I am not really aware of what you are describing.

HN is less "social" than most forums. There are no avatars and the profile is completely free form and can be left completely blank. It is a very large forum, so I cannot assume that everyone recognizes me. It also is overwhelmingly male, so it is common for people to assume that anyone speaking here is male.

I often qualify my remarks here on certain subjects for those reasons. Long experience as a participant tells me that if I don't, someone will make a fool of themselves by accusing me of being a rapey bastard, as obviously only a rapist man would ever say X (or something along those lines). And that is a huge, pointless derail that I hate seeing.

As far as I can tell you're both on the same side that you share the experience that if one isn't (perceived) a member of the protected group they are at risk for being subject of virtue-shaming or ad-hominem attack for debating progressive ideals.

I would like to think that years of study and introspective contemplation have helped me craft an evenhanded and well thought out position on certain subjects.

My observation is that most people, regardless of which "side" they are on, somewhat ham-handedly speak to only the concerns of their side. This very often comes across as dismissive of the concerns of the other side, even when that isn't intended.

So, if someone wants to speak to difficult subjects, I think good advice is to consider how things impact all parties, not just their own side, and work at considering details like context and how that makes your message look. If you barge into a discussion of rape and all you say is (or sounds like) "what about da menz!", well, yeah, that will go badly.

Like take the charge of victim blaming -- on the one hand, we can all probably agree that victims deserve sympathy and a platform to air their grievances as well as our thoughtful consideration.

Yet it seems that of we as a society offer unconditional trust to anyone who claims to have been a victim, this will eventually encourage all sorts of mischief. Not every person who 'seems' like a victim is in fact one, and not everyone who has been victimized can or will lay public claim to that status.

In the limit, this confusion about who is allowed to say what about whom can actually lead to the behavior you referenced above -- if men have internalized the idea that men are only allowed to comment or judge men, but not other groups, then the only possible response is for men to speak about their own group interests.

Sigh. This is perhaps a can of worms I shouldn't open. But here goes:

I was sexually abused as a child. So, in my youth, I very much had the mental model that men are predators and women are prey. It took me a long, long time to sort that out. I think that mental model is shared by quite a lot of people, often without realizing it.

So, if you have internalized this idea that all sex involves a victim and that the woman is probably the victim, well, that explains a lot of the dynamics of discussion that we see, where people implicitly assume that if anything goes wrong in a heterosexual encounter, clearly the man is the perp and the woman is the victim.

I think a lot of people cannot imagine women as having any kind of real power. And therein lies a real huge problem in these discussions, because if you suggest anything women can do differently, you are bad, evil and wrong. Or if you suggest women aren't all paragons of virtue and many would equally take advantage if given the opportunity, this just doesn't sit well with a lot of people.

Someone here mentioned intersectionality, a term I only know from an incredibly toxic environment full of SJWs who claim to want a better world, but mostly crapped all over me rather than being helpful with my problems and also very much are fine with the Lord of the Flies pecking order that is at the root of a lot of social problems. They don't really want to be rid of it. They just want to be at the top doing the shitting, rather than at the bottom getting shat upon.

So if that is your approach, well, duh, the well off white males currently in power aren't going to go along with your plans to make them the acceptable social toilet that everyone gets to crap all over. And when they resist becoming the new victim of our crappy social order, they get accused of all kinds of evil for clinging to the privilege they currently have.

The problems we currently have cannot be resolved by seeking revenge at the societal level. This is an incredibly hard thing to discuss, for a long list of reasons. But the angry, vengeful approach that so many women take helps entrench the problem. It doesn't resolve it.

I don't want revenge. I want constructive change that overall reduces how much people get victimized.

I have been speaking about subjects like rape and women's issues and female empowerment for a long time. It's just a hard, hard subject to have a good discussion on.

I think this one is going incredibly well -- or was. Perhaps this comment will be a thing I very much regret. But it is a thing we eventually need to discuss in the world, and Hacker News has turned out to be the least worst place for me to try to make constructive points on such subjects.

(crosses fingers, hits reply)

Unless you are talking about homosexuality. Then you will see a lot of women trying to lecture you. Damn bastard you.

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

What I'm worried about though is the risk of going past 'we should listen to person from group X when they talk about group X's experience', to the the much stronger claim that 'for all persons P outside of group X, P have nothing valid to say about group X'.

That would be to confuse ends for means, and to discard the attempt to find universal truths and merely settle for truths that are relative to a person's group identities.

In other words, this is thought of as a feature, not a bug.

We can still argue based on merit but I find it interesting to hear the perspective specifically from a woman.

I am a man fyi

I'm glad she said she's a woman first up, it made me much more interested in what she had to say in response.

I would take what males said seriously. But a group of males discussing rape etc isn't quite... Anyway - is this hard to understand? Women have a 'different' point of view on the subject, and on a mostly-male site like this, it's useful to know. I'm puzzled by your confusion. Maybe you are female; then it would be easier to understand what you say. I wish you had said up front :-) It just helps understand where people are coming from, their perspective. A man writing about what feminism should be has a different effect to a woman doing it, and naturally/rightly so.