Everyone whining and crying about the girl jokes in here needs a lesson in internetz.
First session will answer the age-old question: "Should I Take Internetz Srsly?"
The idea of jokes that are 'not okay in mixed company' needs to die. That's a double standard.
How is it okay to make remarks about women
behind their backs, then claim you're an upstanding equal-rights advocate because you don't make those remarks in mixed company? The first half of this thread was a series of PMS jokes implying that women can't hold positions of responsibility, which were all well and good until it turned out one of the readers was female (and someone who has to put up with
incredible gender discrimination in the field of physics, I might add.)
How do
you have any right to decide what will offend her when you have never once had to deal with that kind of disrespect? Female physicists produce high-quality research at a greater rate than males, because they
know they have to work hard to prove themselves. But they still get ignored and undersupported.
Let me quote from
Cosmic Variance:
The jaw-dropping aspect...is that the awarding of conference presentations was grossly gender biased (as was the fraction of service work assigned to the women). The female postdocs had drastically higher levels of productivity (indeed, half the men were less productive than the least productive woman), but were allocated far fewer conference presentations than men with comparable productivity.
A woman going into physics has to deal with this stuff on a daily basis. Do you think that running into it on a recreational site on the Internet, of all places, is going to make that easier?
The Internet has no more right to be a haven for misogyny, even
joking misogyny, than any other public forum, because even joking misogyny perpetuates those problems.
That said, I think this thread is back on track and I don't want to derail it, so that's the last I'll say on the topic.
Mars, I wasn't particularly offended by anything you said.
