Timi Leppänen
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Excuse me if I’m intruding in a bad and/or pointless way, but in my opinion using the perhaps a bit casually sexist labels of “bro culture” and even your coined “Cool Tech Girl” just makes the piece a bit less powerful and dignified.

Reading a subtle jab like “bro culture” just triggers that subconscious white male privilege fueled backlash at the back of my mind that I have to suppress to be a decent human being. I know it’s shitty that it exists, but it does and being aware of it is the only way to begin countering it.

But a lot of people aren’t fully aware of that privilege or its harmful and toxic nature. With those people, the jab just pretty much instantly pushes them away, or creates a mental block that stops them from actually reading and digesting your piece. This, in turn takes away from the potential value of this piece in furthering equality and conversation around it and whatever entertainment value it has isn’t really worth it. In a “from feminists, to feminists” kind of piece it works perfectly, but that sort of self-gratification does fairly little in actually furthering things. It’s akin to just making fun of boys in a little private clubhouse. It might make you feel better about the injustices you’ve faced, but in the long run it’s just going to create an even deeper divide between the sexes instead of helping to equalize and unify.

On the flipside, the catchy term “Cool Tech Girl” sort of plays down the issue at hand as something funny or a hip phenomenon, and especially the estranged ‘simple men’ from before will latch onto that over anything else here.

In summary, ridiculing and calling out people just for the sake of ridiculing and calling them out, no matter how indecent they are as people achieves nothing. Pushing them out of the conversation completely is avoiding the issues you oppose. You’re fully justified to feel resentment for the things and people that have offended you, but letting that resentment leak into undertones of your texts is potentially going to undermine the proper procedures to absolving the issues. You’re absolutely not a bad offender in this practice, barely at all really, and this is just my uneducated two cents but thought I’d share it nevertheless.

BTW I loved your piece otherwise, just got a bit of a sour taste from the generalizations and this conversation pushed it out. Props to Nikki J. for her insightful response as well and for the bits of my response that I pretty much parroted from her.

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    Timi Leppänen

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    One day I’ll build up the courage to write a story… All my responses are based on my experiences, life views and opinions. They aren’t ‘correct’ nor ‘incorrect’