Comment by blahedo

"Signals". Ok. So what's the signal being sent to women by a bunch of men that think that women are so weak that a mild mild MILD joke about fratboys is going to chase them away? (A lame joke that doesn't even involve women directly). Do you really think they're that emotionally fragile?

Don't you see how incredibly patronizing this discussion is towards the people it's supposedly benefiting?

Which do you think is more offensive: a comment that slightly gets under your skin, or someone questioning your ability to handle a comment that gets slightly under your skin?

Isn't the whole point of feminism that we treat women like normal fully functional adults that can stick up for themselves? I'm not a feminist, but how does shit like this help their cause?

A short confession. After participating in this forum for a few years, I never thought this was an actual problem. Watching this whole thread of conversation has been very enlightening, and not in the way I had hoped.

So, on behalf of those of us who had not seen these attitudes before so blatantly on parade, my sincerest apologies.

In my experience, it's always about offending people. But only theoretically, of course. It's hard to find significant quantities of people who are actually offended, which is in itself deeply ~problematic.~

>their impression is that the community here closes ranks to shout her down rather than accepting the legitimacy of her experience

It does say a lot about you and your friends that they assume that anyone who disagrees with them isn't coming from a legitimate experience of their own. Why is it only you and your friends that are Designated Spokepersons for All Women? Not everyone on here is biologically male, you know. Some of the people who think Adria Richards is an idiot happen to be women. Quite a few, actually, since oversensitive feminists make life much harder for women in tech to be taken seriously.

> brilliant, fun, unflappable women

Sure.

>But that means that Hacker News (and to some degree, tech in general) doesn't get the benefit of their participation.

Anyone this upset about the word "bro" isn't someone I want to spend time around anyway.

> And just to throw an anecdote or two into the mix, I have at least two female friends in tech fitting that exact description who very explicitly avoid Hacker News for these reasons.

I'm a guy and I'm getting bloody tired of it. There was a blog post submitted here that had an imaginary conversation between a boss and developer. The explanatory text referred to the developer as "she". Cue people complaining about forced use of "she" being ridiculous and how they couldn't figure out if the author was trying to be "edgy".

Personally "bropages" just sounds childish, like if it was called 31337_h4x><or_pages.

I bookmark a very small number of comment pages for HN members, and yours is one of them. I just wanted to let you know that.

You are correct, it's about signaling. However, we have to think about whether one type of signaling should be privileged over another just by virtue of being particularly loud and obnoxious. (Note that this goes both ways).

The "right" of one type of signaling to suppress others is a privilege, after all.

>These are brilliant, fun, unflappable women

Unflappable except supposedly they literally can't read this website out of the inescapable fear that someone will make a pun about man pages, and then someone else will be unimpressed with their outrage at a pun about man pages.

Lolks

How is "girls are bros too" or the term "bro" an off-color joke or insensitive. Maybe it's just the culture that I come from, but while "bro" certainly can be used to refer to douche-bag college guys it was more often used as "hanging out with my bros" (equivalent to "hanging out with my best friends"), which certainly could be (and for us, it was) gender agnostic.

I think equating "bro" to "nigger" is a huge effort to be offended. I opened the page after reading this comments and expected to see frat insignia, cleavage, etc.... Plain blue on white. Literally 200 comments on this page because they made a clever play on the term "manpages", something that any computer professional recognizes. Truly impressive work by those looking for something to be outraged about.

In what way is this sexist? There is not a single word of disparagement on that site. Nobody in their right mind would say that the word "bro" is sexist unless they're explicitly looking to be offended. (IE: picking a fight)

Are you seriously putting words "bro" and "nigger" in same category? Do you miss some screws in your head?

> Another offended man checking in.

And yet you typed out a racist, highly offensive word (far more offensive than "bro" I'm pretty sure) in your own 2nd paragraph.

I clicked, I saw the name and was a little turned off but thought maybe it was just a clever shortening of a reasonable word I hadn't thought of (the way "man" is short for "manual").

It's really just one of those clever little puns that Unix is known for.

e.g. "more" is a paging utility ... "less" is an alternative one, even though it doesn't show you less of the file.

"elm" is a mail reader, "pine" is a different mail reader, and they are both trees.

"man" is short for manual. Man is also the word for a male human being. "Bro" is another, affectionate word to describe a male human being.

Just another pun, not a dark scheme to alienate women from the programming world. And certainly not misogynistic language or jokes that are likely to create a hostile environment for women.

There are some possible package names that would be sexist and anti-women. This isn't one of them.

Thanks, I come to HN to see the N-word... you've made my day.

for a man to be offended by this FOR the sake of women, you must be one pussy whipped mofo.

let the down votes commence.

This argument would almost make sense if the joke was at all about women. Except it's not. The only mention of women on that page is a message that they're included too. The word "bro" is making fun of college age american males, it literally has nothing to do with women at all.

I mean, I'd think this level white knighting would be excessive if it even had something to do with women, but I'm fantastically amused by the reaction here considering that this joke has NOTHING TO DO WITH WOMEN AT ALL. The "offensiveness" of this is pure extrapolation. Seriously, you're all just /assuming/ that women are going to be offended by this. But somehow, those of us that are saying that maybe you should let women speak for themselves if it really bothers them, we're the sexists.

>Make no mistake, these "jokes" have consequences.

What's your evidence? Anecdotal evidence cuts both ways: every time this issue is discussed on HN there are real women in comments saying that they personally don't feel discriminated at their tech workplaces and find the claims of GeekFeminism et al about the pervasively misogynistic tech culture laughable. Do you actually know that there's an "unrelenting deluge that makes life miserable" for a typical woman in tech? Do you have real evidence that's not coming from self-appointed experts or members of outrage brigades? How do you know that you're not exaggerating and it is not, just to pick a possibility, a regrettable annoyance that we'd be much better without, but not an "unrelenting deluge that makes life miserable"?

>We look around and we wonder why there are so few women in tech. A big reason is that so few women have the passion to don raingear they'll have to wear for the rest of their lives.

How do you know that this is a big reason? What's your evidence?

In the U.S., the percentage of women in tech and CS has been steadily going down since mid-80s, while the society has been getting less sexist since that time by most evidence I can think of: for example, think of the number of women in Congress, representation in the media, jokes that have become too crass, gender pay gap that's been shrinking... If you're right about the reason women don't go into tech, wouldn't you expect the numbers to go up and not down since the 80s?

>Most rational folks will just choose to go somewhere it's not raining as much or as often

What are other occupations in which, like you're claiming for tech, a misogynistic culture drives women out? E.g. take the law. Anecdotally, the culture in law firms is often said to be dominated by very aggressive male partners, with abundant misogynistic jokes. I googled for sexism in law firms and found this article: http://ms-jd.org/what-no-one-tells-you-you-go-law-school-you... by a woman who says that before law school she "spent the several years in a heavily male-dominated profession (software), and never had any issues", but was shocked by the amount of sexism and sexual harassment in law school and law firms.

If she's right, and this is a real problem, would you expect such sexism to be "a big reason" for women leaving law as well? But ever since the 1970s there's been only an up trend in female representation in law. How do you explain that?

Well said.

I took a poll of me, and I think it's bad and not funny. Now we're equal.

I took a poll of the only other person in my house at the moment. She thinks it's juvenile and she certainly wouldn't want to recommend it to other people in a public setting.

Your anecdata, voluntary, sample-size-of-one survey has completely changed my mind. I feel terrible for having thought this was tacky before. To whom do I submit my abject apologies?

EDIT: Also:

Banishing any sort of word play because "the women"...

Straw-man.

As others have said, it doesn't matter if you can find a counter example. So you have a sample size of 1 and you think that matters at all?

You're offended because someone used the word bro. You must be a hit at parties.

I hope, for your own sake, that you're joking here.

"man" is the English term for "an adult human male".

"bro" is short for "brother", and is a thing a certain set of English-speaking adolescent and adult males call each other to express their affection for each other.

"man" is a shortening of "manual", used to name a Unix command which will show you the docs for a command-line tool.

"bro" is a Unix command which will show you a brief example of how to use a command-line tool and nothing else. If you're lucky it may be exactly what you want to do. But probably not.

So the wordplay here: two three-letter words for a particular kind of guy, for Unix commands that tell you how to use other commands. And if they decide to change the name based on people objecting to the cultural assumptions they see in "bro", I'd suggest "guy". Or maybe "dude", which is a little longer, but always feels more laid-back and chilled-out to me than what "bro" has become.

Hope that helps!

No, bro is short for "brother", which is a male gendered person who has the same parent as you.

Brother and sister are the gendered names for children having the same parents.

"bro", in this case is short for "brother".

Ha! You got not just one, but TWO careful completely disingenuous replies.

"Bro" is short for brother the same way that "gay" means "happy". Well, sure, that's trivially true, but it kind of matters what people actually mean when they use a word.

Of course you're right; I have a biological brother and we don't call each other "bro". Here's what google turns up: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/06/21/193881290/jea... ...though I'm sure a bit more searching will find more direct treatments out there of what "bro" means....

As far as I (from the UK) can tell, this is largely a US (North American?) term, rather than one with much use in any other English-speaking country. Some example usage: the phrase "bro's before hoe's" is a hilarious exchange amongst a group of 'men', implying that men are to be valued above women, who are all sexually promiscuous anyway (and, by the way, that's bad when it comes to women, as opposed to being something to be admired in a 'bro').

Those are the kind of connotations conjured in my mind when I see the name of this software tool.

Someone should coin an analogue to Godwin, where linking to the Geek Feminism Wiki is seen as an instant loss of credibility.

The wiki is hugely anecdotal beyond all reason, poorly written, often incoherent and their editorial guidelines clearly show that they have virtually no standard as long as the content fits under a vaguely feminist or social justice-oriented perspective.

(http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Meta:Editorial_guidelines)

Their "vision of intersectional feminism" is postmodernism gone wrong.

I think what bothers me the most about that site is how ideological their arguments get. It's all done under the banner of protecting women, but they've gone way beyond being about what any actual women think and care about, and are more about pushing their ideology of how everybody should think and act onto everyone. To them, the ideology is all-important and must be injected into all situations, no matter how tenuous the link. Anything that touches these subject without bowing to the ideology is forbidden and must be destroyed. To the point that you can't name a little help utility a cute play on words of a well-known utility without starting a huge frickin argument.

My argument is that women have a sense of humor and we don't have to infantilize them by acting like they can't take a joke. Clearly I'm a patriarchal monster. Thank god we have all these social justice warriors to protect women from the word bro.

I'd agree, all except the last line.

The reason I find it distasteful isn't because I myself am offended, but because I know it's going to needlessly offend others. Whether I agree with them being offended or not, I know that it could be easily avoided with little to no cost. That's what makes it distasteful.

Here's a recent example. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/business-inside...

Then you haven't worked on my current team. I used to cringe on a daily basis for the one woman on the team, until she left. They think they're being funny, and they think they are somehow "standing up" for their right not to be P.C. I honestly don't know if they know or intend their tone to be bullying.

This comment is a binding site for the following comment-pattern: It's Your Job To Stand Up To Them.

Read a few comments in this thread for some examples.

> How about an individual having backbone and integrity to stand firm, hold the line and not supplicate?

I have the backbone and integrity to know that as I walk through life, I am responsible for stepping carefully and thoughtfully.

I have no problem stepping forward to call people out when they're well-intentioned but wrong, or ill-intentioned. Even if it costs me karma, or sales, or popularity, it is sometimes the right thing to do.

In this case, I am calling you out on the word "supplicate.' I choose to make the world a better place. I'm not supplicating, or white knighting, or anything like that. It's not about appeasing anyone, it's about doing the right thing for us.

The very word "supplicate" implies a them vs. us dichotomy which is itself a problem. YOU are furthering these problems by using divisive language.

The library is an organic creation. Organisms grow and evolve and CHANGE FOR THE BETTER. If you think it would be better with a name that many find offensive and divisive, that's your opinion.

But you can guess what I think of the premise that when things are offensive, it's everyone else's responsibility to change. It sounds like a spoiled brat who thinks the world should revolve around them, and everyone else should change so that they can do as they like without pushback.

Really? You call another HN commenter "some castrating, sky-god"?

You tell them "in reality, you're the enemy of purity."

You ask, "Feel castrated?"

I don't care what your point is, this isn't the place for those kinds of insults and personal attacks.

Standing firm on something dumb is not a matter of integrity. Backbone and integrity mean you do what's right even under pressure not to. Sticking with this name isn't right. It's not particularly wrong, but it's not some noble thing.

Your premise is flawed. For example, I don't give a damn what women think of my calling people out on misogyny. I am not pro-women, I am anti-jackass. Comments like yours are jackasstic. I can dislike them without a moment's consideration of what women think of your words.

I get really fucking tired of seeing men who are helping derided as "white knights". Trust me, women can TELL when someone is putting us on a pedestal and deciding that we have to be defended because we're such delicate flowers, and we're quick to call that bullshit when we see it. Most of us actually appreciate when our ALLIES step up to talk about this shit.

It's not about "saving us" -- we aren't fucking damsels in distress, and yes, we can speak for ourselves. But assholes like you have made eminently clear that you don't actually LISTEN to women, and so it's nice to know that some men actually have our backs and are willing to do the utterly thankless work of trying to explain shit to you.

For pity's sake, it's not like I said that his patriarchal name encourages rape-culture and that he needs to check his privilege and properly understand the intersectionality of female geeks.

I said it was funny, but that it's probably best for the health of our industry that we try to avoid the whole "gender" subject matter when it comes to jokes.

A little professionalism never hurt anyone.

Of course this is his desired outcome, because every man who works for gender equality is doing it for praise or because he wants to get laid.

Been there. Done that. Teachers are "encouraged" to decorate their rooms. Decorating is a feminine activity. Most meetings are surrounded by the woman talking about things important to them - sometimes very womanly topics like their period or lack their of due to menopause. Never once did I feel that I was being oppressed or anything. No other males mentioned it if they did. Guys and girls are different. This is a good thing.

I couldn't disagree more.

> > If women tend to be intimidated by head-to-head competition (of any type) with a man, it doesn't mean it's wrong or immoral for a man to compete head-to-head with a woman.

> Err, it sure is when men have an obvious advantage. This is why we don't allow men to play in the WNBA. When men don't have an obvious advantage (e.g. competing for grades in class), you're absolutely right. Men definitely have an advantage in tech right now. You can argue whether that's innate or cultural, but it's kinda hard to argue the premise.

It's immoral for a man to compete in the WNBA because the league disallows it. Not because there's something cosmically immoral about men and women competing in general, and not because there's something cosmically immoral about competing with someone who feels intimidated because you're more skilled than they are.

Is there anything immoral or wrong about a more intelligent person competing against a less intelligent person for a job? Nope.

> > If women tend to be intimidated when a muscular male stranger is in their presence, it doesn't mean it's wrong or immoral to be a muscular man in the presence of a woman.

> Your actions are immoral, your mere existence never is. It's about empathy. No one's ever going to say you're wrong for being a muscular man, but people will think you're either insensitive or super oblivious if you're a huge guy wearing a hoodie walking 6 inches behind a small 105 pound woman at night in an alley.

Sure, invading someone's personal space is wrong. That's not at all relevant. If I stormed into a women-only school, that's bad.

However, if a woman enters a public (or private!) space and demands men leave because she feels intimidated, that's wrong, too. And for different (and more relevant) reasons.

> > Likewise, if women tend to be intimidated when men use language that expresses pride in their manhood, it doesn't mean it's wrong for boys or men to use language that expresses pride in their manhood.

> Come on: first of all replace "man/men" with "white" and see why your statement sounds a little ridiculous.

There's nothing wrong with being proud of being Jewish, White, or Asian, despite those being historically successful groups.

Yes, young Whites are shamed for expressing the same pride that everyone else gets to express, and that is precisely what forces "White pride" organization underground, turning them into seething pits of Hell like Stormfront.

> Second of all, no one wants to hear that shit either way. If I have to listen to a group of women talk about how great it is to be a woman, I'm similarly going to either leave the conversation or say "what the fuck?". Wouldn't you? That shit gets old real fast if you're on the outer circle.

Sure, it'd get old. But that doesn't mean women should be shamed for talking about how great it is to be a woman. Let them be proud of who they are. Leave if you want; ignore it if you can't.

> > To all the boys and young men who are barraged daily with messages scolding them (or worse) for using language that implies they're male: Keep your chin up. These people want to break you down, not lift anyone else up.

> Truthfully, nobody really gives a shit what anyone has to say. It's more about who you say it around. If you wanna jibber-jabber about the stock market and 401Ks with your bros, then go nuts. Maybe keep that talk to a minimum when you're around the guy making $8.50 an hour though, you know?

Does the fact that a guy making $8.50 an hour might have an internet connection mean that you can't jibber-jabber about the stock market (or about buying yachts) online?

> It's just about sensitivity. Bro.

Boys have feelings too. Bro.

Is it so obvious? I live far from the west coast, and the only reason I know the term "brogramming" at all is because I read HN and some other Silicon Valley-oriented blogs.

I am the only programmer I know at work or in my personal life that does so. The entire thing is a completely alien concept to me given what I've seen in real life. I hasten to say I absolutely do believe it's a real thing, just something I assume is centered around Silicon Valley.

The first thing I thought when I saw it was not "brogrammer." It is entirely plausible in my mind that the creator wasn't thinking of brogramming. Indeed, I could see myself or someone I know naming the tool that without any idea that brogramming was a thing.

Except that your argument has the same flaws has res0nat0r's argument: neither of you know what the author was thinking when he named it. Was the creator thinking of brogramming? Was the creator thinking of it being the "bro"ther of the man pages? None of us know, so it is useless to argue about it.

We're so used to the "man" command that I think it's hard to judge how it would sound if someone invented it today. There might very well be calls to rename it.

We're okay with it because we're used to it, it's from a different time, and it's far too late to change it now. Those aren't good excuses for a new project.

It would be extremely surprising to me if fsck wasn't recognized to be tongue-in-cheekly profane when it was originally named. It could easily have been called ckfs, chkdisk (as it was on other systems), etc. Fsck first appeared on Version 7 UNIX, which means it dates to the early 80s, long after "fuck" had been established as one of the most popular profanities in English. It's context of usage, when the filesystem had become corrupt and the administrator was in a state of annoyance or anger, is also suggestive.

The whole bro humour is deliberately exclusionary, it is an in-joke for tying together small groups of (mostly) young males. That is what it is for.

It's important to draw the distinction between the usage of the term to

(1) describe oneself and one's peers and create an ingroup

as opposed to

(2) describe (and often criticize) others

I don't see a lot of unironic usage of (1), aside from the odd tone-deaf fratboy.

I see a lot of criticism of "brogrammers" and "dudebros" by self-styled "progressives" on the internet and social media.

The question is, what is the actual intent of this project name - is it just a "ha-ha, man refers to male people, bro is a different word to refer to male people"? If so, then there's no problem with it and people offended by it are overreacting.

If it's intended to exclude females from contributing or participating (though I don't see how), then that's a problem. It's not clear that this would actually be an issue - a man who didn't want to participate in a project because the gem was called "estrogen" or "sister" or something would rightly be criticized for having some issues.

Come to think of it, 'otto' would have been a brilliant name.

There will always be people who don't agree with you. Someone even said that Python can be thought of a slang for male sexual organ. In Chinese, turtle head is slang for the head of the male sexual organ. If I name it turtlehead, I can called sexist by some Chinese feminist. But in my example that's probably a bad name to start with anyway. But is bro-page in the same category as turtle head? My opinion is not.

I really don't see the name bro-page being sexist or evidence of ignoring feminist audience. It sounds genuine. It isn't like the author have a female model in the bro page documentation.

Rather than spending the first 50 comments on this gender flame war, why don't we talk about what makes man page useful and not useful. What makes sites like explainshell and bropage useful and not useful.

No. I said it is ridiculous to turn everything into a sexism discussion. Look, I said if people are making fun of female, like "sudo make me sandwich" that's sexist and we better make sure we correct that idea. It might be okay with a close friend but a public statement like that is obviously not acceptable.

bro-page is not in the same category as "sudo make me sandwich". There is no sexism in that name. Just because it is named "bro" doesn't mean it's sexist. We have girls who like to be called bro. I remember in one of the earliest episode in Family Guys, Lorie said "I respect your feminist initiative and being feminist means I have a choice and I choose not to be like you."

If you force people to feel like the name is sexist, you are making it sexist. If you are so paranoid about sexism that's because we have made many things sexist. Do people ever call a poem using masculine words sexist when some are just completely fine and have nothing to do with people degrading female or male? Ever heard of that?

"Human" is also gendered, and presumes that the default status is male. Perhaps "humyn."

Hell sure, I mean Julia comes from the latin family name but, that is pretty funny.

I was trying to lampoon your hypersensitivity, but you're welcome anyway.

I don't know of a pam command in *nix, but there are a ton of modules related to the "Pluggable Authentication Module" with pam in the name. When I say "pam" at work, everyone thinks "PAM".

Please do not link to the Geek Feminism Wiki. It is nothing but an incoherent and poorly organized collection of anecdotes.

He was simply pointing out that the grandparent's communication style is a bit misleading. Nothing wrong with that.

Ugh, why is the simple-minded application of buzzwords so horribly prevalent in discussions of this nature. I honestly can't think of anything that exemplifies "derailing" more than posting links to Geek Feminism that are almost entirely irrelevant as part of a complaint about someone's comment.

Fallacy fallacy much?