Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

Considering the dangers of things like this happening to guys in our industry, what would you suggest as the safe behavior for a (straight) male around women in professional settings?

Would it be too much to:

1) heavily curtail his communication to only professional, safe topics

2) drink only non-alcoholic drinks; do no drugs of any kind

3) politely refuse (or ignore) any spoken or non-spoken invitation or innuendo

4) avoid any time alone with a member of the opposite sex

Too paranoid or just too little?

View on HN

Check out the social media presences of people you interact with daily.

The woman in the article apparently deleted 60K of her tweet history. That right there would be a red flag for me; people that spend that much time on social media sometimes exhibit very misanthropic behavior, in my experience.

If I were in the game industry, I might consider the Pence Rule...

I'd probably just avoid any fandom interactions; the possibility of interactions with unstable people is just unacceptably high.

It was originally the Billy Graham rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham_rule

That seems almost like victim shaming though, like he is "dressing like he wanted it" or it's his fault for leaving his doors unlocked.

IMO if you're not doing anything illegal you shouldn't have to alter your behavior just because other people are terrible.

Well I am more interested in personal safety than scoring justice points. If I was a woman I probably would avoid dressing provocatively in certain neighborhoods/times of day and drinking heavily with strangers, so I guess it's only fair.

As much as it hurts to say it, this seems like the safe way to err on the side of caution.

These things can also happen outside of professional settings. In the current climate, if you are a male you need to be extremely careful and try to check well if the person you're interacting is emotionally stable. And this needs time, there are no shortcuts. And even if everything goes well, it's very difficult to protect against accusations of sexual assault if someone changes their mind after the fact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com