of our observations of biology. Things that we assume to be masculine traits, like muscles, are just as easily acquired by women who enter a rigorous exercise program, and feminine traits can be taken on by a regimen of estrogen hormones. Whether you think it's right or moral for such things to exist constitutes your belief system, which is a Cultural artifact. However in biological systems that run on inertia and have trillions of parts, probabilities and statistics explain where things may go. So where as your church of synagogue or mosque says there are only Men and Women, nature can throw its hands up and not know what to do with a single incorrectly transcribed codon in the middle of 50-million protein base-pairs following a y-chromosome's replication.

2. Some people share belief systems, and some people don't. This requires a strong underscoring: people disagree, and people disagree with you. And further more, this space we talk in is a civil one. The owners of love2d.org put this here for intelligent people to have cultural, technological, and artistic discussions. So, that urge with win the fight: it's wrong. People who are in charge of the storage of your account and your words can decide to stop paying for the storage and bandwidth if they don't like doing it anymore. So, people disagree with your beliefs, and your beliefs on Gender Roles, and we can debate them, but we can't fight to win.

3. Some people consider biology to be accidental. Now, I don't mean like a traffic-collision accidental, but I mean accidental as in it happened based on chance instead of any kind of intention by the person concerned. The fact that you're a male was a thing that happened beyond your control. You never made the conscious choice for your biology to be one of a male body. Even if a centrifuge and only Y-sperm were involved in your mom's impregnation, that wasn't your choice, it was her's. Since Biology is such a difficult thing to control, many people will decide to control their lives in other ways. This is where we get into redefining the Gender Roles. Simply put, a biological occurrence shouldn't forcefully define the type of life a person lives, especially when our lives are lived in interaction with each other. People desire to be treated fairly based on merits, not treated unfairly based on biology.

Alright. so what?

So. what are people's merits? How do you find people's merits? How does the Meritocracy work? Here's where we have a Gordian's Knot in the need of cutting. How can you treat a person according to their merits if you never allow the person to demonstrate their merits? This is where the traditional Gender Roles have been a disservice to humanity. They probably helped a lot when we had some pretty low numbers and suffered the possibility of extinction whenever a good tornado hit our tribes, but we've got 7 billion humans on earth. When you slap a person with a Gender Role at the start of the interaction, then you're imposing another accidental situation on them, of which they have no desire to be part of. You drive them out before they even enter.

So, we need tolerance. Library names is another thread's discussion, but if you're a jerk and name your library stupid, nobody will use it. Problem solved. But if you fill these boards with intolerance, people won't even visit the site.

Please reconsider how you treat people, for your own good and the good of the community.

[Lövely]

People like Robin give the impression that women only care about development to the extent that they can bitch about how few women there are in development. Please come back when have written your own libraries. You are free to name them however you like, including any feminist-queer-trans sexual activity you can imagine.

[Karai17]

While I commend Robin for actually caring about the health and diversity of this community, I feel like this white-knighting is severely misguided. Sure, we don't have a 50/50 split of men and women in the community, but neither does any place in the entire tech industry. That's just the way it is. If you want to fix it, you need to look at where the actual "problem" lies, assuming there even is a problem. Maybe young girls feel pressured to care about X thing instead of technology, maybe their parents enforce gender stereotypes, or maybe women just don't really like programming. In any of those cases, it isn't the fault of this community, nor is it the innuendo in some of the popular third party libraries that are "driving away" women. The fact of the matter is, women generally don't follow the programming path. And of those who do, they don't seem to come across LOVE.

You wanna fix the problem? Volunteer to teach young girls to program at a local school or youth group. Complaining on the forums about how the community is too male dominant is not going to do a damn thing.

And don't even get me STARTED on that gender nonsense. Words like "male" and "female" serve a purpose, and anyone who thinks they are repressive titles that force a person into a gender role is simply an ignorant fool. People identify with gender roles, whether they are biological, or transgendered. If they didn't, then there wouldn't BE transgendered people, as there would be no reason to feel out of place. If you want to perpetuate that garbage, then take it to the circle jerk on tumblr.

Finally, can we PLEASE stop having this "conversation" every month or two? These posts do nothing more than piss everyone off. No one is changing their library names, no one is excluding women, and no one cares about this nonsense. Enough already.