If you want the URL you are going to have to find the original thread.

Comments:

by yyyyyyyy 4 days ago · link · save · ! That's pretty much it. However, one should be very careful about saying things like "white male nerds need to..." as it's rarely so simple. IMHO it's best to avoid defining a group and suggesting what they ought to do, to the extent that it's possible. Better to say that Scott Aaronson is wrong, and why. you are muted here

by xxxxxxxxxx 4 days ago · link · save · ! I'm very comfortable generalizing about white men, subgroup nerds or otherwise

I just want to note how absolutely scummy this is. Perhaps it is a joke, and if it is I am sorry for not understanding it, but the impression I get here is "I don't give a shit about generalizing these people, and will laugh in your face when you say I should not".

That attitude is absolute bullshit no matter what angle you come at it from. I don't care if people will use "not all men" to derail discussions. I do not care if you are sick of seeing people post things like what you are responding to.

Generalization of a group in a way though which you are looking at them all in a negative light is never ok. It leads to nowhere that is good, and I honestly think that the result of those attitudes and their negative effects are very prevalent and easy to be seen in the person posting them.

I can understand the push-back against the use of "not all men" when it is seen as an attempt to derail. However, if that is what you are against, then be against that, not for the generalization of groups in the exact same fashion you pretend to be standing against.

Article

I really love this whole conversation that came out of this article. It was amazing to read initially and awesome to see the counterpoints, especially when they were discussed in such a calm and decent manner in the original threads.

Firstly, I need to re-read the original post here, just to make sure I am clear on things and what is being said.

Firstly, you have to look at the comment's whole beginnings.

You write about tech conferences in which the men engage in “old-fashioned ass-grabbery.” You add: “some of the gropiest, most misogynistic guys I’ve met have been of the shy and nerdy persuasion … In fact I think a shy/nerdy-normed world would be a significantly worse world for women.”

But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes—is completely alien to your way of seeing things.

I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison.

I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

All this time, I faced constant reminders that the males who didn’t spend months reading and reflecting about feminism and their own shortcomings—even the ones who went to the opposite extreme, who engaged in what you called “good old-fashioned ass-grabbery”—actually had success that way. The same girls who I was terrified would pepper-spray me and call the police if I looked in their direction, often responded to the crudest advances of the most Neanderthal of men by accepting those advances. Yet it was I, the nerd, and not the Neanderthals, who needed to check his privilege and examine his hidden entitlement!

Now, up to this point there is a single recurring theme in this post. Not that men have it worse than women. Not that being a male nerd is a horrible experience.

What the post seems to be saying up to this point is that it is the "nerds" who are being told/effected the most by all this talk of "ass grabbery". You can see where, in media, it is more often than not the neckbeard that is the creep, the stalker, the guy who can't get a girl and obsesses over them.

What this person is saying is two things. Firstly, that it isn't the steriotypical nerds that are doing the ass grabbing in conferences. Secondly, he is saying that the things he saw in feminism/feminist teachings were actively harmful to his view and ability to speak to/communicate with women in a productive way. He is saying that the huge focus that exists in saying how entitled, sexist, etc, nerds are, is doing nothing but harming a group of people.

I really hope I am saying this clearly. The article seems to take a stance as if this post is attempting to say "nerds have it worse than women", which I honestly don't think it is.

Article Quote

“Much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my 'male privilege' — my privilege! — is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience . . . I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me 'privileged' — that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes — is completely alien to your way of seeing things. I spent my formative years — basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s — feeling not 'entitled', not 'privileged', but terrified.”

I know them feels, Scott.

As a child and a teenager, I was shy, and nerdy, and had crippling anxiety. I was very clever and desperate for a boyfriend or, failing that, a fuck. I would have done anything for one of the boys I fancied to see me not as a sad little boffin freak but as a desirable creature, just for a second. I hated myself and had suicidal thoughts. I was extremely lonely, and felt ugly and unloveable. Eventually I developed severe anorexia and nearly died.

Like Aaronson, I was terrified of making my desires known- to anyone. I was not aware of any of my (substantial) privilege for one second - I was in hell, for goodness' sake, and 14 to boot. Unlike Aaronson, I was also female, so when I tried to pull myself out of that hell into a life of the mind, I found sexism standing in my way. I am still punished every day by men who believe that I do not deserve my work as a writer and scholar. Some escape it's turned out to be.

This whole section about how "women who were outcasts had it bad too" is pointless in the context of what the original post meant. The original wasn't trying to downplay what women go through, or state that nerds have it worse. Secondly, the original isn't talking about how feminism attacks those who say women can't be true nerds. I am absolutely sure the OP agrees entirely that those nerds who do such things are in the wrong, and would very much be in line with the writer of this article on that subject.

Feminism, however, is not to blame for making life hell for "shy, nerdy men".

OP is not stating this. OP himself says that he holds/attempts to hold onto "feminist views". He isn't attacking feminism as a whole at all.

Patriarchy is to blame for that.

I just have to ask why, in that case. Why are the things that OP stated in the original post not done by those who claim to be feminists, but instead by "The Patriarchy".

I assume the writer here is talking about how we view men as being supposed to chase women and if they can't do so they are failures? Or perhaps how nerds are shamed for not being manly, and are labeled creeps for that reason?

I see the OP saying how, in fear of being called a creep, a freak, etc, for going after women, he seeked out feminism and saw where it only confirmed those fears where it spoke so much about being cautious about approaching women, about constantly ensuring consent, etc. He isn't saying that feminism is trying to push anyone down here, either, and I think there is clarification later.

Also, this is an entire side-note. Fuck this website (the on nerd entitlement one) for it's autoplaying ads that I cannot locate and are playing in the background every twenty seconds. I'm going to have to close and re-open it when I want to come back to what it is saying.

It is a real shame that Aaronson picked up Andrea Dworkin rather than any of the many feminist theorists and writers who manage to combine raw rage with refusal to resort to sexual shame as an instructive tool. Weaponised shame - male, female or other - has no place in any feminism I subscribe to.

I would much prefer to see a post that contains a self-examination and explanation of why feminsim does not weaponize shame rather than simply stating "Feminism as I see it does not cross these lines."

Feminism is a movement, it has it's more popular aspects and it's more negative ones. If you are going to ignore the more negative ones or are unwilling to explain why they do not exist, then the movement will never improve or change, only stagnate. So far as I am aware, what the OP describes within feminism is a legitimate "Branch" that is fairly commonly accepted.

I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.

This is the most important criticism that OP brings to the table. This is what OP does not like about feminism. This is not something that is discussed or gone over in this so-called rebuttal which is literally titled "on nerd entitlement".

No, there was no such revelation. All that happened was that I got older, and after years of hard work, I achieved some success in science, and that success boosted my self-confidence (at least now I had something worth living for), and the newfound confidence, besides making me more attractive, also made me able to (for example) ask a woman out, despite not being totally certain that my doing so would pass muster with a committee of radfems chaired by Andrea Dworkin—a prospect that was previously unthinkable to me.

OP seems to be making the statement that feminism needs to recognize the collateral damage of the actions detailed above. To take care to avoid having men feel scared to speak to women, scared to be around women, scared to look at women the wrong way, scared to speak to women the wrong way.

I disagree with this next part heavily.

Now, the whole time I was struggling with this, I was also fighting a second battle: to maintain the liberal, enlightened, feminist ideals that I had held since childhood, against a powerful current pulling me away from them. I reminded myself, every day, that no, there’s no conspiracy to make the world a hell for shy male nerds. There are only individual women and men trying to play the cards they’re dealt, and the confluence of their interests sometimes leads to crappy outcomes. No woman “owes” male nerds anything; no woman deserves blame if she prefers the Neanderthals; everyone’s free choice demands respect.

That I managed to climb out of the pit with my feminist beliefs mostly intact, you might call a triumph of abstract reason over experience.

I don't know if OP should have reworded this, or what exactly he meant by "feminist ideals". Did he mean the recognition of things like microagressions? It's honestly hard to tell.

I really don't know what OP was trying to put across here, and have no idea what point he was trying to reinforce. Perhaps that his experiences with feminism are part of what lead him to doubt feminist ideals? I can't say.

But I hope you now understand why I might feel “only” 97% on board with the program of feminism. I hope you understand why, despite my ironclad commitment to women’s reproductive choice and affirmative action and women’s rights in the developing world and getting girls excited about science, and despite my horror at rape and sexual assault and my compassion for the victims of those heinous crimes, I might react icily to the claim—for which I’ve seen not a shred of statistical evidence—that women are being kept out of science by the privileged, entitled culture of shy male nerds

I believe you guys call this sort of thing “blaming the victim.” From my perspective, it serves only to shift blame from the Neanderthals and ass-grabbers onto some of society’s least privileged males, the ones who were themselves victims of bullying and derision, and who acquired enough toxic shame that way for appealing to their shame to be an effective way to manipulate their behavior. As I see it, whenever these nerdy males pull themselves out of the ditch the world has tossed them into, while still maintaining enlightened liberal beliefs, including in the inviolable rights of every woman and man, they don’t deserve blame for whatever feminist shortcomings they might still have. They deserve medals at the White House. This is obvious hyperbole.

Here I am at a somewhat iffy disagreement with the OP also.

While I do agree with the idea that it isn't these entitled white nerds who are driving women out of careers, I do not agree that there aren't at least some issues with the culture in classrooms that are 80% men. The fault here does not rely on the men, or the women, or the teachers, or the anything. The fault relies on hundreds of factors that are next to impossible to control or account for. You really can't say much definite here.

There probably are situations where it is the culture in classrooms and workplaces that drive women out.

There are probably many factors at play that aren't simply white men trying to keep hold of a culture that is "belonging to them" or any other part of that bullshit.

hey’re horrible in different ways. But let me draw your attention to one difference: the number of academics who study problems like the one I had is approximately zero. There are no task forces devoted to it, no campus rallies in support of the sufferers, no therapists or activists to tell you that you’re not alone or it isn’t your fault. There are only therapists and activists to deliver the opposite message: that you are alone and it is your privileged, entitled, male fault.

This is another one of the more important points OP makes that is not addressed in the article.

Back to the article, a few points I take disagreement to

I agree. “In a different social context — for example, that of my great-grandparents in the shtetl—I would have gotten married at an early age and been completely fine,” he writes. Scott, my great-grandparents also lived in a shtetl. I understand that you sometimes feel you might have been better adapted to that sort of life - when dating and marriage were organised to make things easy for clever young men. On the same Shtetl, however, I would have been married at a young age to a man who would have been the legal owner of my body, my property and the children I would have been expected to have; I would never have been allowed to be a scholar. I would have worked in the fields as well as the home to support my husband in his more cerebral pursuits, and with my small weedy nerdy frame, I would likely have died young from exhaustion or in childbirth.

OP wasn't saying he wanted to go back to the time where women were treated as they were, he was saying that he almost envied the time where sexual relations were simplified to the point that there was no insecurity, no fear, none of the above. Not for a time where women were treated as subhuman.

There are a lot of young men out there - I suspect even now - who sometimes wish they'd been born when things were a bit easier, when the balance of male versus female sexual shame was tilted more sharply by the formal rituals of patriarchy, when men could just take or be assigned what they wanted, as long as they were also white and straight.

There are a lot of older men out there who long for that real or imagined world more openly, and without any of Aaronson's nuance and compassion. I would challenge men to analyse that longing, to see it for what it is. And then to resist it. You are smarter and better than that.

And?

We aren't talking about those people, the OP wasn't one of those people. All this is doing is trying to draw connection between OP and those society are more likely to view as bad.

Nerd culture is changing, technology is changing, and our frameworks for gender and power are changing - for the better. And the backlash to that change is painful as good, smart people try to rationalise their own failure to be better, to be cleverer, to see the other side for the human beings they are. Finding out that you’re not the Rebel Alliance, you’re actually part of the Empire and have been all along, is painful.

"these are the bad guys, do not listen to them"

And on that note I shall return to what I was doing before I read this post, which was drinking sweet tea and weeping about how boys don't seem to want to kiss short-haired lady nerds, and trying not to blame the whole world for my broken heart, which is becoming more complex and interesting in the healing but still stings like a boiling ball of papercuts. I'll let you know how that goes.

Meanwhile, the person I originally responded to is sick of hearing "not all men", or "what about the menz".

You know what this sounds a hell of a lot like?

To the unnamed person who decided I should not be allowed to speak on your posts. Feel free to respond, I welcome the discussion.