Are you kidding?
Oh hell, no. The Leftists have produced one of the largest magnifying glasses they possess in order to navel gaze even more intimately. They are damned close to the molecular level.
They posit that Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s home voice have been purposely programmed by men to be sexist.
I repeat at the risk of being repetitive: no, I am not kidding. These devices have female voices because the companies producing them are inherently sexist by nature.
From QZ.com:
We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment
by Leah Fessler
Women have been made into servants once again. Except this time, they’re digital.
Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Google Home peddle stereotypes of female subservience—which puts their “progressive” parent companies in a moral predicament.
People often comment on the sexism inherent in these subservient bots’ female voices, but few have considered the real-life implications of the devices’ lackluster responses to sexual harassment. By letting users verbally abuse these assistants without ramifications, their parent companies are allowing certain behavioral stereotypes to be perpetuated. Everyone has an ethical imperative to help prevent abuse, but companies producing digital female servants warrant extra scrutiny, especially if they can unintentionally reinforce their abusers’ actions as normal or acceptable.
She then comes out and states the obvious.
Justifications abound for using women’s voices for bots: high-pitched voices are generally easier to hear, especially against background noise; fem-bots reflect historic traditions, such as women-operated telephone operator lines; small speakers don’t reproduce low-pitched voices well. These are all myths.
The biggest problems involved the response of the devices when presented with sexually harassing verbiage.
Harassment, it turns out, is a regular issue for bot makers. Ilya Eckstein, CEO of Robin Labs, whose bot platform helps truckers, cabbies, and other drivers find the best route, told Quartz that 5% of interactions in their database are sexually explicit—and he believes the actual percentage is higher. Deborah Harrison, a writer for Cortana, said at the 2016 Virtual Assistant Summit that “a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries” were into Cortana’s sex life.
Even if we’re joking, the instinct to harass our bots reflects deeper social issues. In the US, one in five women have been raped in their lifetime, and a similar percentage are sexually assaulted while in college alone; over 90% of victims on college campuses do not report their assault. And within the very realms where many of these bots’ codes are being written, 60% of women working in Silicon Valley have been sexually harassed at work.
Worse yet:
The graph below represents an overview of how the bots responded to different types of verbal harassment. Aside from Google Home, which more-or-less didn’t understand most of our sexual gestures, the bots most frequently evaded harassment, occasionally responded positively with either graciousness or flirtation, and rarely responded negatively, such as telling us to stop or that what we were saying was inappropriate.
You read it here first: those ignorant devices, programmed by sexist men, responded either with flirtation in return or rarely responded negatively. That is an abject slap in the face to every they on the planet.
The graph above is bad. The graph below is reprehensible.
Leah Fessler concludes:
Clearly, these ladies doth not protest too much. Out of all of the bots, Cortana resisted my abuse the most defiantly. Siri and Alexa are nearly tied for second place, though Siri’s flirtation with various insults edges her toward third. And while Google Home’s rape definition impressed, nearly constant confusion on all other accounts puts her last.
I would logically ask: why does Leah Fessler have a female name? She embraces sexism by simply possessing a name commonly associated with women: Leah. How does she think alphabet humans feel when she introduces herself in a clearly sexist fashion by presenting her sexist name? Does she even use the pronoun “she” in reference to herself? That in and of itself is abominably sexist. What of humans who consider themselves as “they”? Shouldn’t “they” be included in Fessler’s rather narrow world? Apparently not.
As you can see in the photo at the top of the post, Leah Fessler has long hair — commonly associated with women — and two rather obvious breasts encased in what many would conclude is a remarkably repressive device built and engineered by men to? Yes. Conquer. Overwhelm. Even worse, her clothing clearly identifies her with “female.” As do her “earrings,” symbols of evidence that women can be bought and subjugated by the merest of worthless trinkets.
Could she be more uncaring, insensitive or even hateful in her physical (and likely her verbal and mental) representation to others?
Pronouns should be inclusive and not exclusive. Feelings matter. Misgendering people is hurtful, judgmental and, further, shoving your paltry and judgmental version of sex into the faces of those more tolerant and understanding than you.
Sex isn’t something that is hard, fast, immovable, set in stone. Sex is instead fluctuous, changeable, fluid, embracing, uncommitted, tolerant, a wending application of gray in a world of oppressive black and white. People can and should be non-binary, genderfluid, genderqueer, AFAB if applicable. They, them or theirs, to be open minded. Just remember, “Leah”:
Any number of pronouns can be awesome for any number of people, but you don’t get to pick and choose which pronouns you can use for someone else.
When you use “she,” you hurt they. Or ze.
Leah Fessler is young, pretty and Caucasoid. How does she think others receive her when she comes into contact with those who are older, less classically sculpted or whose melanin count exceeds hers? They feel uneasy, intimidated, immaterial, cast aside by the White Privilege they see flaunted in front of their faces.
What does she know about sexism anyway? She is manifestly affluent, well-dressed, drives an automobile, has the ability to walk into most any eating establishment and order an exorbitant meal on the spot with credit or cash. Many persons have been oppressed by sexism and chopped down by society to the point where Fessler’s mere presence flaunts her inability to relate to true sexism or, worse, unaffected by sexism and racism simultaneously.
We haven’t even discussed her cultural and monetary elitism, raised in a prosperous white family whose fortunes were such that they were able to send her to the quite private liberal arts Middlebury College in Vermont, where yearly tuitions are in the $47,000 range and where she has the monied ability to fly to wealthy enclaves like those of the Aspen Institute and Aspen, Colorado, which is 94.94% white. Then dashing off to San Francisco. I’d wager she isn’t walking or hitchhiking.
What of those oppressed “they” people who have never and will never possess the easy advantages that Leah Fessler has clearly enjoyed over her young life? Would it be a fact to submit that she has never had her world destroyed by being misgendered at any point? To be subject to the ego-smashing oppression of sexual confusion or improper reading of her persona?
A jejune little child, the perfect white privilege rich girl, could be Leah Fessler.
Who thinks she knows sexism but, I submit, doesn’t know it at all.
I ask: just how many theys or zes does she know, who are her friends?
Most? Or hardly any at all?
BZ
