This is a fantastic response and despite are our disagreements on the topic I just want to thank you for being real about it. Thank you for the apology as well but want to say that you certainly did not owe me one for your conduct. These long texts degrade the value of what would probably have been a really good conversation in person and I do not doubt that my choices of words and phrasing probably came off as dismissive. Passion is an important part of perspective and we seem to have had a very different set of circumstance we grew up an continue to live in.

I grew up as a white male in a rural town with parents who were way too young but thankfully grandparents who were able to prevent us from living in total poverty. One year an uncle of mine died in a car jacking to a few black men and more than half of my close family just up and decided all black people were bad over night. A spark lighting powder keg of pent up confirmation bias. I was to young to understand it well at the time since I was in 2nd grade but my best friend at the time was the only black kid in my school within like 4 grades and when I couldn’t invite him to my birthday party later that year and no one could explain why. I was oblivious and angry but looking back he was depressingly somehow already accepting of the injustice. We played basketball at recess and still talked plenty but we drifted apart and it took me a long time to understand why.

There is obviously much more like this than just the one incident but suffice to day I’m in my 30s now, moved away to a large city, and I don’t keep in contact with really any of my family with the exception of a 1 cousin (who is also a bit racist at times but serving 3 tours in the military opened his eyes for the most part)

Granted I’m coming at this hatred of stereotypes for selfish injustices rather than countless erosions of my perceive value as a person but I’m passionate about the value of treating others equally none the less.

To continue using the bear, not all bears are going to maul you on sight, but we assume they will, because that will keep you alive in a survival scenario. That is a valuable stereotype. Likewise, when a woman is e.g. at a bar and a man offers her a drink, she’d be correct in assuming the man has the capacity to roofie her drink and rape her, so being vigilant keeps her safer than blindly trusting a stranger.

This analogy helps I guess. I’ll be honest, I still strongly dislike the concept at a level that also feels blindingly obvious to me too but because I want to argue that anyone should be at least somewhat suspicious of any stranger offering you a drink regardless of gender.

I just find this whole viral event to be of diminished impact because it hinges on so many women saying something so exist because there are a lot of men who do need to hear from women they trust that their actions (even those with innocent intent) carry the power to strike fear in those same women that they would feel awful for scaring… But they aren’t going to hear that because this preposterous doubling down that any random bear is less dangerous than any random man is the thing all the loud and obnoxious assholes who make toxic masculinity and what-a-bout-ism their whole personality are going to latch onto.

Have the conversation, make your feelings known, but starting off on this false pretense just ruins the impact so throughly that it’s hard to not be frustrated. I know it’s a technicality and that it’s petty but most people resist change and introspection because it is hard and awkward to navigate. This gives them an out so the reach is now crippled.

I strongly agree that stereotypes are used by oppressors to terrorize and diminish the oppressed but with one added facet… The oppressors often do not see themselves as the oppressor. Most people with advantages in life don’t often see them as advantages. They still have difficulties and issues and traumas that they focus on and when someone comes along saying “I’ve had it worse in this particular regard” they don’t stop to compare objectively they just keep doing exactly what they are already doing until it impacts them. And if that ends up impacting them negatively, of course they are going to resist. Just like anyone would want to regardless of their relative situation when they feel they are being treated unjustly.

Is not what Kate Lister or feminist in general are doing. They’re saying that they are afraid of being alone with a man, this is just how they feel.

Isn’t it though? That’s the subtext of saying you are afraid of men. It pretty directly carries the idea that all men are a group that should be feared by women for the potential dangers they represent.

Here in France, 96% of sexual assaults are performed by men. I don’t think you could find a country where the statistic goes the other way. “a few correlations from time to time” really doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation. It’s not some correlation, it’s a systemic issue in our society.

That does little to establish the likelihood of any given man to sexually assault a women. A stat like that is talking about a populate that is comprised entirely of perpetrators of sexual assault. This would be like saying saying “96% of drowning happens in bodies of water” The stat we would need to see instead would be “what % of men will commit at least one instance of sexual assault in their lifetime” and the population sample would need to be all men that resided in a specific location for say 60 years of their life. I’m sure someone more skilled with statistics than myself could express what I’m trying to say more accurately but I hope I explained well enough you can see what I was trying to convey atleast.

I actually agree that critical thinking goes out the window ! “I chose the bear!” is meant to express that women are afraid of men. The fact that most women would actually be terrified of an encounter with a bear or that they are statistically safer with a man than with a bear is irrelevant. Women want to send a message and instead of listening, you are correcting them on a technicality.

When a message predicates itself on a falsehood it should be criticized. How can you have a worthwhile discussion when your invitation to the conversation is a a lie? It’s like a time share or a MLM, the premise is a lie so everything that follows is not tainted by that even if there is some truth in it.

The fact that you are only talking about the discourse and not the actual problem makes me wonder if you really want the issue to be resolved

So disagreeing with a conversation being built on a lie and advancing a stereotype implies I want oppress women? That’s reaching pretty hard. I’m not saying women aren’t experiencing an unfair circumstance and that their feelings are invalid. I’m saying that this is the wrong way to discuss it because it means the audience who needs to hear it most is presented with cognitive dissonance upfront and a very vocal portion of the women trying to share their experience are shocked and insulted that the men won’t listen or try to defend themselves. Of course that was going to happen when you open the conversation up with nonsense rhetoric and now we silenced women with credible stories to share while galvanizing the very men who need to hear this shit the most from trusting the women with the stories to tell.

You wouldn’t bring loud-mouthed, personal insult slinging demagouges to a debate and expect a favorable outcome would you?

This is a terrible comparison. When woman say they are afraid of men, it’s a dominated group being afraid of its dominators. With your black perso/alligator question, it’s a case of dominators being afraid of a group its dominating.

It doesnt matter what order you put the adjectives in. It’s a terrible comparison because any comparison like this is predicated on stereotypes whether they are gender, racial, religious, or whatever. There is no valid stereotype for individual psychology at such a broad demographic level.

I’m not trying to defend someone here, I was trying to seek understanding while also expressing that I think any person assuming stereotypes are a valid way to think about people you have never met is a bad mindset to have because it elevates the “value” of confirmation bias.

You say the women in my life are blessed with their experiences but are you sure the opposite doesn’t apply? That the women you know weren’t more unlucky than the usual experience?

The finger being pointed by the discourse around this is just saying “I feel like men in general are more of a danger to me than a wild bear” and statistically that is just false. If a majority of men were truly so bad then the patriarchal structure we live in would be significantly worse and there would be absolutely zero advancements of women’s issues for the simple fact that a majority vote would almost never occur in favor of women.

But that isn’t the case. Things have improved slowly over time and the biggest set back recently is access to abortion care and reproductive rights but I think that has much more to do with religious influence (which is inheritelt patriarchal) in the republican portion of the population.

Finally, an olive branch. I have simply been presenting a viewpoint counter to your own and I have appreciated your input. I’m sorry that the lack of tone and subtext available through written communication seems to have made you think I was being rude or something but the knee-jerk reaction to insult and belittle me and my opinion by aligning me with a group that carries a negative connotation is sort of similar to what we are arguing about is it not?

We can disagree and have opposing views and opinions without having to be adversarial. I am unique in my experiences just like you are in yours. Grouping me with others is unfair to both of us because just like the innocent men at the end of that pointed finger, you grouped me up with people who make having dipshits psuedo intellectual takes their favorite hobby. You lose something from this assumption of stereotypes too.

I assume your perspective of our conversation was colored by stains of past experiences you had with members of that group (or atleast those you assume belong to that group) and it meant that even though I was being genuine you saw my messages as if they were an attack against you personally and motivated by malice.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m still not trying to blame you or anyone for that. Perception is reality afterall. But thats the mindset I’m trying to advocate against. The mindset that a group stereotype allows for a realistically useful assumption about any given “member” of that group’s personality, demeanor, or temperament.

I do not disagree that the two things have vastly different histories but that isn’t the point of the conversation to be had. A woman’s fear of interactions with any random man is her perception molded by her life experiences.

I am not a woman so of course I can not speak with my own experiences on this through my own lens but I have had many conversations with the various women in my life to atleast recognize a portion of their perspectives.

I do also concede that they have explained feeling more fearful around men than I can relate to as a man with a physically imposing stature most of my life.

I totally understand that I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in a male oriented society and to be looked at like an object as they sometimes are.

HOWEVER, not one of these female friends, family, or partners had ever been sexually assaulted and of all of them, only two had ever been in physical altercations with a 1 man each.

Now before you jump on that as an “aha!” moment, consider that theae incidents occurred in their 30s.

As a generally mildly mannered person, I have also found myself in physical altercations with other men a few times in my life… More so than my female friends.

Only one incident in your whole life as evidence of violence and ready to consider all men as dangerous? Wtf?

How can you have such a low opinion of 50% of the people in your life that you think they are worse than a wild animal? It’s unfounded in reality

They didn’t say that at all. What they are trying to express is that stereotypes, such as “men are usually dangerous to women”, or “women should fear men just in case”, are disingenuous ideas that harm both sides.

Some men are good people and some are bad. Some women are good people and some are bad.

Condemning either group for the actions of a few perpetuates the stereotype by making impressionable indiviuals on both sides of the equation start accepting the “complimentary” stereotypes just because they observe a few correlations from time to time.

Before long, critical thinking goes out the window, correlation is assumed to be causation and you’ve got men reacting aggressively to posts that say they are dangerous and women saying “I chose the bear!” even though they know that is staticallyess safe because it aligns with the message they think they need to share because they buy into the same stereotype the men did and vice versa.

It runs parallel to the same sort of thing playing out in politics around the world though it’s certainly more pronounced in the US thanks to the two party system and volume of communication.

Talking about the issue is fine but this discourse is flawed. Imagine how it would play out if the question was “white people, would you rather be stranded on a island with a black person or an alligator?”

And now your argument would be “white people should be afraid of black people until they are given a reason not to be.”

Doesn’t that sound really messed up to say? I hope so because it felt bad just to type out for the purpose of this comparison.

Each person is an individual unto themselves and I think if you can agree with that, then there is no rationale that can support group stereotypes in human psychology.

So why not hang out with them outside of the workplace?

Yep, I really enjoy my job too and I even work with some really good people but I keep my personal life… personal. It’s not like I hide my personality and life from my colleagues but I’ve got enough friends that I don’t feel like I need to add any more to my inner circle.

I don’t mean to say that the place can’t be nice but I would hope your home is of greater comfort than your workplace in most cases.

Obviously some different life circumstances influence your options of making new friends as an adult. I can certainly understand your perspective there but perhaps it’s hard for me to relate since my significant other and I have no children nor do our friend and none of us desire to ever have them either.

I’m sure they consume a great deal of time and energy that probably drives a person to crave social experiences away from them. If work is the only place they can get away from them I can understand that too but hobbies can still be an option.

World feels overcrowded as it is. Getting a shit deal because so many others choose to have kids and then want to force people to spend time trapped in a box with them… It’s like a whole population of people having their cake and eating it too… Or whatever expression fits best here for an unfair, double-dipping advantage…

And actually now that I think of it, two of our friend group did have kids and we all drifted apart because they were no longer able to commit time and weekends like we did to each other.

They used to often say “we should all hang out again!” and such but then either we’re never available or had to leave early or host events at their place which required interacting with their kids and I gotta say toddlers are not skillful conversationalists.

I don’t have a solution for people with kids trying to find friends at work. I can understand why it might seem appealing to them but speaking from the other side, it feels like a burden I shouldn’t have to carry.

I’m sure you have friends outside of work right?

That’s the part I never understand about people who connect working in office and with the fun of seeing others is person.

Why are you so willing to put up with commuting, office quality furniture, public restroom facilities, sick people who realllllly should have leverage optional work from home days or just regular old sick time… When you could just have more time for friends outside of the workplace.

I see my friends on weekends or they come over and we have game nights spending quality time with each other rather than infrequent unplanned interactions when we both should be doing something else.

My personal life friends are the people I “jump” for. Not coworkers. Having to “jump” for a coworker is and should be an inconvenience in the workplace because it means a failure of planning occurred somewhere. You can still have friendly camaraderie in the face of inconvenient circumstances but I don’t think you need to have some deep relationship to help out a colleague. That comes with the job to some extent.

When I’ve become friends with people from work, I invite them into my entirely separate personal life and in fact that is the case for one of my closest friends.

I just feel like If you wanna hang out with people from the office invite them to something outside of the office. The whole captive audience thing is such a demoralizing foundation to start a friendship with.

I too have ADHD and my in office days are so full of interruptions I just don’t plan productive work during that time anymore and instead just book them full of pointless meetings.

Working at home I get interrupted exactly once a day by my girlfriend while she plays with our cat on her lunch break since she had a permanent work from home position even before covid.

A single quiet Thursday or Friday let’s me out pace all my peers books of work. The company just wastes their money when they make me show up in person. I don’t even by lunch or snacks out there or anything so it doesn’t even support local economy. Just wasting time and money for people who can’t keep their home organized enough to effectively work from.

It’s the kind of short sighted strategy you always see from upper level corporate execs. They make impulse decisions on limited data and justify it with predictions based on old data.

You know, the only kind of data it’s possible for them to have at the time of their decision because they refuse to pay for external analysis or external data when they can use their own people and records!

So some jackass sets up a slicer on an excel file assigning an arbitrary value to the asset based on headcount capacity and woudknt you know it? The numbers go down when there are less people there.

Well that answers everything you need to know. Keep people in office, property retains value. Simple stuff really but they will say in their speeches and presentations that they have gone over the numbers and this is the way to go.

Never having considered that they could leverage the square footage in other equitable ways than they already do because, well, that data simply wasn’t available.

And it’s all bs anyways because real estate value is speculative and determined by the buyer. So when larger business embrace the hybrid or work from home model they give themselves a market advantage and can purchase or lease smaller office space at lower costs than they would have previously so really the only way this grift works is if all they big players keep overpaying for property.

Sooner or later it gets solved by the market whether that want it to be or not. The genie of work from home is already out of the bottle it’s just a bunch of “boomer” businesses death gripping and smoking copium as much as they can until they are forced to adapt

I bought it digitally on release day so my slightly-above-casual-gamer GF could play on the switch and then a few days later I pirated a copy to play on my steam deck and pc interchangeably. While I would have no major qualms about buying additional copies, Nintendo’s insistence on maintaining their native control scheme in a western market will guarantee that many core gamers like myself, who are familiarized with Microsoft and Sony control schemes, will shy away from their products.

I can only have my immersion and fun interrupted by canceling out of a menu or action so many times before I’m just not that interested anymore despite having given it an honest try more than once.

Whine all they want about piracy but I doubt they aren’t losing a significant number of legitimate sales from it. Most people who buy Nintendo consoles and games are loyal to that ecosystem from my own experiences and wouldn’t bother with learning how to access pirated materials.

So yeah I also pirated it and would pirate another game from them too if I felt like giving it a shot but even if pirating wasn’t an option, I would never buy a Nintendo product for myself.