Human languages don't work like programming languages, you can't always derive the meaning of a phrase from its parts. There are large groups of English speakers among whom, men and women alike, "you guys" is an idiom independent in meaning from the word "guy", and is used as a gender neutral plural second person pronoun. If one is in the company of such speakers there is nothing wrong with using it.
Sure, it might be well-accepted in some groups and in some contexts. But why would you use it in the workplace, when there is absolutely controversy around the phrase? https://www.google.com/webhp?q=is+%22you+guys%22+gender+neut... Why would you use it in an environment where women already feel oddly singled-out because they're in the extreme minority, and when there are plenty of other perfectly-acceptable phrases?
It's definitely not as bad as a group I'm in being addressed as "gentlemen" (which has happened too many times to count), but it's still annoying, in a work context. I don't mind it when I'm with a group of friends, or there are roughly equal numbers of men and women.
Well, OP is implying that a single woman finding something sexist or offensive makes it so. I've presented two counterexamples upthread and grandparent here presented one, that's three. OP presented only two, and one of them is a man who makes his point by conflating the singular and plural forms of "guys".
The etymology of the word "mankind" is not as sexist as most people think. The word "man" used to mean "person" and the words "wereman" and "wyfman" used to mean male person and female person respectively (hence werewolf). The word mankind was in use in a gender neutral way concurrently with different terms that meant "group of male humans".
So ... mankind is fine, but in our fantasy work we should refer to manwolves in the neutral-plural, with werewolf and wyfwolf reserved for circumstances where gender-specificity is important?
If you think "werewolf" is sexist, I would recommend "lycanthrope" as an alternative, rather than "manwolf".
I did not say "mankind is fine" I said that it's etymology is not sexist. The word is not "mankind" because only men count, the word is "mankind" because when it was made up "man" included all people.
That said, it's frustrating when perfectly good words like mankind are labelled as offensive because people either misunderstand their origins, ignore the intent with which they are used, or are simply looking for reasons to be offended.
I am male. When I was in school I was on a project with two women. I asked them if the term "guys" bothered them. They both said no. I even used it when there were only women in the group. Guys is the plural of you in some dialects of English.
"Hot" has many many meanings other than "sexy". When not referring to a person's attractiveness, it means "popular, being paid a lot of attention to" or "high in temperature", or "fast" or "contains a lot of energy".
You are implying that a few individual women you know being okay with a thing implies that it is alright / not sexist / shouldn't be offensive to other women. I'm not necessarily sure that that follows. (This is independent of whether or not the term 'guys' is sexist or offensive to women or anything else).
I will accept many corrections for the benefit of diversity, but when even the majority of the disadvantaged group uses the word in a non-hostile way, I stop feeling like I'm being asked to be helpful and start feeling like I'm being micromanaged and controlled by people who refuse to take into account the obvious intent of my words that the majority of listeners understand.
Informal plural forms
Despite you being both singular and plural, some dialects
retain the distinction between a singular and plural you
with different words. Examples of such pronouns sometimes
seen and heard are:
...
you guys – U.S.,[2] particularly in the Midwest,
Northeast, South Florida and West Coast;
Canada, Australia. Used regardless of the
genders of those referred to
...
(I live, work, and went to school in Northeastern U.S.)
If you explain your intent and they still feel offended, I do wonder how one should react to that. It feels to me like someone who is being pedantic who thinks they are "right". Who knows, maybe it does offend enough people that this usage will decline.
Well, it's judgement call, but offense alone is not enough to change behavior IMO. There was a case where a person reading a history book about the KKK in the presence of blacks was accused of harassment because the picture on the cover depicted: the KKK. That's just ridiculous.
I just realized that my wording was pretty vague. I would err on the side of not changing your attitude. I say this primarily because using one persons reaction (or even a few peoples reactions) to something you do as a test for deciding if you should reevaluate yourself would make you chase your tail like a dog: there would be no end to it. But yeah it is mostly about intent, in my mind. Disagreement is necessary but not sufficient for change.
If you care about someone, and they're offended, then you'll change your behavior.
I'd venture to guess you're also both rational adults, and you if care about someone, and they're offended at lots of different stuff (sexist language, passing clouds, the endless sea), then you could talk about why passing clouds and the endless sea offend them.
This really comes down to human decency; if you see women as people first, worthy of respect and care, then you'll probably want to minimize how much you offend them, instead of placing the problem of being offended on them.
But that right there is exactly the problem I have with people like this. Being offended is a choice. People choose to be offended. One might hear something they perceive as offensive and they're given a choice: Did this person actively choose to offend me, or am I taking this the wrong way? In one choice, you assume that most people are generally good, have good intentions, and aren't out to get you. In the other choice, you position yourself as someone under attack, or someone at the lesser end of a power dynamic.
Again, if you respect the person you're standing next to, the person who's now offended by something you've said, then you're probably going to act a certain way: you're probably going to hear them out about you offended them, and you'll probably want to apologize and then amend your behavior.
Can you reconcile "I respect you" and "I'm not going to acknowledge your being offended, but instead will tell you how you're wrong"?
If I say that an inanimate object is "sexy" and the woman nearby me feels offended by it, certainly I don't want her to feel bad, but I have to be entirely honest and feel entirely blindsided by her state of mind. If I talk about night being dangerous because it is dark and visibility is low and a dark skinned person nearby gets offended, I really have to wonder. I mean as a white guy I guess I have to assume that everybody around me is assuming the worst of me? You don't have to answer that. And I would hope that the person who feels offended would try to meet me in the middle, as it were, by evaluating their overreaction to the situation while I would try to evaluate the language I use, but seriously we are really going down a rabbit hole here.
So if your neighbor is offended that you wear blue shirts and insists that you should wear green shirts, will you change your behavior? After all, they are offended and you care about them.
In this stupid hypothetical (stupid because we're talking about the very real problem of anti-woman sexism in tech, and you're comparing it to someone having an irrational reaction to the color of a shirt), I'd ask my neighbor, "why? Why does my blue shirt bother you?"
My neighbor responds, "because the blue-shirted security forces in the dictatorship where I grew up killed my family when I was young, and it's very troubling to be reminded of that, even now."
Done, I stop wearing blue shirts.
To continue with the stupid analogy, I'm crediting my neighbor with not being irrational, and putting in the effort to listen and hear them out.
Just like I credit women, back in the real world, with not being irrational, and I hear them out about their complaints/frustrations/laments about sexism in tech.
You should follow the prevailing culture of the place you're in. On the internet, a meeting of 190+ countries, anything goes.
Certainly, my experience of America was that you guys say "you guys" all the time. The composition of the group is irrelevant. It transcends particulars.
But if you live in a subdistrict of California where "you guys" is taken completely literally, then by all means stop.
I've never actually heard an algorithm called hot. If I did, my first instinct would probably be confusion, not that the algorithm is "sexy, sleek, or elegant". If I had to put a meaning to the phrase, it would make me think the algorithm is either CPU intensive, or very fast.
It's well known that Tor is vulnerable to traffic analysis by an adversary that can basically monitor the entire internet. In the past, this was considered impractical, but now we know the NSA does something like this. Since this is inherent in its design, that means it doesn't really matter if it's funded by the US government, because they don't even need to weaken it in the first place.
Not to say that funding diversity wouldn't be a good thing, but there's no particular reason to think Tor is broken any more than is already known because of where the money currently comes from.
I2P claims to try to defend against large scale traffic analysis, but they are a underfunded project with few contributors. There was some mention of implementing cover traffic which would solve the issue (at the cost of massively increasing traffic), but I don't think that's happened yet.
I2P, being fully decentralised, is also very vulnerable to a sybil attack. Join thousands of nodes to the network, wait until you are strategically placed, then follow the traffic streams routed through your nodes.
Of course, sybil attacks are a concern in any open network. In theory the tor directory authorities are able to deny new nodes so they have some recourse, but in practice if you stagger your new nodes you can still infiltrate the network. :/
The fact is, anonymity systems are a hard and unsolved problem. That's not due to the source of the funding. We take what we get.
Is "they're tasty" a valid justification? Perhaps you're a vegetarian, but if you aren't there's a logical inconsistency there. If you are, kudos for walking the walk.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I don't think there's a logical inconsistency as clear as you're assuming. I'm well aware that in many instances, the condition farm animals are kept in is much worse than whatever problems I am describing with the act of hunting. At the same time, I'm not sure the very essence of being a farm animal necessitates a worse situation that hunting; there may be a regime, and associated cost, at which farm animals are not significantly worse off than their wild counterparts, and as long as their end is quick and painless, I'm not too adverse to that.
Ideally though, I would like vat grown meat. To many, that sounds disgusting. To me, it sounds like a reproducible process that can eventually be perfected to give very specific types of meat as needed. Perfect steaks every time. It solves a lot of other problems at the same time, so bonus.
I'm aware that the previous, and my stance on hunting, is all very pie-in-the-sky. I still think it's a worthwhile discussion.
Would it help if someone pointed out that wild animals will eventually die in pain whether hunters shoot them or not? There are no vets in the wild to give them morphine to put them down when they get too old to survive. They will either get sick, starve, or get eaten.
Firstly, that's a rather odd argument. I wouldn't assume I could kill some old or sickly person in some remote region of the world where there were no doctors. Why does the same logic not apply to an animal? It may not apply, but at least make the case, rather than leaving it an assumption.
Secondly, I'm not sure how we can assume that the old and sickly animals are the ones being killed when humans hunt. I would assume it's a statistically higher percentage of them, but I would also assume it much less statistically relevant than with a bow, and that less than with a spear. On the other end of the spectrum, I would imagine killing deer by dropping a bomb on them would result in no statistical difference in the kills compared to the normal herd make-up. Technology lessens the "we kill the old and sickly" argument.
Maybe it's not a basic phobia, but the grandparent poster implied that anyone who likes target shooting and owns guns for that purpose is "odd/unhinged".
I don't understand why people can say, "oh he's a farmer, so he's not insane for having a gun" but the moment someone's not a farmer, they're suddenly unhinged or obsessed with violence, as opposed to perhaps, a target shooter or other kind of hobbyist. It's like they have this mental pattern "grandpa with a gun" where it's ok, and everything else just sets off alarm bells. It's odd, because it's usually liberals (in the US this is a liberal/conservative thing) that have more "openness to experience" but for some reason they are rarely open to the experience of growing up with guns, considering them dangerous but useful tools, using them for sport and hunting, and not being insane while doing so.
Weapons of war have historically become objects of sport: it happened with fencing and archery - firearms are no different.
