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Comment by rustynails | Hacker News Reader

It's funny you should say that.

When I was young, I played dungeons and dragons (the board game). I remember how this campaign ostracised people who wanted to play. In particular, girls were very vicious with the insults about being a freak (to all of us that played).

I would compare the stigma to those that liked computers.

I can't think of a single girl who liked either d&d or computers in the 70s or 80s (my wife tells me she started in computing in the 80s though and I don't doubt her). Strangely, supposedly, revisionist reality is the opposite - girls were driven away by mean men (it's revisionist history, but misogyny is the buzzword of the new century and truth be damned).

I'm glad misogyny was mentioned because my life experience was the exact opposite. However, I enjoyed these pursuits and no amount of bullying stopped me. The attitudes have changed so much today and not for the better.

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Men in technology who self-identify as nerds and write about their experiences being tormented by girls in their childhoods don't do much do allay concerns that their industry is pervasively biased in favor of men and against women.

I was as nerdy a kid growing up as I am in adulthood, and I while I had virtually no problems with girls, I had a whole fuckload of problems with cliquish and bullying boys. That, I'm afraid, didn't do much to make me more tolerant of men bullying and excluding women today.

Take from your bad childhood experiences the lesson that deliberate and calculated exclusion is bad, not the idea that anyone has somehow earned a right to justify excluding others.

>I was as nerdy a kid growing up as I am in adulthood, and I while I had virtually no problems with girls, I had a whole fuckload of problems with cliquish and bullying boys.

I'm going to jump in here and second this. I also had a fuckload of problems with cliquish and bullying boys, and none with girls. It would have been nice if girls had been more interested in me, but I finally figured out much later that much of that was because I never took any initiative and approached them or socialized with them; once I figured that out, and how to be more outgoing with them, things changed rapidly. Boys were always the source of real misery in middle/high school.

I've heard (in more recent years) of girls being vicious little back-stabbing bitches to each other, and there's movies that reinforce that stereotype, but as a boy that got picked on, I never saw that myself or had any problems with girls that weren't my own fault.

I'm sorry that there were mean girls in your childhood. I'm not sure why you think your experience disproves the experiences of thousands and thousands of other people, though.

Edit: Not sure why I'm getting more than one downvote here. For example, my gaming group in college was about 1/3 women, and they got along fine with the men, in both directions. I could follow rustynails' example and call him a liar and a revisionist for saying that he knew mean girls--but that would be a stupid and shortsighted thing to do, wouldn't it? There are all kinds of people in the world; you don't get to claim that the ones in your little circle are the only prototype for all the rest, for better or worse.

> Not sure why I'm getting more than one downvote here.

Not from me, but I might explain.

> I'm not sure why you think your experience disproves the experiences of thousands and thousands of other people, though.

[ citation needed ]

A youtuber by the name of Sargon of Akkad had a guest on his show talk about her experiences with online hate after she gave a public talk. The following link is to about 32:00 in:

https://youtu.be/D_Rmbmc1BH8?t=1910

She explains how terribly misogynistic everyone has been. He explains why those insults are gendered: because that works as an insult. Men get different insults than women do. The people claiming "the internet is misogynistic" largely seem to ignore insults directed at men, and talk loudly about the insults directed at women.

She later explains how she gets death threats, and this is an example of online misogyny. He explains slowly that he gets death threats, too.

Her response is that she's clearly shocked. She's never for one second thought that anyone else might be having problems on the net. Just that she's having issues, therefore it's personal, and it's only her (and people like her).

It's an astonishing admission to make publicly. That everyone else on the net is so unimportant as to be not worth human empathy, or even 30 seconds of rational thought.

That's why every time I hear "the internet is evil towards X", I have to ask "Oh? And how is everyone else treated?" Usually the response is "Uh.. I don't know".

Or, as another comment here shows... studies demonstrate that the sex which gets the most death threats, hateful comments, etc. is not women. It's men.

Heck, I've had death threats online. Do I go to sleep worrying about it? No. The people involved are cheap losers who live thousands of miles from me. They can muster up the hate to issue death threats online. They can't muster up the wherewithall to book a bus ticket to my home and ring my doorbell.

The solution to feelings of powerlessness is to give people power. Not to control the majorities speech because a small number of losers are assholes online.

Teach people how to deal with assholes, and they're less afraid. Teach people to be afraid, and they'll demand that we "safe space" the world in order to assuage their fears.

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