>No, treating your women colleagues as if they are inferior merely because they are women is wrong.
Here's the thing: asking them to make him a coffee doesn't mean he thinks they are inferior. At worst, it assumes that this is something that they'll gladly do -- which is more about the era, than about himself. Many others would do the same without anybody thinking twice about it, we just magnify this anecdote from the 50s and 60s because he's famous. Heck, in the same time they had different seats and toilets for blacks and whites and people were OK with that, it was the law even...
>It is not merely bad manners, any more than racism or xenophobia are merely bad manners
Racism alone is not even bad manners -- it's just BS thinking (finding differences in races). Lots of old white elders for example can be racist but otherwise good people (and kind even to people with different skins they're thinking in racist ways about). It will have to translate in some actual harm to become actually (instead of merely potentially) bad.
In other words: people can think whatever they like, as long as they are not putting it in action that hurts others. The same thing, that is, that one might grant to artists with violent tendencies and visions that put that in their art. Some prudes might complaint, but as long as they don't actively hurt real people, what's the problem?
Yes, asking someone to make you coffee is in fact treating them as "inferior". Firstly, in the sense of superior versus inferior: master versus servant. Secondly in the sense that your own work is too important to be interrupted with the preparation of coffee, whereas theirs isn't, or not to the extent that yours is.
Here's the thing: asking them to make him a coffee doesn't mean he thinks they are inferior. At worst, it assumes that this is something that they'll gladly do -- which is more about the era, than about himself. Many others would do the same without anybody thinking twice about it, we just magnify this anecdote from the 50s and 60s because he's famous. Heck, in the same time they had different seats and toilets for blacks and whites and people were OK with that, it was the law even...
>It is not merely bad manners, any more than racism or xenophobia are merely bad manners
Racism alone is not even bad manners -- it's just BS thinking (finding differences in races). Lots of old white elders for example can be racist but otherwise good people (and kind even to people with different skins they're thinking in racist ways about). It will have to translate in some actual harm to become actually (instead of merely potentially) bad.
In other words: people can think whatever they like, as long as they are not putting it in action that hurts others. The same thing, that is, that one might grant to artists with violent tendencies and visions that put that in their art. Some prudes might complaint, but as long as they don't actively hurt real people, what's the problem?