For a lot of years now, I have been tangling with someone from a country with a better track record than the US for women's rights. It has been both a personal growth experience and also infuriating much of the time.
He picked a public fight with me on Aug 21, 2010. The details of that discussion made me realize the weirdness in our public interactions were likely rooted in him finding me attractive, which was news to me because before that I had absolutely no idea that was the case.
He's more polite than most men and never gave me the hubba hubba, nice TITS, baby! vibe I'm typically overly sensitive to and extremely quick to assume.
Within 24 hours, he emailed me to apologize. The exchange was brief and polite and in the course of the exchange, he mentioned a girlfriend. I took this as polite code for "I'm not hitting on you. Let's not have any unfortunate misunderstandings."
I thanked him and essentially forgot about it. He was uncomfortable talking to an attractive woman because he had a girlfriend. No harm, no foul. It's all good. I so don't care and have better things to worry about.
In December 2010, I was contacted by a troubled trans youth I refer to on my blogs as Genevieve. We became fast friends and she knew this guy and adored him as "the father she never really had." I bit my tongue and didn't mention my opinion that he's kind of a jerk.
It's been fifteen years. Some of the details are lost to the fog of time but at some point he offered to help me and it's likely Genevieve was encouraging him to help me.
In the roughly nine months I was close to Genevieve, she increasingly was plotting to get he and I together so he could be her father and I could be her mother and we could be her imaginary happy little family she never had.
I kept telling her "Leave it ALONE. Shut up about the man to me if you want BOTH of us to keep helping you." And she just couldn't do it.
Genevieve had a lot of personal quirks and spoke of so many people as "my sister" that it took me some time to realize she was an only child. So when she first mentioned "J's wife" -- and we did call him J -- I thought she meant common law wife because they were living together and had a child together and I thought she was just being polite and respectful to leave out the detail that they weren't actually legally married.
But over time I realized that this troubled youth who had so much more contact with J than I did really believed he was married WHILE plotting to get he and I together etc. And one day I asked her "What makes you think he's married? J is not married. How does he talk about her with you that you think she's his wife?"
This was one of many incidents over multiple years that led me to conclude that his status as someone shacked up with a young woman and having children with her but not married was a closely guarded secret that few people actually knew.
His casual mention of a girlfriend the first time we exchanged emails wasn't code for "I'm not hitting on you. Let's not have any unfortunate misunderstandings." It was actually code for "I'm hoping to marry you and want you to know I'm actually available, something which isn't common knowledge."
I knew Genevieve about six weeks when I concluded that being trans was not her big issue. Her big issue was that her parents were horrifically abusive and she had spent like a year or more marshalling extensive online support from smart, talented and often wealthy people yet none of them knew how to get her out of that situation. No one knew how to surgically extract her from her insane, horrible parents.
Without telling her, I vowed to extract her if at all possible. I didn't tell her because Genevieve was a walking talking information security disaster zone, her parents had her doped up on medication without telling her the drugs she was on and I knew she realistically had one good shot at escaping. If the first attempt failed, it would become vastly harder to get her out.
I named her Genevieve to protect her psychologically from the abuse while I worked at getting her out. That process looked like that Bedazzled scene where he says he wants a big Mac and a coke and a bus magically appears, she orders for him and afterwards he says "I could have done this MYSELF! I even had to pay for it!" -- while he COMPLETELY misses her magical change of outfit and hairstyle that happens between the bus showing up and then being on the bus.
Her parents had money and power. The people helping her and failing to get her out had more money and power. I was a divorced single mom going steadily deeper in debt.
I had no idea how in over my head I was and no means to determine how bad it was. After she got out, she needed J's money.
I dumped her in his lap and said nothing while she burned me, ran around telling lies about me etc. I didn't WANT credit for the surgical extraction.
Genevieve thought getting out would be the END of her troubles. I knew it would be the beginning of a process that falls under "Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it." I wanted no one to blame me and come looking for my head on a platter.
I blackmailed him. I made it clear to him that if you ever hope to sleep with me, you will do right by Genevieve.
He stuck around long after his pampered first world fantasies died in the fire of this debacle and continued to keep her alive long after he began to bleed from it.
I met them both via Hacker News. When I joined, he was one of the top three people on the leaderboard.
I'm the highest ranked woman there because of my relationship to him, though not in a casting couch manner. Unlike Dan Tasman, owner of Cyburbia, and Josh Millard, then owner of Metafilter, he let me stay in his social circle and that's all he really did other than continuing to let me stay while I fell on my face and his blood pressure shot through the roof, terrified I would stupidly take him down with me.
Being the only woman on the leaderboard of Hacker News is a completely meaningless and useless accomplishment. I'm not invited to the party. I never will be.
The only man there who knows me well enough to vouch for my character CAN'T. It's strictly against the rules and would amount to murdering my reputation and giving me NO hope of EVER being taken seriously because he has a conflict of interest.
Having spent some time hoping to marry me, anything he could possibly say about me would tell other men "Do this whore a favor if you want to stay in good with Mr. Big." After that, nothing I did would ever get me taken seriously as a sincere business person.
I had no idea when I joined that his frequent replies to me meant I was under his protection and he had called dibs on me. Anyone who was anyone viewed me as off limits. He was free to pursue me without real competition.
I didn't know that until he stopped speaking to me and my participation on the site got substantially rougher.
I've stopped participating on HN. Last I looked, he had also stopped participating.
It was an interesting hobby for some years while I worked at not dying from my incurable genetic disorder. It will never further my career in any way and has done egregious harm to any career aspirations I have.
There are no girls allowed in the old boys club and there never will be because without a close relationship to someone like J, you can't learn the rules and with a close relationship to someone like J, you're nothing but a piece of ass who will be tolerated as a bauble on his arm and nothing you do will ever change that.
Nor can he fix it. Through no fault of his own. There's just no path for it that leads to taking a woman seriously on her merits while adequately inculcating her with the appropriate code of honor.
Genevieve and I called him J because early on, I asked her how to pronounce his foreign name and it quickly became apparent she knew less than I did though she was happy to confidently give me an obviously incorrect pronunciation of Muh-theedge.
Most likely, it's something like Mattyoo, ending in a French U. It's the Dutch equivalent of Mathews and his first name is not pronounced the way the French pronounce Jacques.
Jacques is the Dutch equivalent of Jacob or James.
I just call him Jack, having given up on the whole thing years ago. Though I did eventually learn to spell his name: It's I before E except after C and in some weird words like Mattheij.
Footnote
I "blackmailed" him because he was already her friend and claiming he was willing to help her but I felt he didn't really understand what was involved and because I was certain she would soon be dead if I did nothing but without someone to help her once she was out, leaving wasn't likely to be much better. I certainly didn't have the resources she needed.
"Put the thumb screws to him" might be a more accurate phrasing.