First statement is a generalization across 50% of the population.

> I appear to be the highest ranked woman on HN. I've been here over a decade. It continues to be the case that most men don't really want to talk much with me unless they are hitting on me.

Second comment is decrying the fact that the population broadly smeared in the first comment does not want to engage with you.

I can only speak for myself, but the only times that I’ve ever been aware of the gender of a commenter are incredibly rare and only when I recognize the username as that of a personal friend of mine. In general, I’m pretty confident that the gender of a commenter on HN has no effect on how I reply to them for the simple reason that I’m almost always ignorant of it.

In your case, its possible that the mindset expressed in your first sentence contributes to the phenomenon or perception of the phenomenon in the second.

edit before anyone turns this into career suicide for me, I’m not saying that there is a link. I’m just observing the possibility

You and I are talking about two different things.

But I said I was stepping away from this conversation, so I will leave it that.

Your experiences in comment threads are often a reflection of what YOU write. Hostile people get hostility, humble people often get humbleness in return. Looking at this comment thread, some of the problems you mention in this comment have come up and perhaps it's worth considering whether that is due to how you write your comments.

After nearly 11 years of being told things like "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog if you don't tell them" and having it suggested to me that if my gender is an issue, I should simply hide that fact, I'm pretty darn sure it's not the way I write. It's the way the world reacts to women.

The whole thing is a mess for everyone in an assortment of uniquely horrible ways across every intersection.

Please don't put words in my mouth. My life is hard enough without that.

I never expected anything to be easy. Just possible.

My Patreon sits at around $150/month and I get the occasional tip while I get accused of being a beggar for expecting pay for my writing at all when all other doors are effectively closed to me for various reasons.

I recently quit my local volunteer work in meat space because that, also, wasn't leading to an adequate income. It's a long, sordid tale, but boils down to the same problem dynamics I have everywhere: People value my work but don't want to pay me for it.

They end up thinking I do it because I "care" and and they are actively affronted by the idea that I want to make money at it. I get read as very motherly and all this shit and people want me to do things for them out of "love." Meanwhile, no one "loves" me enough to give a damn about the fact that I have literally gone hungry at times and literally had no housing for years. No one is doing a fundraiser for me out of compassion. Etc ad nauseum.

I don't think it's easy for me. But I do know it is possible for men and I'm just as competent as any man here and can't get the right doors open that lead to an adequate income while I am given a zillion excuses, which boils down to people justifying the awful way in which this community has treated me for more than a decade.

I know of a MtF trans youth who had no trouble whatsoever opening doors and getting money out of people here. I can't do the same and I am treated with enormous suspicion and contempt for even trying to figure it out.

I know this is going to sound mean, given your context, but that is anecdotal.

I know (personally) women who have doors flung open for them for the fact that they are women. I don’t tend to agree with it, but I won’t judge those who take advantage.

I know at least one person who uses her femininity very effectively to fund her passion projects. She doesn’t sell her looks or body, she sells “feminity”, as in “an empathetic, sustainable approach to x”. It’s very effective for her at least.

With that in mind, I think the parent was being earnest.

Hardships happen, sadly what you’ve experienced is also experienced by many people, mostly men. Unfortunately they don’t have much of a voice.

I was quite beautiful when I was younger. I was also molested and raped and told it was my fault for being too beautiful to resist.

I considered becoming a model at one time.

I also was one of the top students of my graduating class, won a National Merit Scholarship to one of the two most prestigious universities in my home state and had other academic accolades.

My beauty seems to have been more downside than up. It is actively problematic for trying to pursue a serious career that doesn't in some way trade on your sexuality.

Most very successful female singers, actors, etc are beautiful and sexy. The top paid ones don't hesitate to pose nude and trade on their sexuality.

Men don't have to trade on their sexuality to get to the top of their field and men have many fields outside of entertainment open to them where they can make good money.

In fact, it boils down to this: being successful in a career is what makes a man desirable. But a woman is asked to choose to either be serious or be desirable.

I have found my looks and gender to actively be a problem in getting good constructive feedback. I suspect this dynamic is part of why Theranos was valued at $10 billion before being uncovered as a fraud: It was led by a pretty young woman.

I suspect Theranos would have deflated as the hot air balloon it was well before it hit $10 billion in valuation if it had been led by a man.

I have zero interest in using my looks, sexuality or femininity to open doors for me because I have no desire to follow in the foot steps of Theranos. That company has already done plenty of harm to the status and perception of women.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/03/227176/elizabeth-ho...

I don't think it helps to turn a blind eye to the issue that women can sleep their way into positions, careerwise, and men typically cannot. We have expressions like the casting couch for a reason.

I've spent a lot of years trying to analyze this problem space and find a viable path forward based on actual merit. I'm not going to refrain from criticizing the likes of Holmes. She has done enormous harm to the status of women by her actions, which include sleeping with an investor to get money for a project that had no real merit because it was straight up fraud. So she probably wouldn't have been funded at all if she were male.

Again, unless this came forward in legal proceedings, you're making an assumption.

> We have expressions like the casting couch for a reason.

It's not an expression, it's a literal thing in porn.

I'm not backing down from my view that Theranos was valued at $10 billion largely because it was headed by an attractive young woman and it would have never been that overvalued and gone in one day from that valuation to zero if the head of the company had been male.

I have suggested on more than one occasion that she may have slept her way into power. She was in her twenties and publicly claiming to be celibate because she was so devoted to her company and then it later came out she was secretly living with Balwani.

I think the media has really treated her with kid gloves because of this fear of being accused of being mean or unfair or something because she's a woman.

I have done my damnedest to tread lightly on this topic over the years because I know it's a hot button topic. But I am in no way surprised to learn that she was secretly living with an investor while claiming to be celibate.

I was mostly privately speculating for years that she was probably sleeping with some of these rich and powerful men who helped make her company a success.

I'm a woman. I have zero problem getting sexual interest from wealthy, powerful men. I have enormous difficulty getting them to take my work seriously and get constructive feedback on my projects.

The Theranos story is one I have paid a fair amount of attention to because it hits a nerve for me. I have a form of cystic fibrosis and I have been getting healthier for 19 years while the world calls me crazy and acts like I'm making that up. There are no wealthy, powerful men expressing interest in the potentially world-changing medical crap my head contains.

I can fairly confidently estimate the personal value to me of that knowledge at about $9.5 million dollars (and counting) cuz reasons. So I have no doubt it's potentially worth billions if not trillions if I can figure out how to disseminate it. (At least in terms of impact on the world. Not necessarily profit per se.)

And I may die in obscurity because while there is no shortage of men who would love to sleep with me, there are no men interested at all in what I know about medical subjects.

So I'm not backing down on my view here. I'm still waiting to hear that Balwani wasn't the only one and she basically fucked her way to power every step of the way.

I'm not going to continue this discussion. I have no doubt this comment will be downvoted to hell. The world has a huge problem with the idea that I know anything medically useful and a huge problem with the fact that a woman who spent nearly six years homeless still has self esteem.

Have a good evening, or whatever time of the day or night it is where you are.

This is another bs dismissal of my criticisms.

I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board. Between my two handles, I have over 50k karma, which would put me respectably high on the leader board if it were one handle.

You are "anecdotally" acting like this is some personal problem for me as an individual. If I'm just some loser that life has kicked in the teeth having nothing to do with my gender, where are the many other openly female members who are on the leader board and/or obviously making bank through their participation here?

I strongly suspect this is not a huge issue for men.

I was strung along for months by someone who was married and not telling me that until he finally told me one day that he was married, his marriage was in the toilet and he needed "a friend." I wouldn't have fallen for that if it was clearer to me what actual successful networking looks like.

When two hetero men network, saying "Hey, let's have coffee" is a clear and unambiguously platonic proposal. This is not true in my case and it leaves me with serious challenges in figuring out just how on earth you do this.

It's only very recently that I have figured out how to get someone to discuss my work with me because those initial inquiries are so often ambiguous. Networking looks not dissimilar to dating in the initial phases and that means I waste a lot of time trying to make a business connection that will never happen because business is not his goal and will never be on the table, no matter how I handle things.

I suppose my perspective is that the grass is always greener. I have always assumed that I'd prefer the opportunity to pitch at a higher rate, versus a better qualified opportunity at a much lower rate. But that's probably a fallacy.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I still don't feel bad for attractive people, since the outcome measurements clearly show it's advantageous, but the experience isn't something I'd considered prior to your comment.

Sometimes the grass is greener because of all the manure in the yard.

I try hard to "count my blessings" and to figure out what's good about my situation. But the reality is I'm frequently broke, often to the point of going hungry, so I very much need to solve some questions concerning "How on Earth do you make money instead of being treated like slave labor?" (Because I get feedback that people benefit tremendously from information I share and things I do and they "value" it, they just don't want to pay me for it.)

I don't bitch more about HN because while it is infuriating and upsetting I remain dirt poor, HN is generally less bad about most things than most places, so it's all kinds of problematic to harp too much on it here. It amounts to being abusive to some of the better people on the planet.

But it's equally problematic to not harp on it. That doesn't solve my problem here either.

So even the best of the best that I can find are still failing to go "I know! If we care about the status of women, we should figure out some kind of path forward on helping this very talented, intelligent, educated and persistent woman in our midst who has spent over a decade proving she's absolutely not some kind of man-hating feminazi."

I don't think it would be unreasonable at this point for me to just lose my shit and go completely postal over this garbage. I'm not, cuz reasons, but this is pretty goddamned ridiculously extreme stuff that any idiot should be able to see "That ain't right."

A man, on the other hand, has to work hard and earn a good living, otherwise he's a "loser", he also has to have social calibration and be able to be interesting and good looking to find a decent looking woman.

Probably best explained here:

https://witnesstodestruction.blogspot.com/p/the-gray-zone.ht...

>Focusing on "But what is the message to girls here..." is the wrong focus. It doesn't solve the real problem women have.

Given the former statement, it is the right focus.

Even before OnlyFans blew up, people(both men and women) already looked down on women who did sex work for a living. What do you think happens from here when every girl and their grandmother's has an OnlyFans? That's something every guy will probably be thinking about now when they are considering a girl to date. That is now something for employers to consider when hiring a woman. I'm not saying that's okay either, by the way. I'm just suggesting that that's what will happen.

I'm not calling for a ban on sex work anyhow. Never did. I'm only voicing my concerns.

And I'm doing my best to address those concerns. In a nutshell, I'm saying it's sort of neither here nor there whether we normalize the practice of women getting rich via selling their bodies.

The general narrative goes something like this:

"It's bad for women to make good money off of sex. We should stamp out this practice because it is immoral."

Then I say "But how else can they make good money?" and I get told that's somehow beside the point.

It's not beside the point. It is the point.

If you want to empower women, worry about what is keeping them out of the C Suites of corporations and things like that. Don't worry about sex work. Worry about why trading on their looks or sexuality via sex work or in the course of being entertainers seems to be the only really good way for women to get rich on their own efforts.

Women often turn to sex work because it's the only way they can make adequate money. This is why you see so many single moms working as exotic dancers and the like.

Some of those women would do other things if it wasn't such a huge uphill battle.

That's all I'm trying to say.

For guys like me, it's great that we get to have this huge abundance of porn from all kinds of girls who would've never done it before. I just feel very sad for the girls and boys who never consented or signed up for this fucked up clown world we've got now. That's all I wanted to say. I am not calling for a ban. I'm just pointing out that this does not help women and in fact only hurts women in the long game.

I don't think this is true. I think ordinary guys have access to knowledge that most women lack and just talking with women and taking their issues seriously makes a real and meaningful difference.

So thank you for conversing with me (as opposed to pissing all over me or just being blatantly dismissive).

I am not calling for a ban.

I'm sorry that you feel accused. I'm not trying to accuse you. But the logical outcome of your objections is a ban, if everyone agrees that you are right.

I'm just pointing out that this does not help women and in fact only hurts women in the long game.

I don't believe this is true. I believe this framing is rooted in broader cultural practices where a woman's sexuality doesn't really belong to her. It's a double standard that needs to be stamped out.

But I've had enough of sounding fighty on the internet for one day. So I will likely bow out of this conversation at this point.

Have a good day.

Most people on OnlyFans have a “real” job and are using the platform to supplement their income. Not unlike people who drive for Uber on nights/weekends.

No opinions allowed except those of "the right kind of people" supported in "the right way" which pretty much guarantees that the status quo will be reinforced.

I don't think my remarks are in any way off topic.

They illustrate the problem space with a specific example.

I choose to use myself as the example because then I'm not doxxing other people, in essence. I can say as much or as little as I feel comfortable saying about myself.

You're ability to participate here is facilitated by the nearly 11 years I have spent here. I did a lot of laying of the groundwork to make it possible for women to open their mouths here more readily and participation by women is up.

Maybe use that ability that I helped make possible to do something other than piss all over me.

(Edit: For that matter, I have reason to believe my participation here also has made it easier for the LGBTQ crowd to participate more openly in part because I am not straight, though I don't comment very often on that fact.)

> You're ability to participate here is facilitated by the nearly 11 years I have spent here. I did a lot of laying of the groundwork to make it possible for women to open their mouths here more readily and participation by women is up.

This is an anonymous internet forum comprised of tech stories and random nonsense. I can post here because I have an internet connection. Get over yourself.

> Maybe use that ability that I helped make possible to do something other than piss all over me.

You are not being attacked just because someone sheds some light on why you aren't getting the results you want out of posting on an internet forum and I can post here because I was able to think of a user name and password.

Try an experiment where you post anonymously and see if it actually changes the way people respond. Hacker news is extremely charitable, which makes it a bizarre place to claim to be victimized while posting walls of text with loose connections to the story link.

Ironically you have posted around 20 times in a few hours, which isn't what I would call being silenced.