“Yet another man who thinks all women are hysteric. What next, are you going to ask me if it’s my ‘period’?”
Once one moves from a position of effective prejudice (“he will criticise me because I’m a woman”), any critical statement can be read from that perspective. It’s a bit like with conspiracy theories, where every debunking attempt can be turned into “of course THEY would say that!”.
You are inventing a hypothetical straw-man. Until you can point to conversation where someone said something fact based like I gave as an example and people accept your twisting and start a twitter mob of any impact, this remains a hypothetical victimization.
I could transcribe entire conversations here and you would still accuse me of making them up. What I wrote I heard almost precisely word for word; but in the end, exchanging anecdata until the end of time will do precisely nothing to persuade anyone that such mindset really exists (and indeed prospers), apart from making me a candidate for cancellation.
The main point is that, unless you’re talking physics (maybe), nothing is so “fact-based” that it cannot be perceived in the “wrong” way by someone sufficiently determined to do that.
1. An observation that you are arguing from a position of assuming malice from the other side. "They" are trying to twist everything, therefore evidence is not required since "they" won't listen anyway
2. You can point at any public twitter mob where the real conversation was made public afterwards or where you know the inside scoop and with the caveat of anecdata it could strengthen your point
3. You seem to be dangerously close to resting on a "what even is 'fact based'?" argument repeating that "they" are determined to misunderstand statements in malicious ways
You said “if I say something like this, there is no room for attack/misinterpretation”. I showed you how such a statement can be easily attacked/misinterpreted - and I can do that because I’ve been in enough conversations like those to know that this mindset is relatively popular.
You are free to not believe me and continue to live your life as you were, I honestly don’t care. Take my statements as anecdata and move on. Just don’t come crying to me when you’re cancelled because of some “fact-based” statement.
Facts can't win if emotions are involved. Facts only work when everyone is rational, but, to quote former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss, from his excellent book on negotiation (Never Split the Difference): humans are inherently irrational. A large chunk of his book is how you rarely succeed in arguments or negotiations based on facts, because humans are irrational emotional creatures. I highly highly recommend reading the book (because its great, not because it says this particular thing).
No, but you also can’t rely on just one. You need both. I highly recommend reading he book, he explains it a lot better than I ever could.
The problem is many people think that just by presenting facts they will get through to people, but that doesn’t work. You have to understand the other persons emotional state too.
There's nothing hypothetical or straw-man about his comment. If you surf around english-language forums where the new breed of feminist hangs out, you'll see dozens of posts pretty much exactly like that, all highly liked/upvoted and with huge numbers of responses agreeing and amplifying. Any posts with the message of "hold on, maybe it's not just sexism and he actually has a point" will be downvoted and attract hateful responses: "you sound like just another one of those sexists!".
I mostly try to avoid places with a lot of that, though it still feels like it seeps through anyways sometimes. /u/fastball's link is a gold mine of that stuff though.
Most recent example outside of Reddit subs catering to neo-feminists that I can recall is this one:
Not the literal exact quote, but a fine example of a story about, somebody treated the new hire intern disrespectfully, where the comments go in that direction. Oh wait, it was a woman? Well it definitely must be sexism! Downvote anyone who expresses doubt. It's not like men ever get disrespected and told to sit down and shut up in roles like new hire intern.
Erm...so maybe Germany is actually more sexist than the US, but I could totally see this happpen to women in germany, less so men. Because, especially in engineering, older workers do sometimes still assume a women in a dress must be a secretary or something. And is your point "well it definitely wasn't sexist?" Because....just because men also get disrespected doesn't mean that this happens a lot more to women? Or are we just abandoning statistics to make feminists evil now?
I was kind of expecting something more...respectful? Like, that's not at all "candid advice misunderstood". That's a person disrespected in a way that happens more to women than men, and people drawing conclusions.
Once one moves from a position of effective prejudice (“he will criticise me because I’m a woman”), any critical statement can be read from that perspective. It’s a bit like with conspiracy theories, where every debunking attempt can be turned into “of course THEY would say that!”.