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Hacking my Vagina

scanlime.org

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Re: Hacking my Vagina

#171

Post by twowaway »

mikeash wrote: post #139
trhtrsh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My friends call me Beth."

It's her middle name. Not uncommon to go by one's middle name.

I appreciate your stubborn loyalty, it's commendable and, in a way, cute. In this case you're wrong though:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/micahdowty/5150806818/in/photos... http://www.flickr.com/photos/micahdowty/4698425505/in/photos... http://www.flickr.com/photos/micahdowty/4371698700/in/photos...

(Just a few self-photos from Beth's public Flickr stream; all pics are work-safe. This is an extremely cool hacking article, btw, regardless of the author's gender history.)

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#172

Post by cup »

kephra wrote: post #168
scanlime wrote: post #143

Hey, this is beth from scanlime.org. I was doing my best to keep the site up, but it looks like Dreamhost just pulled the plug. I'm pretty annoyed with this.

oh HN managed a DDoS again 608 points should be around 60.000 visitors. Thats something any site should be able to handle, but ... http://dreamhost.com/servers/vps/ UNLIMITED ... till they pull the plug lol But it might also just be that the site is overloaded. I sometimes get an "Error establishing a database connection" and sometimes "Problem loading page". So there is still a server who desperately tries to answer…

The post is also on the front page of the technology subreddit so that is probably pulling in a few thousand more people too.

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#173

Post by rmc »

kdazzle wrote: post #169
zeteo wrote: post #5

I wonder if an article called "Hacking my Penis" would ever last long the HN front page.

Being a generally excellent article aside, there are really very few articles on HN that deal with women, and even fewer that have a feminist bent, such as this one could be easily argued to have. There is also a noticeable lack of women in tech, so an article for and about women is more notable and interesting than articles about dudes wanting to be or being entrepreneurs. Those are being written roughly the same wa…

In other words, we're all hackers here. If you want to see cock stuff, Just do it.

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#174

Post by rmc »

victorhn wrote: post #84

This is not meant to be a troll post, but just sincere curiosity. From the site "My full name is Micah Elizabeth Scott, but I used to be Micah Dowty prior to Fall 2010. My friends call me Beth." How can a woman who used to be a man can have a vagina? is there some kind of surgery? do you keep your sensitivity to be able to use vibrators?

Is Micah a male name? I'd have thought female initially.

Sometimes names can be different genders in different countries. I'm in Ireland, and here Rory is a male name, but apparently in USA it's a female name. The world is big and weird.

(And yes, modern surgery can create vaginas)

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#175

Post by rmc »

georgeorwell wrote: post #103

Warning: this is not a politically correct viewpoint, but nevertheless it's my perspective. The actual best thing about this post being in first place on Hacker News is not that it's a woman posting but that she has a Y chromosome and most people don't realize it. It's like her recently-acquired vagina is a new laptop to be hacked. It's still objectification of women if you try to turn into one and then objectify you…

By putting quotation marks around her & she, you're implying she is not female. Don't do that.

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#176

Post by tagada »

duaneb wrote: post #166
vacri wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does any article focusing on women's experience have to have someone come along and say 'it's hard for us men'?

I have no problem with articles on sex appearing on HN-I assume most of us are adults-but it's disappointing that there aren't similar topics for men. I'm not sure whether it's because male sexuality is narrower (yet, strangely, far more accepted if it's accepted at all) or because an article on female sexuality is more popular among the (presumably) male-dominated site. Anyway, this is the first article of it's kind…

There aren't similar topics for men because men's sexuality is thought as being bestial, mechanical and obscene and vulgar, while women sexuality is thought as being sensual, soft, sweet and so on.

Plus the nerd's world is full of men who are fascinated by women, and so they obviously are by women's topics. That's the reason why this article is that successful - even if the content and the descrition of the technical process is nice, there is nothing really incredible here, it's a soft easy reverse engineering and basic electronics hacking ... Nothing to justify the fist rank on HN during several days.

There should be a study about that. "How a women's sexuality topic make the nerds thinking with their wand only".

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#177

Post by nickik »

Intressting.

Going a step further would be to give the vibrator some AI. There is of course some need to monitor pleasure, I dont know if that is easily possible but one could implment some kind of AI that would to that.

The next step would be to sell it to millions of woman and analysie all the data. Would be intressting what could be figured out that way.

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#178

Post by georgeorwell »

makomk wrote: post #170
MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's still objectification of women if you try to turn into one and then objectify yourself. I don't buy in to the equivalence of building a better vibrator and objectifying women. Whether she is trans* or not has nothing to do with this writeup. Why belittle her accomplishments? This is an innovative idea, and it will get people thinking about different ways to please themselves or their lovers.

In some people's eyes trans women are objectifying women merely by existing, and those people tend to interpret everything they do through that lens. I'm a bit surprised to see a comment like that on HN though; this particular form of transphobia is basically a radical feminist thing, and I didn't know we had any radfems.

I'm not a radical feminist in the sense of "intercourse is rape" but hmmm... I think I have body modification phobia - so that would include women getting breast implants - and also exhibitionist phobia and also pull-the-wool-over-your-eyes phobia. (Although quite frankly, I wasn't fooled for long just based on the extremely masculine technical writing. I have never read anything that a woman wrote that looks remotely like that. Sorry.)

If the article had been open about scanlime's transexuality it wouldn't have irritated me nearly as much, but my interpretation was that it was (unconsciously, perhaps) designed to validate that she really is a woman. No, you cannot actually change sex, modulo some crazy gene therapy.

I know I was kind of unfair in my original comment. I think it was really me whinging that the HN crowd wouldn't be gushing like this if they all knew that scanlime was trans, and then me also getting annoyed at my guess that scanlime was complicit in this. I feel like I need to say sorry. Sorry. But I'm about to undo my apology :/

In general, I get really annoyed by queer people making a point about their sexuality (e.g. gay men who lisp), and in my mind this article counts as such. They annoy me as much as frat boys and drunk girls in skimpy clothes and people wearing leather collars. I basically think our society is hypersexualized and that this is bad.

I don't know if trans women are objectifying women merely by existing. Most men do this, so it's highly likely. My most heinous viewpoint is that queer/fetish sexuality is likely to be some kind of psychological defense mechanism against childhood trauma, and while good and perfectly acceptable if it works and life is functional, it's important to keep the source of it in mind. Oh and finally I'm very likely not a radical feminist because I don't believe in equality between men and women but rather a kind of complementarity. (Yes, universal suffrage is good, and woman should be allowed to have jobs, etc.)

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#179

Post by Tichy »

mistercow wrote: post #68
rizzom5000 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for stereotypes. The article deserves to be up voted because it is remarkably thorough and well written.

I agree that it deserves to be upvoted for those reasons. I just don't think that's necessarily the primary reason it has been upvoted. Examining the "would this be ranked this high if it were about penis hacking instead?" question is productive because it addresses that.

Almost everyday several articles that have nothing to do with women are voted up a lot on HN. I think that answers your question. You could perhaps ask if there would be a penalty for penis content, but that is a different question.
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