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Comment by slededit | Hacker News Reader

It’s pretty clear she wants to follow her current path despite the obstacles. She’s been hearing the same criticisms for years now. The only change is it’s escalated from random internet people to the NYT.

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.

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Hacker News gets 5 million visitors a month. I'm posting on Hacker News and addressing the audience here. I did not try to find contact information for her so I could try to "school" her on how she "should" behave. I don't happen to assume she's ever going to see this remark, much less care about what I think.

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.

> 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.

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 aware of that.

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.

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