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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but for the guy? The sight of a bunch of guys rushing to fight sexism (often without even understanding what sexism is) and solve women's issues for them is amusing. This is not to say, that there are no problems. But the biggest problem I see is a knee-jerk reaction to anything involving gender or race. Sometimes assholes are just assholes and couldn't care less if their victim is women or black person, or whatever. The bunch of self proclaimed righteous knights however fails to see that and then everything becomes sexims and/or rasism thus diluting real problems.

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> Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but for the guy?

HN is getting better at being less aggressive and at being more constructive with criticism.

Perhaps you can find an example where a male dev had pictures of his face, and pictures of another man's penis, posted to a website with his name and email address. And, when you find it, HN will be supportive of that man and will condemn the anon attacker.

As an actual example, in the GitHub penis incident, HN seemed mostly supportive of the target:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601342

Even if there is such an example, you really need to have your head stuck firmly up your ass if you're willing to argue that it would have anywhere near the same social and emotional impact.

Perhaps "outing" a developer as gay could have a comparable impact for men, but that would only apply in predominantly homophobic communities.

Which in turn says a lot about this community's attitude towards women. If it wasn't hostile to women in the first place, extreme examples like this troll would never have such an impact.

What about accusing the guy of being a rapist and a pedophile?

Just read it again, and have to ask: what was the impact of those actions on the community? It obviously had an impact on the targeted woman, but the community? Did anybody really think "gee she looks ugly in those pictures, I guess she sucks as a person" or anything like that?

Maybe female devs saw it, and decided they didn't want to be the target of that behaviour, and decided not to contribute to tech conferences?

It's interesting that you say "couldn't care less if their victim is a women or black person, or whatever".

Can you come up with a good example of this kind of extreme attacking of a white man? You say "How would this look for a guy", I honestly can't think of any examples where people go anywhere near as far trolling and harassing white men. I may of course just be forgetting some obvious cases.

I can, unless you mean white straight men.

In tech?

Not that it doesn't happen in day-to-day life, but I can't think of any case where even a white, gay cis man was targeted this way during a conference or subjected to an online harassment campaign. When maddog came out there were a couple comments quoting Leviticus and that was it. Certainly the HN threads about sexual orientation are almost completely free of the sort of "they're lying!" or "they're just manipulative!" or actually any sort of vitriol whatsoever (and what there is is rapidly down-voted.)

This is a good thing! But if you are going to argue that straight gay men in tech are treated similarly, I'd like some citations.

I would suggest that harassment of white men (and men in general) usually comes in the form of attacking one's mind, rather than body. George W. Bush stands out as a notable example. I don't know of anyone posting supposed pictures of him naked, but the jokes about his intelligence were seemingly never ending.

People questioned and attacked his intelligence because of his actions, not because of his race and/or gender. I'd suggest that people who want to attack someone for whatever reason will go after low-hanging fruit (being some sort of statistical outlier), and should that not exist they'll have to go after something of actual substance. When your goal is belittling someone, an attack that requires people to actually think tends not to be terribly effective.

And contrary to your suggestion, I've certainly received plenty of harassment based on my body as a white male. Less these days as I refuse to work with people who can't act like adults, but I've taken plenty of crap about my height and physical appearance (I'm 25; lots of "oh, when do you finish high school?" kind of stuff)

They surely did: I remember several times when I saw Bush's monkey face mounted on top of a slightly NSFW girl.

Please, tell me, why there is always one individual who reads an article like this and goes "but what about teh menz!?"

I agree that it's not appropriate here, but in general; people do it because male forced envelopment victims get congratulated, male domestic violence victims that call for help are redirected to a hotline to confess as an abuser, males are ignored in legislation bringing more health care benefits to women, males are more likely to commit suicide, and males are less likely to succeed in lower education or matriculate into college. Also the prisons are full of men (who get longer sentences for similar crimes), where it's also a hilarious joke that they are raped because fuck criminals.

I wouldn't have replied but I hate that "what about the menz" trope. Men and women both have social problems, it wasn't appropriate to discuss men's issues here but that does not mean it is never appropriate. Maybe people need better filters than, "a discussion about gender is occurring, here is my two cents," but it's hard for people who care about these issues to find a good time simply because it's somewhat taboo to say men have problems at all. So they probably just don't mention anything until they really disagree with something being said.

"Sometimes assholes are just assholes"

Good, lets out them and get rid of them whatever their issue is, so the rest of us can get on with our lives.

yep, equality sucks, especially when you're attacked as an equal. The thing is, these idiots that do stuff like this are targeting the woman's sexual attributes, and not her intelligence or skills.

As for the guy that said he learned better from other men - maybe he does, give him the benefit of the doubt - it's not ALL about you.

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