Over on the Antifeminists subreddit. one of the brethren asks his subreddit-mates for their best advice on how to deal with feminists at work.
“My daily job requires communicating with a wide range of people,” writes haaq14.
Among the most entitled are feminists and the Karen’s.
So fellow brothers of this sub, can you give me some general rules and precautions that I should follow.
The answers vary, but all are alike in their assumption that feminists are as dangerous as witches, or perhaps man-eating tigers.
“Rule #1,” announces EngineeringDry6717.
Do not deal/interact with a feminist.
Rule#2: Do not deal/interact with a feminist.
Rule#3: Do not deal/interact with a feminist.
And so on
“Wear a bullet-proof vest,” recommends ThePigmanAgain.
Others suggest ways to avoid startling the feminists and setting them off.
“Stay professional and remain within your boundaries,” advises 1NearbyAccident..”Don’t expect anything just do your job and get home safely.”
Ckgjfxfcgb is more specific:
To interact with feminist, you have to let them believe they’re better than you. And just listen to the shit that comes out of their mouth and just nod in agreement. Otherwise they’re going to set you up, like they’ll say that you raped them or something.
You know, like they do.
One commenter takes another tack, urging haaq14 to confront the feminists if they misbehave.
“Demand respect,” insists BaldSandokan.
If anyone disrespects you even with rolling their eyes or the tone of their voice you demand respect immediately firmly, but not aggressively and as professionally as possible. But make it absolutely clear that there is no continuation of any discussion until they conduct it respectfully. You must keep your cool, and be respectful. Cold and professional. Don’t try to belittle them, make fun of their behaviour, express disgust or mimick their voice.
There is no situation where it is socially acceptable to disrespect a person that [is] polite and respectful to you.
Stay safe, fellas. And whatever you do, do NOT drink any potions they may try to give you, lest you get turned into a newt.
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Off topic, but I gotta know where that pic came from and how I can get a watermelon car.
So make sure to stay in your echo chamber and be preemptively unprofessional?
Got it.
But heaven forbid anyone suggest that an anti-feminist shouldn’t be interacted with! No, that’d be hateful!
I feel like “stay professional and remain within your boundaries” is accidental good advice from a terrible source.
“Turning them into newts” would probably be an improvement, but what have newts done to warrant such punishment?
@personalpest
“The image was scanned from a vintage 1908 Halloween postcard by Tuck and sent by Mrs. Okey to Miss Emily Burke in Genoa Nebraska.”
https://www.zazzle.com/halloween_witchs_watermelon_car_card-137557605088054268
You can get a copy of it, on a set of cards, on Zazzle
Find a job that doesn’t require dealing with a wide range of people.
This is all performative posturing for his dudebro friends, but I’ll call his bluff. If he wants to engage in theatrical anxiety and jump up and down as if feminists are a cross between a venomous snake and ticking time bomb, then he’s not mature enough to handle a customer-facing job. Odds are just about every woman with the misfortune of speaking to him gets lumped into the “entitled Karen” basket.
@personalpest
Off topic, but I gotta know where that pic came from and how I can get a watermelon car.
You realize that I can’t but imagine the above question coming from the young lady in your icon.
Okay; real watermelons don’t grow quite large enough to press into service as an auto chassis scaled to an average adult human (let alone familiars); here’s the most recent Guinness World Record largest watermelon, grown by Christopher Kent and exhibited at the 2013 Hamilton, Tennessee Operation Pumpkin Festival: http://www.whataboutwatermelon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/world-heaviest-watermelon-300×300.jpg
Mythbusters, ye should be with us at this hour!
(Speaking of pumpkins: size wouldn’t be among the constraints to building a real-life Cinderella carriage; here’s the 2021 record holder, grown by Stefano Cutrupi and measured at the 10th Campionato della Zuccone pumpkin festival held in Peccioli, Italy, on 26 September 2021:
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/heaviest-pumpkin)
As for pimping a regular car into the semblance of a watermelon, that’s doable, and done: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/30o9ej/fresh_pic_of_my_brothers_sacrilegious_watermelon/
(Images like this have a way of going viral and melting into Trad and Anon; by the grace of Tineye and Google Translate, I was able to track down the source: this Bentley belongs to Jer Robinson of Beloved Shirts: https://web.archive.org/web/20181025044803/https://www.planetcarsz.com/marcas/BENTLEY/195)
And this 2002 Daewoo Lanos was customized by Ukrainian artist Nathalie Paltcoon: https://makezine.com/2010/09/12/watermelon-car/
Are we sure this is actually a watermelon, and not, say, a gourd with a red plush interior? Decorative gourds were common for Halloween before pumpkins, and carriages with red plush interiors were a symbol of decadence.
@ Snowberry
Or a marrow, they are that shape, colour and are stripey. Plus they are little use as food so any sensible witch would turn a marrow into a car rather than eat it.
Is rolling your eyes disrespectful? I thought it was mostly done when someone was droning on at length about their pet subject for the fifieth time this week. I guess that would be considered disrespectful from a woman by these bozos.
@Jazzlet
Well, I consider rolling the eyes disrespectful. I’m extremely sensitive to it. But that’s because I had the wonderful experience of my first graduate advisor, in front of every single one of my peers, during my very first practice presentation in a class that was specifically for the purpose of learning how to present your graduate work:
1) roll his eyes repeatedly
2) sigh extremely loudly and with gusto repeatedly
3) offer bitten-off exclamations
4) flop all over his desk dramatically
5) put his head in his hands
6) rub his eyes and look to the heavens
Of course I fell apart during my presentation, being already of an anxious disposition. I could see my cohort looking to his dramatic and disrespectful disapproval and back to me to see the effect, and there was nothing but a poor end for everybody unless some of the spectators enjoyed an object lesson in how to bully a graduate student. In order to present in public, I now have to dope up with extra anxiety medication and memorize a script, or I will still fall apart. My current advisor (I failed out of the program with that one, I can’t IMAGINE why) is a lovely man, but I still watch him to catch him rolling his eyes. Maybe he’s just a fake-o, maybe, he’s going to start yelling at me too one of these days.
So I understand when people might be upset by rolling eyes. It can also be considered a microagression by HR at my workplace, as it turns out to be one of the primary ways white male computer scientists dismiss POC and women computer scientists without saying anything bad. A sigh and a roll of the eyes can convey easily just how stupid you and your ideas are.
I am sorry you had a bully for a first supervisor, I hope your current one continues to be supporrtive and doesn’t let you down. Bullying affects the ‘strongest’ of people in their strongest areas, let alone any of us when we are insecure about something.
Thank you for that as I’ve only encountered eyerolling (in person) amongst friends, very much a “they’re going on about (whatever) again” shorthand. It wouldn’t have occured to me that to do it in a work context, I’m not surprised it’s used as a microagression by white male computer scientists, but I didn’t know about it – I have been out of the work place for some years. Sighing I already knew about, I had an ex-boss who used sighing (among other physical microaggressions) to denigrate what anyone on the team suggested while they were talking ; this was because we weren’t allowed to have ideas, any good idea would be ridiculed, then pop up a few weeks later rebadged as his idea.
The paragraph about respect sounds like he is about to “give that young lady a stern talking to”. It is better than losing one’s cool or flying into a rage, but it sounds like they are intentionally being condescending to women. I suppose if she rolls her eyes she is being condescending herself, but people often response to condescension with eye rolls so I think he is just making his problem worse.
@Big Titty Demon That story makes me doubt the whole concept of “Tenure”. It seems like rewarding seniority with reduced accountability, but I wouldn’t really know. Clearly that guy doesn’t care about supporting or respecting students much, and doesn’t fear the consequences of complaints from students.
@Jazzlet That sounds intentional, because God forbid that somebody else get acknowledged.
@Quantuminc
I think, like many things, it may be a result of the for-profit nature of education. I easily understand why there is tenure: before tenure in academia you are in the rat race of the publication mill, desperately attempting to churn out papers that get published in top conferences/journals. Your students’ well-being will not take top priority: you not getting fired from your job takes top priority. If you have a student that takes time to ramp up, even if they could be great with proper nurturing, they will get kicked to the kerb, because they don’t help you publish immediately.
After tenure you can take those students because you can’t get fired unless you do something really awful. And I mean, really bad: “Caused a student to commit suicide in a named and published article” isn’t bad enough, that guy only recently was prevented from publishing for a measly 10 years, he’s still a tenured professor. You’d probably have to do the murder yourself or rape several women. We see that the doctors at UCLA and USC sexually assaulted hundreds of women before anything happened, and they weren’t even tenured.
But that happens because students are a money mill. Churn them through as fast as possible and hide everything. If education wasn’t for-profit, that motive isn’t there. I dunno. I’d have to quiz some European friends on their experience, but most of the people I know mastered out, or are men who don’t pay attention to this sort of thing because, you know… they don’t have to. Maybe that in itself isn’t a great sign.
However, I will have to also say, no one fears the complaints of students very much, including myself as a graduate student. That’s because students will legit complain about anything: I sat down to teach for half a course one time, because I broke my ankle. It was in a cast. I had a high stool that I scooted along the chalkboard and sat on to do the algorithms and it was ABUNDANTLY clear why I was doing it.
Half my evals for that course came back “Fat and lazy. Sits down on the job. Terrible teacher.” Cheaters mad I don’t let cheaters through, doing the only thing they can.
I have my doubts that these people would do these over the top actions in the workplace at the risk of their jobs.
@BTD:
In the US, at the very least, you can rape 26 women and still become President. As long as the rapes weren’t at knifepoint or otherwise overtly violent, and as long as the rapist is white and has enough socio-economic status, it seems to be almost a non-crime. If he slips women some Quaaludes and leaves them woozy, traumatized, and with memory gaps (and thus credibility problems in court), but alive after, it seems he can get away with it almost 100% of the time without consequences even as severe as getting fired. Though, if he does it while black or Jewish he might actually see a day in court over it. Even then, he can shop around with the appeals until he gets a male judge whose misogyny exceeds his racism and then get a conviction overturned, in the unlikely event he even gets convicted.
And there are nation-states out there that are much more misogynist than the US …
@ QuantumInc
Oh it was intentional all right, the same insecure behaviour that meant he did all the reporting to committee, he couldn’t risk any of the rest of us (all female) showing we were all more capable than him.
To be honest, I find the advice to do your job at your place of employment and mind your own business to be great advice. It might be the first time I have read good advice from this sort of guy.
After several years without difficulty, suddenly that pesky Ontario Electricity Support Program renewal site is giving me fits again. A few days after I did the online renewal form, this time I got a rather insulting email, titled “We need you to correct information on your application for the Ontario Electricity Support Program” (the insult being the implication that I didn’t get it right the first time, which I did).
It goes on to say that they “couldn’t verify my income”, and to contact an “intake agency” to have my income verified “manually”. No contact details are provided in the email for any “intake agency”.
I was eventually able to get phone numbers allegedly belonging to some of these “intake agencies” in Ontario, but the first two turned out to be some sort of food charitable donation organizations instead. Both presented a phone menu whose options related to such a function and did not include anything about taxes, income verifications, OESP, or anything similar; and neither provided any apparent way to get a human on the line. (I called on a Thursday during business hours but both dialing 0 at the phone menu and just waiting on the line ended up at a voice mail for leaving messages to schedule food deliveries.)
A third number did lead to an agency with a live human, which started a chain of referrals through an additional four phone numbers, the final one of which actually said they could transfer me to a person who could do this thing. By then it was 3:30 in the afternoon. That person said they had a couple things to do at the office but promised to call me back at or shortly after four; I left my number, said thanks, and hung up.
There has been no call from them since. Not on the Thursday afternoon, nor all day Friday, nor today.
So now what do I do? I apparently both must get this “manual income verification” and, simultaneously, cannot get it since the people who can do it apparently, for some reason, won’t (and worse, will say they will, but then simply fail to follow through, rather than even being upfront about their unwillingness).
I seem to have hit a dead end here and have no idea what else I can try.
This stupid world doesn’t seem to have been designed for me, or I for it. I don’t know how other people deal with these things. Either I missed the class on that during my turbulent and fragmented experience with the school system back in the day, or the thing I’m missing is something that comes naturally to everybody else, and the whole system has been designed around the assumption that it would come naturally to everybody without even one exception. And now I’m probably going to have to start paying double or triple for my heat and power because of that, and because of whatever the fuck changed in the past two years to break the renewal process that had worked for me before.
It seems I can’t trust anyone or anything. Computer systems have bugs and glitch out and fail to work for unobvious reasons, and human beings lie and slack off on the job and otherwise let you down as well. It would be nice of those neglectful alleged ancient aliens would finally come back after all these millennia and check up on us; maybe an alien could actually be trusted to get the job done instead of either malfunctioning or just choosing to drop the ball …
—and not one suggested ‘Build a bridge out of them!’?
A subtle hint, perhaps, that you really are NOT the main character?
@Surplus, first of all, I’m really sorry you have to jump through all these hoops. As I’m sure you know, governments often spend significantly more money testing program recipients to make sure they’re “really” deserving than they would ever have to spend on fraudulent claims. It’s a punishment for being poor (and/or in some cases for having an addiction), pure and simple.
Now, that having been said, call the agency back. I know it’s not fair you have to call them again. I know you did the bit you were supposed to do, and you didn’t get the result you were promised, and that’s upsetting and frustrating. Remember, though, that the same governments that want to claw back as much aid as they possibly can also want to claw back as much funding as they possibly can to the kind of support teams that would do things like income verifications. There are probably not enough staff working for too little salary under too small a budget, and it looks like you fell through the cracks.
It’s not fair that you have to do that. I know it’s not fair, and I’m sorry. However, unfair or not, you’re going to need to call back if you want to get the support that you require with your bill.
And what stops that turning into an infinite loop of call-backs that never ends up accomplishing anything? Unless I do something different the second time, the obvious thing to expect is that the same thing will happen as the first time … but I don’t know what to do different.
@ Surplus to Requirements
This sounds like a throw things at the wall until something sticks kind of situation, and yes, you may have to throw the same thing several times to get it to stick. Sorry, but we’ve all been there. That’s life.
So, what you’re saying is there is no way for me to guarantee I get this thing, even though I did two years ago, my circumstances including costs and income have not changed since then, and I am therefore just as eligible now.
That is unacceptable. That constitutes an act of grand larceny. Withholding money to which I am entitled by law is the same as breaking into my place and snatching it, and over a two year period it would add up to around $1500, which exceeds the threshold to be considered grand larceny. I will not accept having $1500 of my money stolen from me. I likely cannot afford having $1500 of my money stolen from me.
Stop threatening me with possibly losing that money and tell me how to fix this.
You keep calling, being as polite as possible while still showing that yes, you are concerned, and following whatever direction the folks on the phone give you within reason, until it works.
Sometimes stuff is hard and annoying and you have to play phone-tag for a month and get passed from department to department and it’s stressful as heck, and some days you just want to curl into a ball and not exist for a while, but you need the income/service/help that’s being stress to get, so you have to try again.
But there is no fix One Individual can implement to fix it immediately, or instantaneously, or guarantee the next call will be the last inconvenience.
Sometimes things suck, and you just have to keep trying. Over and over and over again.
That’s all I got. I can be empathetic to it really, really sucking and being really, really stressful, because I’ve been there… but I can’t fix it for you.
I wish I could, because I’ve got a couple times I’d have loved fixing it for me or one of my close friends.