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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

My ex was not messy. He did things like meticulously organize his book collection and kept his own possessions in pristine condition. He was just a sexist pig.

He did not think he was a sexist pig. He was very idealistic and talked about the importance of women's rights. It wasn't apparent I was marrying a troglodyte until well after we married and our first child was on the way. On some level, he wanted a modern two career couple lifestyle. But, when push came to shove, he expected me to pick up after him, cook for him, etc. Trying to get him to see where his words and his actions parted ways was very challenging.

A lot of people are like that about various things. This is part of why psychology distinguishes the conscious from the subconscious.

People never have perfect information about their partner. There is a lot dating does not reveal.

(My ex was not a bad guy. I don't hate him and these issues are wholly unrelated to why we divorced.)

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I'm really uncomfortable reading these insults, even if they're deserved. More so because they're in response to a comment of mine (even though I'm not the destination). I'd be so pleased if you removed them. That said, I do understand where you're coming from (both through empathy and some cases I personally know). But you should see that we agree: he probably was a bad choice for you. People always hide their bad parts when it comes to dating, and some are outright dishonest and manipulative, but that does not change the fact that someone was a bad choice. What I wanted to say was that I think that, we can not blame people for being what they are; and thus that we should pick who we would love for who they are, not for what we can sculpt out of them. I was not trying to advice or criticise you or anybody else on relationships and dating, I'm sorry if it came off that way.

You have that backwards. You replied to a comment of mine in a manner that implies a great many negative things about me and my marriage. Those implications are entirely inaccurate, but given that this is an overwhelmingly male forum, it is a no win situation for me. Not rebutting them implies that you are correct. Rebutting them has resulted in my comment getting downvoted and now you acting like your feelings of offense vastly outweigh the importance of my feelings of offense.

And we do not agree: He was not a bad choice for me.

> "Those implications are entirely inaccurate, but given that this is an overwhelmingly male forum, it is a no win situation for me."

How does the fact that HN is an overwhelmingly male forum make this a no win situation for you? Are you suggesting that only a few HN members could ever see things from your point of view?

For what it's worth, I thought that this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15359215 was a little too callous, but not in an intentional way. Talking about relationship problems in broad strokes after someone gave specific details about an old relationship is almost never going to end well, as it sounds like they're summarising a relationship they have no knowledge of. However, I get the sense that gkya was talking in broader strokes to talk about patterns rather than single cases, so whilst it sounded like it was about a specific relationship considering the context, in practice it was just a badly directed comment, in my opinion.

English is not my mother tongue, so maybe I've done a silly language transfer using "you" to mean "one, people". I've definitely heard native speakers use second person in similar ways though, but mostly British.

Americans do that a lot too. I have done it and had it go sideways in public discussions. That really was the only explanation needed to straighten things out with me.

The problem is that isn't what you said to me. Instead, you informed me of your discomfort and asked me to delete my remarks out of deference to your comfort.

You called your ex husband a pig, in responding to me. That was what I said I wanted you to remove, because I feel strong discomfort having caused someone I don't know at all getting insulted at in public. I'm still very uncomfortable with it and still, I'd be happy if you edited your comment to remove that particular word. Wrt the other issue, well, I've said I'm sorry enough times and all I've gotten was bias and aggression. You've said that I'm acting to create a certain impression on other readers, and you've implied that I'm sexist. I won't add any more comments to this thread because this is becoming really annoying and actually offending.

So, you are uncomfortable that my ex husband was insulted in public, though he was not named. But me being insulted in public is not a problem.

Every single remark here by you errs on the side of some man's feelings mattering a helluva lot more than mine. I am not implying you are a sexist, but your actions continue to err in a particular direction. If you don't like the impression that makes, you can just stop doing it and genuinely apologize to me instead of adding yet more faux apologies wherein you repeatedly act like I am somehow in the wrong.

If you speak English as a second language, it is totally fine to say "Whoops, I didn't mean to offend. English is my second language." It is not totally fine to tell someone else they are being offensive, they need to change their behavior and then excuse the misunderstanding based on your poor English. That isn't cool at all.

And yet you are crabbing at me instead of them. Why is that?

Because they're not the one that conflated gender with understanding, and that's what I found interesting about your exchange. The rest of the discussion was just a common form of miscommunication that happens when someone wants to talk about specifics and the other wants to talk in generics, and the two collide.

I am not conflating anything and I have no idea why you would claim that I am.

What did you intend to suggest with "given that this is an overwhelmingly male forum"?

I am the top ranked openly female member here. That observation is informed by long experience. In gendered discussions that get heated, the majority of people on HN will tend to side with the man or the male point of view.

Once a man says or does something moderately problematic that is a stereotypically gendered issue, the odds are long against a woman getting a fair shake. Your choice to reply to me and accuse me of making this a gendered issue instead of siding with me and letting them know that their remark is a sort that does not work well is completely consistent with that pattern.

> "I am the top ranked openly female member here. That observation is informed by long experience. In gendered discussions that get heated, the majority of people on HN will tend to side with the man or the male point of view."

With all due respect, on HN I don't care whether I'm replying to a man or a woman, someone young or old, someone who lives close or lives far away. I barely even look at usernames, and will often only do so if I'm replying to someone, or someone makes an interesting comment (good or bad). If you say you're the top ranked openly female member here, good for you, but it honestly makes no difference to me. If you've found yourself getting flak for being a woman, I'm sorry about that, there's no justification for that, but I suspect that many people are of a similar mindset to me and judge based on written content rather than background.

> "Your choice to reply to me and accuse me of making this a gendered issue instead of siding with me and letting them know that their remark is a sort that does not work well is completely consistent with that pattern."

I commented on your gender remark AND sided with you in the general discussion in the exact same comment. I did not take one side over another. How you could come to any other conclusion is beyond me. Here it is again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15360339

EDIT: To the people downvoting Mz in this comment thread, can you not please, it's not warranted.

Well, you are basically fighting with me (but not them) and your criticism of their remark was vastly more sympathetic than your criticisms of me. That is part and parcel of the pattern and it is incredibly insidious.

I didn't expect you to know who I am. Nonetheless, it remains true that men will notice remarks they feel are disrespectful of men and pounce on them, oblivious to the fact that it is a woman being ganged up on and only trying to defend herself from unfair criticism. And the ganging up on her is very much a gendered, problematic thing.

It puts a woman in a position of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I only mentioned my position as the top ranked woman here to advise you of my long standing firsthand experience. That's it. And yet it has become yet another reason for you to act like I am somehow doing something wrong.

This whole thing is off topic and a ridiculous, unfair derail. The odds are very high that others will join this debacle and it really won't matter how I handle it, I will still be framed as being in the wrong and also framed as making it a gendered issue rather than as having a right to rebut the original remark that started this nonsense.

Anyway, I am running a fever, so replying at all is probably rooted at least in part in poor judgment. So, for the record, I plan to bow out. Hacker News can have a brouhaha if it so desires. But there is probably zero good to be gained by me participating further in this utter and complete nonsense.

> "Well, you are basically fighting with me and your criticism of their remark was vastly more sympathetic than your criticisms of me. That is part and parcel of the pattern and it is incredibly insidious."

If I found gkya's comments more interesting than yours, then I'd be responding to them directly, and more openly discussing their comments. You could see this as argumentative if you want, but my main line of questioning was asking you to clarify a statement you made. If you can point to a single sentence I've said in our exchange that you found offensive I'd be interested to hear it.

> "I only mentioned my position as the top ranked woman here to advise you of my long standing firsthand experience. That's it. And yet it has become yet another reason for you to act like I am somehow doing something wrong."

I'm not suggesting it's wrong, I'm suggesting it's mostly irrelevant. I could say something like "I'm the most vocal proponent for Brexit on HN", and whilst that has a small element of truth to it, I don't think people hold it against me beyond a comment thread. I'll probably forget we had this chat in a week, and we may find ourselves agreeing on a different topic before too long. That's the impermanent, impersonal nature of HN, most of it isn't tied to identity, it's just people playing around with debating ideas and sharing experiences. What I'm saying is, I doubt people hold a grudge on HN, and if you choose to be openly female on HN and people like or dislike what you say, perhaps they're just liking or disliking what you say regardless of your gender.

If I couldn't get my point across, that's probably my bad; I wasn't implying your person with the pronoun you in that comment, I'm sorry. I was trying to talk about relationships in general. And I may have misunderstood you, I'm sorry about that too. But this is a discussion, not a contest of who's offended whom more, or of correctness.

So, when you tell me to delete something because it offends you, that's fine. When I tell you that your remark was just as offensive to me, you add yet another criticism of me to your track record and act like I am behaving badly for mentioning that I am offended.

This is exactly why emotional labor is a popular catch phrase: Because women are expected to care deeply about how men feel and to twist themselves out of shape to cater to the feelings of men. But, how women feel is not supposed to matter.

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