I think Clan McDonald would probably have a problem starting a chain of restaurants. I was completely confused by this online service (app or not) having the same name as another online service.
The issue is men don't use the app. I downloaded it on my SO's phone and was able to find most of the college age guys I know on it. None of them knew they were on there.
Have each of them demand a dump of their reviews from the service, as they're entitled to under EU data protection directive. If there's anything libellous in there, try to get a newspaper interested. The Daily Mail is probably a good choice for this mixture of sex and scandal.
No idea. You have to install the app on your phone, so it can read your phone's accounts. I think a Google account is required on an Android phone. Google accounts have gender in their profile (remember the G+ fiasco?). You also have to link it to Facebook, so it has access to your Facebook data as well. Maybe they don't like new Facebook accounts with zero activity, but certainly there is a usecase for women who want to use this app, but don't want to use Facebook (I would think there is a usecase for women who don't have smartphones as well). Not sure about the iPhone flow.
This thought exercise is really making me scared about how much the owners of the apps on my phone know about me!
Precisely my feelings. #UsesLulu would be all I would've wanted to know about someone to realize it wouldn't work out. Similar to girls who drive SUVs and support Drill-Baby-Drill. Big red flags.
Write a polar opposite. Push it through the same channels. If someone has it taken down, cry "sexism!" and demand the same for "Lulu" (an idiotic name, anyway).
UPDATE: Or perhaps not. After looking at the web site, it seems that this service, and a bad review of my person, is precisely the thing to repel exactly the kind of women I've never wanted to have anything common with.
If nothing else, there is already a publishing service with the same name. If I were running it, I'd seriously consider some legal steps. This smells of potential defamation by association.
"I've published my book on Lulu.com."
"Oh, is that the horrible sexist girl gossip website?"
"I didn't know they were running it. I'll tell my friends to stop buying their books from there."
Lets not act as though this is in anyway revolutionary, people have bitched behind other peoples backs for as long as there have been people.
Bitterness, anger and jealousy are unfortunately some of the strongest traits we humans have, especially when it comes to our interactions with one another, this application, while on the surface immoral, is simply providing a means for this to happen online.
I don't in anyway agree with this application or the practices it supports and the tags come across as misandric but people will be people, if they don't bitch here it will be on more public venues, such as Facebook or Twitter, at least here I don't have to see the self absorbed whinging simply by virtue of never visiting the app.
That aside, I hope the creators provide some means of men removing themselves from the website or there could very soon be some kind of law suit coming there way, regardless of their contrived TOS.
I think there is a difference between people bitching in private, and it being something publicly searchable by people who just met you. One bad date and suddenly you have a reputation that follows you forever? (Assuming people used this app of course)
Oh, definitely, that's why I added the last paragraph.
That being said, I would find it a good indicator, if the person you were dating took notice of this drivel, they are probably the kind of person you don't want to be dating anyway.
I think the biggest issue is the complete anonymity which is inherently given online, even if it asked for identities, these can easily be faked.
What is to stop a jealous co-worker or an annoyed sister, or even a drunk friend from tarnishing your public image online by saying you treat them badly, or even worse, raped them, over an application like this?
The unfortunate part of all of this is it could potentially perpetuate the negativs this has on relationship building, and on society as a whole. If people were on there to verify information or maybe even offer counseling of sorts to help people get through resentment, anger, jealousy, etc. then it'd be helpful - but I don't imagine anyone would use that app for that. I wonder even if any of my female friends would come forward to say contrary to what the herd is saying for fear of being ridiculed, etc..
I think it's hilarious and a brilliant idea. Everyone knows that dating is a lemons market, what's wrong with trying to fix it? And presumably you can rate things how you want... so if people want to put #Big.Feet or #AlwaysPays, that's their choice.
In recent times I've gotten the impression that their is a double standard going on regarding certain (not all) services and events that are only targeted to women.
If this had been an app for men rating and alerting them about certain women all hell would of broke loose.
The problem in this case is that in the same way women are most often the recipients of sexual discrimination, men are most often the recipient of being decried as sexual discriminators.
It's so easy to look down on someone identifying as male as being discriminant but when the opposite is true, the male point of view is often ignored.
Simply put, we are expected to man up, whereas women are expected to stand up.
I don't think it's quite as dramatic as you say. But personally I'm ok with it.
Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries. Owning property. Voting. Higher education. Being allowed to practice a profession. Being favored by marriage laws. Being favored by social biases.
Like Peter Parker and Voltaire say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Having received a substantial boost just for being born with a dick, I'm ok with manning up. To me, that's part of using my power to redress the imbalance.
We must have grown up in drastically different times then - I'm barely 20 and for the majority of my life I have been taught that boys are smelly and girls are sweet, boys do the dirty jobs and that men are dangerous and shouldn't be left alone with women.
Sure, men have had the upper hand for centuries but we live in an age where the scales have tipped - we need to be careful that instead of having a substantial boost for having a dick, or a vagina, that instead every has the same substantial advantage.
Barely 20 is pretty young, I suspect as you get older you will notice more and more ways men still have societal advantages. Around 20 most of your life you've spent in school, where if you're in a relatively progressive environment your teachers and administrators have made a point to put students of both genders on equal footing.
The problem (at least here) is that they don't. Boys are usually given harsher sentences for same misbehavior as girls. Also, there is more boys dropping out than girls. Girls tend to grade higher than boys as well.
Unemployment of young folk (<30) is more prevalent in men than women.
I don't want to take anything from the women's struggle, but more and more, they are getting the upper hand. (Heck, my boy is 11 months old, and even now, he gets more 'insults' about behavior then his female cousin about same age)
Nope, men have the upper hand and lower hand, and if you take the average out of that then women are men are equal at least in all Western nations. Even though 60-80% of politicians may be male, that's contrasted with 80% of homeless people being male, 80% of suicides made by men.
If we look at young people, then women clearly have the uppder hand. In addition to having the upper hand in dating, they out-earn young men and have greater success in education. Interestingly, if women are better than men at something, then the explanation is never discrimination, but if men are better than women, then the reason is discrimination.
"X have upper hand" implies that on average X are better off than non-X. Therefore it's not very honest to talk only about the well-off subset of X, if there's a similarly sized not-so-well-off subset of X which mirrors the successful subset.
> "X have upper hand" implies that on average X are better off than non-X.
I don't think that's a valid inference, honestly. Firstly, "average" is too tied to distribution and biased outliers and asymmetry. Perhaps you intended to compare medians.
"have the upper hand" I think means that when you compare proportions of X to non-X within strata that the proportion of X decreases with increasing status.
Query: why are 80% of men homeless. That stat on it's own is not indicative of disadvantage towards men. There needs to be some analysis of the why to determine that.
Quey: how does the suicide give women an "uppper hand" this is a personal choice, and doesn't seem to be about gender equality at all. Sure you could say "men are more pressured..." but you could also say "women aren't empowered to make decisions about their body and don't see it as viable". Again: how does the stat show an upper hand?
About dating: I don't think you can declare women have the "upper hand". At best they have an "even hand". Sure there are pretty girls that get an absurde level of "power of choice", but there are plenty of men in the same category. Similarly when the traditional "men approach" role is taken, women are stuck with what comes their way. Putting it another way: in my experience the problems women experience in dating are the same as the problems men experience: shitty candidates, lots of fear of rejection, insecurity and incompatability issues. Leading to:
Query: how do women have the upper hand in dating in your mind?
>Query: why are 80% of men homeless. That stat on it's own is not indicative of disadvantage towards men. There needs to be some analysis of the why to determine that.
It indicates that men are at a disadvantage. It doesn't matter what causes the disadvantage, it's still a fact. Of course, when men are at a disadvantage the reason is never expected to be gender roles or discrimination.
>Quey: how does the suicide give women an "uppper hand" this is a personal choice
If you think social issue like suicide can be categorized as "personal choice", you don't know much about depression and suicide. There are factors that increase risk to suicide, like poverty and depression, which are quite prevalent in males.
>About dating: I don't think you can declare women have the "upper hand". At best they have an "even hand". Sure there are pretty girls that get an absurde level of "power of choice", but there are plenty of men in the same category.
That description doesn't quite fit the facts, though. It's more like the upper 2/3 of women are in the same position as upper 1/3 of men for various reasons. You can just look at the number of messages on online dating sites, or look at the genetic evidence: 2/3 of all women in history have had children, but only 1/3 men have had genetic offspring.
>Putting it another way: in my experience the problems women experience in dating are the same as the problems men experience: shitty candidates, lots of fear of rejection, insecurity and incompatability issues.
The social etiquette and gender roles and various other reasons mean that men are expected to make the initiation, and women can simply choose the best candidate. That means that men have to face a lot more rejection than women.
>>Query: why are 80% of men homeless. That stat on it's own is not indicative of disadvantage towards men. There needs to be some analysis of the why to determine that.
>It indicates that men are at a disadvantage. It doesn't matter what causes the disadvantage, it's still a fact. Of course, when men are at a disadvantage the reason is never expected to be gender roles or discrimination.
False. This is not how statistics work. There could be other confounding factors that are relevant. For instance, of the women who would become homeless how many are forced into some sort of prostitution scheme from which they can't escape? How many die early in homelessness because they are at a survival as homeless person disadvantage? You are not providing enough data, just cherry picking context free numbers as if it meant something.
>>Quey: how does the suicide give women an "uppper hand" this is a personal choice
>If you think social issue like suicide can be categorized as "personal choice", you don't know much about depression and suicide. There are factors that increase risk to suicide, like poverty and depression, which are quite prevalent in males.
Maybe. So what advantages to women have. Again, you need to explain a causal relationship of advantage, not just cherry pick numbers as if it were meaningful.
About the dating stuff: your stat makes no sense with regards to genetics. Everyone gets a X chromosome, some get 2 of them. Of course there will be more attributable genetic lineage to women, wheres a guy who only produces daughters will not necessarily be identifiable in a few generations from his sister who passes on the same X chromosome to ~50% of her offspring. Also, why does this genetic number prove evidence for "do nothing"? That is conflating two similar numbers pointlessly. Again, I suggest you learn some simple statistics.
As for the initiation thing: that is not a disadvantage to males. A couple reasons:
First of all, except for people who have 0 social skills initiation is really not hard.
Second, initiation must be invited, putting half the onus in the woman's hands (again, there are cues and signaling for this) - the act of asking or a date or starting a conversation is quite far into the courting process.
Third, simply choosing the best candidate is not - ever been part of a hiring process? Sometimes all the candidates are shitty and you have to choose "no hire", this is a problem.
Fourth do you really think women just sit there and do nothing in dating but wait for a candidate to come along? I doubt that, otherwise why would there be a giant business targeting women with things like "how to make guys notice you", and "improve your dating potential".
Fifth: In the traditional role, women have the following disadvantage: they are the ones with the job of keeping men around far more often than men keeping a woman around. Once the relationship is established, the woman has to keep the man happy. (again - big buisness in magazines with articles like "keep your man happy and around", "how to prevent him from cheating" and the like).
Finally your linked article presupposes the conclusion it reaches, and ignores in its analysis any other factors.
You're right about some of this, although you're overstating the case: about 44% of the homeless in the United States are single men; families with children are about 36% and single women are only 13%. (Figures for Europe are certainly different as they offer different social services, especially for families.) Greater male service in the military is one component of this, as in the US veterans make up 16% of the homeless, as opposed to 10% of the general population.
I'm one of those overeducated women with the upper hand or something like that, although due to my great success in education I'm not out-earning all that many people yet. Remember, though, that the mythical ability to get a guy to pay for dinner and that incredible math PhD mean nothing when a guy on the street is looking me up & down & giving me a "compliment." If I talk back to that crazy guy on the bus, even if I'm out-earning and out-educating him, I always remember it can go like this: http://unwinona.tumblr.com/post/30861660109/i-debated-whethe...
To return to the original topic, I don't support Lulu at all. I've had far better success in dating and life treating men like people.
>(Figures for Europe are certainly different as they offer different social services, especially for families.)
Yeah, I used statistics from my own country.
>Greater male service in the military is one component of this
Funny anecdote, here in Finland men still have conscription (e.g. forced labour for 6-12 months), but almost nobody talks about that as a gender equality issue.
>I'm one of those overeducated women with the upper hand or something like that, although due to my great success in education I'm not out-earning all that many people yet.
Education of course doesn't directly lead to higher earnings, as you need to choose the right industry and career path. Of course, I don't know anything about you in particular, but most well-off people underestimate the earnings of otherpeople. (I don't know the exact statistic, but the top 10% think that they're only slightly better off than the average or something).
Anyway, men earn more than women because they work longer hours (about 20% more in average). The other explanation is that men choose careers that have higher income (e.g. according to research for men income matters a lot more in career choise than for women).
>Remember, though, that the mythical ability to get a guy to pay for dinner and that incredible math PhD mean nothing when a guy on the street is looking me up & down & giving me a "compliment."
Err, men have to deal with crazy people on the bus too. In fact, vast majority of street violence is against men (it's around 80% in my country).
Well, honestly, I didn't start noticing my privilege until I was a fair bit older than 20. It's a normal cognitive bias. Nobody wakes up in the the morning saying, "Thank goodness I have legs," as they jump out of bed. We just accept the positives life hands us as normal. What we notice are the negatives.
Racial privilege was the one I noticed first. And that was mainly because I lived in places where as a foreigner I was outside the normal framework. That made it much easier to see race and class dynamics at work. It was only after that I could start seeing gender dynamics more clearly. But they're still hard, because you can't try be an outsider to that in the same way.
I agree that we should be working toward parity. I just don't think we're there yet.
The scales still have a way to go. Sure, it's sometimes more acceptable to make sweeping negative generalities about men than women, because we're more tuned in to misogyny than misandry, but the reality remains that women still have serious issues to contend with, including by not limited to:
- lack of representation in media (look up the Bechdel test)
- street harassment
- pay discrepancies
- discrimination in hiring processes, etc
As a man, at least here in north America. You're expected to have a thick skin, to not care if someone has a better lot, and to more or less take what you want (so long as it's not immoral to do so). There are quiet a few men who don't fit this bill, but I have to ask: What's so bad about these expectations?
If these expectations remain, what possible social change could occur that would put our "brutish" gender in the crapper? As long as that cultural push exists to be stoic, strong, tough, and to go for what they want, then our male culture is ingrained to be immune to a social upheaval. It's a good way to live if you ask me.
My recommendation is to not care.
I do not care.
I hope the girls have fun on LuLu.
Now if the girls want to change their cultural expectations to make their lives better? Sounds great! I don't care.
>Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries. Owning property. Voting. Higher education. Being allowed to practice a profession. Being favored by marriage laws. Being favored by social biases.
Yes, so let's reverse it, and get a female-biased revenge ...on people that weren't even alive back at those times.
You're doing it wrong. If you want to Godwin a thread, you actually have to mention Hitler or the Holocaust. Just making ridiculously over-the-top historical analogies isn't enough.
I'm the one doing it wrong? The parent mentioned that discrimination is OK because of "historical analogies" drawn from past centuries. I merely extended it to another domain for sarcasm's sake.
Second, you DO know that "Godwin's law" is not an actual law that govern's discussions, and it's not even something that people agree on its validity, right? It's merely a BS internet meme, a funny quote used as a joke. Invoking it is like invoking made up statistics as an argument.
Hi! I do know about Godwin's Law. I even know Mike Godwin a little. And I'm invoking it as a reminder to avoid hysteria and outrageous hyperbole, which was the original point of his comment.
By the way, I didn't say that discrimination was ok, and I wasn't making a historical analogy. I was pointing out that our existing society is just emerging from that long history of sexism.
>Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries.
Not really. Men have had more freedom but less security. Just because you personally like your gender role (as it seems), that doesn't mean other men agree (or agreed in the past). Sure, men were allowed to be employees and women cared for the children at home (though reality was actually a lot more complex than that, but we can accept this caricature for now), but men had to work or they wouldn't find a women to marry. Women didn't have to work, as they could be supported by their husband. Work was pretty gruesome in the past, even if homework was also harder in the past.
Of course, there's little proper scientific research on this subject, as "women's studies" start from their assumption that women had and have everything worse without really proving it.
The problem with saying that the men's gender role of more freedom but more responsibility doesn't take into consideration that some people prefer to have less freedom and less responsibility, while some women prefer to have more freedom and more responsibility and some less freedom and less responsibility (or at least prefered in the past).
>Having received a substantial boost just for being born with a dick, I'm ok with manning up.
Even if we assume that men had better starting position in the past, that doesn't apply anymore. Young women are outearning and have more success in education.
True equality can only be reached through the abolition of gender roles for both men and women, not assuming that men need to "man up" and therefore saying that gender inequality is somehow positive and should exist.
You also made the claim about "imbalance". There's no imbalance in favor of women in Western countries. Men have just as much gender equality problems as women, but even speculating this is politically incorrect. Here's a study o the subject: http://granum.uta.fi/granum/kirjanTiedot.php?tuote_id=18450
You've made a lot of soup out of a small amount of meat. Some quick replies to clear up misunderstandings:
I agree that patriarchy is bad for men too. I disagree that it was equally bad for both genders. I disagree that we have reached balance. By "manning up", I don't mean reinforcing gender roles or maintaining gender inequality. I mean that men should, as the relatively privileged parties, not be whiny at either the shift toward balance or the small anti-male inequities that crop up temporarily along the road to equity.
>...men should, as the relatively privileged parties, not be whiny at either the shift toward balance or the small anti-male inequities that crop up temporarily along the road to equity.
Translated from feminist rhetoric: Men have no right to complain about discrimination against them.
shanelja and nawitus, I think abundance of people with similar views to wpietri highlights how real your points actually are.
I think everybody has a right to complain. E.g., the recent rich people complaining that their tax rates might become almost as high as their secretaries? They're totally within their legal right to complain.
But I have the legal right to say that they're whiny idiots when they appear unable to notice or acknowledge the context of their complaint. If you're going to cry, "have sympathy for meeeeeee", you really should make sure you've demonstrated some sympathy for others.
Not at all. I forgive people their errors all the time without accepting them as good or normal.
For example, if somebody is tired and cranky and says something mean, I don't have to get upset at it. I can let it go, and treat them compassionately. I think that is precisely the road to getting rid of meanness.
I don't see why past & present inequality justify anything and everything that is bad for men/whites/whatever. Don't you see a difference between e.g. hiring policies that specifically advantage women and objecting to services that are potentially vicious and hurtful specifically to men? (I'm not convinced lulu is the latter, but assume for the moment it is).
I do think that to a privileged person, any move toward equality feels like inequality, because what they notice is things getting worse for them.
I also think that people emerging from oppression are liable to cross the line of exact equity from time to time. An as long as the swings are small, I'm ok with that. Specifically, as a guy, I'm saying I don't mind brushing off something that might be a bit of anti-guy sexism. Because that one small nettle-sting is nothing in proportion to the benefits I've received, or to the scope of the historical wrong that we are righting.
I don't know enough about Lulu to have an opinion on it. And for the record, I'm opposed to hiring practices that advantage women. I am strongly for, though, active practices to eliminate the disadvantage that women face.
You're enforcing the stereotypical gender role of men: "Don't whine, that's unmanly, don't complain, deal with your own problems". That's pretty offending to me.
I want people to treat other people as individuals, not representative of their gender. I don't care about my own gender role. I don't want people to say "man up" to men if I face some injustice. And I don't want (the reverse I guess) it happen to women either.
Your path doesn't lead to equality, it just slows down progress.
I was echoing the words of the comment I was responding to. As I already explained to you, I am in favor of gender equality. Your high drama here comes across to me as concern trolling, especially given the other things you have posted.
This isn't true no matter how you slice it. Men had more economic security because they could work, whereas most women could not. Men have bodily security in ways women do not, esp. in regards to sexual assault and domestic violence.
> men had to work or they wouldn't find a women to marry
I think you have this backwards. Men didn't have to marry. However, since women at large could not work and support themselves, many had no choice but to be attached to someone who could work. Due to past stigmas about women were not married, this put women in a position where getting married was a near necessity.
> Women didn't have to work, as they could be supported by their husband.
Not only would women have little recourse but to marry someone, but women by far were expected to should domestic duties. That is a lot of work and is a full time job in and of itself.
> Of course, there's little proper scientific research on this subject, as "women's studies" start from their assumption that women had and have everything worse without really proving it.
This is blatantly not true. There is a ton of written and academic research work on gender, sexism, etc. and women's studies is a real academic discipline.
> The problem with saying that the men's gender role of more freedom but more responsibility doesn't take into consideration that some people prefer to have less freedom and less responsibility, while some women prefer to have more freedom and more responsibility and some less freedom and less responsibility (or at least prefered in the past).
Men are much more able to pursue the less freedom and less responsibility life, as you put it, compared to women because of how they are treated in society at large. Historically most women did not have the option for the less freedom and less responsible life since they would either be pigeonholed into domestic care or they would have been working poor.
> Even if we assume that men had better starting position in the past, that doesn't apply anymore. Young women are outearning and have more success in education.
This is plainly not true. Most women still earn less than their male counterparts. Further, women still suffer far more from domestic and sexual violence and have their bodies policed much more than men.
> True equality can only be reached through the abolition of gender roles for both men and women, not assuming that men need to "man up" and therefore saying that gender inequality is somehow positive and should exist.
Gender inequality exists right now, even without something like Lulu, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Having an app that deals with one aspect of that reality is totally legit.
> You also made the claim about "imbalance". There's no imbalance in favor of women in Western countries.
Amazingly you say that there is no real research on women's studies, but then go on to conclude there is not problem at all.
> Men have just as much gender equality problems as women, but even speculating this is politically incorrect.
Ah yes, saying men have it as hard as women, which is demonstrably not true at a societal level, will summon the PC police.
The summary of that study tries to use misandry and matriarchy seriously to describe the social and political condition of a western country. This is laughable on its face.
>This isn't true no matter how you slice it. Men had more economic security because they could work, whereas most women could not. Men have bodily security in ways women do not, esp. in regards to sexual assault and domestic violence.
In a marriage the women of course benefits from the man's income to provide economic security. They've also had the security of not dying in senseless wars, and the security of men defending women from danger as is the gender norm even today.
>I think you have this backwards. Men didn't have to marry. However, since women at large could not work and support themselves, many had no choice but to be attached to someone who could work. Due to past stigmas about women were not married, this put women in a position where getting married was a near necessity.
I never claimed that men had to marry, though most of them wanted to (to gain access to sex if nothing else). Men didn't have the option to not work and marry, while had to work to marry, and women didn't have the option to work and not marry.
>Not only would women have little recourse but to marry someone, but women by far were expected to should domestic duties. That is a lot of work and is a full time job in and of itself.
I'd say domestic duties were significantly easier than the typical hard work in the past. Workplace safety was non-existent, for starters. That's of course in addition to military duty and dying in wars.
>This is blatantly not true. There is a ton of written and academic research work on gender, sexism, etc. and women's studies is a real academic discipline.
Women's studies is not an empirical science, if they start from an axiom which doesn't require evidence.
>Men are much more able to pursue the less freedom and less responsibility life, as you put it, compared to women because of how they are treated in society at large. Historically most women did not have the option for the less freedom and less responsible life since they would either be pigeonholed into domestic care or they would have been working poor.
That's of course blatantly not true. Men who didn't work were deemed pretty worthless, and no women would marry them. Besides, they would starve on streets or something, while a women could marry someone and not need to work.
>This is plainly not true. Most women still earn less than their male counterparts.
I said young women. Please try reading what I'm actually saying :). As for the whole pay gap, it's explained through men working 20% more hours per year and making career choices that focus on income.
>Further, women still suffer far more from domestic and sexual violence and have their bodies policed much more than men.
>Gender inequality exists right now, even without something like Lulu, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Having an app that deals with one aspect of that reality is totally legit.
What? This app doesn't prevent gender equality, it enforces it, along with stereotypical gender roles that discriminate both men and women equally. Only a misandrist can support this kind of app.
>Amazingly you say that there is no real research on women's studies, but then go on to conclude there is not problem at all.
> In a marriage the women of course benefits from the man's income to provide economic security. They've also had the security of not dying in senseless wars, and the security of men defending women from danger as is the gender norm even today.
Certainly there is a benefit to having some income through a marriage than none at all, but it is a problem if marriage or association with men is the only option available to have any economic safety at all. Women do not fare well in war because women are very often the target of violence from armies and military conflict even if women do not serve in those conflicts. Men defending women from danger isn't a real phenomenon, as violence against women is predominantly perpetrated by men. Common stories about women and lifeboats, for example, may not reflect reality: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/13/chivalry-at-sea-a-myth...
> Men didn't have the option to not work and marry, while had to work to marry, and women didn't have the option to work and not marry.
My main point about this is that there it was much more likely for women to have no economic security without marriage, whereas men could achieve some economic security without a marriage. Obviously there is a big class element to this w.r.t work access and pay and that women of color have always been working in large numbers outside of personal domestic work.
> I'd say domestic duties were significantly easier than the typical hard work in the past.
It isn't about quantifying the difficulty of some kind of work, but that women still were very like to perform labor in home even if they worked outside of the home in some capacity. Either way, the notion that women didn't do work in a marriage while their husband did contributes to the perspective that domestic work isn't real work and that domestic work performed by husbands/wives at home doesn't have the same value as paid labor.
> Women's studies is not an empirical science, if they start from an axiom which doesn't require evidence.
Women's studies doesn't start from an axiom of "that women had and have everything worse". Women's studies generally explores the condition of genders and provides research, including statistical and empirical research, about the lived conditions and experiences of people.
> Men who didn't work were deemed pretty worthless, and no women would marry them. Besides, they would starve on streets or something, while a women could marry someone and not need to work.
First, work isn't something that most people have for their lifetime in perpetuity. Many folks go through periods of having work and not having work and social factors may exacerbate the availability of paid work. The era leading up to prohibition in the US, for example, made the working situation for the poor worse and damaged existing marriages and families, so to say that there is some kind of binary decision making process in who gets married to whom is silly. Also, the notion that women could marry and not work isn't a common reality for most marriages, in the past and now.
> I said young women. Please try reading what I'm actually saying :). As for the whole pay gap, it's explained through men working 20% more hours per year and making career choices that focus on income.
The pay gap is a complicated thing, and while incomes have improved for younger working women, executive level pay and representation is still belong men in similar positions and companies. Working patterns like the one you mention don't fully account for wage and position gaps for women.
Yes, it is. Your views on historic gender roles do not reflect reality. Men were restricted by gender roles too, and their role was largely "go risk death to get a chance to provide for a woman and children".
That is the worst way to go about this because it DOESN'T ACTUALLY FIX THE PROBLEM. It just makes it worse. Particularly because you are punishing people, men, who have never participated in the subjugation of women. This whole counter racism, counter sexism thing is just making things worst. It is basically just shifting the balance. What does that do for actually fixing the problem? Not a damn thing. Your attitude is vile and it is the same attitude that led to women being treated the way they were in history.
Men as a sex have had advantageous circumstances and treatment for a long time, yes. That has absolutely nothing to do with men who are alive today.
Perhaps you're a male who's OK with being the subject of discriminatory treatment over centuries of gain you didn't get to live through. I'm not, and I don't think anyone should be. Unless two wrongs make a right, discriminating against people who have not been a party to the kind of discrimination you're talking about helps no one, it just alienates those who see our position clearly.
"Men as a sex have had advantageous circumstances and treatment for a long time, yes. That has absolutely nothing to do with men who are alive today."
Let's talk about the gender ratio today in Congress, or among Fortune 500 CEOs. Let's talk about the recent study showing that given identical (fake) resumes for a lab manager position, scientists on average offer lower salary and less mentoring to female candidates. http://www.psmag.com/culture-society/sexists-in-white-coats-... That's just a few examples; there are countless others.
I completely agree that it's unfair to blame men today for the long history of inequality in our society. But 1) that history is not remotely over, and 2) the responsibility that we do have as men alive today is to find whatever ways we can to make progress in improving these issues for everyone.
I honestly don't know the best ways to do that; none of them seem entirely good or entirely effective. But if we know that there is a vast invisible finger of society tipping the scales against women in a given context, it does not strike me as necessarily immoral to put explicit structures in place designed to tip things a little bit back the other way. (I'm sure it could be implemented poorly.) We have to break the self-reinforcing cycle somehow, and maybe an admittedly clumsy counter-push against those social pressures can help.
> Let's talk about the gender ratio today in Congress, or among Fortune 500 CEOs.
The few male at the top are supported by an army of women in leading positions, such as project manager and director. Under these women are many, many more men with lesser roles.
Women have it good in the middle to upper regions of corporate and politics. In those roles they are very appreciated and have lots of real power (and get to boss around other men).
It should be interesting to know how many have women as direct superiors vs viceversa.
>Let's talk about the gender ratio today in Congress, or among Fortune 500 CEOs
Sure. But lets also talk about the gender ratio of prisoners, the homeless, suicides, workplace deaths, etc. It is fallacious to look only at the top 0.0001% of men and declare that men as a group have things better as a result. Men have a much greater variance in virtually every measurable aspect. Look at the entire spectrum.
But if we know that there is a vast invisible finger of society tipping the scales against women in a given context, it does not strike me as necessarily immoral to put explicit structures in place designed to tip things a little bit back the other way.
Seriously? A "vast invisible finger?" No, I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. I'm all for social equality. Equality of opportunity. The way to implement equality is not through further inequality in another direction. That means opportunity starting all the way at the bottom, with basic education, moving up towards higher education, government, and business.
That does NOT mean "hey, we're going to fix this RIGHT NOW, and if women/blacks/pygmys/minority x are underrepresented in any way, we're going to 'tip the scales' in your favor until someone arbitrarily decides thing are 'equal' enough!"
It is unfair to blame men for this situation. It's also unfair to everyone to try and solve the problem of discrimination with more discrimination.
You're conceding too much. High status men have had advantageous circumstances and treatment for a long time. Men are competitors & not particularly kind towards those below them, especially those of no inherent reproductive value... cannon fodder don't have ovaries.
As a man who is, by all accounts, alive today, I still feel like I've gotten a pretty swell deal.
Just because I haven't been an active participant in discrimination doesn't mean I haven't been the recipient of unearned privilege.
I agree that two wrongs don't make a right. But I also believe that fixing the endemic sexism that's still with us is inevitably a messy process. And I believe people who have been victims of that have some very reasonable issues to work out along the way. I think everybody should try to be understanding. But as somebody who ended up getting a better deal than average, I think it's especially incumbent on me to be gracious, kind, and patient.
>Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries. Owning property. Voting.
You are referring to rich men, that elusive 1%. Average men have traditionally gotten the worst/riskiest jobs such as soldier and physical labourer. While the top 1% do get these advantages, the bottom 99% are maybe worse off than women.
Also, the "men had it good for centuries, it's women's turn now" doesn't hold. I am not those men. I was not present then and I resent having to pay for it. Should a child have to pay for the sins of 10 generations ago?
What counts for us is here and now. What passed, passed. It was not our doing.
> Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries. Owning property. Voting. Higher education. Being allowed to practice a profession. Being favored by marriage laws. Being favored by social biases.
Are you saying that men should be expected to "pay" for the priveleges of previous generations of men? If not, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, because all the advantages you list are now equally enjoyed by women (in some cases moreso, e.g. favored by marriage laws).
There are a couple of schools around the world targeted at men, or women...
One very interesting thing, is that schools targeted at women are seem as "traditional" and "bastions" or "empowering", specially if they are ancient and do have good education...
Men schools, once regarded in the same way, are now being attacked, one of the best schools in the US for example is being sued for not taking female students, and a common tag attached to them is "Backwards" or "medieval" or "inquisitors"
If this was a US-only phenomenon, at least I would feel less troubled, except even in Brazil we had a crazy problem...
During the government ranking of high schools (that is made with a test that all high schools students in the country must take if they wish to join university), the first place was a boys-only school.
This is a problem, because it drew attention to them, now there are all sorts of discrimination lawsuits from parents of girls, and the media is bellowing how "less worse" they are, because they accept female teachers, and that when they did not accepted them they were evil, and now that they do they are less evil, but that this would be only a truly good school when they start accepting girls and change some of their authoritarian ways and become more tolerating and egalitarian.
Or some issue with bars... Female only bars in Brazil are allowed and seen as a female fun thing. Male only bars get the cops quickly called on them for refusing entry of costumer based on gender. (Female-only are illegal too, but cops ignore it).
Or one even crazier, it is common to employers to want to hire one gender or other (for example they might want a woman to be the maintenance person of the women's bathroom), yet although signs of "hiring female x" don't attract problems, if you put a sign like "hiring male bathroom cleaner" you get quickly sued for hiring discrimination (that is illegal).
I even had a business owner once complain that a woman sued him (and almost won... a judge chance that allowed he win the case) for not hiring her as attendant in a store for male intimate clothing... The first judge saw it purely in the light of law: you cannot discriminate, period. the second judge had more common sense on his head and imaginated that it would bring even more legal problems to have a woman hanging around men that might want to become naked (or almost naked depending on store policy regarding trying intimate clothes) to choose his new clothes...
> Men schools, once regarded in the same way, are now being attacked, one of the best schools in the US for example is being sued for not taking female students, and a common tag attached to them is "Backwards" or "medieval" or "inquisitors"
You've discovered Marxism! Marxism views the world through the lens of class conflict. In Marxist thought, racism and sexism can only be committed by dominant groups. So blatant discrimination and double standards against them are okay.
For better and for worse; the coverage of apps targeting women usually portrays women as hapless damsels in distress to whose rescue we must come through outrage and this and that.
The increased outrage is not necessarily something that automatically favours the sex it purports to defend.
One could argue that people care more about women than men, but one could also argue that women need to be defended more than men, which flips the discussion of sexism or gender-favouritism on its head.
But generally, I definitely find there to be a gendered response, depending on the target demographic.
like most models? many advertising agencies use minors on their "sexy" ads that are specifically targeted to arouse men of all ages. You just don't see it but men are all over younger girls.
How does this even work?
I assume it's a database that you search by name and location but then there's going to be all kinds of collisions. Or does it pull data from social networks?
I imagine the signal to noise ratio will just be horrible, bitter ex girlfriends will just spam guys with negative tags even if they aren't true and it's information will just lose all value.
It'd be interesting to see a review of Lulu that didn't seem to be mainly made of "dude with baseball cap, suddenly concerned that he might be called to account".
To me, the emotional heart of this piece of writing is his concern with "men kowtowing". I looked at his other articles and his personal site, and I didn't see anything where his writing was half this passionate. And certainly nothing where he'd expressed concern for sexism.
I suspect if I looked into Lulu I'd also not like it. But this article is so full of the author that I really can't see the subject.
Um.... So because the author doesn't normally soapbox about this hot-button issue but felt unusually compelled to call this instance out, you're less inclined to take him seriously?
Never mind that either side of that is the worst kind of ad hominem.
Exactly. Because that, along with the article itself, suggests that the unusual compulsion is not a strong opposition to sexism.
Ad hominem concerns apply to rational arguments. This piece is not cool, rational discourse. It's a highly emotional piece, written to incite emotion. Inquiring about the source and nature of the emotion that drives it is fair.
He probably didn't notice sexism until it became personal. Why is that wrong? Most people become activists when something personally gets in their face, rather than through some abstract idea of "justice".
It's not wrong as such. It's just shallow. Hopefully it's the beginning for him of understanding sexism more deeply.
I do think it's wrong for a writer, though. If you're going to set yourself up as writing an article about a topic, I think you should actually know something about the topic.
This would have been a better piece if he'd made it more explicitly about his own feelings all the way through, rather than trying to make it about bigger things.
Besides the sexist nature of the app (imagine the outcry if it would be an app to rate girls... "sexist startup guys treating women like netflix movies") what the hell is their business model? they collected 2.5 million for a free app, without a business model and a VERY questionable legal standing (if not in the us almost anywhere else in the world)
Need someone to hack and leak the user data to build a database of pathetic self absorbed women not worth giving the time of day to let alone building any sort of friendship or god forbid a relationship with.
As a guy, I couldn't care less that these kinds of things exist. This app will be used exclusively by a superficial audience who I would have absolutely no interest in meeting. If anything, I'd quite like to end up on this with extremely negative reviews just so the horrible people using this will stay the fuck away from me.
But then those people will talk to their friends, and so on. And, contrary to what you might think, there's plenty of highly educated women who are sufficiently steeped in feminism (due to the process of acquiring that higher education) to see this as perfectly fair payback for patriarchy's many evils, and to use it without regret. So you end up targeting a thin sliver of possible women: not too superficial, but not too educated, and with no friends in either of those categories. Good luck with your dating.
>there's plenty of highly educated women who are sufficiently steeped in feminism (due to the process of acquiring that higher education) to see this as perfectly fair payback for patriarchy's many evils, and to use it without regret.
Your implicit attack on morals derived from feminism reveals a failure to understand feminism and its ideals and effects. Furthermore, demonizing "plenty of highly educated women" as eye-for-an-eye combatants seeking revenge for patriarchy isn't just silly, it's offensive.
Obviously it's not black and white, but my point was to disabuse jshakes of his (frankly elitist) notion that only superficial and uninterestng people would be exposed to this app's ratings.
Well-educated people - both women and men, actually - are in fact more likely to be feminists (due to the cultural milieu at most universities, if nothing else), and feminists are in fact not unlikely to approve of things like Lulu as well-deserved reversals of privilege. I'm not saying all of them would (in fact, I am a feminist myself, and I do not), but it's not rare, either, and I've seen that kind of reaction from people I would not consider superficial or uninteresting.
That's not an attack on anything, it's just me sharing my personal experience. And who are you to say that my experience is invalid, or silly? I think that's far more offensive than anything I've said.
Imagine you were going to go out on a date with a new woman and you knew there was a "review" of her online that you could download for free in 10 seconds.
Would you not be tempted to at least look? I mean you know it's just superficial crap, but you might have a look; just for laughs of course..
Or you meet a new girl out somewhere and get her phone number, then your buddy comes to you and says "haha, dude that chick you met.. says here she gives a terrible blowjob! LOL!"
I mean, you'd like to think that stuff wouldn't colour your judgement at all..
No, not really, why in the hell would I want to know what other people think about her? They obviously didn't get on perfectly because they're not still dating - QED.
And if my 'buddy' said that he'd get a polite "fuck off".
Wow, it's like everything that I used to fear about the dating world put into one shiny app. Had this been out years ago when I was single, it would've definitely given me a lot of anxiety. Having been happily married for 5 years, all I can say to single folks is that if someone actively rates people on apps/sites like this, they are most likely not the kind of people you want to be with in the long run.
As for the startup/app itself, it's the natural evolution of taking HotOrNot ratings + OKCupid profiles + Fuckedcompany gossip and building it into a neat package. There is certainly a demand for apps like this in the market but if you're a user, try to be nice even if you don't like someone. People can become really mean when anonymous.
Indeed. This would become the first question I asked a woman when trying to date. If she's childish enough to use something like this, I'd have no problem saying sayonara. There should be some expectation of maturity and general couth in any relationship.
Yes, it does. I have standards for the people I choose to involve myself with. In a similar vein, I would likely not even befriend anyone that uses it, or anyone that supports this type of application (either directed towards men or women). A big part of maturity is having personal integrity in all dealings. This means, for me, an automatic rejection of anyone who would use something like this. Similarly, I do not befriend constant gossips or complainers, and call my friends out when they do it. Certain people are a waste of relationship effort.
Not to mention, female privilege lets them call men "creepers" or "perverts" without question. I've pressed female friends about this and they just answer with "I didnt like the look he gave me" or "we just didnt click."
So instead of understanding that most people are not compatible, we're now building a db to slander them based on purely emotional reasoning?
If women are using this then it says a lot about the woman. I imagine the women drawn to this are difficult anyway. This problem kind of solves itself. I doubt this app can help them and its a symptom of a very negative attitude toward dating and, frankly, socially acceptable misandry.
Until we, as a society, can stop blaming women for their rapes (she was so sloshed, what did she think would happen when she got into bed with him?) women are going to be EXTREMELY conservative about these kinds of things.
When it's your fault if he rapes you, you put "creepy" on a hair trigger.
No, not what the GP said. Simply put, women are overly cautious when evaluating men because they know that they are not very well protected by the law (in as much as the threat of punishment acts as a deterrent, an idea for which the jury is still out) when it comes to rape, so they have to protect themselves by using any little indicator to hint that they are in the presence of a pervert. This is not particularly fair to most men, but I don't know that asking women to assume more risk so that you have an easier time getting laid is very fair either.
Just in case you are unaware of this, most women I know and have discussed this with agree that social awkwardness in men is often correlated with inappropriate sexual behaviour, so yes, if you make an awkward attempt at conversation, you are probably going to get negatively labelled. May I suggest working on your social skills if this bothers you?
That is a very subjective measure. Would be interesting to see a study about whether women actually correlate social awkwardness with inappropriate behavior or unwanted behavior. If the guy is super charming and does the same thing, do they still consider it inappropriate?
I've known a number of women that tend to avoid the socially smooth guy because they see it as a mask for other sexual behaviors. I'm sure much of these types of judgments come from personal past interactions regardless of which direction they tend. Yay for anecdotal evidence!
I don't disagree with what you're saying, though I think that only picking on social awkwardness goes too far. For the benefit of any guys who read this and feel bad about themselves, here are some other behaviours that frequently correlate with inappropriate sexual behaviour:
- playing on a sports team (I'm Canadian, so I like to pick on hockey players, but this happens in other sports as well).
- working on oil rigs.
- abusing heavy drugs.
- working in sales.
- being too smooth.
- practicing that moronic "treat girls like your sister and insult them" pick-up method.
Long story short, there are many, many indicators of inappropriate sexual behaviour.
Maybe you didn't mean to use that example, but I think your point is kind of defeated if you say when women are simply being conservative or cautious and append that to a very non-cautious act. Getting sloshed is not the cautious way to go about something whether you are male or female. Your chance of being a victim of a crime (not just sexual crimes) goes up when you get drunk.
Before anyone jumps the gun, I'm not saying that someone raped while drunk is at fault. Only that this is a bad example of someone acting cautious at all. Caution and being protective (or the lack there of) != fault.
Yeah, but women want to have fun. So the solution is get drunk, but be careful about who you hang out with. Thus the hair-trigger creepiness detectors.
You're being disingenuous. There are thousands of rape convictions a year regardless of whatever cherry-picked anti-women sentiment you think exists. Some of which are purely on hearsay and men go to prison with little to no physical evidence. Brian Banks is a good example.
Also, this app is to rate men. Its not an anti-rape app. Stop playing the rape card to defend every lousy idea.
And when it's your fault for being a "creeper" when you just try to talk to a woman, you learn not to bother. Blaming women for their rapes is of course absurd and unjust, but indiscriminately second guessing all men everywhere is not the solution.
"Creepy" means "he made me feel threatened and unsafe". It's valuable information for women to share within their social group so that they can avoid uncomfortable situations.
Though it is not at all appropriate to share such information on a public online forum.
In theory, yes. I've seen more than one woman "confess" that creepiness was more a factor of attraction - that the same behavior from two men was considered creepy, unless the woman was attracted to one, in which case it was considered acceptable, even positively (and though I'm wary of ascribing fiction as another anecdote - witness female-oriented fiction, such as Interview With A Vampire, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey as being heavily tinged with behavior that, if there wasn't attraction, even if unexplored / unannounced as yet, would be unacceptable).
The problem with such terms as "creepy" is that they could apply to anyone, depending on circumstances.
- Did the hot date you were kind of into try to touch your boob without asking you? Creepy! (acceptable)
- Did the ugly guy two tables over compliment you on your looks when you were both trying to get a drink at the bar? Creepy! (not so acceptable.)
- Did the guy you were dating for a few months ask you for a 5' in-person conversation after you decided to break up out of the blue over SMS? Creepy! (that one happened to me and I felt personally threatened by this woman's implicit threat of slander)
It's also interesting how prevalent the notion of "creepyness" is in the US. Whereas in other cultures the same guy would be considered annoying, inconvenient, misguided or justifiedly threatening, here a blanket term is applied and everyone accepts it. The same principle applies to a lot of emotional stuff, where Americans apply very coarse "pattern matching" to behaviors that other cultures are way more nuanced about.
I don't really have much to hide in terms of being a "bad" guy, but I will openly admit I have several minor forms of neurosis. I could see several guys being needlessly embarrassed by an app like this. What I choose to share on the interent is one thing, what others choose to share is a bit different.
Exactly. As offensive, shallow, and demeaning as Lulu might be it really isn't anything new. Trashy people of both sexes have used Facebook for gossipy purposes such as this for years. By now we should all have learned how to prune our relationship tree and unfriend, avoid, and block people who do this sort of thing. Anyone who would use a site like Lulu is not worthy to be a friend, much less a significant other.
To add to the anxiety that some men are probably feeling about this app, Lulu obnoxiously uses a homepage photo in which the women look like they're acting at best mischievous and at worst downright evil. Personally, the app does not cause me any anxiety, but I can tell from the comments that for some it does, and the homepage photo choice is a blatantly unapologetic statement about how Lulu hopes the app is used. The photo choice on the homepage does not mesh well with the text in the About page.
I don't have Facebook account myself, but it's related to Lulu app and onlulu (according to the faq). Apparently, guys can see what girls say about them.
I don't think the main goal is to help people. Lulu get personal datas from girls (mobile app, onlulu) and from guys (luludude) with this system and probably make money with it. Helping ladies and guys is a "secondary" activity.
From onlulu.com's FAQ:
"Lulu Dude is a separate app we created for the boys because we do not let them into the original Lulu.
Guys don’t see what the girls see. We let them select their relationship status and profile picture and we encourage them to get their “fan base” to review them.
Lulu Dude is also a place for guys to get self-improvement tips. Think of Lulu Dude as Cosmo for guys."
Interesting to see a startup with a business model that is entirely based in toeing the line of libel. I wouldn't bet on its sustainability...but certainly interesting to watch nonetheless.
I used to be unhappy about this app until I found an SQL injection vulnerability that allowed me to log in and access the accounts of my previous dates by only needing to know their email addresses. This meant I was able to manipulate the ratings and comments people had made about me. Now I like the app :)
Be careful with your trivial SQL injection, if the US police find out, that's 60 years behind bars, no access to a computer and daily "fun" in the shower.
I find it absolutely despicable to make light of violent abuse, including sexual abuse, in prison. We should be doing all we can to make our prisons safer for everyone.
The fact that many people think it is OK to make and laugh at prison rape jokes sickens me. What would you think if I made rape jokes about your 90 year old grandma? Or your ten year old son? Or your wife? If that is not ok, neither is prison rape of adult men.
I am appalled to realize many people think prison rape is part and parcel of the "prison experience". Should rape be used as a deterrent to unwanted behavior? Where do we stop? Will you be ok with teachers turning a blind eye on students raping other students in detention for not doing their homework or for misbehaving in the classroom? Answer me.
This being said, I would like to point out that I also made light of violent, sexual abuse in prison in the grandparent post - I deserve the downvotes too.
Do you live in the real world? Prisons aren't safe because they are full of violent offenders! It's pretty obvious that when you densely pack the bottom tier of society into small spaces that the outcome will be a whole load of violence - of all forms, rape (which is about power and control), gangs (which is core to the human species), fights and murder.
#1 on the list would be to stop sending so many people to prison, one way or another. Then you can afford to spend more resources per capita to better rehabilitate/reform/etc. the smaller number of inmates that remain.
I apologize for my rudeness. It was uncalled for and I really didn't mean it that way. I didn't mean to target you or put you on the spot. I understand that reforming people's views takes time. (I visited a freshman class in a South Asian university. If I was from there I presume I'd most likely think that cat calling women as they entered the classroom was normal and acceptable behavior.
I think we have a similar problem here. We've grown up with these jokes and lived with them for so long that it just doesn't bother us. I am glad you agree that prison rape is not OK. I am not trying to be sanctimonious (I actually had to look up that word). I just feel so helpless about this situation.
I don't think that this is a very reasonable response - making a joke and caring about something are not mutually exclusive.
Comedians regularly make jokes about some of the most abhorrent things that happen in the world. Racism, pedophilia, murder. Do you think that these comics therefore agree with racism, pedophilia and murder? No, of course not. They're making jokes.
It may not have been funny, and it may not have been appropriate (we're not in a comedy club after all), but it doesn't mean esquilax will be OK with "teachers turning a blind eye on students raping other students in detention for not doing their homework".
Basically, calm down, he made a bad joke, it's not the end of the world.
>Comedians regularly make jokes about some of the most abhorrent things that happen in the world.
Comedians who joke about raping women generally get booed and chastised and otherwise shunned. Comedians who joke about prison rape generally don't. Regardless of which you think is the appropriate response, it would be nice to see a little consistency.
You can certainly feel the way you want to, but sticks and stones. Jokes make light of plenty of despicable things. That's the point of a joke: to make light of something.
A joke is a joke. Specifically naming someone is not a joke. It is personal and implies a thinly veiled threat. It's not apples to apples at all unless you are the personification of the concept of prison rape.
IMO prisons should be about taking away peoples freedom, not about treating them like animals. But many people seem to be more concerned about their utility or lack thereof, for example if having a death sentence for death convicts costs more than life in prison or vice versa. Or the idea of having them work as effectively slave labour.
As the former CTO of that company, I really doubt this. When I was there, the app was built on Django, and I left some pretty competent people behind, so I'm quite sure they wouldn't have made a mistake so rudimentary.
However, I don't know what happened after I left, so there might have been some dubious decisions.
Facebook and Google have to do a lot of penetration tests to keep their security in tip-top shape, sure, they have a much larger attack vector in terms of code but my point is there:
Where there is public facing code, there is vulnerability.
Regardless of if you are built on Django, CodeIgniter, Rails or super-secret-obfuscated-language-mark-two, no application is bullet proof and it would be trivial for any highly skilled security tester to interface this way with your database.
Above you are essentially saying every application has SQL injection vulnerabilities and any good security guy will find them. This is a very specific and dubious conclusion to draw from the more general principle that there will be some vulnerability, somewhere. SQL injection specifically is quite easy to avoid. With some frameworks it would actually be rather laborious to introduce an SQL injection vulnerability. This is what Alexander is alluding to. This does not imply that applications are easily secured, just that this attack vector isn't what it used to be.
Well, statistics of pentests does show that, if tested, the vast majority of good quality, generally securely built applications have some vulnerabilities, and average applications have a huge multitude of vulnerabilities.
SQL injections are just one class of many. There are ways to vastly reduce SQL injection risks but that still leaves many other venues of attack.
No, I never have to be lucky at all. I literally can not put an SQL injection vulnerability into production unless I do so deliberately, my code wouldn't compile. Not everyone uses terrible rails style "lets automagically do shit behind your back so security holes are hidden from you" frameworks.
You're being too harsh. You seem to be talking about Haskell, so saying "not everyone" is a weird way to put it. You really mean a tiny fraction of people use Haskell to be safe in advanced ways. Well, Haskell is ahead of its time. Of course not that many people use it.
Even Haskell is not a silver bullet against every kind of security problem. Didn't Snap have a directory traversal bug a while back?
I don't understand what you are trying to convey. It appears like a deliberate red herring to try to distract from what I actually said. I personally use haskell, but you do not need to do so to get a complete guarantee against SQL injection. Nobody said anything about silver bullets or protecting against every security problem. I very clearly said SQL injection is a solved problem, in reply to someone claiming every single web app has SQL injection vulnerabilities in it and that any security researcher can easily sit down and exploit them, and the only way to deal with SQL injection is to be lucky over and over.
You are being too harsh (again). Whatever problems you deal with, whatever mistakes you make in your professional work, are also solved problems, using some technology that is unacceptable to you (probably for very good reasons).
You could have been informative and made your original point tactfully. Instead, you badmouthed a certain technology without even naming the stuff that was supposedly better. I'm a Haskell evangelist and agree with you 100%, and you came off like a jerk even to me.
I think perhaps we are operating with very different definitions of harsh. If your response is simply intended to be a poor attempt at criticizing my tone, you did not make that clear. Obviously such vacuous nonsense would not warrant a response.
Your assertion that whatever problems I deal with are solved problems is absolutely insane. Please, tell me how problems like interpreting customers requirements are "solved" and what technology I can use to ensure that all the code I write will 100% always match the users mental picture of what they wanted.
Criticizing the choice to deliberately create security holes for convenience is not "badmouthing", and "I'm offended" is not a productive response. It literally conveys no useful information at all.
Most vulnerabilities probably aren't due to the language but the application writers, simply because there are more eyes on the language than the application.
If there's one thing the internet has taught me, there is no such thing as ironclad code. OpenBSD still has security vulnerabilities, and I highly doubt Lulu's security chops are as good.
That said, I'm not trying to doubt the skill of Lulu's employees. Just warning that vulnerabilities are always a possibility.
While I was there, we were building a social network for women, something between Path and Facebook where they could share their day-to-day with their closest friends. The rating thing was sort of an afterthought, I guess they pivoted.
There wasn't really a guy-hating culture, in fact, most of the employees there were men. I don't know how it's changed since.
> so apparently guys are still good enough to hire. Interesting.
I re-read the parent, and nowhere does it say nor imply that the CTO nor the people he hired were male. For all that we know, the site might be built by bimbos scratching one of their own itches.
I wouldn't bet on it, of course, but I'm amazed to see that prejudices are so deeply ingrained that:
His username is "StavrosK", and his full name, Stavros Korokithakis is in his profile. If you weren't familiar with the name Stavros and didn't know the gender, you could google it and the first link would take you to his website which shows his photo.
I don't see the 'deeply ingrained prejudice' here.
It sounds like something that's going to divide people on the moral compass but in the end you don't need to ask someone's permission before you can have an opinion of them and share it with other people.
Technology changes the scale, though. Gossiping with your friend about your ex is different from sharing your opinion of said ex with thousands of people.
How on earth could this app get funding? If it were a male->female app there would have been an outrage about it.
Moral issues aside, I can see a lot of libel lawsuits (at least in the UK) springing up because of this app. There are enough rumours in the world as it is, we do not need apps that profit from people rating the opposite sex and spreading rumours about them.
The connected nature of the internet and mobile devices reduces the cost of disseminating information. It doesn't discriminate about what information is made easier to share. Expecting app stores to play gate keepers sets a dangerous precedent. Imagine if the internet was an AOL app store and Steve Case had the final opinion on everything that would be made available to their users.
You just have to roll with the punches and adjust. It's fine to be appalled at stuff like this, it goes over the top whenever you want someone to have authority to bring a stop to it for you. Adjusting your expectations and dealing with your objections are a better option than giving someone you can't really trust such long lasting power just to temporarily please your ego.
In two days you're going to forget about this app, but then you'll probably have found something else on HN to be outraged about. Maybe it will be the app store gate keeper shutting down an app you liked.
Tried signing up for it with a fake Facebook account with gender set to female, and it did not work. I still think this is really effed up - but honestly was genuinely curious to see what is on this thing! Kind of to see what girls I know that would even use this.
What are you talking about? I see at least a few stories per week on sexism in the top 10. Given that this place is more technology/startup-related than "let's talk about society", that's a pretty good frequency for just one of many valid social causes.
Next time you see a story about sexism against women (redundant but needs the clarification here anyway), watch its movement. Yeah, it may get up in the top for a bit, but you can watch stories that are older with fewer points and comments move up above it. Happens every time.
I've seen this effect in other "heated" discussions, and I wonder if it's the effect of moderation. Primarily, what happens to a thread as the percentage of moderated messages increases? Is that metric involved in the positioning? I could see a topic like sexism (or emacs v. vi) getting an inordinate amount of moderation, and thus might be flagged more often, moving it down the list. Maybe that has nothing to do with it, but I've seen this effect before.
Are... are you serious? Or is it just trolling? I'm not an obsessive HN reader but I see sexism stories show up at the top of the HN list all the time. To the point that I've taken it as one of the odd HN cultural quirks, that you all like to discuss it obsessively. Claiming they get "buried" is contrary to all evidence I've seen, though I guess if you have statistics I'm willing to be proven wrong.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadI think the issue is men can't use the app.
This thought exercise is really making me scared about how much the owners of the apps on my phone know about me!
UPDATE: Or perhaps not. After looking at the web site, it seems that this service, and a bad review of my person, is precisely the thing to repel exactly the kind of women I've never wanted to have anything common with.
"I've published my book on Lulu.com."
"Oh, is that the horrible sexist girl gossip website?"
"I didn't know they were running it. I'll tell my friends to stop buying their books from there."
I find the whole idea objectionable at every level and about as innovative as "rate my poo".
Bitterness, anger and jealousy are unfortunately some of the strongest traits we humans have, especially when it comes to our interactions with one another, this application, while on the surface immoral, is simply providing a means for this to happen online.
I don't in anyway agree with this application or the practices it supports and the tags come across as misandric but people will be people, if they don't bitch here it will be on more public venues, such as Facebook or Twitter, at least here I don't have to see the self absorbed whinging simply by virtue of never visiting the app.
That aside, I hope the creators provide some means of men removing themselves from the website or there could very soon be some kind of law suit coming there way, regardless of their contrived TOS.
That being said, I would find it a good indicator, if the person you were dating took notice of this drivel, they are probably the kind of person you don't want to be dating anyway.
I think the biggest issue is the complete anonymity which is inherently given online, even if it asked for identities, these can easily be faked.
What is to stop a jealous co-worker or an annoyed sister, or even a drunk friend from tarnishing your public image online by saying you treat them badly, or even worse, raped them, over an application like this?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoAdmit#Criticism_and_controv...
If this had been an app for men rating and alerting them about certain women all hell would of broke loose.
It's so easy to look down on someone identifying as male as being discriminant but when the opposite is true, the male point of view is often ignored.
Simply put, we are expected to man up, whereas women are expected to stand up.
Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries. Owning property. Voting. Higher education. Being allowed to practice a profession. Being favored by marriage laws. Being favored by social biases.
Like Peter Parker and Voltaire say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Having received a substantial boost just for being born with a dick, I'm ok with manning up. To me, that's part of using my power to redress the imbalance.
Sure, men have had the upper hand for centuries but we live in an age where the scales have tipped - we need to be careful that instead of having a substantial boost for having a dick, or a vagina, that instead every has the same substantial advantage.
Unemployment of young folk (<30) is more prevalent in men than women.
I don't want to take anything from the women's struggle, but more and more, they are getting the upper hand. (Heck, my boy is 11 months old, and even now, he gets more 'insults' about behavior then his female cousin about same age)
If we look at young people, then women clearly have the uppder hand. In addition to having the upper hand in dating, they out-earn young men and have greater success in education. Interestingly, if women are better than men at something, then the explanation is never discrimination, but if men are better than women, then the reason is discrimination.
I don't think that's a valid inference, honestly. Firstly, "average" is too tied to distribution and biased outliers and asymmetry. Perhaps you intended to compare medians.
"have the upper hand" I think means that when you compare proportions of X to non-X within strata that the proportion of X decreases with increasing status.
Quey: how does the suicide give women an "uppper hand" this is a personal choice, and doesn't seem to be about gender equality at all. Sure you could say "men are more pressured..." but you could also say "women aren't empowered to make decisions about their body and don't see it as viable". Again: how does the stat show an upper hand?
About dating: I don't think you can declare women have the "upper hand". At best they have an "even hand". Sure there are pretty girls that get an absurde level of "power of choice", but there are plenty of men in the same category. Similarly when the traditional "men approach" role is taken, women are stuck with what comes their way. Putting it another way: in my experience the problems women experience in dating are the same as the problems men experience: shitty candidates, lots of fear of rejection, insecurity and incompatability issues. Leading to:
Query: how do women have the upper hand in dating in your mind?
It indicates that men are at a disadvantage. It doesn't matter what causes the disadvantage, it's still a fact. Of course, when men are at a disadvantage the reason is never expected to be gender roles or discrimination.
>Quey: how does the suicide give women an "uppper hand" this is a personal choice
If you think social issue like suicide can be categorized as "personal choice", you don't know much about depression and suicide. There are factors that increase risk to suicide, like poverty and depression, which are quite prevalent in males.
>About dating: I don't think you can declare women have the "upper hand". At best they have an "even hand". Sure there are pretty girls that get an absurde level of "power of choice", but there are plenty of men in the same category.
That description doesn't quite fit the facts, though. It's more like the upper 2/3 of women are in the same position as upper 1/3 of men for various reasons. You can just look at the number of messages on online dating sites, or look at the genetic evidence: 2/3 of all women in history have had children, but only 1/3 men have had genetic offspring.
>Putting it another way: in my experience the problems women experience in dating are the same as the problems men experience: shitty candidates, lots of fear of rejection, insecurity and incompatability issues.
The social etiquette and gender roles and various other reasons mean that men are expected to make the initiation, and women can simply choose the best candidate. That means that men have to face a lot more rejection than women.
This is a good article on the issue: http://alvanista.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/another-okcupid-st...
>It indicates that men are at a disadvantage. It doesn't matter what causes the disadvantage, it's still a fact. Of course, when men are at a disadvantage the reason is never expected to be gender roles or discrimination.
False. This is not how statistics work. There could be other confounding factors that are relevant. For instance, of the women who would become homeless how many are forced into some sort of prostitution scheme from which they can't escape? How many die early in homelessness because they are at a survival as homeless person disadvantage? You are not providing enough data, just cherry picking context free numbers as if it meant something.
>>Quey: how does the suicide give women an "uppper hand" this is a personal choice
>If you think social issue like suicide can be categorized as "personal choice", you don't know much about depression and suicide. There are factors that increase risk to suicide, like poverty and depression, which are quite prevalent in males.
Maybe. So what advantages to women have. Again, you need to explain a causal relationship of advantage, not just cherry pick numbers as if it were meaningful.
About the dating stuff: your stat makes no sense with regards to genetics. Everyone gets a X chromosome, some get 2 of them. Of course there will be more attributable genetic lineage to women, wheres a guy who only produces daughters will not necessarily be identifiable in a few generations from his sister who passes on the same X chromosome to ~50% of her offspring. Also, why does this genetic number prove evidence for "do nothing"? That is conflating two similar numbers pointlessly. Again, I suggest you learn some simple statistics.
As for the initiation thing: that is not a disadvantage to males. A couple reasons:
First of all, except for people who have 0 social skills initiation is really not hard.
Second, initiation must be invited, putting half the onus in the woman's hands (again, there are cues and signaling for this) - the act of asking or a date or starting a conversation is quite far into the courting process.
Third, simply choosing the best candidate is not - ever been part of a hiring process? Sometimes all the candidates are shitty and you have to choose "no hire", this is a problem.
Fourth do you really think women just sit there and do nothing in dating but wait for a candidate to come along? I doubt that, otherwise why would there be a giant business targeting women with things like "how to make guys notice you", and "improve your dating potential".
Fifth: In the traditional role, women have the following disadvantage: they are the ones with the job of keeping men around far more often than men keeping a woman around. Once the relationship is established, the woman has to keep the man happy. (again - big buisness in magazines with articles like "keep your man happy and around", "how to prevent him from cheating" and the like).
Finally your linked article presupposes the conclusion it reaches, and ignores in its analysis any other factors.
I'm one of those overeducated women with the upper hand or something like that, although due to my great success in education I'm not out-earning all that many people yet. Remember, though, that the mythical ability to get a guy to pay for dinner and that incredible math PhD mean nothing when a guy on the street is looking me up & down & giving me a "compliment." If I talk back to that crazy guy on the bus, even if I'm out-earning and out-educating him, I always remember it can go like this: http://unwinona.tumblr.com/post/30861660109/i-debated-whethe...
To return to the original topic, I don't support Lulu at all. I've had far better success in dating and life treating men like people.
Yeah, I used statistics from my own country.
>Greater male service in the military is one component of this
Funny anecdote, here in Finland men still have conscription (e.g. forced labour for 6-12 months), but almost nobody talks about that as a gender equality issue.
>I'm one of those overeducated women with the upper hand or something like that, although due to my great success in education I'm not out-earning all that many people yet.
Education of course doesn't directly lead to higher earnings, as you need to choose the right industry and career path. Of course, I don't know anything about you in particular, but most well-off people underestimate the earnings of otherpeople. (I don't know the exact statistic, but the top 10% think that they're only slightly better off than the average or something).
Anyway, men earn more than women because they work longer hours (about 20% more in average). The other explanation is that men choose careers that have higher income (e.g. according to research for men income matters a lot more in career choise than for women).
>Remember, though, that the mythical ability to get a guy to pay for dinner and that incredible math PhD mean nothing when a guy on the street is looking me up & down & giving me a "compliment."
Err, men have to deal with crazy people on the bus too. In fact, vast majority of street violence is against men (it's around 80% in my country).
Racial privilege was the one I noticed first. And that was mainly because I lived in places where as a foreigner I was outside the normal framework. That made it much easier to see race and class dynamics at work. It was only after that I could start seeing gender dynamics more clearly. But they're still hard, because you can't try be an outsider to that in the same way.
I agree that we should be working toward parity. I just don't think we're there yet.
And even calling women "sweet" isn't always appreciated. See http://rookiemag.com/2013/04/no-more-nice-girls/
If these expectations remain, what possible social change could occur that would put our "brutish" gender in the crapper? As long as that cultural push exists to be stoic, strong, tough, and to go for what they want, then our male culture is ingrained to be immune to a social upheaval. It's a good way to live if you ask me.
My recommendation is to not care.
I do not care.
I hope the girls have fun on LuLu.
Now if the girls want to change their cultural expectations to make their lives better? Sounds great! I don't care.
I sincerely hope you're joking.
Yes, so let's reverse it, and get a female-biased revenge ...on people that weren't even alive back at those times.
Why not also sell white people as slaves?
Second, you DO know that "Godwin's law" is not an actual law that govern's discussions, and it's not even something that people agree on its validity, right? It's merely a BS internet meme, a funny quote used as a joke. Invoking it is like invoking made up statistics as an argument.
By the way, I didn't say that discrimination was ok, and I wasn't making a historical analogy. I was pointing out that our existing society is just emerging from that long history of sexism.
You know who else wanted to end threads? Hitler.
Done.
Not really. Men have had more freedom but less security. Just because you personally like your gender role (as it seems), that doesn't mean other men agree (or agreed in the past). Sure, men were allowed to be employees and women cared for the children at home (though reality was actually a lot more complex than that, but we can accept this caricature for now), but men had to work or they wouldn't find a women to marry. Women didn't have to work, as they could be supported by their husband. Work was pretty gruesome in the past, even if homework was also harder in the past.
Of course, there's little proper scientific research on this subject, as "women's studies" start from their assumption that women had and have everything worse without really proving it.
The problem with saying that the men's gender role of more freedom but more responsibility doesn't take into consideration that some people prefer to have less freedom and less responsibility, while some women prefer to have more freedom and more responsibility and some less freedom and less responsibility (or at least prefered in the past).
>Having received a substantial boost just for being born with a dick, I'm ok with manning up.
Even if we assume that men had better starting position in the past, that doesn't apply anymore. Young women are outearning and have more success in education.
True equality can only be reached through the abolition of gender roles for both men and women, not assuming that men need to "man up" and therefore saying that gender inequality is somehow positive and should exist.
You also made the claim about "imbalance". There's no imbalance in favor of women in Western countries. Men have just as much gender equality problems as women, but even speculating this is politically incorrect. Here's a study o the subject: http://granum.uta.fi/granum/kirjanTiedot.php?tuote_id=18450
I agree that patriarchy is bad for men too. I disagree that it was equally bad for both genders. I disagree that we have reached balance. By "manning up", I don't mean reinforcing gender roles or maintaining gender inequality. I mean that men should, as the relatively privileged parties, not be whiny at either the shift toward balance or the small anti-male inequities that crop up temporarily along the road to equity.
Translated from feminist rhetoric: Men have no right to complain about discrimination against them.
shanelja and nawitus, I think abundance of people with similar views to wpietri highlights how real your points actually are.
But I have the legal right to say that they're whiny idiots when they appear unable to notice or acknowledge the context of their complaint. If you're going to cry, "have sympathy for meeeeeee", you really should make sure you've demonstrated some sympathy for others.
For example, if somebody is tired and cranky and says something mean, I don't have to get upset at it. I can let it go, and treat them compassionately. I think that is precisely the road to getting rid of meanness.
I do think that to a privileged person, any move toward equality feels like inequality, because what they notice is things getting worse for them.
I also think that people emerging from oppression are liable to cross the line of exact equity from time to time. An as long as the swings are small, I'm ok with that. Specifically, as a guy, I'm saying I don't mind brushing off something that might be a bit of anti-guy sexism. Because that one small nettle-sting is nothing in proportion to the benefits I've received, or to the scope of the historical wrong that we are righting.
I don't know enough about Lulu to have an opinion on it. And for the record, I'm opposed to hiring practices that advantage women. I am strongly for, though, active practices to eliminate the disadvantage that women face.
I want people to treat other people as individuals, not representative of their gender. I don't care about my own gender role. I don't want people to say "man up" to men if I face some injustice. And I don't want (the reverse I guess) it happen to women either.
Your path doesn't lead to equality, it just slows down progress.
This isn't true no matter how you slice it. Men had more economic security because they could work, whereas most women could not. Men have bodily security in ways women do not, esp. in regards to sexual assault and domestic violence.
> men had to work or they wouldn't find a women to marry
I think you have this backwards. Men didn't have to marry. However, since women at large could not work and support themselves, many had no choice but to be attached to someone who could work. Due to past stigmas about women were not married, this put women in a position where getting married was a near necessity.
> Women didn't have to work, as they could be supported by their husband.
Not only would women have little recourse but to marry someone, but women by far were expected to should domestic duties. That is a lot of work and is a full time job in and of itself.
> Of course, there's little proper scientific research on this subject, as "women's studies" start from their assumption that women had and have everything worse without really proving it.
This is blatantly not true. There is a ton of written and academic research work on gender, sexism, etc. and women's studies is a real academic discipline.
> The problem with saying that the men's gender role of more freedom but more responsibility doesn't take into consideration that some people prefer to have less freedom and less responsibility, while some women prefer to have more freedom and more responsibility and some less freedom and less responsibility (or at least prefered in the past).
Men are much more able to pursue the less freedom and less responsibility life, as you put it, compared to women because of how they are treated in society at large. Historically most women did not have the option for the less freedom and less responsible life since they would either be pigeonholed into domestic care or they would have been working poor.
> Even if we assume that men had better starting position in the past, that doesn't apply anymore. Young women are outearning and have more success in education.
This is plainly not true. Most women still earn less than their male counterparts. Further, women still suffer far more from domestic and sexual violence and have their bodies policed much more than men.
> True equality can only be reached through the abolition of gender roles for both men and women, not assuming that men need to "man up" and therefore saying that gender inequality is somehow positive and should exist.
Gender inequality exists right now, even without something like Lulu, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Having an app that deals with one aspect of that reality is totally legit.
> You also made the claim about "imbalance". There's no imbalance in favor of women in Western countries.
Amazingly you say that there is no real research on women's studies, but then go on to conclude there is not problem at all.
> Men have just as much gender equality problems as women, but even speculating this is politically incorrect.
Ah yes, saying men have it as hard as women, which is demonstrably not true at a societal level, will summon the PC police.
> Here's a study o the subject: http://granum.uta.fi/granum/kirjanTiedot.php?tuote_id=18450
The summary of that study tries to use misandry and matriarchy seriously to describe the social and political condition of a western country. This is laughable on its face.
In a marriage the women of course benefits from the man's income to provide economic security. They've also had the security of not dying in senseless wars, and the security of men defending women from danger as is the gender norm even today.
>I think you have this backwards. Men didn't have to marry. However, since women at large could not work and support themselves, many had no choice but to be attached to someone who could work. Due to past stigmas about women were not married, this put women in a position where getting married was a near necessity.
I never claimed that men had to marry, though most of them wanted to (to gain access to sex if nothing else). Men didn't have the option to not work and marry, while had to work to marry, and women didn't have the option to work and not marry.
>Not only would women have little recourse but to marry someone, but women by far were expected to should domestic duties. That is a lot of work and is a full time job in and of itself.
I'd say domestic duties were significantly easier than the typical hard work in the past. Workplace safety was non-existent, for starters. That's of course in addition to military duty and dying in wars.
>This is blatantly not true. There is a ton of written and academic research work on gender, sexism, etc. and women's studies is a real academic discipline.
Women's studies is not an empirical science, if they start from an axiom which doesn't require evidence.
>Men are much more able to pursue the less freedom and less responsibility life, as you put it, compared to women because of how they are treated in society at large. Historically most women did not have the option for the less freedom and less responsible life since they would either be pigeonholed into domestic care or they would have been working poor.
That's of course blatantly not true. Men who didn't work were deemed pretty worthless, and no women would marry them. Besides, they would starve on streets or something, while a women could marry someone and not need to work.
>This is plainly not true. Most women still earn less than their male counterparts.
I said young women. Please try reading what I'm actually saying :). As for the whole pay gap, it's explained through men working 20% more hours per year and making career choices that focus on income.
>Further, women still suffer far more from domestic and sexual violence and have their bodies policed much more than men.
No, men are mutilated more than women (since male-only circumcision is legal in most countries). Also, majority of rape victims in USA are male: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/men-outnumber-women-among-a...
>Gender inequality exists right now, even without something like Lulu, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Having an app that deals with one aspect of that reality is totally legit.
What? This app doesn't prevent gender equality, it enforces it, along with stereotypical gender roles that discriminate both men and women equally. Only a misandrist can support this kind of app.
>Amazingly you say that there is no real research on women's studies, but then go on to conclude there is not problem at all.
Just because women's studies are based on non-empirical "science" doesn't mean there's no research on the subject. Like this: http://granum.uta.fi/granum/kirjanTiedot.php?tuote_id=18450
>Ah yes, saying men have it as hard as women, which is demonstrably not true at a societal level, will summon the PC police.
Good that you agree with me!
>The summary of that study tries to use misandry and ma...
Certainly there is a benefit to having some income through a marriage than none at all, but it is a problem if marriage or association with men is the only option available to have any economic safety at all. Women do not fare well in war because women are very often the target of violence from armies and military conflict even if women do not serve in those conflicts. Men defending women from danger isn't a real phenomenon, as violence against women is predominantly perpetrated by men. Common stories about women and lifeboats, for example, may not reflect reality: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/13/chivalry-at-sea-a-myth...
> Men didn't have the option to not work and marry, while had to work to marry, and women didn't have the option to work and not marry.
My main point about this is that there it was much more likely for women to have no economic security without marriage, whereas men could achieve some economic security without a marriage. Obviously there is a big class element to this w.r.t work access and pay and that women of color have always been working in large numbers outside of personal domestic work.
> I'd say domestic duties were significantly easier than the typical hard work in the past.
It isn't about quantifying the difficulty of some kind of work, but that women still were very like to perform labor in home even if they worked outside of the home in some capacity. Either way, the notion that women didn't do work in a marriage while their husband did contributes to the perspective that domestic work isn't real work and that domestic work performed by husbands/wives at home doesn't have the same value as paid labor.
> Women's studies is not an empirical science, if they start from an axiom which doesn't require evidence.
Women's studies doesn't start from an axiom of "that women had and have everything worse". Women's studies generally explores the condition of genders and provides research, including statistical and empirical research, about the lived conditions and experiences of people.
> Men who didn't work were deemed pretty worthless, and no women would marry them. Besides, they would starve on streets or something, while a women could marry someone and not need to work.
First, work isn't something that most people have for their lifetime in perpetuity. Many folks go through periods of having work and not having work and social factors may exacerbate the availability of paid work. The era leading up to prohibition in the US, for example, made the working situation for the poor worse and damaged existing marriages and families, so to say that there is some kind of binary decision making process in who gets married to whom is silly. Also, the notion that women could marry and not work isn't a common reality for most marriages, in the past and now.
> I said young women. Please try reading what I'm actually saying :). As for the whole pay gap, it's explained through men working 20% more hours per year and making career choices that focus on income.
The pay gap is a complicated thing, and while incomes have improved for younger working women, executive level pay and representation is still belong men in similar positions and companies. Working patterns like the one you mention don't fully account for wage and position gaps for women.
> No, men are mutilated more than women (since male-only circumcision is legal in most countries). Also, majority of rape victims in USA are male: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/men-outnumber-women-among-a....
Firstly, male circumcision isn't a form of domestic or sexual...
Yes, it is. Your views on historic gender roles do not reflect reality. Men were restricted by gender roles too, and their role was largely "go risk death to get a chance to provide for a woman and children".
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
This is impossible, all men have and do participate in the subjugation of women so as systemic sexism exists.
Perhaps you're a male who's OK with being the subject of discriminatory treatment over centuries of gain you didn't get to live through. I'm not, and I don't think anyone should be. Unless two wrongs make a right, discriminating against people who have not been a party to the kind of discrimination you're talking about helps no one, it just alienates those who see our position clearly.
Let's talk about the gender ratio today in Congress, or among Fortune 500 CEOs. Let's talk about the recent study showing that given identical (fake) resumes for a lab manager position, scientists on average offer lower salary and less mentoring to female candidates. http://www.psmag.com/culture-society/sexists-in-white-coats-... That's just a few examples; there are countless others.
I completely agree that it's unfair to blame men today for the long history of inequality in our society. But 1) that history is not remotely over, and 2) the responsibility that we do have as men alive today is to find whatever ways we can to make progress in improving these issues for everyone.
I honestly don't know the best ways to do that; none of them seem entirely good or entirely effective. But if we know that there is a vast invisible finger of society tipping the scales against women in a given context, it does not strike me as necessarily immoral to put explicit structures in place designed to tip things a little bit back the other way. (I'm sure it could be implemented poorly.) We have to break the self-reinforcing cycle somehow, and maybe an admittedly clumsy counter-push against those social pressures can help.
The few male at the top are supported by an army of women in leading positions, such as project manager and director. Under these women are many, many more men with lesser roles.
Women have it good in the middle to upper regions of corporate and politics. In those roles they are very appreciated and have lots of real power (and get to boss around other men).
It should be interesting to know how many have women as direct superiors vs viceversa.
Sure. But lets also talk about the gender ratio of prisoners, the homeless, suicides, workplace deaths, etc. It is fallacious to look only at the top 0.0001% of men and declare that men as a group have things better as a result. Men have a much greater variance in virtually every measurable aspect. Look at the entire spectrum.
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
Seriously? A "vast invisible finger?" No, I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. I'm all for social equality. Equality of opportunity. The way to implement equality is not through further inequality in another direction. That means opportunity starting all the way at the bottom, with basic education, moving up towards higher education, government, and business.
That does NOT mean "hey, we're going to fix this RIGHT NOW, and if women/blacks/pygmys/minority x are underrepresented in any way, we're going to 'tip the scales' in your favor until someone arbitrarily decides thing are 'equal' enough!"
It is unfair to blame men for this situation. It's also unfair to everyone to try and solve the problem of discrimination with more discrimination.
Just because I haven't been an active participant in discrimination doesn't mean I haven't been the recipient of unearned privilege.
I agree that two wrongs don't make a right. But I also believe that fixing the endemic sexism that's still with us is inevitably a messy process. And I believe people who have been victims of that have some very reasonable issues to work out along the way. I think everybody should try to be understanding. But as somebody who ended up getting a better deal than average, I think it's especially incumbent on me to be gracious, kind, and patient.
You are referring to rich men, that elusive 1%. Average men have traditionally gotten the worst/riskiest jobs such as soldier and physical labourer. While the top 1% do get these advantages, the bottom 99% are maybe worse off than women.
Also, the "men had it good for centuries, it's women's turn now" doesn't hold. I am not those men. I was not present then and I resent having to pay for it. Should a child have to pay for the sins of 10 generations ago?
What counts for us is here and now. What passed, passed. It was not our doing.
My point in bringing up the history is that the effects of the history aren't past. I have done unfairly well because I'm a guy. That should end.
Are you saying that men should be expected to "pay" for the priveleges of previous generations of men? If not, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, because all the advantages you list are now equally enjoyed by women (in some cases moreso, e.g. favored by marriage laws).
One very interesting thing, is that schools targeted at women are seem as "traditional" and "bastions" or "empowering", specially if they are ancient and do have good education...
Men schools, once regarded in the same way, are now being attacked, one of the best schools in the US for example is being sued for not taking female students, and a common tag attached to them is "Backwards" or "medieval" or "inquisitors"
If this was a US-only phenomenon, at least I would feel less troubled, except even in Brazil we had a crazy problem...
During the government ranking of high schools (that is made with a test that all high schools students in the country must take if they wish to join university), the first place was a boys-only school.
This is a problem, because it drew attention to them, now there are all sorts of discrimination lawsuits from parents of girls, and the media is bellowing how "less worse" they are, because they accept female teachers, and that when they did not accepted them they were evil, and now that they do they are less evil, but that this would be only a truly good school when they start accepting girls and change some of their authoritarian ways and become more tolerating and egalitarian.
Or some issue with bars... Female only bars in Brazil are allowed and seen as a female fun thing. Male only bars get the cops quickly called on them for refusing entry of costumer based on gender. (Female-only are illegal too, but cops ignore it).
Or one even crazier, it is common to employers to want to hire one gender or other (for example they might want a woman to be the maintenance person of the women's bathroom), yet although signs of "hiring female x" don't attract problems, if you put a sign like "hiring male bathroom cleaner" you get quickly sued for hiring discrimination (that is illegal).
I even had a business owner once complain that a woman sued him (and almost won... a judge chance that allowed he win the case) for not hiring her as attendant in a store for male intimate clothing... The first judge saw it purely in the light of law: you cannot discriminate, period. the second judge had more common sense on his head and imaginated that it would bring even more legal problems to have a woman hanging around men that might want to become naked (or almost naked depending on store policy regarding trying intimate clothes) to choose his new clothes...
Which school?
EDIT: I can't comment as to the criticism; I haven't heard any.
Just read the comments related to this subject, and you will see what I mean (lots of attack on them because the wish to remain male only)
The increased outrage is not necessarily something that automatically favours the sex it purports to defend.
One could argue that people care more about women than men, but one could also argue that women need to be defended more than men, which flips the discussion of sexism or gender-favouritism on its head.
But generally, I definitely find there to be a gendered response, depending on the target demographic.
Google "Black Book Apps". There should be hundreds of them, I assume.
An iPhone app that finds bikini photos of your Facebook friends
I imagine the signal to noise ratio will just be horrible, bitter ex girlfriends will just spam guys with negative tags even if they aren't true and it's information will just lose all value.
I would expect it to be a lot of negatives, because people usually don't (seem to) gossip as much about positives.
To me, the emotional heart of this piece of writing is his concern with "men kowtowing". I looked at his other articles and his personal site, and I didn't see anything where his writing was half this passionate. And certainly nothing where he'd expressed concern for sexism.
I suspect if I looked into Lulu I'd also not like it. But this article is so full of the author that I really can't see the subject.
Never mind that either side of that is the worst kind of ad hominem.
Ad hominem concerns apply to rational arguments. This piece is not cool, rational discourse. It's a highly emotional piece, written to incite emotion. Inquiring about the source and nature of the emotion that drives it is fair.
I do think it's wrong for a writer, though. If you're going to set yourself up as writing an article about a topic, I think you should actually know something about the topic.
This would have been a better piece if he'd made it more explicitly about his own feelings all the way through, rather than trying to make it about bigger things.
I don't see why anyone would want such a "business model".
Your implicit attack on morals derived from feminism reveals a failure to understand feminism and its ideals and effects. Furthermore, demonizing "plenty of highly educated women" as eye-for-an-eye combatants seeking revenge for patriarchy isn't just silly, it's offensive.
Well-educated people - both women and men, actually - are in fact more likely to be feminists (due to the cultural milieu at most universities, if nothing else), and feminists are in fact not unlikely to approve of things like Lulu as well-deserved reversals of privilege. I'm not saying all of them would (in fact, I am a feminist myself, and I do not), but it's not rare, either, and I've seen that kind of reaction from people I would not consider superficial or uninteresting.
That's not an attack on anything, it's just me sharing my personal experience. And who are you to say that my experience is invalid, or silly? I think that's far more offensive than anything I've said.
2. "Highly Educated" and "Decent, intelligent human being" are different things. It's nice when they collide, but they don't always.
3. Not all education leads to idiotic opinions like these.
Other than that, obviously everything you've said there is totally true, in that I think that covers everything you've said there.
Would you not be tempted to at least look? I mean you know it's just superficial crap, but you might have a look; just for laughs of course..
Or you meet a new girl out somewhere and get her phone number, then your buddy comes to you and says "haha, dude that chick you met.. says here she gives a terrible blowjob! LOL!"
I mean, you'd like to think that stuff wouldn't colour your judgement at all..
And if my 'buddy' said that he'd get a polite "fuck off".
As for the startup/app itself, it's the natural evolution of taking HotOrNot ratings + OKCupid profiles + Fuckedcompany gossip and building it into a neat package. There is certainly a demand for apps like this in the market but if you're a user, try to be nice even if you don't like someone. People can become really mean when anonymous.
So instead of understanding that most people are not compatible, we're now building a db to slander them based on purely emotional reasoning?
If women are using this then it says a lot about the woman. I imagine the women drawn to this are difficult anyway. This problem kind of solves itself. I doubt this app can help them and its a symptom of a very negative attitude toward dating and, frankly, socially acceptable misandry.
When it's your fault if he rapes you, you put "creepy" on a hair trigger.
Just in case you are unaware of this, most women I know and have discussed this with agree that social awkwardness in men is often correlated with inappropriate sexual behaviour, so yes, if you make an awkward attempt at conversation, you are probably going to get negatively labelled. May I suggest working on your social skills if this bothers you?
I've known a number of women that tend to avoid the socially smooth guy because they see it as a mask for other sexual behaviors. I'm sure much of these types of judgments come from personal past interactions regardless of which direction they tend. Yay for anecdotal evidence!
- playing on a sports team (I'm Canadian, so I like to pick on hockey players, but this happens in other sports as well).
- working on oil rigs.
- abusing heavy drugs.
- working in sales.
- being too smooth.
- practicing that moronic "treat girls like your sister and insult them" pick-up method.
Long story short, there are many, many indicators of inappropriate sexual behaviour.
Too smooth? What is the right amount of smooth?
Before anyone jumps the gun, I'm not saying that someone raped while drunk is at fault. Only that this is a bad example of someone acting cautious at all. Caution and being protective (or the lack there of) != fault.
Also, this app is to rate men. Its not an anti-rape app. Stop playing the rape card to defend every lousy idea.
Though it is not at all appropriate to share such information on a public online forum.
- Did the hot date you were kind of into try to touch your boob without asking you? Creepy! (acceptable)
- Did the ugly guy two tables over compliment you on your looks when you were both trying to get a drink at the bar? Creepy! (not so acceptable.)
- Did the guy you were dating for a few months ask you for a 5' in-person conversation after you decided to break up out of the blue over SMS? Creepy! (that one happened to me and I felt personally threatened by this woman's implicit threat of slander)
It's also interesting how prevalent the notion of "creepyness" is in the US. Whereas in other cultures the same guy would be considered annoying, inconvenient, misguided or justifiedly threatening, here a blanket term is applied and everyone accepts it. The same principle applies to a lot of emotional stuff, where Americans apply very coarse "pattern matching" to behaviors that other cultures are way more nuanced about.
That's a contradiction in terms.
Very ... smart.
/edit: Oh, their privacy disclaimer states that they will also pull your friends' data into their DB.
Guys don’t see what the girls see. We let them select their relationship status and profile picture and we encourage them to get their “fan base” to review them.
Lulu Dude is also a place for guys to get self-improvement tips. Think of Lulu Dude as Cosmo for guys."
Thanks Lulu!
*badoom, pish!
The fact that many people think it is OK to make and laugh at prison rape jokes sickens me. What would you think if I made rape jokes about your 90 year old grandma? Or your ten year old son? Or your wife? If that is not ok, neither is prison rape of adult men.
I am appalled to realize many people think prison rape is part and parcel of the "prison experience". Should rape be used as a deterrent to unwanted behavior? Where do we stop? Will you be ok with teachers turning a blind eye on students raping other students in detention for not doing their homework or for misbehaving in the classroom? Answer me.
What can we do to help deter prisoner abuse?
#1 on the list would be to stop sending so many people to prison, one way or another. Then you can afford to spend more resources per capita to better rehabilitate/reform/etc. the smaller number of inmates that remain.
I think we have a similar problem here. We've grown up with these jokes and lived with them for so long that it just doesn't bother us. I am glad you agree that prison rape is not OK. I am not trying to be sanctimonious (I actually had to look up that word). I just feel so helpless about this situation.
Comedians regularly make jokes about some of the most abhorrent things that happen in the world. Racism, pedophilia, murder. Do you think that these comics therefore agree with racism, pedophilia and murder? No, of course not. They're making jokes.
It may not have been funny, and it may not have been appropriate (we're not in a comedy club after all), but it doesn't mean esquilax will be OK with "teachers turning a blind eye on students raping other students in detention for not doing their homework".
Basically, calm down, he made a bad joke, it's not the end of the world.
Comedians who joke about raping women generally get booed and chastised and otherwise shunned. Comedians who joke about prison rape generally don't. Regardless of which you think is the appropriate response, it would be nice to see a little consistency.
A joke is a joke. Specifically naming someone is not a joke. It is personal and implies a thinly veiled threat. It's not apples to apples at all unless you are the personification of the concept of prison rape.
However, I don't know what happened after I left, so there might have been some dubious decisions.
Where there is public facing code, there is vulnerability.
Regardless of if you are built on Django, CodeIgniter, Rails or super-secret-obfuscated-language-mark-two, no application is bullet proof and it would be trivial for any highly skilled security tester to interface this way with your database.
It's not if you're not doing dumb stuff.
You have to be lucky every time, an attacker only needs to be lucky once.
SQL injections are just one class of many. There are ways to vastly reduce SQL injection risks but that still leaves many other venues of attack.
Even Haskell is not a silver bullet against every kind of security problem. Didn't Snap have a directory traversal bug a while back?
You could have been informative and made your original point tactfully. Instead, you badmouthed a certain technology without even naming the stuff that was supposedly better. I'm a Haskell evangelist and agree with you 100%, and you came off like a jerk even to me.
Your assertion that whatever problems I deal with are solved problems is absolutely insane. Please, tell me how problems like interpreting customers requirements are "solved" and what technology I can use to ensure that all the code I write will 100% always match the users mental picture of what they wanted.
Criticizing the choice to deliberately create security holes for convenience is not "badmouthing", and "I'm offended" is not a productive response. It literally conveys no useful information at all.
That said, I'm not trying to doubt the skill of Lulu's employees. Just warning that vulnerabilities are always a possibility.
There wasn't really a guy-hating culture, in fact, most of the employees there were men. I don't know how it's changed since.
I re-read the parent, and nowhere does it say nor imply that the CTO nor the people he hired were male. For all that we know, the site might be built by bimbos scratching one of their own itches.
I wouldn't bet on it, of course, but I'm amazed to see that prejudices are so deeply ingrained that:
* you read what was absolutely not written;
* nobody noticed.
Of course, it could not be true, but I can't see why anyone would bother.
I don't see the 'deeply ingrained prejudice' here.
Moral issues aside, I can see a lot of libel lawsuits (at least in the UK) springing up because of this app. There are enough rumours in the world as it is, we do not need apps that profit from people rating the opposite sex and spreading rumours about them.
You sound like you expect investors to somehow be more guided by ethics than other people. Ever consider that it might be the other way around?
The investors expect it to make more money than they put in.
You just have to roll with the punches and adjust. It's fine to be appalled at stuff like this, it goes over the top whenever you want someone to have authority to bring a stop to it for you. Adjusting your expectations and dealing with your objections are a better option than giving someone you can't really trust such long lasting power just to temporarily please your ego.
In two days you're going to forget about this app, but then you'll probably have found something else on HN to be outraged about. Maybe it will be the app store gate keeper shutting down an app you liked.
Oh wait this is about how awful women are to men. Never mind.