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Comment by oirjjlksjmfljaj | Hacker News Reader

There's a rhetorical pattern I see in many articles, this one included, that perpetuates the issue this article is trying to address: men are the problem. Before, it was men saying bad things. Now, it's that men aren't saying things at all.

"I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up." If not, then perhaps that's the wrong problem statement, and solutions will become more readily obvious and suggestible when not coached as the problem of men.

That's as candid as I can make it, and I feel that I have to use a throwaway account to do so.

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That's not at all the way I interpret the article. The author empathizes with the male investors, and justifies their behaviour. If anything, she's blaming society, not men.

The author literally calls it "the problem of men clamming up." Empathy or not, they're saying the problem is male behavior. This could be framed as "the problem of taking grievances to the mob" or "the problem of overattributing behavior" or anything that puts responsibility for change on some group other than men, but it does not. Whether they're to blame or not, men are the ones behaving incorrectly.

> "the problem of men clamming up"

Even when phrased that way, I don't perceive that the author is _blaming_ men. The author is critical of the mob, and the dangers of being incorrectly perceived as sexist and ruining one's reputation. You may insist on your interpretation, and fixate your attention on a couple of sentences that ring the wrong way to you, but I think you are missing out on the nuance.

I disagree, the author seems to blame women:

> "If there weren’t both women who made false accusations and an audience eager to hear and magnify such accusations, then the upstanding investors would have nothing to fear about being candid. But, unfortunately, both do exist."

I don't think there's anything wrong with the article, but it does exemplify the tight rope you sometimes have to walk as a man.

The issue is that women are, well, individuals. Who knew? Some like direct honest feedback. Others don't. The same applies to men. Perhaps on average women prefer the more gentle approach rather than the more direct one, but in the end it all comes down to the individual.

The problem with a lot of these debates, IMHO, is that they're framed as a group/gender debate ("men vs. women") centred around statistics and averages, rather than as an interpersonal conflict. I have definitely been the target of "mansplaining" by more than a few men, even though I am a man myself. I'll readily believe this happens more often to women, and this is an issue, but that's an average which doesn't necessarily say all that much about the social interaction you're having right now.

Interpersonal conflicts happen all the time. Between men and men, between women and women, and between men and women. There are loads of reasons for this; mismatched expectations, misunderstandings, lack of empathy, cultural differences, or just plain personality conflicts. It's part of the human condition.

But once you start framing all these things in a context of sexism it becomes tricky business to get it right. Being accused of assholery is one thing, but being accused of sexism is quite another. No matter what you do, sooner or later you will do something wrong because we're all just blundering through all social lives making tons of mistakes all the time.

A few years ago I attended a (local) programmer meetup; one women made a presentation I quite strongly disagreed with and we had a decent discussion about it. Afterwards I realized that perhaps I came off as a tad too strong (this was also quite recently after I moved to the UK from The Netherlands, which has quite a different culture). Live and learn. I don't think I did anything wrong as such and would have voiced things pretty much the same if it had been a man, but I was afraid that it was perceived as "mansplaining" by either the presenter or some of the attendants. I don't know if I was, but it's certainly possible.

It's hard... Unfortunately a lot of the more, ehm, engaged people on this issue seem quite unwilling to listen to men about this and learn from their experiences. This entire thing is really hard and if we're ever going to fully resolve this everyone needs to listen to everyone else. Men need to listen to women, but women also need to listen to men.

Please don't take HN threads further into gender flamewar hell. Instead, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and remember that this guideline:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

...applies to articles too.

Agreed, I'm definitely not comfortable with her phrasing in several sections of the article, and it clearly has an impact since some people are saying that this behavior is also male sexism.

The author is, perhaps inadvertently, contributing to the problem.

BTW, yeah, this is one of my alt accounts.

Great point. Another subtle aspect to this kind of rhetoric is that it's about an issue so pervasive that it's disingenuous to present this as new information. Even as a boy you have to be careful what you say to girls, and vice versa. The rules are slightly different, but there are still gender lines and it's going to be really (really really) hard to change that! Men and women are all aware of this, so presenting this as new information is a bit divisive, despite the best intentions of the author.

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