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AMD Offers Women Geek Dating Advice
Blacklaw writes "It appears AMD has decided to branch out from integrated circuits and enter the romance market with a handy guide for girls to land themselves a geeky guy. From the article: 'In a blog post written by Leslie Sobon, the company's vice president of marketing, Sobon describes her life in the largely male-dominated world of technology as being "mostly surrounded by guys all day," but says: "I can tell you that — in general — technical guys are pretty cool," and offers advice on how girls can land a geek guy. Although clearly meant in a lighthearted way, Sobon's missive serves to patronize both her company's customers — who, we learn, are socially inept and bad dressers — and women, who apparently can't understand technology and need to find a nice man who can "fix the TV, your PC, and the sprinkler system" along with other magical item s far too complex for the poor female brain to comprehend.'"
Dear everyone,
Please stop taking every so damned seriously.
Thank you,
Byron
Seriously, if a nice girl's just willing to strike up a conversation with us, she's already miles ahead in my book without having to learn how to parrot stupid lines about x86 vs. ARM.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
If a male wrote this drivel, he'd at the minimum. be fired, and there's a good chance he'd be sued for sexual harrasment as well. But if a woman writes it? No penalties at all.
Not really true. They can always find *someone* who is ready and willing, but that is a far cry from having any man they desire. Once you get to know a girl or two, you'll probably realize they have to work at it a bit too, and it all evens out in the end.
I know. I accidentally the whole thing, and yet I can still it lightheartedly.
Once you get to know a girl or two...
TWO girls??? Did you forget this is slashdot?
Well, if you read the actual blog post instead of that jackass written article, you will find the blog is actually pretty light and makes little, if any offensive comments or insinuations. Really, it's pretty cut and dry and somewhat silly. So, after three posts, I've decided Gareth Halfacree is a total douchebag, and the author of the blog itself, Leslie Sobon comes off as pretty date-able. Also, I posted three separate times because everything is better in triplicates, and work is extremely slow today.
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Don't they realize that if all their smart geeky employees start getting laid regularly they'll quickly lose motivation to work ridiculous hours for less pay than their superiors who don't do anything?
If geeks start getting laid, the American economy will collapse, since geeks is all we really have left. I, for one, think that the sexual activities of geeks should be heavily monitored and controlled by the government to ensure their continued general dissatisfaction with human relations. It must be done; for the sake of our children, for the sake of American prosperity.
p.s. I'm moving to Germany (Gottingen) next week.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
There are downsides to both gender roles.
One workshop that tried to help genders understand each other better did these exercises:
- First, they got all the men in the room to line up and had the women rate them on their appearance, to teach guys that women feel constantly judged by how they look no matter what the context and give them a chance to see what that feels like.
- Second, they got the women in the room to go up to a stranger and ask them out, to get a feeling for what men go through every time they initiate a relationship.
What's particularly sad is the number of women who've been taught by their moms or Cosmopolitan and the like that when they like a man they shouldn't ask him out, but should somehow signal to him that they want him to ask her out. This leaves the women frustrated because the men didn't pick up their signals, and leaves the men frustrated because they can't figure out when a woman wants to make something happen.
I am officially gone from
I'm not sure my wife could name any of the programming languages that I have used in my career. And that doesn't bother me.
I don't need my partner to be interested in the specifics of my work. When I am upset or frustrated about work, or want to talk about what I did that day, generalities are fine, because honestly, unless you were on the same project I was on, it wouldn't make much sense no matter what level of vocabulary you had.
I've had the experience of dating a girl very seriously who was beautiful, highly intelligent, and an excellent system administrator. And our shared language and work/hobby interests did nothing to smooth over the rocky spots in our relationship, and while initially it made me much more attracted to her, in retrospect it was perhaps novelty more than anything else. IOW, her qualities as a person were considerably more important than her "job" as a sysadmin or her interests as "a geek", and our ideology and personality clashes eventually overshadowed our mutual geekyness.
_My_ advice to women who are interested in geeky guys is
1) be accessible. Women _baffle_ men, and geeks are used to being able to come up with valid mental models to predict the behavior of complex things. But this is regularly less successful than we would like when applied to girls. (See xkcd: http://xkcd.com/55/)
This means, when we work up the nerve to ask questions or chat, use accomodating body language. Listen, and ask clarifying questions to help draw us out more. Don't act like we have the plague -- we probably don't.
2) Expect to be challenged. Challenge back. Most geeks will want to have an authentic relationship. We will, like all asshole men, project our values, expectations, and ideas about women on to you, but we're better off if you challenge us when we do that. Not like "STFU you patriarch bastard", but actually engage us in a discussion about why we are wrong. You don't have to care about what we do, but you do need to demonstrate critical thinking skills. We, by and large, do not have serious relationships with people who are very beautiful but very dim and self centered. They are eye and arm candy, but not for serious relationships.
3) We are usually not eye and arm candy.
(To be fair, we're not asking you to be either -- very often :))
If we need to shave more or dress better or whatever to meet your expectations regarding house-broken mammals, we will probably not understand, and we will probably resist any attempts by you to guilt us or shame us into complying. Explain why it is important to you _personally_, and work things from that angle. There will be some amount of ideological opposition, but usually you'll luck out by appealing to the pragmatist within us.
4) Don't be ashamed of who you are or what your interests are. The AMD lady's advice is pretty bad I think -- if you're not interested in CPU types, don't pretend to be. Some of us love explaining that stuff to anyone who will listen, and others would rather not tell you if you cannot be bothered to find out for yourself. But don't patronize us and imply that you are interested when you really aren't.
5) Many of the same problems between men and women apply to geek men and women. We have pride, we desperately want your respect, it is important (to varying degrees) to us to be approved of by you. Often, we are better at expressing our anger and frustration in words, but not always. Some of us are alcoholics, quick to anger, and some of us will hurt you, because after all, we're still men, even when we're not tan and not rippling with muscle mass.
(PS: many of us are still confused about how we fit into a world that has a traditional yet evolving idea of what a "man" is. Yes, our grandpas fought wars, our dads worked in factories and enjoyed a stiff drink. Yet some of us don't like going outside. Somewhere inside all of us is the need to be a bit macho at times, but we're not always sure how.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
This is a photo of Leslie Sobon Alright, that's pretty good, but then these are also photos of Leslie: one two three four That's quite a range there, never know what you're going to get.
Are you new to dealing with human beings (I was going to say "women" but then realized even that was too narrow)?
Every single one of those pix looks like the same attractive woman. But people look a bit different from time to time, like when they are working vs when they are posing for an "image" shot. It is exactly the same with guys as with gals, except that you don't have the same "appearance police" mentality scrutinizing the guys for imperfections like you do with gals.
This reminds me of the candid paparazzi snaps of, say, Jennifer Aniston picking up some hygiene products on a midnight run to 7-11 at midnight in her sweats. Someone who is possibly the world's most beautiful woman (sorry Ashwariya) looks kind of dowdy under those conditions but she is still the same person and could look absolutely dazzling later in the morning. If she doesn't pass your "always must look beautiful test", its your problem not hers.
Guys who expect woman to be glamorous 24/7/365 are either very rich or idiots. Both sets are jerks.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
This isn't actually directed toward commodore64. I don't know the first thing about his love life. For all I know, he has a harem of eager sex slaves who worship the ground he walks on. It's really directed toward anyone who read his post and thought "Yeah! He's dead right!"
You have it backwards. It's much easier for an unattractive man to make himself attractive than an unattractive woman. That's because most women are attracted by the way we make them feel, not just how we look (looks don't hurt, but you might be surprised by how many "pretty boys" can get enough women with just their looks that that they never bother to develop a personality...which is much, much more important). How often have you seen a drop-dead gorgeous woman with some pathetic loser and you wondered why, knowing you'd be so much better for her? How often do you see a drop-dead gorgeous man with a hideous woman?
We're the lucky ones. Many women will tell you that men get more attractive with age. Not all, of course. But a surprisingly high percentage.
We do have to work at it. But talking to women is actually a lot more fun than it is work. If you're getting an instant "no" as soon as you walk up, or simple derisive laughter when you try to step things up a notch, you're doing something terribly, terribly wrong. Women are much more sensitive to social nuances than men, and they're much more polite and concerned about hurting other people's feelings. Sure, you'll run into the occasional bitch, but they're really few and far between.
If what you're doing isn't working, change what you're doing.
I can't believe I'm getting ready to post this on /.