zlacker

I’m a white cis male, and I work as a software engineer at a Silicon Valley unicorn. My employer is a perennial darling of the HN crowd, and is likely to continue its rocket ride in the years to come.

I’ll be completely candid here: I have some kind of problem with women. This isn’t to say that I don’t like women or don’t want women to succeed. I just don’t want to associate with or be seen around women. I’m sure there’s some kind of deep reason for this, but I haven’t exactly been looking for it.

On the other hand, I’m a huge believer in the “live and let live” principle. I found a good way of reconciling these two sides of my personality. Whenever I’m thrust into a situation in which I must interact with women, I gracefully extricate myself from it.

I’m very sneaky about this too. Sometimes my departure can be performed swiftly, but other times I must maneuver over a period of days or weeks to get myself away from an unpleasant situation. I’m never overt about it, I never hurt anyone in the process, and I’m pretty confident that no one has any idea that I’m like this.

In the past I’ve had to abandon projects I was working on, and even ditched maintainership of a popular open source project because a female coworker started contributing to it. Given that I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades, I’m willing to say that I’d do more or less anything to get away from women, as long as no one gets hurt. Yes, it might take a while, and I might need to make some sacrifices, but I’ll eventually get away.

Of course this started way before Twitter mobs and cancel culture became a thing, so I can’t claim prescience. But I do permit myself a little smugness at this point in time. I think I’m pretty much cancel-proof.

>>c5o49t+(OP)
Thank you for admitting this.

>>c5o49t+(OP)
Your methods and conclusions make no sense - associating with women doesn't get you canceled, Kevin Spacey didn't molest any women as far as I know.

Smugness makes no sense when what it appears is you have some deep rooted psychological issues that need addressing.

>>c5o49t+(OP)
My knee-jerk reaction was misogyny.

Then, no, you're describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynophobia

> Gynophobia should not be confused with misogyny, the hatred, contempt for and prejudice against women

Ok. That's sad. Best wishes.

But then, finally, your admitted smugness bothers me, as it reveals a deep lack of empathy for woman and why the culture is necessarily going through these fits and throws.

To what degree is your “live and let live” actually “live and let live or die, it's not my problem”?

>>c5o49t+(OP)
We bend in favor of comments that share personal experience, but after rereading this one several times, I think it crosses into trolling ("I’d do more or less anything to get away from women", etc.) and have banned the account.

Edit: also, please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post. We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613077.