What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one - basically it's a posh person finding out what the "real world" looks like.
Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Thin bloke who doesn't look strong enough? Ginger hair? Tall guy, short guy? Weird tattoo, etc. Definitely the one black guy or the one white guy is going to get shit. But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
The other thing, which in my experience is relatively common worldwide, is that working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics. In academia and in highbrow society the tendency is to basically sanitise every social interaction. When you're in an environment where that isn't happening then you can't suddenly ignore it any more.
IDK, I think it's to enforce pecking orders based on stuff you can't at all help. I grew up working class and hated it--it's essentially bullying, no matter how you look at it.
It's one thing to make lighthearted jokes about some stuff you did, like "remember the time you forgot to base64 decode the images and stored garbage in the DB". It's entirely another to bully people for who and what they are. You're basically daring people to get somehow violent with you to get you to stop, and besides that being dangerous, a lot of people would rather not. It also creates this dynamic where people willing to be violent avoid bullying and rise ok the pecking order, and those who aren't don't.
On my way to a "white collar" job, I worked construction. It was stage building, which is the kind of construction that "blue collar" workers routinely laughed at, but it was still hard, physical work.
How did I get my promotion that made the job worthwhile? A person fell 30 feet onto concrete. The next week, I was replacing him, with all of the risks he had, and the potential outcome.
That said, all of the chiding and sideways comments I received in the construction field didn't amount to half of the comments I received as a developer. There is something toxic about our field that we don't want to focus on (and I can't blame those that look away).
People claim "simple" when they mean "my way". People claim lack of "knowing how to use the language" when the wrong ideas get injected into a language (I'm personally looking at you Perl, but now that I'm working Golang, it's starting to feel too familiar).
The truth is, there is often more than one way to solve a problem, but an strong willed person won't see it that way. I've walked away from plenty of marginally (and I mean marginally) better solutions just to compromise to some form of a solution than I care to enumerate. One can't win such arguments.
I agree, it's not malicious, but is is egotistical. I've even won solutions where I said "Let's all agree that you're right, and then let's accept the code as-is." This industry is improved compared to decades before, but it's not yet fully rational, or even fair.
That said, all of the chiding and sideways comments I received in the construction field didn't amount to half of the comments I received as a developer. There is something toxic about our field that we don't want to focus on (and I can't blame those that look away).
As a programmer, I've worked in places and with people who were straight-up sociopathically abusive and I've worked with people who were absolutely respectful and reasonable and groups that were in-between. The co-workers, the boss, the company and location's culture all went into this.
Thing about this is - since it is variable, since it is not necessary, there's no excuse for it as a natural thing, in any industry. Also, while sometimes it's the result just dysfunction (the "tolerant" boss who tolerates psycho team lead) but often it's a strategy for extracting more work for people (at Intel, for example).
A lot of the specifics mentioned in the article aren't specific to her being a woman. Many guys just talk about things differently; they will banter about themselves and how any lady is easier on the eyes then any man. That's not sexism; that's just reality of what a guy thinks and banters about. And an average guy is stronger then the average girl; that's biology. Most guys don't care what sex you are, so long as you can do the work, don't complain much, and can afford banter to make the day go by faster.
The one that got me was the comment about a customer looking past her at a co-worker, even though she was older than he was, and "for all they know, more experienced". But, she's not actually more experienced, she's new at the job, which might have been evident (this detail is left out). Anyway, judging someone's competence based on their age, which she expected them to do, is hardly better than doing it based on their sex.
If the customer was trying to guess which of two people in front of them might be a welder, and only 5% of welders are female, it's not irrational to assume that it's the man. The customer may never have seen a female welder before. Until they say something like you can't be a welder, you're a woman, I think the generous reading would be that the customer is having their priors updated in real time, not necessarily that they're a misogynist.
I thought similar. Anyone moving from an office environment to one of physical work is going to struggle both with the physical challenges and the workplace culture. Trippily so coming from academia!
As someone who started their career in an office environment, then went to grunt work, and now back in an office and a remote WFH job. I don't think it would be a struggle. Would it be different? Of course... physical labor is the complete opposite of office work. Would it be harder than sitting in a chair pressing buttons?... sure. But it wouldn't be a struggle. It would be more of a struggle working with people that don't understand what context is or what nuances are.
It's not the work or the culture, it's the people. The type that would call you a vagina for wanting water on a hot day to avoid dehydration. Or the boss that will tell you "you think too much" when you come to them with an idea that increases productivity. But ya, the work or culture would be a piece of cake to navigate. For me, often time it's the idiots you have to work with that usually make a place a shit place to work.
The "physical work workplace culture" fits me much better: more fun, less stringent, less talking behind someones back because maybe he/she made a non-PC remark, no one will go cry to HR for a remark you made that was not even about them personally...
I don’t miss many things from my last blue collar job, but it was so much more relaxed. My coworkers all felt much more “real”. Too bad the pay wasn’t there, or I’d still be doing it.
What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one...
I read the article. There is zero indications anywhere in the article that this is the case, none.
Notably, the authors describes both her experience and the experience of other women. And they don't like but they expect and let it roll off their backs.
Sure, some work places have culture of "good-natured razzing" but others have a culture of straight-bullying. Sometimes the bullying comes from people who are damaged themselves and other times it comes from a company or a manager who believes this lets them control their workers (not always incorrectly). Either the bullying doesn't serve the workers.
But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
A second of thought should show this kind of generalization is impossible. You're engaged in the classic "I know the working class and they are exactly this way" sophistry.
I'm now a soft-hands, academic-type but worked in a metal fabrication shop all through my schooling. Your read is very accurate. I still get her perspective though, because even as a male, white, straight, married guy in a shop full of the same I found it exhausting.
Another anecdote: my straight white male friend who isn't a tough guy left a job (building commercial ACs) as an electrician because the whole business was full of dudes bullying whoever they could. Plus the management just didn't care about worker safety, and the workers took it as a point of pride that they were ruining their own health. Toxic as hell. He found a different job with less machismo bullshit and more safety and is much happier. But that job is also overnight shift; if he was a single parent that'd be nearly impossible, luckily his wife can stay at home with the kids. This is in rural Virginia, not a ton of jobs around.
My window into the blue collar world has made it look like if you want a job where safety is respected, you probably want a union job. There a macho tendency working against it, and management’s all too happy to let that, plus the implied threat of firing if you become too irritating, erode safe practices, even if they nominally have policies to the contrary.
Yeah union jobs definitely seem to get all the safety aspect down in my experiences in the US. In some cases in can be a little overzealous, but 99.99% of the time you want to be doing what they recommend and have the tools and safety gear they expect so you don't get maimed or killed just to save somebody else 30 cents. That isn't to say you can't find safe non-union work, but generally you gotta do a bit of job hopping around in most trades to find a safe employer because doing unsafe shit is all too uncommon in trades.
I've found that the shop talk communities end up with stronger bonds and generally more real friendships vs office friendships which are very weak.
It makes me think it's a somewhat innate way to foster relationships. It definitely seems to break down walls. I've come to learn that the more a group roasts you the more they like you.
This is an idea that is promoted by the media. Occasionally it is true.
After eight years of working in the military, it only took two years before I never heard from another member of my unit. Within the first three months of leaving, only one person kept in touch (for the two years). When they moved out-of-state, I never heard from them either.
Don't underestimate the perception of what happens with what is likely to happen. I don't think it differs much between "the shop" and "the office" having worked in both. How many people do you talk to on a weekly basis from your last company?
My strongest lifelong work friends definitely came from grad school where none of that happened. Or from research work where it didn't either. But there it was pressure and performance and cooperation that helped. It breeds trust.
In blue collar work, esp team oriented which it often is, I'm not sure it's the shop talk or the team/trust environment. Either way i felt the same bond to people making pizza 5 busy nights in a row as I did late night coding sprints while pair programming, or contorting under the steel hull of a target boat to reach a bad CPU while my colleague watched the terminal while seasick and we are both drinking diesel funes.
It's about shared trust I think. The level of casualness of shop talk is just an indicator and kind of a stress test of bonds.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. It's something about the level of pressure but a lot of us software guys have pressure but don't get the same relationships blue collar workers get. I've done both industries (industrial construction and programming), and I definitely found it much easier to make lasting friendships in the construction one even though I experienced similar pressures
It's something to do with the casualness or gruffness of it that makes it better. Office environments are so sterile. Maybe it's the lack of HR. lol
Bonds forged in fire are stronger - this has been known since Rome needed soldiers. Bootcamp doesn't require sleep deprivation, adversarial leadership,and that level of physical strain, but shared suffering increases unit cohesion.
I choose less suffering at my work, I can choose my friends from other circles, thank you very much.
So can "corporate talk" at a white collar job. There are days where I want to vomit after hearing about "stakeholders", "action items", and "alignment". I'd prefer crude jokes to that, even if they were directed at me.
It's a little different when people are regularly talking about your genitals or sexual preferences or histories or your family reputation. And in public. And in team meetings.
That kind of thing rarely comes up in corporate america. In corp/academia people just like to imply you're lazy or unintelligent, subtly and frequently. But yeah, white collar jobs are annoying as well. That's why we all get paid to do them.
Because I've heard different levels and amounts of insults. It can just be some harmless dad jokes and softball stuff you'd hear in white collar work. It can just be outright sexual harassment. It depends so much on your environment that it's hard to pin down a universal "standard" .
I realize I made a throw away account just to post this, but try reflecting shop talk back to white men with white stereotypes
They often can't take the shit they give out. You won't know who's-who until you get undermined behind your back and they start fucking with your work
The insecure ones blend in with the ones who can actually take the shit they give and it's the collective support of giving shit to non-white men in the trades that's the problem
It's high school bullies trying to present as it being all in good fun when it rarely is
It's never in fun. I don't mind a good razzing. But when it's constant or every day or you're the only one razzed because people like laughing at your no nonsense attitude when you get riled up at their stupidity it's like living in a courtroom of idiocracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfifauG93ZU
> Women in trades have reported encounters with customers who doubted their competence and who refused to deal with them, seeking a man instead.
There is plenty of low key sexism (and racism) like that among white collars too so it is not restricted to trades (as acknowledged by the article's author), but this goes beyond banter like just teasing someone because they have red hair.
Real sexism is way more present among middle-class/white-collar workers (whatever their gender is) than between blue collar workers. You will have poorly worded jokes from your coworkers, but the ass-grab or demeaning remarks will always be from managers (the kind of manager who don't know the trade or inherited the job) or customers.
That’s an optimistic take, for instance there’s a lot of physical sexual harassment and even rape reported as occurring between members of the military, and infantry at least seems to code as blue collar.
See, I kind of agree that there are certain types of sexism like assumptions that women won't get their hands dirty or patronising artificial politeness that are purely middle class constructs.
But the idea that only white collar workers are capable of ass-grabs or genuinely derogatory remarks is wild...
It is only when someone think they have power over someone else that they allow themselves to be inappropriate on the workplace. My mom was a nurse before forming nurses, and lived through that (from doctors especially). Her best friend was a security guard at diverse places, but she started at a mall (where she has "wild" stories as you put it. Confirmed 100% always her manager or customers, once the day manager was put on ice for harassment, his replacement ended the night by touching her butt the day he arrived. Crazy that people do that).
But even closer to me, and more recently: i know a woman who work in a call center, and she explained to me the reason why it's always managers on the workplace: the other don't have the time to play powergames with each other, they have too much work (for her it was a female manager who learned of her homosexuality who started to get touchy).
I stand by that. Obviously it is different in non-work settings, but at work?
My guess would be that it's less about "position of power" and more about "less likely to face consequences". You see the same type of behavior in a variety of cases
- Construction workers hooting and whistling at women
What is power, if not the ability to do what you want without facing consequences? If other people already support you or are indifferent, no power is needed to do what you want.
> It is only when someone think they have power over someone
Isn’t that kind of the point though? That the racist and the sexist and the queerbasher think they have power over the group they’re bigoted against - and that’s what lends them the confidence to act mean?
Yeah that's normal, like we short fat guys are never popular with girls. Learnt that from teenages and firmly believe that biologically people look down on each other.
societally. what amounts to attractiveness can vary a lot more than you think throughout cultures and times.
But yes, people have always been in competition biologically to flaunt success and pick the best mating partner. You can do that through putting others down or otherwise controlling a mate. And the dimorphic needs between sexes only intensifies this. I'm no sociologist but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a universal experience.
Honestly, it often will be malicious, or will quickly become malicious if you don't take it graciously. And why should you? It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.
> It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons
This probably seems obviously true to you but it should not. Some people think there's a reasonable amount of banter, sometimes at the expense of another acquaintance, before it becomes bullying or unacceptable in the workplace.
Without wanting to indulge too much in macho tropes: A welding shop is inherently dangerous. If you spend long enough in one, you are going to get seriously injured at some point. You are going to be the first responder when someone else gets seriously injured. Surviving in that environment requires a certain level of toughness. I'm not defending bullying, but some places aren't supposed to be welcoming.
I worked construction for a few years after high school and the only injuries I received on the job was from bullying/hazing (minor, but still). Never mind the stupid shit they did that could have hurt someone, but luckily didn't.
People who work dangerous jobs can get pretty callous about it. I saw people doing dangerous shit constantly. And the people with permanent injuries end up using gallows humor to cope.
I just looked it up. Welding is definitely not a safe profession, but it seems like severe injury rates is around 3.5 per hundred workers throughout a whole career. Definitely not "most". And about the same or slightly less than carpentry (4 per hundred), which from personal experience is a profession filled with decent and friendly people.
There's a lot of potential for petty injuries that'll be a nuisance for weeks to months. Minor burns, slightly smashed fingers or hands, some real good cuts, etc. Not a lot of potential for serious injury though above the baseline of your environment (i.e. air conditioned shop vs muddy trench)
I did a couple of years at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego as a welder after the first .com crash.
The (literal) toxic work environment is why I left welding, even though I genuinely enjoyed the work. But I was already starting to see real changes in my health, even though I was super careful about respirator use, etc. What really sealed the deal was learning that my shift lead, who I thought was a good decade older than me, was actually a few years younger, but had just been welding longer, with the body damage to show for it.
Yea, that’s one thing that really stood out to me when I did a 2 year mechanical engineering program - mostly training to be a cad jockey. Some of my teachers looked waaay older than they should have, and the welding instructor was the worst.
Now think of how many guys there are out there doing it with no repository protection and the good ‘ole safety squints.
Per hundred workers. Your link is in absolute units of fatalities, their claim is a rate. At the very least, you need the number of workers (which is also available in BLS data) to refute their claim.
The data shows roughly 454k workers in the welders, solderers, and brazers occupation series. With their claim of 3.5 severe injuries per 100 worker-careers, that's about 16k severe injuries. If you assume an average career is about 25 years, that's about 636 severe injuries per year, compared to the 48 fatalities per year. So it's an order of magnitude higher (which I think is the direction most people would expect).
The main factor driving safety is experience. I suspect shop talk does indeed correlate, but I think it's a mistake to assume causation. Put differently, the number of angry words thrown around being a major contributing factor to an accident response strains belief. It's experience.
Why would the risk of either being injured or treating injury require you to be the target of bullying or a bully?
Wouldn’t it be in your best interest to be kind and supportive to one another in such a dangerous / difficult environment? That way everyone is happy and confident and focuses on the stresses of the job, not the stress of being bullied or being cajoled into bullying for the sake of conformity?
What you’re describing sounds like it really only appeals to a certain kind of person, and I don’t understand how that kind of person makes a better welder.
On some level, you're describing a difference between traditional male bonding (joking and "razzing") and traditional female bonding (being kind and supportive). Both of these can be positive and both can be toxic - bullying is an obvious case, but just ask anyone who has been in a supposedly "supportive" environment filled with backstabbing and gossip how nice that is.
I don't know why there's a need to define either of these as inferior and wrong - isn't the point of diversity to allow people from different backgrounds to take different approaches?
To me, personally, the "kind, supportive" style often comes off as insincere. It's actually a barrier to me trusting someone. But I don't know, maybe that's just me.
What on earth? Yeah, if I work in a dangerous profession, I want my coworkers to be people I trust, not people who bully me because I stand out. Honestly, if it's a dangerous workplace, shouldn't we be looking out for each other instead of making casually sexist comments at the only woman in the shop?
It’s not just fun, but the least offensive way of establishing hierarchy, which is required to form a group, in men. They ask you who you are. A reference to some rule (e.g. what’s acceptable) is by definition a confrontation. A refusal to position yourself in a group, which is tested/offered by poking a person, makes you a questionable element in it. Yes, all this is mostly pointless in a modern life. But that’s how an average hunting-age male works.
The attributes and reasons do not matter in isolation. They will find where to poke even if you’re a twin of one of the group members. Red hair is just the obvious one to use.
The alternative is going to the office, filtering thoughts in your mouth and reporting slight misspeaks and inappropriately timed eye contacts to a special manager who then decides who’s higher in hierarchy according to some rules.
Is that not down to the culture? I found some of the warmest workplaces were also the places were everyone was constantly shitting on each other and not taking it too serious. I'd not say it was bullying, as everyone got a piece. There was a certain toughness to it, but at the same time everyone was caring deeply for one another.
If the target of your joke isn't laughing (if they're upset by it), then it's not a joke, it's bullying. If they _are_ laughing/enjoying it, then it's playful banter. You're right, it very much varies by culture (culture here being as specific as "the specific group of people")
Spent a lot of time in hunting and fishing parties with near constant teasing and in those situations its usually the rudest and most egotistical jerk who doesnt laugh and enjoy. They cross the line repeatedly, everyone takes it in good nature while internally counting the incidents, then eventually someone takes them down a peg and they act like a child.
So you're saying constant teasing is a fun way to weed out the jerks. Sounds about what I experience it to be. Never thought of it like that though: thanks!
Would you say this is more typical in groups of men, or among the men within a group? (I'm thinking about social situations myself now as well)
In a culture where banter is accepted, sometimes someone will be upset by something.
I think the current tendency to prevent all possibility to upsetting behaviour is overshooting the mark.
Against bullying is a good movement.
Against all possibly upsetting remarks is basically being against banter and killing a part of what makes us human. I hope that free speech remains allowed and to some extend "uncancelable".
>It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.
How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.
Dudes in dangerous professions bond by calling each other slurs which is ok because they're all in on it, such that if you can't handle some bad words how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs, so you're either not cut out for the job.
You as an outsider from the nice people bubble don't have a say in this to lecture them since you're not in on it.
Sounds like an opportunity for any of the wealthy left-leaning people to start a competitor and seize market share by hiring those traditional companies consider undesirable.
Great at excluding snowflakes which is what you want in those dangerous professions. If you get pissy that someone called you ginger, you're clearly not cut for any demanding and dangerous job. Better stay in your sanitized white collar safe space while you tweet how the world is mean.
Apparently a lot of construction, extraction installation, maintenance and repair folk have a very bad time of i. Perhaps if they could get decent support in the work place that wouldn't happen. Though I suppose you'd probably conclude it's just natural attrition as the snowflakes kill themselves.
Have you ever attended a mandatory DEI meeting? The entire premise of that industry is to tell you which slurs are acceptable (ie: cisgender ) and which are not.
"Cisgender" is a slur the same way "male", "heterosexual", and "white" are (I am all three; four, including cisgender). In other words, it is not a slur.
Slur isn't an intrinsic property of a word: it's a property of how it's used. "Male" can be a slur, as can "heterosexual", or "management". In theory, "cisgender" can also be a slur, though I've never heard such a use. (You'll sometimes hear "cissy", but I've never heard that used against a specific person.)
You might argue that "punching up" is acceptable, or even that it's not slurring by definition (which I'd dispute), but membership of one "privileged class" doesn't automatically translate to actual privilege. (I think the feminists call this intersectionality.) In such a context, the labels of "privileged classes" absolutely can be used to punch down (e.g. saying "you're such a man" and slamming the door in the face of an impoverished gay transgender man trying to access domestic abuse services).
The usage of the word "slur" in question -- it has to be this if it's on a list one can learn from DEI consultants -- is
a derogatory or insulting term applied to a particular group of people.
It is inherent in the term itself, not in its use.* So it isn't simply anything that can be understood as an insult. All the stuff about "punching up" and so forth is beside the point.
"cisgender" has a technical meaning which is still it's primary use: someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth (so it can apply to intersex people as well). In this it is like "heterosexual" and "male". Arguably it is not like "white", in that who counts as white is malleable, but for the most part whatever it is, in most contexts, "white" is not a slur either.
* I am in fact a lapsed linguist. I have a PhD. My specialization was in semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is meaning encoded in language. Pragmatics is meaning inferred from use: "it's cold in here" meaning "shut the window", for example. I am aware that one can talk more precisely and at much, much greater length about all of this. But this is Hacker News, so this is all I am going to say.
What does any of this have to do with what they said? There's a difference between an in-group privately calling each other whatever and said in-group directing it towards someone not part of said group.
That is the point of the banter: to see how you handle stressful situations.
Women don't understand this, but nearly all men do.
Why? For every accident, there are around twenty near misses. For every near miss there are several situations that could have gone bad very quickly unless the person on the spot remains calm and acts rationally.
It is essential to know how you behave under stress in most blue collar work. They're not being assholes for fun; they're doing it to save lives.
And even if it was and watching sport or going down the pub was in fact an extremely safety-conscious environment compared with the sterility and politeness of, say, the aerospace industry, it's not entirely clear how encouraging people to either escalate or laugh off would help them deal with actual danger which generally requires neither of the above...
It's not about the social actions, it's the traits they represent. Are you quick-witted? Do you freeze or overreact and lash out, behave erratically? Do you stay calm? Can you think fast enough under pressure to choose to say and do things that result in laughter or de-escalation, or escalate in a way that shows you're communicating on the same level (i.e. tease back, but not overdo it and insult the other person)?
If I can't stay calm and think rapidly under mild social pressure without threat of bodily harm or lost lives, I personally wouldn't feel honest in telling my teammates, "yes, if you or I are in a situation with risk to life or limb, you should trust that I'll handle it appropriately and protect myself and/or you."
Sorry, without some sort of data I’m refusing to believe that social adeptness has anything to do with ability to act in an emergency or other high pressure situation.
My own experience in tall ships and shipyards, where there are plenty of life and death decisions is not that.
There are people that I can fluster easily in a social situation that are perfectly calm and capable in high pressure dangerous situations. There are people that are practically insult comedians that I wouldn’t want driving a car in the same parking lot.
Not to mention that people doing boring, safe jobs behave like that too. Trust me, when I have the banter with my friends in the pub, I'm really not evaluating whether I can rely on their accountancy or web design to save my life
What actually seems to be the common factor is male groups in informal settings
No, I don't think ability to banter has any relationship with ability to properly handle those risky situations. There's zero intrinsic reason why someone who freezes when insulted must also freeze if a bay crane lift starts going wrong, because to me they are clearly different kinds of stress.
Sterility and politeness is variable, but I also work in that industry and have yet to encounter a situation where the banter resembles that of a largely risk free but comparably male environment like, say a sports ground or pub lunch with friends I've known since we were kids.
Which is a good thing really, because I wouldn't want to think that people were actually determining fitness to be trusted with a soldering iron or embedded systems design based on their witty comebacks or tolerance for jokes about their wife.
i agree it's not cunning or a plan, but that doesn't exclude the possibility that this is an evolutionary/societal adaptation that _really works_.
Two things can be true at the same time: that this type of banter has undesirable consequences as well as desirable ones. This type of nuance is generally the sort of thing that's worth trying to understand before you try to 'fix' it.
My mother and father were both fishermen. They would've shitcanned someone firing off slurs in the middle of a stressful situation, because if you're doing that then you're making a stressful situation worse.
> Women don't understand this, but nearly all men do.
I completely agree with you about the purpose and value of banter- but do you actually know any women or interact with any on a regular basis?
It's simply not true- women banter with each other just as much as men do, and they especially banter with men they are interested in romantically- for the exact reason you mention - to see if they handle stressful situations well, which is a desirable (attractive) trait in a romantic partner.
I'll admit women tend to be more subtle with this then men- such that some people (especially the ones who are failing the test) will mistake it as complaining or arguing.
I enjoy it very much when my wife does this- I usually respond by turning it into some kind of joke, or turning it back on her in a way she doesn't expect, and I can see her light up with joy that I 'got it' and didn't respond with frustration/etc.
This is so bizarre. No, it's not. It's to shit on the new guy because he's new or different or whatever. You just made up a post-facto justification for bullying out of whole cloth and tried to make it sound like some social benefit.
It’s strange but it’s a fine line. Being made fun of your physical attributes is pretty par for the course in most male groups and it paradoxically makes the place more comfortable to be in. Women just don’t get how this works. Obviously I’m talking about most places. Sometimes it’s just truly evil bullying because they genuinely hate you.
That is not true. The goal of banter isn't to belittle others seriously, it is often just used to break the ice or for some fun in between work. It is not about a group bullying another.
Many places that require nice language are far more toxic. Or perhaps any place with strict behavior and language rules is toxic, it often seems to be the case.
The parent said that women don't get it. I disagree, most of them working in such environments get it just like men. There are some exceptions for either gender.
Close people can joke like that. Joking like that before you become close is rough attempt at manufacturing closeness fast. If it works it works, if it doesn't it gets nasty.
Why? Men make fun of themselves and each other all the time. It's how we talk. It honestly isn't negative; it's almost a form of banter that tells the truth in a low-key softball way where we can all laugh.
Why is banter not acceptable? Who went and took the fun out of life? I'm not talking here about purposefully mean banter or taking things too far. But come on, who made these "rules" you speak of?
Banter is wonderful when you are part of the in group, especially if you are the dominant player in that group. But it is often used by members of the in group to marginalise those outside and to maintain the dominance of the leading players in the in group.
I like how you've defined yourself as the norm and not the GP, even though you're both calling from your personal experience with a sample size of one.
It's fascinating for me to watch these comment threads blow up, I hadn't thought this would take off so much.
It's a constant stream of "but my guys don't do this" "but my guys do do this".
It's all just rephrasing of, well, this is the highbrow culture, and this is the working class culture, and I'm in one or the other and you're abnormal.
The reality is that it's just two different worlds and where they clash things get weird.
Looking at _so many_ responses to my post, almost none of which actually have new content, makes me think this is some sort of dead internet bots vs. bots contest.
Only one side is making positive claims in this thread.
I never made a claim that "all men do X" or that "shop talk and banter are fairly universal". I did point out that I and my friends do not mock our friends and colleagues.
Still avoiding positive claims, but here are some normative claims:
- I object to claiming that mocking is normal and acceptable in all groups of men
- some, not all, working class subcultures use mocking as a shibboleth
- this aspect of those subcultures is not a thing I think "we" should valorize
Fair, but trying to enforce "you're never allowed to mock people, even when those people expect enjoy it and it's all in good fun" also makes you an asshole. Different behaviors are appropriate for different groups. I have groups I swear in, and ones I avoid it in. Same thing.
Mockery can be cruel, and even gentle mocking can be irritating or even harmful if it's very repetitious. Mockery is not always appropriate, or even truly funny. Mocking others is not an especially important activity or an especially important form of humor.
Even so, categorical prohibitions of mockery (in society, in particular workplaces, whatever) are truly and obviously joyless propositions. Maybe they're warranted in some contexts! But to say 'there can be no mockery' is indeed inherently stifling.
Almost every time someone brings it up, people dismiss sexism, racism, etc. and their impacts. If I want to know the impact of, e.g., weather on farming, or the hurricane, I ask someone who has experienced it. This person had these experiences; you didn't but that's irrelevant.
> posh ... highbrow
It's using a stereotype as argument - perhaps not coincidentally - rather than listening to what people actually say.
It was interesting for me going from interacting with wealthy, educated developers, to working in a very physical, low-paying blue-collar job. It seemed like living in two different worlds almost.
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics
I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.
I can't pinpoint exactly "what I mean" but basically traditional values. More willing to accept the fact that men and women are going to find each other attractive, that you probably don't want your wife or husband to have a "platonic" friend of the opposite sex that they meet up with one on one, etc etc.
Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable, so we should sanitise all of the interactions and punish everyone for being human and then we might be able to make it work, sort of kind of but not really, everyone will be miserable but we pretend.
I think universal conscription is a good idea for the sole reason that everyone should get a bit of this perspective. The people who’ve never left the nice-people bubble of college and professional employment will go to completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended. You said the manager’s idea was maybe not as good as the other thing in a meeting? You just made an enemy for life. Meanwhile soldiers have productive and respectful working relationships with people who they physically fight with the day before because that’s a better alternative to however UCMJ allows your commander to screw up your life.
It’s a great exercise in personal growth for coping skills.
I worked with a very well educated Chinese man who had been caught up in that. He had a terrible, and on occasion terrifying, time. I'm pretty confident that it didn't make him a better party member. As far as I remember from what little he was willing to say about the time the only thing it made him better at was catching stray dogs to eat.
Xi Jinping himself had an awful time too according to a podcast I listened to about his life. But he later changed his tune in recent years when hyping up the old times became popular again, similar to the Stalin years is popular again in Russia.
Look at it more like part of the education system.
Because that is what it is. Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription.
And, in my opinion, it has been some of the most valuable education I have got and something I'd definitely recommend my kids and my friends do if offered the opportunity.
I have quite a few German friends who looking back speak highly of their experience doing the civilian alternative service (they objected to military service). This was before the conscription was abolished in 2011.
Even though it was not military service, it put them in situation and workplaces that were different from their own experience and environment.
Similarly, in France some engineering schools required an internship in a factory to learn the perspective of blue-collar workers that the student might eventually manage but at 8 weeks only I don't think it gives as much perspective as what my German friends had.
"Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription".
You should be more careful with such statements as that's more exception than rule. If you're country goes to war, and it's not just some peace keeping mission, you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.
AFAIK everybody who was sent to Afghanistan was either professionals or ordinary soldiers who applied.
If we end up in an attack on our homelands thats another thing.
But even then no ordinary conscript that reads HN (ok, possible exception for russians, but even they try to maintain a veneer of "voluntary" on it when they send conscripts) will be sent to abroad.
There are hundreds of thousands of people alive in the US right now who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The only war with conscripts that the US didn’t send people abroad for is the civil war in the US
We didn’t have any conscripts in Afghanistan because we don’t have any conscripts at the moment. I can say that there were a lot of people that were deployed in the Middle East when they didn’t want to be. Especially for second and third tours. I personally have a friend who was told he was going to be on a ship in the Navy who ended up in Iraq.
> you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.
Of course?! We've had a volunteer army for the last half century?! How can you claim professional service members are being conscripted and sent to conflict?
All Nordic countries, Switzerland and probably Austria.
Same goes for Taiwan and Israel.
Germany does not at the moment but can reintroduce it at a moments notice, and also they are taking steps to encouraging voluntary conscription like service.
Probably more 1st world nations, these were just the ones from the top of my head.
Did you choose to do that because you were going to "completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended" after being in a "nice-people bubble of college" ?
> find middle class folk ... to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.
I think it's the betwixt and between dynamic: working class folk know they're living on what they have coming; upper class folk know they're living on what they have; but middle class folk, no matter how they live, are only middle class folk if other middle class folk agree they are — hence the insecurity, and at one reason for the conformity.
One point that Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System makes over and over (maybe never quite explicitly, but implicitly, throughout) is that Fussell’s “middle class” is essentially defined by being thoroughly pathetic. They’re the most class-concerned, by far, desperately anxious to signal higher class, while having no clue how to correctly do that. An Upper-Middle spots them a mile away, to say nothing of Upper. To Proles, their preferences and behavior are grating or risible. They end up jockeying awkwardly for position only amongst themselves.
There are many taxonomies of people. Workers vs owners is one, and relates to the relationship between people and the means of production. Other taxonomies are young vs old, male vs female, and class structures with more than two classes. Notice that this thread has been about social class, more than economic class.
I see. I went from interacting constantly online and being surrounded by people in post-secondary and higher-level academics to working alongside immigrants in a tough and (frankly) undignified job. This coincided with some other major changes in life and it definitely changed my view of what's "normal". I had to think about my previous life and where I actually derived happiness and value.
I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways, so I took the intersection of their worldviews and now ...well I'm probably wrong in every way ;) We can but try.
What is wrong from the view of each? (As someone who interacts both with phds and high school graduates on a daily/weekly basis I find the differences interesting).
Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.
It's hard to put into words. I think the essence of you questions is "what is your philosophy now, and how does it differ from before?" That's a question I've been struggling to conceptualize myself for a while now, so I can't describe it with any sense of coherence in a public forum.
I will say that, at the root of it all, we are who we orbit.
> Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.
I was once in an environment where, depending upon how I was dressed, I would either be addressed in english and called "Sir" or addressed in spanish and called "Paisano".
Why was the community surprising? (I mean, my mental model is that most dyadic social interactions can be approached with either authority or community, so I'm not surprised that groups without much authority tend to play the community card instead)
> I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.
I find the same (also in the UK) from having lived in (and grown with) a non-western culture. One that is also uptight (much more so in many ways, and definitely sexist) but in a different way.
> Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable
I am quite surprised at the extent to which gender stereotypes are pervasive. At a bonfire last weekend kids were being sold illuminated toys, and all the little boys had swords, and the girls had unicorns. My daughters would have wanted swords (they are teen and adult) but I have realised that is unusual.
Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics
I’ve also seen this. There’s more of an acknowledgment: that people will be attracted to each other (or not),the status/dating games people play will be out and open. It will be acceptable to talk about physical/sexual qualities of your coworkers, etc. That when you are in physically close proximity you might see each others sexual parts and comment on them. It will be understood that after a breakup people will be less amicable.
You can also see this in literature: look at Les Miserables. In the factory they talk about sexual fantasies of the foreman. Whereas in the context of the upper classes it’s talked about in context of love/romanticism.
Contrary to popular believe, I find this much healthier. Emotions expressed can be dealt with and moved on. Emotions suppressed grow and fester. If it’s normal to talk about who’s is attracted to who, then everyone is aware of the sexual exploits of the general manager. Therefore people know where to set boundaries. If it’s hush hush kept quiet then the exploits of the Gm can grow.
I kind of get this for men, what you're saying makes sense and is for sure the healthier option if all was equal. The sticking point is the social and power asymmetry. Being commented on in that manner is low-key kind of threatening. The name of the game is appease the guy long enough for your friends to get you out of there. And when you're at work it's hard to just leave. Guys with nothing to lose don't take soft-nos for an answer and hard-nos are how you get assaulted, from experience that one.
The dynamic works when flirting is within a social circle because bad behavior risks your social status in the group and it works in bars because you're equals, around friends, and can just leave. At work, at least in an office, is kinda the worst combination. I've seen it work well outside of office settings because there aren't as complicated power dynamics— we're all equally in the shit in the kitchen.
pretty much all weird gender dynamics happen in upper class and posh environments. You won't find women on a farm afraid to get their hands dirty or men afraid to stitch something. People just do the jobs that are necessary. The entire idea that women are too pristine or fragile to do any work is basically an upper class fantasy because no working class household can afford to operate like this.
Whether its the military, manufacturing or agricultural environments, anywhere that's sort of blue collar or practical people aren't obsessed with their differences that much. I grew up in a rural environment and as kids boys would play with girls, as teenagers we'd go skinny dipping, there'd be none of the weird neurotic and insecure interactions I encountered when I went to university. There's entire categories of stereotypes and boxes highly educated and "high status" people invent to separate themselves in, not just along gender lines.
I love this post. It not only makes no sense whatsoever, it flattens gender, race, being ginger, and having tattoos into one uniform measure of Otherness in a way that preserves a magical naïveté and childlike wonder that’s absent in virtually every adult
Swearing and language rules are “made up”. The idea of harm is programmed into us.
People don’t riot despite receipts for priests molestation. They don’t riot over social scandal after social scandal. They’ll riot when they can’t feed their families. Most on the planet aren’t as obsessed with the pristine syntactic structures like the HN crowd. They never asked to exist and just want to live in conventional terms and die.
Like religion it’s just made up constraints; biological tick some all seeing eye will get mad.
I think, not being able to tell whether someone's being friendly or abusive, is a classic sign that it's probably abusive. Also, abuse is generational, so this may be how people were treated when they were starting out themselves.
Never welded professionally, but I learned to weld from a few friends, one was a woman who let me into the art school's jewelry shop. She considered welding as a trade, but as someone coming out of college, part of her hesitation was that she'd be starting fresh in the workforce and, as a welder, she'd be on a more senior payscale than many of the people she'd rely on on the job site. It wasn't a dynamic she wanted to be in.
Yeah, folks who don't grow up in rural towns or grow up lower-class REALLY don't get this.
They get the exact same treatment that you'd get if you were the 14-year-old kid working in the shop with his uncle. You get called names, teased, and tested—it's part of the culture.
But instead of recognizing it for what it is, they try to apply labels like "sexism" to it. Or they're "resentful for being tested" as if any shop jockey feels _confident_ the first time they fix an item for a customer.
If you don't like the culture, leave it. Stop applying your labels when you don't even understand the world you stepped into. It's like labeling the Native Americans as "savages" just because they don't fit your sensibilities of how the world "ought" to work.
I agree, this is just an expression of the real world, and some people are uncomfortable with that. In my friends & coworkers circle, there are people of all varieties and it is the conservatives who are most honest. This morning they are affirming that the dems lost because a small fraction of the population ("the alphabet people" is the term I am seeing) don't understand their place, that the rest of the world does not want to live by their rules.
It's kind of gross, sure, if you're in that minority, but a part of me can appreciate that the conservatives are honest about what's in their hearts. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation when everyone is pretending to be someone they're not.
Primary schoolers are the sweetest people in the world. It is middle schoolers that express adult emotions with no filter. Fortunately the filter does get more effective with practice, but it is always worth remembering that at their core, most people are not fundamentally different than they were in middle school.
This is common in software too. Like, you make fun of a guy for being from Kansas or generally non smart states as banter, and they'll get all riled up about it. Dude, we're just playing around about the L3 cache latency on a 9684X. It's okay if you don't know it. It's not malicious or anything. Just the amount of elitism this and elitism that. It's folks unfamiliar with an environment and the fact that some of the rough and tumble of life is helped by not being so sensitive.
There was a truth to the business about scolds and snowflakes. It's all right to have a bit of fun. No need to lose one's mind over it.
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics
I agree. Gender differences seem to be exaggerated, while in upper classes women and men converge to androgyny. One contributing factor is that surviving on low incomes requires more differentiated roles (care taker vs manual laborer).
Do the women have to be the "care taker" and the men the "provider"? The proportion of jobs in developed economies that require physical strength is much lower than it used to be.
As a man who has been the primary parent for most of my children's lives (my ex is not very good with older children) I find the assumptions people make annoying. People are surprised my younger daughter lives with me rather than her mother. They struggle to find words to describe a man as primary carer.
I think this is damaging to men - bringing up children is incredibly rewarding and men are given a smaller role in it. Its damaging to women too.
Not everyone has to be - I do about half the childcare of my daughter and am often the odd-man-out at child activities. But most people have to be because that's what each sex wants. It's not a great plan to be looking for a partner by not having a job and telling everyone that your goal is to be a stay-at-home dad who wants a high-earning wife to support him. Women aren't interested in that.
> Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target.
Just that it's "universal" doesn't mean it has to be that way. For fucks sake we all exchange 40 hours a week (or more) to our employers, on top of overtime and commute. There's no reason at all anyone should have to put up with unprofessional abusive/discriminatory bullshit from anyone, no matter if customers ("Karens") or coworkers.
At least the young generation got the message, this time they have the numbers advantage to actually demand meaningful change, and we're seeing the first effects of it - particularly in the trades, that fail to attract new trainees despite pretty competitive wages.
(The next thing I'd love to see on the chopping block is corporate politics, it's utterly amazing that everyone knows at least one horror story where endless amounts of money were wasted, sometimes entire companies sank because two middle manager paper pushers thought their fiefdom wars to be more important than the success of the company at large... but apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit)
This is like someone telling a fish that there are people who live on land, and the fish saying "it doesn't have to be that way". Someone mentions a cultural difference between your group and another, and you say "the other group is wrong, my culture is right".
Instead, what you could do is think about how this is a completely arbitrary thing that the two cultures just do differently, and that maybe people shouldn't be offended by friendly banter that isn't meant to offend.
I was in the US military. We all joked, in ways that probably shouldn't have been jokes, that we would "trip" on deployment to the "zone" causing trendily fire accidents for the least like members of our team.
Being US military didn't make it right, we were effectively deciding who we would kill in an effort to make the team more cohesive. That never set right with me, and I still remember the joke (but maybe it's not a joke, joke) to this day.
Don't look to the military as a model of good teamwork. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. One cannot pretend it's the right model to follow.
The line is mighty fine between bullying and good natured ribbing, and has a lot to do with group dynamics. Edgy banter can bring a group together, but bullying can do far more damage.
That's very reminiscent to arguments that western culture is just one of the possible cultures and is no better or worse than culture of pre-technological bushmen.
For a funny take on this, see the movie "Gran Torino", where two people excoriate each other viciously, until we the audience discover that they are actually two close friends.
Sadly, in our modern world people are not only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.
Yes, if only we could aspire to ideals -- no doubt better modeled in some golden past far far from modernity -- where more "close friends" excoriate each other viciously, obviously that's perfectly healthy and nobody could possibly have any reasonable basis for preferring something else.
> only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.
It's one thing if you or someone else personally enjoys some recreational conversational sadomasochism with the right partner, likely you can even persuade people to accommodate you with talk like that.
But the idea that there can't be genuine offense, only motivated offense attributed to some handwavy goal is clearly more projective pretense than anything like actual insight.
> apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit
They rarely know anything about what middle management is doing. After all, if you own any stocks, do you know anything about the middle managers in that corporation?
Guess why I'm out of the stocks game other than the occasional gamble of meme stonks. I'm German, we don't need it either way.
The thing is, we allow corporations to become (way) too fat. When a corporation grows too big, it grows uncontrollable as well - once the complexity of any corporation grows so large that there is no way for any single person to understand at least the basic scopes of everything the corporation's parts do at the same time, all kind of auditing and oversight becomes a sham, no matter if internal (boards) or external (consultancies, auditors, regulatory agencies).
You don't have to present a full strategy to discuss a problem. In my opinion a strategy is something to reach through discussion. Dismissing the discussion because of lack of results is counterproductive.
I think there's some truth to that, but I don't think that's the only factor in everything the article described, and it's not specific to blue collar work.
There's a lot of actual prejudices (not just banter) among, say, "educated" tech industry workers, too.
Including sexism, racism, ageism, and classism.
Most people will at least superficially hide it in modern workplaces, but it's still there, and having effects.
You've probably seen evidence of this places you've worked, and you can also see it often in pseudonymous HN comments.
It's even worse. The educated tech industry workers don't actually make any banter, so any time their prejudices slip through, it's just their actual opinions instead of banter. It's a very bizarre opposite to the supposedly 'uneducated' blue collar way of doing things, which brings levity as a first-class citizen, and communicates boundaries well.
You don't even need to be inappropriate to have workplace banter. Nobody ever said that a light environment has to be built on jokes that bust chops. In fact, busting chops kind of blows. There's plenty of room for clowning around outside of that, and plenty of ways to build camaraderie, too. You don't have to bring racism or sexism to the table to have a good time, and you don't have to have a good time at someone else's expense.
Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer. We should be making more skeleton jokes and showing each other macaroni art pictures.
In the UK government, before programming was considered a high-value skill, the vast majority of programmers were women. So much so that programming was measured in girl hours (which were paid less than man hours).
When it became clear that programming was going to be a big deal, women were systematically excluded, flipping the gender balance (although they had trouble hiring initially because men saw it as lesser work).
It flipped because the roles programmer (largely women) and analyst (mostly men) became programmer-analyst. The role women were dominating was collapsed into the one men already dominated.
At the exact same time (at least in the US), which was the 1980s, law and medicine (as in doctors, not nurses) rapidly shot toward near-parity of participation by men and women, while both being high-pay and much higher-prestige than anything to do with computers—now, still, but especially then. That the profession becoming higher-paying and a “big deal” was the cause of this shift doesn’t make much sense, given what else was going on at the same time.
[edit] to be clear, I’m not denying the existence of a gap, or making claims about whether it should be addressed—in fact, I think understanding the cause is vital if we do want to address it.
This is the same in blue collar environments. They have more of the levity that I'm seeking regardless.
> And let's face it the kind of people who want to dedicate their life to staring at a screen make for a strange crowd.
Maybe this is it? I'm not fully convinced. I have worked with tech dorks that had a sense of humor, and that didn't bring contentious things to the working environment. Is it a lack of wit? I don't know. The more I think about it, the more confused I get, honestly.
This is an interesting question, so here's a bit of speculation.
Banter is a matter of wit. You could call it an intellectual pursuit.
Blue collar jobs are primarily not intellectual pursuits. They need their own kind of smarts, but these smarts are relatively orthogonal to the kind of linguistic smarts used in banter, and most importantly the work output itself is not intellectual. There's little chance of the banter directly getting into the work output, and so there's little direct motivation for bosses to police it.
Software development is basically entirely an intellectual pursuit that very much overlaps the wit of banter, and banter is likely to leak into the work output. Hence easter eggs are a thing. So, bosses are more likely to want to police banter-adjacent activities, which has a likely chilling effect on banter itself.
Another, more recent, factor is that more software development activity is online/remote and therefore lower bandwidth. The subtleties of banter don't convey as well as they would in-person.
>Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer.
HN is like this too unfortunately. Anything slightly out of the high brow sanitized tech groupthink gets downvoted or flagged even if it doesn't break the rules.
It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
People are too sensitive and act on their feelings and emotions instead of logic and critical thinking. Which is ironic considering how such people pretend to be liberal, educated and all about free speech and freedom of opinion but only as long as your opinion matches theirs.
> It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
With regards to camaraderie and banter, I don't even want to talk about world views. I genuinely don't think they matter too much in that context. Really what I'm sick of is just a lack of any attempt to make a connection whatsoever. I don't need to align with a person politically or socially to build a connection and have good workplace banter. There's just such a fundamental unwillingness to do so, in my experience. That's what bugs me.
And I know the difference. I've been in both blue collar and white collar environments. Blue collar people look to build the connection and bond together almost immediately, just about every time. There's a period of 'feeling each other out' when you start on a new job or with a new coworker so that they can suss out _how to connect with you_. That's right: it's such a first-class citizen to their working relationships that there's an entire art form to initiating it.
Contrasting with the white collar environment... it's almost non-existent, unless you work with people who, ironically, come from blue collar environments. I think it's really sad, and I think we could benefit from being a little looser. I don't think that means we need to drag any contentious topics in, nor do I think it means that we need to drag ourselves into un-professionalism. There's just something to be said for being able to be goofy and chat with coworkers that seems to be lost on the white collar environment.
Harmony is the strength and support of all institutions. Banter and camaraderie build that harmony.
I don't know what this phenomenon is by which humans take personal experiences and attempt to extrapolate broad, sweeping generalizations and/or present anecdotal data as objective fact, but it's far too prevalent for my liking.
I'm sorry that your experiences differed from mine, but some of my best friends are connections that I organically grew in ostensibly white-collar jobs (in the education and tech sectors).
Many of the engineers I know are some of the most eclectic goofballs you'll ever meet.
I've worked a fair bit in both environments. Maybe I've somehow missed out on 'the mean', but that's my experience. I've met the eclectic goofballs in tech too, but they're far from the norm.
There is always a fine line between professionalism and stick in your arse. Of course you need to know when such a culture is adequate and when it is not. If you work in support you probably don't banter with the people calling you. That would indeed be unprofessional.
Professionalism is to keep distance to others, banter is the opposite, as it is a form of bonding.
"Modern" workplaces that advertise themselves as such are very likely toxic. Might seem counter intuitive but it is often the case in reality.
Some Indian immigrants working in tech companies have also alleged they were subject to caste discrimination by other immigrants. I have no idea how common this is but there does seem to be some actual prejudice.
Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Thin bloke who doesn't look strong enough? Ginger hair? Tall guy, short guy? Weird tattoo, etc. Definitely the one black guy or the one white guy is going to get shit. But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
The other thing, which in my experience is relatively common worldwide, is that working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics. In academia and in highbrow society the tendency is to basically sanitise every social interaction. When you're in an environment where that isn't happening then you can't suddenly ignore it any more.