> Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to say "you're being too emotional".
I'm nor sure this would never apply to a guy. Saying someone is illogical or "motivated by emotion, not reason", or is "overly sentimental" seems to be a common attack during geek flamewars.
It's also a fairly common attack during corporate shark feeding frenzies.
That it was once used to attack women in general (as opposed to individually) actually makes it more tenous to use it as an attack against a woman. The speaker in that case can be accused of being sexist, whilst if they called a man "emotional", it would force someone to address the accusation itself.
And as a bonus when used against a man you will at the same time question his manliness. So actually I think this low blow argument might be even better used against men, but works against women.
And for the specifics of the article. I see no explicit accusation of being emotional. "I was being hard on S" does not necessarily mean that the people being hard on another is emotional, since it could also mean almost the opposite: that you do not care about people's emotions. And this argument ("being too hard on") can be and is used on men.
I do not see how this article relates to sexism, rather it relates to various low blow tactics in corporate politics.
I'm nor sure this would never apply to a guy. Saying someone is illogical or "motivated by emotion, not reason", or is "overly sentimental" seems to be a common attack during geek flamewars.
It's also a fairly common attack during corporate shark feeding frenzies.
That it was once used to attack women in general (as opposed to individually) actually makes it more tenous to use it as an attack against a woman. The speaker in that case can be accused of being sexist, whilst if they called a man "emotional", it would force someone to address the accusation itself.