Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

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I am female. My behavior is frequently interpreted by other people as extremely aggressive, attention mongering and so on. (Edit: I suspect a lot of it would be interpreted differently if I were male and it would be less of an issue.) It has gotten me loads of extremely negative attention. I have spent many years trying to learn to fly under the radar and deflect attention. This problem began very early in life with being an excessively cute, sunshiny child and continued with being viewed as a beautiful young woman (which came with perks like being raped and told it was my fault for being too beautiful to resist).

There are serious downsides to getting attention. Faking confidence when you do not have it and also do not have the ability that it implies can bring real trouble. I still want to figure out how to get traffic for my websites because I think that is my best hope for financial success but I have put a great deal of effort into learning to deflect attention away from me personally. I hope that if my work ever does garner good attention those lessons will stand me in good stead. Lots of celebrities have been seriously burned at some point and had trouble understanding why they were no longer darlings of the public eye. I got to go through that on a much smaller scale. My hope is that it will pay dividends some day when it matters more.

" Lots of celebrities have been seriously burned at some point and had trouble understanding why they were no longer darlings of the public eye. I got to go through that on a much smaller scale" After all it seems that you are afraid of loosing attention. Attention flood may be as undesirable as a drought. But if you have an unusual capability it would be unwise to not use it to your advantage, that is, unless you have money enough to pay for marketing and promotion while you stay away from the public eye.

I am not afraid of losing attention. I have a healthy respect for the very real danger that comes from negative attention. There is nothing neurotic about that. I have a medical condition which makes a normal job a big problem for me. My best bet for success is via the internet. Traffic is necessary to make money. That is a simple objective reality having nothing to do with my feelings, personal baggage, yadda.

Sorry to hear about your past troubles.

Usually it helps when you learn to consiously (on demand) get yourself into a more relaxed state/mood internally. I found that when I am in the relaxed state, this really smoothes some rough edges in how people perceive myself.

Thanks. My past has a variety of influences, including abuse and medical impairment. I have addressed quite a lot of my personal issues. Getting this back to the topic of body language, for me, I think eye contact was a big factor. I wrote about that here:

http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/2011/07/17/an-invisible-shi...

Are you trying to say you get a lot of attention and don't like it/can't handle it and thus you think being subordinate (low power poses0 is the answer to not being able to cope with things? Come on your argument is that if you fail at something you get burned? There's nothing truer to to life except that we're going to be uncomfortable in it for a long time, but it's easy to ignore if you choose. I understand not wanting to draw attention to yourself, that's a personal thing and a choice only you can really make, but saying "it hurts, I don't want to fly any higher" is never going to change reality, and I think it's sad that someone is posting about life is "forcing" them to do something they don't seem to want.

I didn't say anything like that. You can read remarks by anyone in the public eye about the fact that there is a very real downside to it. For some people the cost is more of a problem than for others. I was simply agreeing with the OP that the situation is not as cut and dried as "dominant behavior good, low status/submissive/nondominant behavior bad."

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