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Comment by ccccvdddd | Hacker News Reader

It's still a gathering place for men with these attitudes. Reddit in general is a boy's club where women are considered second class, and there are no women-only spaces, but plenty where men dominate.

For example, the 'lesbians' subreddit is full of pornography, and the 'actuallesbians' subreddit is full of men pretending to be women. Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.

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This has been a "culture" on the internet for as long as I can remember, dating back to the first printed picture from a computer (or first sent image over internet?) being of a group woman and one of the standard test image (for early machine learning maybe?) was a woman in a suggestive pose (from Playboy or similar magazine if I remember correctly). The term "No one is a woman on the internet" has also been uttered for as long as I remember, although many of the early pioneers of computers were women and the space wouldn't have been the same without them.

There are women-only spaces on Reddit (or at least they claim to be, impossible to verify obviously) just like there are male-only spaces on Reddit (and both goes for the internet in general), you just need to know where to look.

> Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.

I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.

Edit: To add another example from this very submission, which is a common way of framing things (on the internet):

> Alright boys, I think I have figured out where the timeline went wrong [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30232117

> I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.

This doesn't prove that it'll happen to _every_ women-only subreddit, but I think the previous poster is alluding to the ban on several radical feminism subreddits. I'm sure more detail can be found on their new home, which rhymes with "we are over it".

> one of the standard test image (for early machine learning maybe?) was a woman in a suggestive pose (from Playboy or similar magazine if I remember correctly)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

That's the one! Original (uncropped) version: NSFW obviously - https://womenlovetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/distres...

Here is a nice SFW article about Lena (Lenna) today:

https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...

A brief report from a 1997 IS&T conference where Lena was a special guest (also SFW except for one link that has a warning next to it):

http://www.lenna.org/lenna_visit.html

An article from The Pudding about Lena's wish for her Playboy image to stop being used:

https://pudding.cool/2021/10/lenna/

And her Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Forsén

> I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.

By "exclusively for women" he means "excludes trans women".

Well, yes. Because they're actually men. So you end up with absurdities like the 'actual lesbians' subreddit being full of (and moderated by) fetishistic dudes talking about their "girl dicks" and other such nonsense.

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