Below is a slightly edited piece originally published on a different blog of mine (no longer live) on 05/01/21.
I appear to be the highest ranked openly female participant on Hacker News. In some sense, this is a professional forum and when I first joined it more than eleven years ago (July 2009), surveys suggested it was between 95 and 98 percent male.
My original handle on HN was Mz. It was supposed to be MZ and I typoed it is the short version of a longer tale that's not especially pertinent here.
Those two letters were the initials of my handle on Cyburbia, another professional forum of sorts that was, if I recall correctly, about 70 percent male. My ability to navigate Hacker News effectively is rooted in having first been an active participant of Cyburbia.
The internet was younger then and so was I. The development of this blog has been delayed tremendously mostly because I don't really know how to write about those experiences in a manner that I would find satisfactory.
As they say: "Mistakes were made." I learned a lot from those experiences and I'm not particularly bitter about any of it, but I expect it to be a challenge to hit the exact right note that I would like to hit.
The current #MeToo environment we live in looks for guilt and is intent on nailing all the "bad guys" to the wall. And it is bad guys it seeks to crucify and god forbid that you should have any compassion or understanding for the man's side of any story.
Plus, I'm banned from Cyburbia, so I'm sure everyone assumes the worst about my motives for writing about it. All of that makes it extremely hard to explain it the way I would like to explain it.
I've done as well as I have on Hacker News in part because there is a long history of me having male friends. I was a girl gamer and my gaming buddies -- mostly guys -- were enormously supportive of me in my teens.
I also had friends on Cyburbia as well and some of them were men.
When I joined Cyburbia, I was a full-time homemaker still and a part-time college student. I was probably also going through serious withdrawal from medication at the time that I joined.
I went to GIS School the summer of 2002 and I guess I probably joined Cyburbia not long after that. Going to GIS School saved my life because they put me on something like ten different prescription drugs so I could complete the school while reacting anaphylactically to the polluted air in the Los Angeles basin anytime I left the building.
When GIS school ended, twenty-two months of withdrawal from all those drugs began. At one point, I was awake for 39 hours straight and an utter loon because of it.
I also made a truly terrible first impression the day I joined Cyburbia. I joined a few days earlier than I had intended to join and I did so for the express purpose of picking a fight with people about the topic of homelessness, basically.
I came in with both barrels blazing to let everyone know how wrong they were. I then spent the next several months carefully minding my manners to prove I'm not actually a walking, talking shit show every step of the way nor an incorrigible troublemaker.
And under these enormously difficult circumstances where I had "bad impression" written all over me in giant flashing neon letters at least six-feet high, the people of Cyburbia were amazingly kind to me. And I spent a LOT of time there while mostly housebound thanks to my health issues and drug withdrawal.
I had lived a really private life and had basically always been a student or homemaker. I had no idea how to "be a professional."
Cyburbia was a space for urban planners to hang with other urban planners and make friends. It wasn't a super uptight space where everyone needed to be super professional all the time.
And I was facing a divorce after being married about half my life. I had no idea how to navigate a professional life nor the dating scene at that point.
In 2005, while I was still heavily involved with Cyburbia, the American Planning Association had its conference in San Francisco. I lived about 45 miles away, which was at least an hour and fifteen minutes drive in Bay Area traffic and potentially up to two hours.
Money was always tight and I had serious health issues, but I was able to arrange to go to the conference with a little help from my friends on Cyburbia.
One of those friends happened to publically announce on Cyburbia that he was willing to let someone crash on his couch at his condo if they were trying to attend on a budget. No one took him up on it so after a few days or something I asked if he would be okay with me taking him up on it.
That allowed me to attend two days of the conference without it being a hardship for me in terms of travel and expenses. Instead of driving, I took the train to San Francisco and spent the night at his place instead of having to pay for a hotel or try to travel back and forth between my home and San Francisco while very ill, etc.
This friend not only let me crash at his place, he helped me arrange transportation. Taking the train was his suggestion and it was very helpful to me.
He had been a good friend, someone who had my back in arguments on Cyburbia and took me seriously in debates because he felt I was smart. We had exchanged private messages at times and there was nothing at all wonky about his offer.
This offer was not made to me personally. It was made publically on the forum we both hung out on to anyone wanting to attend the conference and facing budget issues.
There was no trickery or manipulation involved.
But to his surprise, there was also no couch at this place that was some kind of time share I guess. So we ended up spending the night in the same bed and that night wasn't spent platonically.
Mostly so far so good, except he failed to bring a condom which he knew ahead of time was something I expected because of my health issues. That detail is most of why I never wanted to see him again romantically and it became a point of contention between us.
At some point, he made an ugly remark to me on Cyburbia that I took as subtext for "Bitch! How dare you dump me over that detail!" This incident contributed to me leaving Cyburbia for a lot of years before returning briefly in 2018 for a few months (which is when I was finally banned).
To be clear, he was not The Reason I left Cyburbia. Had other things been different, I might have hashed it out with the other mods -- he was on the moderating team, so I felt his ugly remark was an abuse of his position of power there -- but his behavior was never THE Big Problem with Cyburbia in my eyes.
As far as I know, he told no one we were intimate that night. I told another friend -- also on the moderating staff -- and that friend later asked me some questions about the incident.
Looking back on it, his inquiry was probably part of some kind of investigation though I wasn't told that at the time and I was pretty naive and still probably fairly heavily medicated most of the time. I didn't lambaste the man I had spent the night with and didn't suggest he was guilty of anything for having spent the night with me, which may not have been what they expected to hear.
I don't really want to make a lot of commentary on the incident at this point in time. I just want to tell the story.
Maybe at a later date I will do some analysis and hypothesizing. And maybe not.
I recently participated in a discussion on HN about a piece titled My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community. It tells a tale that more or less begins with a young woman going to a conference and sharing an AirBnB with a man to save money and things going badly.
That's a large part of why this is being written and also why I don't wish to add commentary or opinion to the tale at this point in time.
This is not a rebuttal of anything she wrote. This is not commentary on anything she wrote.
Reading her story simply made me remember these events in my own life which have some really small similarity to her story in that she and I both managed to attend a professional conference in part because we saved money by staying with some man who was also attending.
If this were a post on Cyburbia, it would probably be marked AIB ("As inspired by") to indicate "Oh, that piece made me think of this" basically.
I was just a low-level mod in charge of my own sub (for Citizen Planners) and had no mod powers outside of that sub and eventually stepped down from my moderating position. My choice to step down had nothing at all to do with this incident.
After publishing the piece, someone emailed me about it, someone upset that I had written it. My recollection is they felt it somehow "hurt" the person who had written the piece about her negative experience in the Scala community.
I'm sorry she was hurt but I agree with some of the remarks on Hacker News to the effect that men are expected to be adults in sexual situations and women are routinely assumed to be victims with no agency.
I'm aware that many women are socialized from birth to "be nice" and not tell people no when they are demanding hugs and kisses. I did not raise my own children that way and I remarked on that in comments.
If you are a woman who wants a real career, you need to behave like an adult and take responsibility for your own choices and not assume that men are all going to be perfect gentlemen or something. This may require you to rethink some of the things with which you have been inculcated.
No, that does NOT give abusive, rapey men a PASS for bad behavior. It just acknowledges that things get muddy when social expectations are in flux -- as they are currently with women as a group still in the process of leaving the default homemaker role behind -- and if women want to be paid like men, they need to be responsible for their part of the equation like men.
I appear to be the highest ranked openly female participant on Hacker News. In some sense, this is a professional forum and when I first joined it more than eleven years ago (July 2009), surveys suggested it was between 95 and 98 percent male.
My original handle on HN was Mz. It was supposed to be MZ and I typoed it is the short version of a longer tale that's not especially pertinent here.
Those two letters were the initials of my handle on Cyburbia, another professional forum of sorts that was, if I recall correctly, about 70 percent male. My ability to navigate Hacker News effectively is rooted in having first been an active participant of Cyburbia.
The internet was younger then and so was I. The development of this blog has been delayed tremendously mostly because I don't really know how to write about those experiences in a manner that I would find satisfactory.
As they say: "Mistakes were made." I learned a lot from those experiences and I'm not particularly bitter about any of it, but I expect it to be a challenge to hit the exact right note that I would like to hit.
The current #MeToo environment we live in looks for guilt and is intent on nailing all the "bad guys" to the wall. And it is bad guys it seeks to crucify and god forbid that you should have any compassion or understanding for the man's side of any story.
Plus, I'm banned from Cyburbia, so I'm sure everyone assumes the worst about my motives for writing about it. All of that makes it extremely hard to explain it the way I would like to explain it.
I've done as well as I have on Hacker News in part because there is a long history of me having male friends. I was a girl gamer and my gaming buddies -- mostly guys -- were enormously supportive of me in my teens.
I also had friends on Cyburbia as well and some of them were men.
When I joined Cyburbia, I was a full-time homemaker still and a part-time college student. I was probably also going through serious withdrawal from medication at the time that I joined.
I went to GIS School the summer of 2002 and I guess I probably joined Cyburbia not long after that. Going to GIS School saved my life because they put me on something like ten different prescription drugs so I could complete the school while reacting anaphylactically to the polluted air in the Los Angeles basin anytime I left the building.
When GIS school ended, twenty-two months of withdrawal from all those drugs began. At one point, I was awake for 39 hours straight and an utter loon because of it.
I also made a truly terrible first impression the day I joined Cyburbia. I joined a few days earlier than I had intended to join and I did so for the express purpose of picking a fight with people about the topic of homelessness, basically.
I came in with both barrels blazing to let everyone know how wrong they were. I then spent the next several months carefully minding my manners to prove I'm not actually a walking, talking shit show every step of the way nor an incorrigible troublemaker.
And under these enormously difficult circumstances where I had "bad impression" written all over me in giant flashing neon letters at least six-feet high, the people of Cyburbia were amazingly kind to me. And I spent a LOT of time there while mostly housebound thanks to my health issues and drug withdrawal.
I had lived a really private life and had basically always been a student or homemaker. I had no idea how to "be a professional."
Cyburbia was a space for urban planners to hang with other urban planners and make friends. It wasn't a super uptight space where everyone needed to be super professional all the time.
And I was facing a divorce after being married about half my life. I had no idea how to navigate a professional life nor the dating scene at that point.
In 2005, while I was still heavily involved with Cyburbia, the American Planning Association had its conference in San Francisco. I lived about 45 miles away, which was at least an hour and fifteen minutes drive in Bay Area traffic and potentially up to two hours.
Money was always tight and I had serious health issues, but I was able to arrange to go to the conference with a little help from my friends on Cyburbia.
One of those friends happened to publically announce on Cyburbia that he was willing to let someone crash on his couch at his condo if they were trying to attend on a budget. No one took him up on it so after a few days or something I asked if he would be okay with me taking him up on it.
That allowed me to attend two days of the conference without it being a hardship for me in terms of travel and expenses. Instead of driving, I took the train to San Francisco and spent the night at his place instead of having to pay for a hotel or try to travel back and forth between my home and San Francisco while very ill, etc.
This friend not only let me crash at his place, he helped me arrange transportation. Taking the train was his suggestion and it was very helpful to me.
He had been a good friend, someone who had my back in arguments on Cyburbia and took me seriously in debates because he felt I was smart. We had exchanged private messages at times and there was nothing at all wonky about his offer.
This offer was not made to me personally. It was made publically on the forum we both hung out on to anyone wanting to attend the conference and facing budget issues.
There was no trickery or manipulation involved.
But to his surprise, there was also no couch at this place that was some kind of time share I guess. So we ended up spending the night in the same bed and that night wasn't spent platonically.
Mostly so far so good, except he failed to bring a condom which he knew ahead of time was something I expected because of my health issues. That detail is most of why I never wanted to see him again romantically and it became a point of contention between us.
At some point, he made an ugly remark to me on Cyburbia that I took as subtext for "Bitch! How dare you dump me over that detail!" This incident contributed to me leaving Cyburbia for a lot of years before returning briefly in 2018 for a few months (which is when I was finally banned).
To be clear, he was not The Reason I left Cyburbia. Had other things been different, I might have hashed it out with the other mods -- he was on the moderating team, so I felt his ugly remark was an abuse of his position of power there -- but his behavior was never THE Big Problem with Cyburbia in my eyes.
As far as I know, he told no one we were intimate that night. I told another friend -- also on the moderating staff -- and that friend later asked me some questions about the incident.
Looking back on it, his inquiry was probably part of some kind of investigation though I wasn't told that at the time and I was pretty naive and still probably fairly heavily medicated most of the time. I didn't lambaste the man I had spent the night with and didn't suggest he was guilty of anything for having spent the night with me, which may not have been what they expected to hear.
I don't really want to make a lot of commentary on the incident at this point in time. I just want to tell the story.
Maybe at a later date I will do some analysis and hypothesizing. And maybe not.
I recently participated in a discussion on HN about a piece titled My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community. It tells a tale that more or less begins with a young woman going to a conference and sharing an AirBnB with a man to save money and things going badly.
That's a large part of why this is being written and also why I don't wish to add commentary or opinion to the tale at this point in time.
This is not a rebuttal of anything she wrote. This is not commentary on anything she wrote.
Reading her story simply made me remember these events in my own life which have some really small similarity to her story in that she and I both managed to attend a professional conference in part because we saved money by staying with some man who was also attending.
If this were a post on Cyburbia, it would probably be marked AIB ("As inspired by") to indicate "Oh, that piece made me think of this" basically.
Footnotes
If it seems weird that I was friends with multiple moderators: I was on the moderating staff myself for a time.I was just a low-level mod in charge of my own sub (for Citizen Planners) and had no mod powers outside of that sub and eventually stepped down from my moderating position. My choice to step down had nothing at all to do with this incident.
After publishing the piece, someone emailed me about it, someone upset that I had written it. My recollection is they felt it somehow "hurt" the person who had written the piece about her negative experience in the Scala community.
I'm sorry she was hurt but I agree with some of the remarks on Hacker News to the effect that men are expected to be adults in sexual situations and women are routinely assumed to be victims with no agency.
I'm aware that many women are socialized from birth to "be nice" and not tell people no when they are demanding hugs and kisses. I did not raise my own children that way and I remarked on that in comments.
If you are a woman who wants a real career, you need to behave like an adult and take responsibility for your own choices and not assume that men are all going to be perfect gentlemen or something. This may require you to rethink some of the things with which you have been inculcated.
No, that does NOT give abusive, rapey men a PASS for bad behavior. It just acknowledges that things get muddy when social expectations are in flux -- as they are currently with women as a group still in the process of leaving the default homemaker role behind -- and if women want to be paid like men, they need to be responsible for their part of the equation like men.