Mark Jaquith here. Happy to clear some things up (and would appreciate it if you could make this comment visible on the thread).

Here is the text of my tweet:

> Imagine if men talked like women with "Golden Uterus Complex" do… "Excuse me, but which one of us has a penis? That's what I thought."

First, the definition of "golden uterus complex". This phrase was brought to my attention by Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, a doctor of Clinical Psychology. Dr. Palmatier assigns a great many attributes to this personality, but the one most related to my point is:

> the golden uterus believes that having birthed a child makes them better and more knowledgeable than others; e.g., the “Well you don’t have kids so how would you know anything?” woman

This phrase doesn't apply to "women". I wasn't making any kind of blanket statement about women. I wasn't even making a blanket statement about mothers. I was referring to women who have carried a pregnancy to term and who exhibit specific behavior characteristics. I sure hope that how people behave is an aspect upon which they can be judged.

Here's the specific thing that triggered my tweet: http://i.imgur.com/GxYf8.png

For context, it is a picture on Facebook of a mother feeding her newborn baby solid food — a seriously dangerous, ignorant, and irresponsible thing to do. Someone in the comments tells her that you shouldn't feed a baby that little solid food. The mother responds "Well it my kid not Yours so what I do with him is none of your concern thanks" [sic].

It didn't matter to her that the commentator was correct, and that what she was doing was potentially lethal to her baby. She gave birth to the baby, so in her mind she's the expert and the ultimate arbiter of what is right for the baby. I've even seen this complex be applied to matters other than child care, as if the act of giving birth confers all manner of sagacious powers.

I'm not discounting the power of personal experience. I was present for the births of both of my children, and even as a mostly-spectator, it was a unimaginably transforming experience. What I am objecting to is the idea that childbirth automatically makes a woman the ultimate authority on child care or anything else. This is the sort of attitude that has contributed to the anti-vaccine nonsense that has been plaguing some Western countries in recent years.

My tweet contrasted the way that mothers with this behavioral complex openly talk about the utilization of their reproductive organs for childbirth being the source of their claimed superiority, and I pondered what it would be like if men claimed and talked about their reproductive organs as the source of their supposed superiority. It was a reductio ad absurdum, clearly. Men (well, most men post high school) don't bring up the use of their sex organs in polite conversation as a trump card. Some (nota bene: SOME) women do. Sexist men usually exhibit a sexism that is much more closely tied to feelings of mental superiority and greater physical strength. I find it to be an interesting social sexual difference to how some women express a sense of superiority over men.

People do reductio ad absurdum comparisons about social sexual imbalances all the time. Like how it's weird to imagine women yelling things out of a car at an attractive male jogger. Or making a joke about how if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament in most religions. I guess I made the assumption that my Twitter audience would get that (a) I was proposing a ridiculous scenario, partly for comedic effect and (b) that I also did it to provoke thought about quirky social sexual imbalances. Maybe that was too much to assume for such a constricting medium such as Twitter.

But in any case, my intention and meaning could have been discovered by Ms. Nabors by either asking me for clarification, or doing a simple web search for the phrase, either of which would have immediately made it clear that the phrase refers to a behavior exhibited by a subset of the subset of women who have given birth, and it is not in any way a slur against women or mothers (I will grant that it is a slur against people who exhibit this behavior, behavior being an acceptable thing to criticize).

Instead of seeking out my meaning, Ms. Nabors quite publicly called me an "ass", accused me of making "sweeping and dismissive generalizations" about women, implied that I was socially inept (while also making her own sweeping generalization about the social skills of developers), called me openly hostile to women, and called my remarks a symptom of a boys-club attitude within the developer community.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether she fairly judged my actions.