[Gendergap] Gendergap Digest, Vol 9, Issue 5

[Nathan]

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Maggie <rockerrepro at gmail.com> wrote:

>snip
>
> Second, she referred to women as girls. Which, as far as I know with any
> woman, is incredibly insulting and a way of one-upping someone. I'll assume
> you are a man because your name is Rupert. I'm sure you know if another man
> called you a boy it would be emasculating. It is the same for women. It's
> also something women have battled with for years--people still call grown
> women girls, no matter how much we fight it.
>
>snip
>
> Many of the people who spend the most
> time there are those who have little to do with their time. Those who are
> busy putting flat-out porn on the site are not of the reasonable sort.
>snip
> --Maggie
>

I've always heard that one of the things that drives many people, not
just women, away from Wikipedia is the sometimes aggressive and angry
tone of discussion. I've heard a lot of people complain, even on this
list, that people make assumptions about them based on their gender,
or based on short comments misunderstood, etc. When the level of
discourse really starts to degenerate (like to accusations of lying,
or remarks like "get a fucking life"), it's an opportunity to take a
step back and get some good perspective on what the problem is and
where it comes from.  Whatever causes it on-wiki, we obviously haven't
escaped it here.

Nathan

P.S.: I often hear both men and women describe others as "boys" or
"girls" without meaning anything diminutive or emasculating, etc.
Maybe it's a regional thing; inferring an insult from it, especially
from someone from another continent raised with a different language,
is probably reading too much into it. (On the other hand, people on
this list have a habit of using "males" to refer to men and "women" to
refer to women. Flip side of the same coin, perhaps?).