EDIT: the issue isn't the Hacker News audience; the issue is that you were wrong in your assumption that Dove was male, and your entire comment depended on that assumption. There is no audience for which you could write that comment where it would have been correct (though some audiences might have cheered it, that would be a fault, not a virtue, of theirs.)
One of the beautiful things about the HN community is that we expect and welcome disagreement -- but we hold it to high standards. We expect people to read whole comments and engage in the actual ideas expressed, not to skim and then rail at straw men. You are welcome here, and you are welcome to disagree with the ideas expressed in Dove's comment -- but we will not demean you by excusing low-quality, low-content, personally-targeted rants as the best you can do.
> "don't think this is really true ... in any online community."
Stick around and give us the opportunity to surprise you ;)
> "My comment would have been the same regardless of gender."
You might have intended the same point, but I suspect you would have articulated it differently. There were a few lines like "We probably are under more pressure than you" or "Everything is about you all the time anyway" that don't make sense directed toward a woman, for example.
> "direct to a blog post"
Thanks. I think that helps me articulate my own disagreement better (and also some agreement, though I won't focus much on that.)
In essence, you're approaching the issue from the perspective that talking about men's issues "silence" women's perspectives, and you believed Dove's comment was an uninvited insertion of men's issues. It wasn't. Instead, it was the same type of meta-commentary as the blog post -- it was about how to have the discussion effectively without silencing the relevant perspectives, specifically, why trying to "keep score" is an ineffective approach (as a direct response to a scorekeeping comment) and why that approach inherently silences key perspectives. The approach that says "group X has it worse than group Y" invites competition and pushback rather than understanding and collaboration. The natural consequence of a comparison is for people to argue the comparison, which takes the focus away from the actually-relevant issues, and thereby silences actually-relevant perspectives in favor of tangential perspectives and pointless noise-making.
In a broader sense: every "civil right" or "human right" happens at the intersection between people, groups, and/or institutions. Whenever we're talking about rights, we're talking about the boundary between what we are entitled to (both "to do" and "to be"), and what we are restricted from because it interferes with another. Whether we're talking women's rights, men's rights, LGBT rights, economic rights, religious rights, immigrant's rights, parental rights, children's rights, or any other type of rights, it's always about how we as a whole interact with each other. There are two conceptually different approaches to how we approach the discussion, and IMO one of them is far more effective than the other.
One approach is to treat rights as group-specific, and to create a hierarchy of rights violations. To say, this is a women's issue and it's worse than what men face, and talking about men experiencing literally the exact same thing is a distraction. This hierarchical approach (which the blog post criticizes in its quoted point #5) invites competition and one-upmanship and tribalism among "insiders" and "outsiders". It invites "patriarchy hurts men too" comments as a way for men to attempt to improve their position on the scoreboard.
The other, IMO better, approach is to treat rights as universal, and then to apply the universal to the specific. For example, all humans have the right to life, and we recognize that right is threatened by domestic violence, particularly for women. So we highlight that issue as a women's rights issue, but not exclusively so -- and we also recognize that solutions are not explicitly women's solutions. This approach invites us to hear women's perspectives and to elevate those perspectives because they represent a large part of the whole (and allows for women-only discussions to particularly highlight those perspectives, but does not treat that as the default expectation.) It also invites the broader community to participate in holistic understanding and unified, compassionate support. It invites us to treat each others' civil rights as participatory, to transform our own actions for the sake of one another, and to treat our underlying humanity as a uniting force that allows us to respect our differences and hold one another in high esteem.
Eventually, those "universal" rights have to be applied to an out-group or they are meaningless. There's no avoiding a conflict. Look at the hundreds of messages on this page which sum to "nothing is wrong, change nothing".
> "those "universal" rights have to be applied to an out-group"
Yes, absolutely! That's why I used the term "universal". They apply to everyone, not just favored groups.
> "hundreds of messages on this page which sum to "nothing is wrong""
A few. Most, you're reading uncharitably. I'd summarize the most common theme as more like "we've misidentified the precise problem, and as a result our solutions are ineffective or worse."
> "There's no avoiding a conflict."
Some types of conflict are essential and inevitable. Others are optional and unnecessary.
When you apply universal rights to a group that has been dehumanized, there is necessary conflict between those who wish to continue dehumanization and those who wish to end it.
But when you treat rights like a contest, you introduce unnecessary conflict, by creating incentives for various groups to try to knock one another down in order to compete for a more favorable spot in the hierarchy.
Focus on resolving necessary conflict, not artificially generating unnecessary conflict.
I don't think it's fair to blame the audience for what happened there. (Not to pick on you; people diss the HN community left and right all the time and say all sorts of things that aren't true, and I sometimes feel like standing up for what's good in it.)
By far the best thing about this thread is how many women have been posting their thoughts. That's excellent for the same reason that a systems programming thread with lots of systems programmers would be.
Dove said she’s a woman pretty clearly. And her comment didn’t make something that was about women all about men. She made it all about shit people deal with in their working life.
