It Seems to be an Uncrackable Problem

I don't expect this site to ever get traction. This is a super hard topic to address well and no matter how well I do it, it effectively goes nowhere.

I spoke openly about sexual assault on Hacker News while posting openly as female on an overwhelmingly male forum. This comment by me is one of my most upvoted comments there and people thanked me for it.

In spite of how careful I was, I knew speaking about such subjects publicly was a political act and I knew speaking on them as a woman on an overwhelmingly male forum was inherently extremely challenging and at least once someone tried to suggest that my decision to do so was evidence I'm still extremely screwed up. I've written about that elsewhere and probably linked to it before on this site.

Hacker News is the first forum I participated in substantially without ever making a single friend. Genevieve was a con artist who used me to get in good with a wealthy man she knew through Hacker News and then burned me to secure her position.

I knew she was lying to him about me because he told me once that she was talking trash about me. He said so publicly.

She was doing on Hacker News what I had done elsewhere: Making friends with a lot of people to try to make her life work and she had been molested, so she was likely contacting people open on Hacker News about having been molested as children.

She once told me her best friend was someone who posts under the handle btilly whom I knew best as a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse who chose to post openly on Hacker News about such subjects.

His name is on record in various comments on the site as Ben Tilly. He claims to be a brother of Meg and Jennifer Tilly, but not listed on Wikipedia.

Genevieve was big on name dropping. She had no real accomplishments to her own name and was big on social climbing and bragging about all the important people she knew, so his famous sisters made their supposed friendship brag worthy.

This site -- Einstein Riding a Llama -- was born because I have long observed there is a dearth of resources for men impacted by sexual violence and crimes. Unsurprisingly, btilly doesn't appear to be healed up. He most likely hasn't had the good fortune I have had in getting extraordinary support from a series of extraordinary people.

He has baggage -- a LOT of it -- and odds are extremely high he simply took his good friend's word for what happened and believed whatever lies she told about me and never checked her story. So he essentially gave me the cold shoulder on Hacker News and I was aware he was doing so and I knew he most likely did so because he was helping Genevieve cut me out socially per her desire to do that.

I most often saw his comments on topics like childhood sexual assault and I didn't want him squeeing at me in public about how I am the awesome sauce and everyone should adore me and agree with me. I also didn't want him writing to me privately "because we have a mutual FWEND!" and trying to bond with me over our mutual political activist type comments on Hacker News about sexual trauma.

I was glad a man participated on Hacker News and like me chose to be open about his firsthand experience with abuse. I have reason to believe it's shockingly common and most men keep it a secret and never seek help and just go through life carrying this garbage without ever sorting it or putting it down or trying to.

But I didn't really want to have anything to do with him. I felt that had disaster waiting to happen written all over it.

So I viewed Genevieve's malicious behavior as having one silver lining: It created a situation where btilly and I both chose to speak on this same topic and never spoke to each other.

Presumably, that means he was unable to find meaningful criticism of my remarks because he was likely actively looking for an excuse to tear me apart and never did.

This is an inherently challenging problem space to address. I've spent decades working on trying to figure out what works to actually heal someone and I think I'm healed, but I still have no idea how to package it for public consumption and have it get meaningful traction.

To me, this story sums up why, though I probably am failing to adequately explain what I see and telling it doesn't guarantee anyone else will see what I see.