Zen Cho tweeted some sobering thoughts on what happened to Mark Oshiro at ConQuesT.

I think they're very well observed.

I clearly missed out on the first round of the Scott Aaronson debate - an MIT professor who argued in an online discussion of the position of women in STEM that as a shy, nerdy guy he was not privileged, and that feminism made him feel like a monster( ... mention of rape/compounding the idiocy ... ) - but a friend just pointed me at a good analysis of what Aaronson was trying to say, and how he went so wrong, that may interest people here: The plight of the bitter nerd: Why so many awkward, shy guys end up hating feminism

Laurie Penny (who has already written about this general issue when she pointed out the need for male nerds to make the uncomfortable recognition that their position in society isn't as their fondly imagined parallel to the Star Wars Rebel Alliance, but that they're actually an arm of the Empire) also has a good analysis of this in her article On Nerd Entitlement, in fact she pretty much nails the argument with her sub-title: 'White male nerds need to recognise that other people had traumatic upbringings, too - and that's different from structural oppression'. She examines where Aaronson is coming from (white male nerd who had an appalling time at school), compares it to her own lived experience (white female nerd who had an appalling time at school), and then rips him to shreds for trying to claim male nerds aren't part of the structural problem, particularly for women in STEM, by showing that yes, in fact we clearly are. And I love the fact that she goes on to tear apart his bewailing the fact that boys/men like him would do better if marriages were still being arranged by elders within the shtetl as happened for earlier generations of men in his family, by pointing out that his ancestral 'better' was only achieved by the ancestral subjugation of earlier generations of women in her family and others, within the demands of seeing the young men had the best chances, enabled at the cost of the hopes, and even ultimately lives, of young women like her.

It's this kind of *headdesk* -worthy idiocy from male nerds that makes me so glad I became disabled, as that transition/revelation/Damascene conversion gave me a much better appreciation of how, even as the proverbial shy, nerdy guy, my life had been privileged until that point (and still is) by the fact I'm also a straight white, middle-class male. ( ... further mention of rape ... )