Why shouldn’t she have that right?

I'm a pragmatist looking for a path forward that actually works. I don't find it helpful to get hung up on theoretical ideals. I'm much more interested in figuring out best practices.

Constantly calling tremendous attention to a thing while complaining that it gets too much attention is not a best practice.

I'm aware that the world at large will focus overly much on the detail of her gender no matter how she chooses to handle it and this gets crazy-making and makes it difficult to find a path forward. The fact that it's difficult to figure out all on one's own is why I left the comment. It only compounds the problems women have to avoid talking about a pragmatic approach and what piece women can take a little control over due to the general attitude that talking about what part women can control is routinely decried as victim blaming.

I'm not blaming the victim. I'm only saying that if you don't want to be a victim, there are things within a woman's power that can help improve outcomes.

It is unfortunate that it is so hard to make such a point. The degree to which I get attacked for trying to talk about what actually works in the world rather often strikes me as an insideous means to deny women better answers and keep them trapped in the role of victim while pretending to ascribe to higher ideals than me.

This means that you seem incapable of being rational and critical of societal norms. Your independent variable is an individual, not society.

Voices like yours are well-meaning, and ultimately tools for oppression. If that sounds dramatic, just look at history.

More like: resisting social change in the name of “pragmatism” is a very old pattern.

Imagine a dialogue like this before 1967: “Hey friend, I’m just being a pragmatist — interracial marriage is illegal. You could go to jail. Just break up and date someone else. Of course it’s not right, but what can you do? We have to understand that our actions have impact in the society we live within. Don’t take this to court, it’ll ruin your life.”

Without people disagreeing with this, without people disagreeing with status quo-aligned pragmatism, Loving vs Virginia would have never happened. Not would have the end of slavery, women’s suffrage, gay marriage, etc.

I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of Hacker News (under a different handle).

The meaning of that is likely lost on you. Suffice it to say, it hardly supports the status quo.

I don’t really see her as a victim and I don’t think she sees herself that way either. Certainly she feels she was dealt with unjustly - and is fighting back.

Suggesting it would just be easier if she stopped is accurate but that’s not how change is accomplished.

By the way I carefully avoided charged terms like “victim blaming” because I don’t feel the larger debates in the west matter here. She lives in China with its own different set of challenges.

If she wants to be a force for change, hopefully she's cool with sparking meaty discussion among other people who are trying to sort their crap.

Unfortunately, you can't have meaty discussion in the abstract. It's quite hard to latch onto a good topic of discussion without sounding like you are talking about something in specific, in this case her.

My attempts to try to talk here really shouldn't be construed as intent on my part to tell her how to live her life.

It's impossible to work out best practices for talking about a thing without being allowed to talk about it at all. Replies like yours are basically the norm -- we can't talk generally about what works because someone might take it as an attempt to police their choices.

I've generally erred on the side of not commenting on her choices because I believe it's her life. But that de facto leaves me no path forward for talking about any of the issues involved.

Yes, she lives in China. But none of the articles I've seen are really about her life in China per se. They are mostly about her life online interacting with the western world. That's even what the title of the piece is about.

If she were merely limiting her life to China and not intentionally circumventing their rules to reach a western audience, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

It's one of the criticisms of her I gave above: you can't post on the internet looking for money and interaction from a western audience and then tell the west "You can't criticize how I choose to express myself!" And now she's been largely cut off from her western audience and their money and is complaining about that fact.

If she just wants to be a Chinese individual with a Chinese life and no western audience and no money from Westerners via Patreon/the internet, she is free to go do that.

The west only has any interest in what she does because she chooses to go to great lengths to reach out to the west.

You can't have it both ways. You and she need to pick one.

The problem is not the criticism, its the culture war and tactic of de-platforming anything uncomfortable. If she just got rude messages or even unfair articles in the NYT and it was left there, then she could just ignore them and continue doing what she likes doing - and what her audience likes watching.

It should also be noted that her latest deplatforming wasn't even related to her. Paypal cut off her alternative to gofundme because of other people they were funding. She was just collateral damage.

Nobody here is complaining about mere criticism. They are complaining about the very real attacks and successful attempts at censure and silencing.

I'm a pretty controversial figure and have been thrown off of a number of forums or simply left because it clearly wasn't going to be productive and was an excess of drama. I've also worked hard for a lot of years at figuring out how to sort my crap and try to find my voice in ways that made me acceptable in some spaces.

I was homeless for several years and my gender has absolutely been a barrier to me using hn as effectively as I wish I could for professional networking and developing my own online income.

No one has the right to do anything they want. No, she really can't take the position that she can do whatever the hell she wants and you can't stop her. You can do more of whatever the hell you want in private. When you want to do it in public, especially with an audience and for profit, you can either find ways to be acceptable to those gatekeepers or get censured and silenced and cut off from the money you think is your right when it's really not.

I've dealt with a lot of similar issues to Naomi Wu. I'm older than her and I've taken a different approach to trying to address such issues.

What I'm doing appears to be generally less drama and trouble than most women deal with and seems to be moving things in the right direction. So I think I know a few things about the problem space and my preference is to try to explore what actually works rather than spend all my time on my high horse acting like other people are just bad people and should stop being bad people for my convenience or whatever.

I think Naomi Wu would be vastly less controversial if she put a stop to promoting herself with soft porn style photos of her enormous and artificially enhanced breasts front and center on all her work where you can't escape it even if you try. I think she could continue to dress exactly the same and keep her artificially enhanced giant breasts and have photos of herself in her quirky and often scanty outfits and pretty much all the rest of it and see the drama drop substantially by making that one change.

Suggesting she be willing to make a single change in positioning for PR purposes isn't some kind of censure. It is really a fairly small detail.

I'm sorry you and she seem to not want to hear that. But, again, I suggest you pick one: either women can do whatever the fuck they want on the internet at all times without justification -- including me -- or people who expect to earn a living online and have a public life via the Internet need to find ways to be diplomatic and craft their image and their message in a socially palatable fashion as simply a practical matter -- including both me and Naomi Wu.

I have worked hard at finding a way forward on the latter. I'm increasingly unsympathetic to people who want to both silence me for disagreeing with them and simultaneously argue that women should be allowed to exercise their God given right to do any fucking thing they want. I'm a woman doing what I fucking want here. If you sincerely think that's how it's supposed to go, then a "You go girl!" is all I should hear from you.

Since that's not what I'm hearing, I suggest you reconsider your claims about what you imagine you believe.

Please reflect and grow

Bitch was asking for it. Just look how she dresses. Slut.

But if this is typical of how you introduce yourself, then I can't say I'm exactly surprised that you get so much flak. It also makes me vastly less sympathetic to your many complaints about how other people behave.

> [...] women need to know what works and what doesn't.

I think men and women need to not treat people as sex objects regardless of how they dress. Saying that "women need to know 'what works'" is precisely victim-blaming, because it puts the onus on women, not men, to be responsible for men's behavior.

(Any genders above can be replaced with any other gender classification; it's irrelevant to the point.)

I wish you had taken the time to read what I wrote in the article- it does address many of the appearance issues you are fixated on and find so distressing.

I also wish you had taken the time to contact me- I have a standing invitation pinned to the top of my Twitter profile to any woman with questions about my appearance to have a friendly private chat about it before coming to conclusions.

I was brought up properly. I am respectful to more experienced, more educated women in the community who have the specific background to evaluate the impact of my appearance and presentation. If Limor Fried, Becky Stern- any of a dozen women in academia that I am in contact with told me I was hurting other women with my shenanigans and to go put some pants on. You'd see nothing but a blur as I did just that. That would be the end of it. Period. The consensus has been it hurts no one but me, and it has been argued it helps others in ways it does not help me.

I am a precedent- if my appearance does not matter, then no one's does. Not butch, not femme, the large, the small, the disabled, trans- none of it is relevant. The work and personal conduct are what matters. As soon as it becomes about "I know it when I see it" people have just as much right to complain about "sexualized" clothes like even a modest skirt, high-heels, makeup. The incel community shares your concerns and would love the foot you've put in the door for them.

Yes, I am aware that things have reached the point where my appearance does hurt me far more than it helps. It's a terrible "promotional" tool- all of the more successful female creators on YouTube dress far more modestly. It has closed countless doors and I do accept that. I looked this way long before I was on Western social media. It is gender expression first and foremost and important to me for reasons you would not be able to understand. I have made clear in the article you were uninterested in reading that I will not explain it- because no one should have to.

My appearance being raised in a post about being unjustly targeted and endangered by media outlets is odd. How is it relevant? My work stands on its own- I have never pushed for inclusion in anything on any basis but my work. I don't think we want to say that those with an objectionable appearance during some part of their life, should be excluded from professional events during which it's neither relevant nor apparent. If someone is a furry on the weekends- that's their business. If someone wears hot pants on the weekends- that's their business. So long as they don't hurt anyone, follow the prevailing dress code of the event- that's where it ends. It's about the work- not your personal comfort with my gender expression.

You- personally are uncomfortable with my appearance. That's simply as far as it goes. It's not justification for anything. Not with me, not with anyone else. I'm ok with that- you personally don't have to be comfortable with my appearance. But wrapped in however many awkward disclaimers you like, you don't get to suggest that the unreasonable conduct of others is something I should silently endure because of it.

If you were to best describe what the role I serve in the community, what my "profession" is- it's literally "STEM ringer". We have a problem in STEM where pervasive stereotypes try to tie women's intelligence and competence to their gender expression. My job to fuck with that. My job is to look dim, act sharp & kick ass. My personal style IS professional.

I did not introduce myself to you. I posted on a public forum where I am a regular participant. As I already stated elsewhere, I did not seek you out because I'm sure you don't care what I think. Your remarks here strongly suggest my conclusion was spot on.

I'm not in the least bothered by your appearance. You are free to do as you please in that regard. I've already stated that elsewhere as well.

I don't actually care about your assertion that you know more important women than me whose opinions matter so much more than mine.

Your hostility is unlikely to further your cause. Coming at me like this is only serving to alienate me.

Your remarks here are simply convincing me that your ideology and mine are fundamentally incompatible.

I believe it suggests what I said in the comment above: you're putting the onus on women to "know what works" instead of on men/whoever.

> Your remarks here are simply convincing me that your ideology and mine are fundamentally incompatible.

That is why the world is in the state it's in.

Those aren't the droids she's looking for, so to speak.