Ladies and Gentlemen

War of the Words

So yeah, that was a thing. I don’t usually do follow up posts, but the response to my sexism piece was so extraordinary, I don’t think it’s right to ignore it. So here, a week later, is a brief post to follow up on what happened before I go back to musing about the future of things like an idiot.

Gottle of gear

I got 1000 times more traffic than I usually do. The link has been retweeted well over 100 times. There have been some excellent follow up pieces, one from my good friend Margaret Robertson, discussion on Forbes, Edge, Reddit and numerous blogs and forums. And that’s only what I’m aware of. 

I wasn’t expecting any of those things to happen.

My predictions about the comments proved largely accurate. I received little abuse, and certainly none for it was based on my gender. Largely, people have agreed with me. Some people just claimed there wasn’t a problem, some detractors claimed that actually trying to do something about it was a bad idea, or impossible, and a few said that men suffer from sexism too! These excuses have been fully addressed in the comments.

The Lynx Effect

I received a lot of messages, mostly from women saying thank you. That made me happy to have done something seemingly right and sad that a bunch of intelligent women would feel the need to thank a random guy on the internet for writing an article that took maybe two hours to put together. There is no doubt at all that I believe what I wrote more now than I did when I wrote it. 

If this wasn’t a problem, or if doing something was worse than doing nothing, none of these things would have happened.

And that’s all I have to say about that.