tim: Tim with short hair, smiling, wearing a black jacket over a white T-shirt (Default)
Tim Chevalier ([personal profile] tim) wrote in [personal profile] naath 2009-06-25 12:36 pm (UTC)

To be more concrete about it, one of my friends recently made a post decrying the lack of willingness of some men to take the responsibility to use condoms. She received a comment from someone assuming she was saying "all men are bad", and responding to that point rather than the one she actually made. This sort of reply is depressingly common. You could address that by saying it's a common logical fallacy. Perhaps so, but it's one people ought to be aware of and work to avoid in their speech, which is one of the things I think was saying. The other problem there is that even if my friend *had* been implying "all men are bad", perhaps there are more important things than refuting such a statement, such as the specific point she was making about condom use. When people systematically ignore everything else somebody says as long as they can extract whatever faint "all men are bad" implications they can find, and jump on those, you have to wonder why their first priority is to defend the reputation of men (and not any specific man, just men-as-a-whole!) And I think that goes beyond universal brain wiring and into sexism, which is, again, something people need to work actively to overcome.

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