
She’s Got Game - woldemariam
https://restofworld.org/2020/you-just-got-pwned-habibi/
======
noman-land
This is such an awesome mental image.

"When the hall flooded with nearly 3,000 women, some as young as 13 and others
in their 50s, it was a shock. “I definitely did not expect moms to come,”
Felwa said. Back then, it was mandatory for women to wear the traditional
black abaya, and often a headscarf, while in public. It was only when the
women walked through the doors into the all-female space that their abayas
slipped off to reveal an array of cosplay costumes."

~~~
hammock
This is what weddings are like (minus the cosplay) and it happens every week
across the world

~~~
groby_b
The "change into cosplay" part here is the relevant part. Thinking you're one
of only a few, and for the first time in your life discovering that you're far
from alone is an amazing moment.

I wish that happened every week across the world, but most of us will be lucky
to experience this once or twice.

------
outsider7
I lived in KSA for about 2 months doing post delivery services on a project at
the client's office. As I started befriending some of the personnel, I found
one of them had a daughter from his first wife. He was very angry at her and
blamed her for the child, basically saying that she had become pregnant on
purpose so that he would have to cancel his trip to Europe where he was
planning on finding his fourth wife. He was the fairer and kinder man of the
bunch over there. Most of them were mostly busy making stunts to have some
time off at work and look good, not caring at all about work or worst, create
problems so as to gain leverage against our company for negociation. They
separated the immigrants workers in poor shared offices from the KSA citizens.
Offices were also missing drinkable water even thought it was in a capital
city (I could see skyscrapers...)...

Ever since that trip, while I hope they'll see some positive change for
women's right, I fear the opposite might happen to our countries due to low
demographics. I don't believe we are benefiting from a relationship with that
country at all, there is not point in even taking time to deal with them.

------
baybal2
Saudi Arabia is a Middle Eastern North Korea.

America's fascination with it is beyond understanding.

How can the world's most libertarian nation fawn over one that is the least
free?

~~~
yoda97
Is it really that hard to understand?

~~~
erik_landerholm
yeah, it is. I get that they have oil, that doesn't explain the fascination. I
could see an attitude of necessary evil, but a lot of americans think the
saudis are some kind of beacon in the middle east.

~~~
adventured
> but a lot of americans think the saudis are some kind of beacon in the
> middle east.

A lot of Americans so on and so forth, supposedly.

For example, one could say a lot of Americans think Iran is better and are
fascinated with it (I see that premise on a frequent basis on HN and Reddit).
Why are some large groups of people in the US fascinated by Iran? Such
statements are, at best, opinions. I'd say that Iran is not better, they're
both similarly terrible on human rights, they're both extraordinarily violent
theocracies (Iran murdered thousands of protestors last year, while the US
media went out of their way to ignore it; contrast that with the Khashoggi
coverage - which tells you everything you need to know about who is fascinated
with Iran). In the US, the left is very sympathetic with Iran and they more
strongly dislike Saudi Arabia; and that's reversed for the right. Such
theocracies have dominated the Middle East since the end of the Islamic golden
age, over seven centuries ago. In Iran they murder gay people and deprive
their women of basic human rights as a matter of cultural routine, as in Saudi
Arabia. Both aggressively sponsor terrorism and proxy wars all over the Middle
East, fighting for influence and position. Some just pretend there is a
difference between the two.

~~~
phobosanomaly
Ok, I'm going to throw out an oversimplification here, but I think it's
representative of a common college-educated American's image of Iran vs. KSA.

Iran is a large, middle-income country full of lots of regular folks who
wrestle with weird internal politics much like we do. Sure, they're a
theocracy, but we also overthrew the only democratically elected leader
they've ever had. I think Iranians are pretty easy to relate to. The US is
full of Irainians who moved here because they weren't willing to buy into the
theocracy.

KSA is a tiny, yet massively wealthy country full of spoiled princes drag-
racing Ferraris and employing de-facto slaves who is currently committing war
crimes in Yemen with weapons we sold them. A lot less sympathetic, and I'm not
familiar with a large Saudi expat population that fled because of disagreement
with the politics of the ruling monarchs.

~~~
adventured
Saudi Arabia isn't so tiny these days. They're #41 in population and climbing
rapidly. Their population is larger than Australia and will soon eclipse
Canada and Poland. In ~10-12 years they'll catch Spain and Ukraine in
population.

Iran - as with Iraq and others in the region - is of course seeing a similarly
rapid population expansion.

> middle-income country

Iran isn't a middle income country. Their GDP per capita places them at #95
(below Iraq) - around $5,500 - they're a very impoverished low-income nation.
That's comparable to Jamaica, South Africa and Guyana, far away from middle
income. To break into the middle income group you plainly have to approach the
global average on GDP per capita (or higher), around $11,000 and above will
get you into that discussion. Poland and Chile are middle income nations, with
roughly $15k in GDP per capita.

> Sure, they're a theocracy, but we also overthrew the only democratically
> elected leader they've ever had

Mohammad Mosaddegh was not democratically elected at all. He was specifically
appointed by a king (the Shah of Iran) and feudal lords that ruled the Majlis.
It's one of the great propaganda myths of modern times that Mosaddegh was
somehow democratically elected, while it's a total fraud of a premise. Iran
has never been democratic, not even remotely close, not at any point in their
entire history.

Even Wikipedia openly supports the fact that Mosaddegh wasn't democratically
elected, and instead he was appointed:

"On 28 April 1951, the Shah appointed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister after the
Majlis (Parliament of Iran) nominated Mosaddegh by a vote of 79–12."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh#Appointment...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh#Appointment_as_Prime_Minister)

The Majlis itself was not democratically elected. It almost exclusively
consisted of large land owners that were de facto feudal lords.

This would be like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump or Barack Obama (a former
President or similar) appointing the new President after the US Senate voted
on who to nominate. Absolutely nobody would think that was a democratic
process. And it wasn't a democratic process when Iran did it.

Today, the same people that claim Iran was a democracy in 1951, simultaneously
claim the US is not a democracy. It's a rather hilarious spin if one is
capable of being objective about the propaganda behind that myth-building
push.

~~~
sweeneyrod
> Their GDP per capita places them at #95 (below Iraq) - around $5,500 -
> they're a very impoverished low-income nation.

That's nominal not adjusted for cost of living. For the latter they're close
to the world average, above Brazil and not far below Argentina. Possibly more
relevantly, "middle-income" is defined by the World Bank
([https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/90...](https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-
bank-country-and-lending-groups)), which in fact categorises Iran as "upper-
middle-income".

Iraq isn't actually that poor, it's just terrible for mysterious other
reasons.

------
DoreenMichele
Makes me think of a meme or cartoon:

[https://me.me/i/cmdr-rheon-magerheon-replying-to-
griglager-t...](https://me.me/i/cmdr-rheon-magerheon-replying-to-griglager-
thi-s-sug-is-c97c16ad6a7848c88ad40b703fd340cd)

Though when I was a teen "gamer girl" \-- mostly RPGs -- I looked like a cross
between the two images. You can be a gamer girl and also be pretty and like
nice clothes.

I was usually the only girl there. Glad to see progress on this front across
the globe.

------
sneak
This reminds me of the gender-based discrimination in Banks’ Culture novel The
Player of Games.

It’s still astounding to me to see a country keep half of its population in
effective slavery.

~~~
sukilot
It's not freedom, but it's not slavery.

~~~
klyrs
Women are effectively owned by men. They can do _very_ little without
permission of a male guardian. There's been a bit of progress in the last few
years, but for example marriage is a contract between two men amounting to
transfering ownership of the bride.

~~~
DoreenMichele
That's not as radically different from Western culture as Western culture
likes to pretend it is.

We have traditions like a man asking her father for her hand in marriage. We
change her last name to signify she has transferred identity from her father's
clan to her husband's. We treat marriage as very much a financial contract and
divorce tends to hurt women financially much more than it does men.

Etc.

~~~
klyrs
Just this week a woman who's spoken in favor of a man controlling his wife's
vote was featured at the RNC. In my family, three of my female cousins were
forbidden by their husbands from voting, employment, opening bank accounts or
holding credit cards, and learning how to drive. They were evangelical
Christians. Two have since stood up for themselves and divorced their
husbands, one persists and still considers her obeisance a duty to god. I
really don't understand why you're getting downvoted, Doreen.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_I really don 't understand why you're getting downvoted, Doreen._

I am getting downvotes because anytime a woman tells Western men they don't
treat their women as wonderfully as they like to imagine, they kick the living
crap out of her and let her know she needs to SFTU because women have it so
very good here. It's par for the course.

~~~
pcf
Western men "kick the living crap out of" women who speak their mind like
that? And tell her "to STFU"?

I think you're confusing the West with countries like Saudi Arabia.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Mmm, hmmm.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317792)

~~~
luckylion
You are mixing up traditions that are optional, voluntary and more role play
than anything else (as if it was common that a Western man in a Western
country would ask the father of the bride to be _instead_ of her; it's, for
some people, a formality _after_ the couple has decided to get married, and
everybody plays their part) with state law with heavy punishment.

Similarly: it's tradition to say "until death do us part" in marriage vows,
but essentially nobody means it, divorce is common.

"There are crazy drops in a sea of sane people" != "There's a sea of crazy
people, but I've seen a sane drop or two".

~~~
DoreenMichele
I'm really not mixing up anything. Please, kindly, don't tell me I simply have
muddled thinking and no real validity to my point of view.

I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of
HN. I spent nearly six years homeless while a member here. I remain dirt poor.

Meanwhile, some of the men on the leaderboard are millionaires who made their
millions in part by networking via HN.

The figures for women in leadership positions at Fortune 500 companies is
something like 6 percent female CEOs and 17 percent overall. There appears to
be one and only one woman on HN to have ever graced the leaderboard, a list of
100 names that has changed over time. So my brief appearance there puts me in
a league of my own and well under one percent of those names is someone who
posts as openly female.

Yet all most men here want to know if they email me is if I will sleep with
them. So HN has been a huge networking fail for me and I remain dirt poor.

Since that poverty means I can't afford to eat today, I'm a hair crankier than
usual about the whole thing.

Sexism is alive and well in the West and the gains we've made fall very far
short of anything resembling equality.

I think I'm done here for now. My story is not remotely a secret. It's galling
how I get treated here and then told to quit my whining about my poverty.

In discussions of gender equality, so it's on topic. It's just not welcome and
this is a silencing tactic that helps ensure I can never get any kind of
remedy.

~~~
saagarjha
Doreen, as someone who is here fairly often, I appreciate the perspective you
provide, as it’s one that’s uncommon here and I (and judging by the fact that
you have been on the leaderboard) and Hacker News finds very valuable. While
I’m nowhere near being a millionaire, I’m young, male, and fairly removed from
being in any sort of poverty; I think you would be right in your claim that on
the leaderboard there is probably nobody with the same experience as you,
while you could say I bring comparatively little that is novel “to the table”
if you will.

That being said, a couple things you’ve mentioned that I wanted to talk about:
one is that you’re one of the only women, or poor people on this site (I
noticed you’ve qualified it with “leaderboard”, but I suspect you know as well
as I do that this is highly correlated to “how much do you use the site”). I
won’t claim in any way that this group forms a majority of course, but I have
run women who qualify themselves as being a woman in pretty much every thread
where it would make sense to do so. I see people who are poor, perhaps living
in countries where wages are an order of magnitude lower than they are in say
the US, some that don’t have a roof over their heads or have been skipping
meals. So these people are here, and I am glad to hear from them just as I am
glad to hear from you as well.

In addition, you’re not really being fair to Hacker News with your claim that
men here would only email you to see if you would be interested in them. Some
might, of course–as you mention, sexism is a real thing, it exists everywhere
including in what we would call “western countries”. But it’s something that
Hacker News is not about, nor is it acceptable behavior; the majority of men
are not how you’re describing them to be. You mention that you haven’t been
able to network effectively, but of course Hacker News skews heavily into
recruiting people with college degrees in computer science, maybe multiple
programming languages under their belt, maybe a fresh graduate or someone with
experience at another software engineering company. We can talk all about
whether this is what Hacker News should be about, and perhaps if it should
branch out into being more welcoming to people of your background, but I just
wanted to point out that I don’t think that you can necessarily correlate your
experience with “nobody wants to network with me because I talk about being a
woman and also being poor”.

To be clear: we’re not saying there isn’t a problem in the US with sexist, or
trying to downplay your hardships both in life and on Hacker News in
particular. But on a topic of “is life worse for women in Saudi Arabia or the
United States” your personal experience with sexism is anecdotal and answers
the question “ _is_ there still sexism in the United States”.

