> If your house is on fire you don't stop to mow the lawn. You put the fire off.

It's a nice analogy. Please identify the fire, and tell me how to put it out. Your criticism is that I am behaving suboptimally if my goal is to fix discrimination, and the clearest way to demonstrate this is to explain how I can behave more optimally.

> The problem with low-hanging fruit is that they give you a false sense of accomplishment. In optimising code, the easy 1% fix doesn't mean anything if there is a slow function taking 60% of the call times.

Please, figure out a way to identify the 60% function here, and identify how to solve it. If such an optimization exists, I'll go for it. Explain in further detail (1) what it is that we should fix and (2) how we should fix it. Otherwise, the low hanging fruit is what I'll go for because (1) we know it's a problem and (2) we know how to improve it.

> Very plausible? That is as far fetched idea as any I've ever heard. At the very least, citation needed.

There was a recent discussion about how much evidence you need in order to convince people that sexism is a real problem that we need to solve. But "citation needed" in this case very easily turns into "citation provided", if you would bother to go to Wikipedia or Google rather than dismiss claims offhand.

1. "exposure to seemingly innocuous sexually suggestive ads can lead to disturbing antifemale sentiments" http://www.psu.edu/dept/medialab/researchpage/newabstracts/o...

2. "women whose male partners objectified them scored lower than those whose partners didn't gaze at their bodies" http://www.livescience.com/11649-ogling-men-subtracts-women-...

If you'd like to read the studies and point out flaws in methodology, or provide studies that refute these claims, feel free to do so. I hope you consider these studies sufficiently relevant for the discussion, I don't want to have to track down the study which most closely replicates the conditions described in the article.

> If I showed a picture of Simon Peyton Jones would that equally imply "programmers in the audience have to be as smart as him else you are losers"? If I show Marc Zuckenberg or some other successful enterpreneur does that mean "Less than 1 billion net worth is for suckers"? Would anyone even think of it that way?

I think men have an enormous problem when they internalize the comparison of themselves against more successful men portrayed in media, and this can definitely have harmful consequences. There are plenty of stories about men who become unemployed during an economic downturn but don't tell the family. Every day the men would drive out to a parking lot, wait for ten hours, and return home, living off savings. They thought that the prospect of being unemployed was emasculating. They felt that being laid off is a personal failure — even in a recession, even if the company is going bankrupt for reasons beyond their control.

I think this would happen less if we reassured men that they do not become worthless creatures just because they are temporarily unemployed, that they have value as a human being beyond their careers. I think there aren't nearly enough men in media (movies, advertising, etc.) portrayed as valuable members of society through avenues other than what the traditional measures of success dictate.

For further reading, I recommend "Stiffed" by Faludi and "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" by hooks. I've been looking for a good book about men written by men, but I have not yet found one that incorporates the most basic lessons learned by the feminist movement. It's like the difference between Kant and Aristotle: Aristotle was a genius but his work is mostly irrelevant today, of course he wasn't well-read by modern standards since hardly anything had been written yet. Most men writing about male sexual politics haven't read enough from the past dozen or so decades of female sexual politics, and it shows in their sophomoric arguments.

> >Sexism is not a simple problem and you do not help anything by imagining what it would by like if a woman put sexy pictures of a man on a powerpoint slide. Fact is, men are not generally worried about getting raped.

> Where's the equality then? Or is having different arbitrary demands for each gender acceptable?

If I were really after just "equality", and I were a dictator, I could just order my secret police to rape men until the numbers match up for the two genders. I'd not like to get into a deeper discussion about "equality" but suffice it to say our resources are (as you stated) limited, and the problems for men and women are different, so we have no business e.g. allocating the same level of funding to men-only DV shelters because they are simply not needed as much. Also suffice it to say I think objectifying men is wrong too; but it is not as much of a problem (based on empirical evidence that suggests that it is not as much of a problem).