Rex Kerr
1 min readApr 11, 2024

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Good reply overall, especially in pointing out the difference in goals, which when kept in mind really does help one understand the differences between your and Simon's styles. But up there, in that quote? You just endorsed rampant stereotyping. You just endorsed dehumanization. Oops?

You admit that being characterized like that doesn't hurt you. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt a lot of guys.

This is what soft bigotry is built out of: hiding from the verbal inaccuracies and the damning implications and the emotional damage inflicted by your statements by rationalizing it. Heck, what you endorse isn't even that soft.

There are lots of ways to avoid bigoted language, and many of them are not hard. You can use conditional language ("When guys X, then ..."). You can add caveats like "some", a move that you criticize feminists for! It's five characters, for crying out loud, and goes a long way to acknowledge individual variation, but you want to stomp that out?

You really need to reconsider your position here. It's possible to take caveats to legalistic extremes, but you haven't identified any specific instances of that.

People are individuals. See them! And use language that demonstrates that you do.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

Responses (3)