Vox: Saying "You Guys" Is Sexist, You Guys

Serious You Guys.

I used to consider women to be the intellectual equals to men -- but feminists seem determined to convince me of the opposite.

This is bubble-gum stuff. This is unworthy.

This is the sort of shit that dumb people write about, which other dumb people are impressed by, because they're too dumb to know the difference.

The tech startup npm recently blogged about the unusual challenge some of its employees have agreed to participate in: they put a dollar in a glass jar every time they say "you guys."

"We didn’t invent the idea, though I’m not sure where we first heard about it," reads the company's explanation on Tumblr. "But the idea is: if you believe that using the word 'guys' to describe a mixed-gender group of individuals is creeping sexism, and are trying to eliminate that word from your casual use, you put a dollar in the jar every time you do it accidentally."

Yes, "creeping sexism."

That sounds pretty intense. I'm a big user of "guys," and when it was first brought to my attention that the phrase was frowned upon among leading feminist thinkers and people concerned with equality --- especially in male-dominated workplaces -- my reaction was, "Oh, come on. It's inaccurate, but it's not actually hurting anyone."

But I've changed my mind. As I read up on the issue...

You read up on the issue?

This is what I'm talking about: You can't "read up on the issue" because there's nothing to read but Vox-style Highlights for Children-level blogshit about it.

She makes it sound like she's done some real reading about a real subject.

Nope! She's just read the shit these dummies read and call themselves well-read for reading-- Jezebel, Guardian Comment is Free, HuffPo...Maybe "read up" on some of Anita Sarkozian's Cultural Marxism for Gurlz (TM) videos...

Incidentally, she provides no link here to all the "reading" she's done on the issue -- she does link Tumblr, though, which I think we can all agree is one of the most profound journals of critical thought in the world today.

Oh well, I guess I should be glad that a Vox editor spared me of all the footnotes, references, and annotations that she had in the original draft of the article.

...I realized that my knee-jerk response ("It doesn't seem like that big a deal to me, personally, and changing would require effort on my part and that's hard and tiring") is nothing more than a very typical lazy excuse for avoiding the tiny tweaks to our lives that can, as a whole, make society more equal.

Now I'm convinced that "guys" --unless we are actually addressing a group of guys -- has got to go.

I won't indulge this stupidity any further.

I will just note once again that these Identity Politics children's games appeal to the intellectually weak and superficial. It lets them pretend they're talking about Real Issues, like the Big Kids do, while continuing to talk about the most insipidly simple and silly crap imaginable.

I've said it a hundred times:

Dumb is Easy, and Easy is Holy.

Update:

posted by Ace at 02:05 PM

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