Dibs

I joined Hacker News and some guy, hereafter "Jack", talked with me regularly and didn't appear to be hitting on me. He's Dutch and the Netherlands has a better track record for women's rights than most countries and certainly better than the third world country of Merika where I happen to live.

I eventually concluded he hadn't been hitting on me personally se but had been checking me out. I guess he eventually realized that I was, for realzy realz, very ill and celibate for medical reasons and unlikely to ever be sexually available anytime soon, if ever.

More than half the land of the Netherlands has been wrested from the sea by the Dutch and the long history of Polder Politics means warring cities in the same polder -- flat area of land prone to flooding wrested from the sea bottom -- frequently had to cooperate in keeping the sea out lest they both end up destroyed entirely.

At one point, I left Hacker News for eighteen months to assure Jack I would not intentionally nor unintentionally harm him without good cause. Other than that, unlike a longish list of other men who wanted me and couldn't have me, he allowed me to remain part of his social circle.

When I first joined Hacker News, it was around 98 percent male according to member surveys that used to get posted semi regularly and I'm a woman. I very briefly tried posting in a gender neutral fashion, didn't feel that really worked and proceeded to try to figure out how to navigate this overwhelmingly male social landscape as openly female.

It's never been easy being me on Hacker News but when Jack stopped speaking to me, things got a great deal rougher. I could feel the chill in the air surrounding me as people seemed to not know what to make of Jack no longer speaking to me.

Had I done something wrong? Was I bad person? If so, why politely tolerate me?

Unbeknownst to me and probably also to Jack, merely speaking to me frequently was a case where he had called dibs on me and I was effectively under his protection so long as he continued being friendly towards me. When he went silent, most people there had no idea why and no means to try to sort it out.

It wouldn't be appropriate to ask Jack invasive personal questions about his relationship to me, especially as a lot of people believed he was married though he wasn't.

And I was a relative newcomer and the wrong gender etc. There was no reason to trust me or speak to me at all unless you were hoping for a piece of ass, I guess.

I've stopped participating on Hacker News. I've concluded that once in a great while, some man vouches for his wife and then she's accepted there to some degree as legitimately there for reasons other than being a trollop for people to hit on.

It doesn't help that most women there are openly man bashing misandrists with no interest in figuring out how to earn their position there socially.

I'm a social outcast and spent years homeless while relatively prominent on Hacker News. 

That's me living like a man. Most homeless Americans are single MEN. 

Women typically don't want to think about that. They bitch about not making it to the upper echelons career wise and income wise and don't want to ponder why men are also overrepresented at the bottom of society.

Anyway, I got to run an interesting social experiment in becoming both the first and second openly female member on the leaderboard and learning something about business ethics and male culture, but it has done nothing to help pay my bills or get me included socially anywhere etc. while members of Hacker News openly mocked my complaints about being unable to use Hacker News as a means to improve my income like men sometimes successfully do.

I don't have a solution to what's wrong socially with planet Earth. I can't even make MY LIFE work in spite of not being willing to sleep my way into money or opening doors and actually trying to figure out how to earn the respect of the people on Hacker News instead of merely showing up to loudly bitch about feminist bullshit.

I did talk enough about the obvious differences in how I got treated that many people there probably will rewrite history in their minds and decide that's really all I did.

I don't have a point. I don't have an audience. I don't have a path forward.

I'm just writing because I like to write.