>Interestingly enough, there's not much animosity toward trans-men. These ground exclusively concern themselves with trans-women.
I second this. Maybe it's some echo chamber effect or a minority stirring shit up, but I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less? I don't think we have much of a dog in this race so I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN considering most of us here are men. Boring day at work?
I do feel bad for the women's Olympics, but I'd like to ask the Olympics committee what the hell were they thinking long before I start any kind of anti-trans crusade. This is one discussion that doesn't seem to be happening much. The diatribe is as always directed among the proles and the decisionmakers get a free pass. Someone must have said, "Yes, lets allow a 35 year-old recently transitioned man to compete with early 20 year-old women," and some approval process must have happened. Those are the people you want to start asking the hard questions, not look at LH and blame her for participating in the Olympics that she's allowed to participate in.
Or as someone else put it: "A female POC just lost her spot to a white, middle-aged, male-born son of a billionaire. This is supposed to be progressive?"
The Olympics has been dealing with the question of womanhood for a very long time. For a while they were literally stripping and groping female athletes. Later they did chromosome testing, until they discovered intersex individuals who confound that theory.
Even their current testosterone-levels theory is imperfect, since some people have obviously female bodies but inordinately high testosterone levels.
So they seem to be muddling along about as well as they can. If they want to have a separate women's category, it's a question they're going to have to answer.
The Olympics will eventually become a contest of the best humans, regardless of sex / gender. This is already how it is more or less today: people born with the right body types, into the right families, etc, will make it to the top.
This is the most elegant solution, but it's also functionally equivalent to "women can't do high level sports anymore"
I feel like women's sports is extremely cursed - a sporting competition with a handicap, except the handicap is not specified in the rules but is instead a randomly distributed quirk of biology, meaning that people have to judge who does or does not have it, except that the handicap is also an integral part of a person's identity...
(no I don't mean to say being female is a disability, the context is sports)
They're already in an arms race about performance enhancing drugs. And even without those, there are artificial limitations like age in women's gymnastics, because of the damage it does. Football players are grappling with decades of head injuries.
If you want to know the very best a human can do, you will destroy them. It's just not a question we can safely know the answer to.
So it's never really going to be fair, and we need to ask a different question. Exactly what that question is remains to be seen.
> I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN
Take a look around, I think you'll find transmen comprise a much larger proportion of this community (and tech communities in general) than the general population.
There's also a lot of desire on HN to comment on political topics while pretending not to comment on political topics. Things like gender identity, women in tech, genetic differences, etc are all wonderful smokescreens to allow us to post politically but maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest.
> maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest
Some of us have an academic interest in biology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology, etc. while still aligning with the overall origin of this site as a place to discuss the latest in news as relates to technology startups.
It is unfortunate that this politically charged topic is so misunderstood and that ignorance of the basic science behind it is so prevalent, but here we are.
> Things like gender identity, women in tech, genetic differences, etc are all wonderful smokescreens to allow us to post politically but maintain a solid veneer of simply having an intellectual discussion on a topic of general interest.
Especially when it comes to these topics, I imagine it's very easy for people who aren't affected by these issues to "debate" them *because* they aren't the ones directly affected by it.
> The rest is just weaving arguments for the fun of it.
Interesting discussion is the HN way!
Some enterprising scientists may have some cutting edge insights reviewing HN comments on technology topics, no reason to suspect otherwise for social sciences.
TERFs primarily don't focus on trans men because they see them as misguided women. You can find many TERFs blaming trans women and "gender ideology" for convincing butch-identified lesbians that they're actually straight men. Personally I think this denies trans men the dignity and autonomy to define themselves as they see fit, but then again, I would say that, I'm trans.
It's ironic that this transphobe fantasizing has led to non-conforming cis women being harassed in the bathroom. Whatever minimal problem there was with women being harassed or assaulted in the bathroom by men or AMAB people has been completely surpassed by these fantasies sparking a witch hunt.
Not sure what part you're referring to but it's more or less overt that many of them think trans men are basically women. This combined with what they say about trans women is most of where the accusations of essentialism come from.
> TERFs primarily don't focus on trans men because they see them as misguided women.
Not well versed in feminist theory, but I’m curious whether anyone has formally documented in the scientific literature these sorts of psychological attitudes.
Probably a cross-disciplinary masters thesis worthy topic if no one has done that research yet.
It's because there is no reason to have animosity toward a woman becoming a man. The main objections to MtF are about safety (a MtF will always be stronger and bigger than a woman on average) and fairness (should male born people get female scholarships, compete in women's sports?). A FtM is not hurting anything or taking any opportunities away from anyone really.
The scientific community may not yet have crafted any research on the specific question of attitudes towards transgender athletes, but it shouldn’t be hard to find the research if it exists.
> fairness (should male born people get female scholarships, compete in women's sports?). A FtM is not hurting anything or taking any opportunities away from anyone really
fairness is an issue when considering MtF, but not FtM? why exactly?
Transitioning female to male doesn't make you more likely to win Olympic weightlifting competitions in your new gender, so you'd be vanishingly unlikely to do it for the sake of gaining an advantage.
Keep in mind that transgender individuals are almost certainly, in general, and by regulation if they are transgender and an athlete, undergoing hormone therapies. In the case of estrogen treatment, that implies a reduction in muscle strength in addition to the other physical changes caused by the addition of estrogen and the removal of testosterone.
This is a factor in why there are regulations requiring testosterone levels below a certain amount in order to qualify in the women’s section of certain sporting programs.
>I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less?
It's really not that hard to understand. It's the same sort of thinking that motivates the slogan "don't punch down". Males aren't threatened by females identifying as men. But females are threatened by males identifying as women for many obvious reasons. For example, with self-id as the only criteria keeping men out of women's prisons, it undermines the protection women have against abuse from men while in forced proximity. A female in a male prison or male changeroom is a novelty, not a threat.
Seeing as how the historical perspective is almost directly reversed from what you claim, I'm going to have to be skeptical about this. The European-historical aversion to largely one-way nonconforming to gender and sexual roles (men acting as women being a problem, ditto male homosexual behavior) is pretty explicitly due to a rejection of (heterosexual) masculinity translating as a threat to that (heterosexual) masculinity.
Those currents run deep, and run through to today. And that's not to say that "but a guy might go in the girls' bathroom!" is not what bigots say, because as a prima facie claim that's certainly common--but I very much doubt, were we to see some unvarnished honesty, that bathroom fears are actually a primary motivator rather than a convenient battleground.
There is certainly a longstanding cultural thread of defending traditional manhood through explicit castigation of male deviants, but notably the source of the explicit castigation is largely from other males. The pushback against trans-women's acceptance as women isn't largely driven by men. It is pretty evenly distributed, or perhaps even more driven by women. The point is that these seem to be distinct phenomena driven by distinct concerns.
I don't have any hard numbers, but it is the impression I get from various organizations and legal challenges to trans legislation in the UK. The organized opposition seems to be largely driven by women.
I suspect it has much to do with the idea that trans-men are transitioning into a gender "in power." That is, adopting masculine social behavior and lifestyle allow transmen to enter the patriarchal fold and slip quite seamlessly into a male dominant society, as long as they remain unknown. Once they are known, the idea that they must be excommunicated or "proven" as female becomes imperative. Transmen are subject to inordinate degrees of violence like transwomen. This is all to say that cis men aren't as afraid, be it in washrooms or on a sports field, of transmen as much as transwomen.
Transwomen, on the other hand, are much more defined, in the eyes of a patriarchal society, by their rejection of masculinity in favor of femininity. To some cis-men, they appear as aberrations or duplicitous (hence the nickname "trap"), to some cis-women they appear as potential unfalsifiable unknowns, and a potential thing to be feared for sexual violence. Transwomen are thus caught in the crossfires of fear from both genders.
I don't think so, that's a work of fantasy and quite the leap.
It's probably more that in the grand scheme of things trans-men don't pose any sort of threat to other males. I don't recall ever discussing trans-men with my peers.
Trans women are seen as seeking female privileges (like the ability to compete against women in sports, which is easier than competing against men). Which enrages some people.
Trans men are seen as giving up their female privileges, to which everyone shrugs and says "you want less privilege? Fine by me!"
Of course men have privileges too, but I think many of men's privileges come from confounding variables. Like men are on average taller, and people are biased to view taller people as having more authority, so taller people are more likely to become CEOs etc.
Whereas women's privileges come from society compensating for men's privileges. So society sees women on average are smaller and physically weaker, and thus decides they need privileges like separate sports to compensate.
Trans women who went through male puberty often have the size advantage of men, so them also have the social privileges of women is seen as double dipping.
While for trans men it's the opposite, they're often small like women, but not afforded social protection for it.
Anyway that's just my theory why some people hate trans women more than trans men. I myself have sympathy for both cases, dysphoria sounds pretty awful.
Future post: "We have listened to our users, and we are removing ad-free paid search due to a lack of demand and [some excuses about how it's technically difficult to maintain it]."
We'll see which comes first. That post, or "Our Great Journey."
>Like a lot of white males, I read Ayn Rand’s bestselling novel Atlas Shrugged when I was 18.
>Rand’s simplistic Objectivist worldview couldn’t be better designed to appeal to sheltered middle-and-upper-class suburban white boys like me
>As soon as I befriended people who were not suburban white dudes, and once I understood that they had to work five times as hard to enjoy half of the privilege that I enjoyed, I realized that Rand was singing a heroic ode to the comfortable.
Stop posting racism that's wrapped up as self-flagellation. It's getting tiresome.
Alternatively, there is an argument to be made that these quotes are antiracist in the context of present society (in the US, although not exclusively).
You've answered your own question. Actual wisdom is difficult to attain and often times difficult to further express in spoken or written language (ie. "tacit knowledge", if you believe such a thing exists I suppose). The kind of wisdom you DO attain may not be socially acceptable, either. But, you still want to have the appearance in front of your friends, colleagues and potential "partners" that you are somehow wise. So you turn to statistics, and damn lies that follow.
ba doom cha! God, as a musician and fan of Ericsson's actual work, that one drives me bloody bananas. Ericsson's own book "Peak" is worth reading. One must assume the motivation to write some for lay people was at least partly out of frustration at hearing his academic work mis-quoted so damn much because of Outliers. It would make me CRAZY.
April last year, when this whole thing hit, we had people under throwaway accounts including myself speaking about this on HN, and as expected we hit a roadblock because anecdotes aren't data and whatever, so we were downvoted, called conspiracy theorists and other nonsense. There's ultimately nothing for any of us to gain in lying that we've been asked, by our doctors, going back to October of 2019, whether or not we've been to Wuhan (asked specifically and point blank).
There's a lot more that we know than we are willing to share because HN just isn't a good platform for this sort of discussion anymore. It's too politicized and too many bruised, sensitive egos that can't handle contrary thinking. So for the rest of you, you'll have to get used to constantly having to shift and re-evaluate what you think you "know" and how you feel about a certain thing today, and the kind of statements and comments you've made in the past based on events that you think did or did not happen (because you've been told, and you believe what you're being told by the big media) when, in fact, it may turn out that the "truth" was factually incorrect or hidden from you to begin with.
Take it however you may, just please don't shoot the messenger.
I agree. But people seemed to not be able to entertain the thought that doctors were aware something was happening back in October. In their minds, I think, if the big media did not have an article on it, then it doesn't exist. This is a grievous state of affairs for discussions, because it means NYT and others are effectively the Ministry of Truth for HN.
Dude, it's one thing sharing your experience, and a whole different to assume that doctors knew and are hiding something. Just because there were scattered cases here and there doesn't mean that the medical community could correlate them all and understand what they were dealing with.
Wait, what evidence is there that the virus was spreading in August 2019? From a quick Google search, this source [0] published not long ago claims they think earliest it could possibly have been was mid-October of 2019.
It spread in the fall of 2019, which is late September, October, November, and December. That would put it in line with spreading in the US in December.
Hey, that’s my post :-D I think it still holds up. The virus being “present” in the US in December isn’t the same as being spread widely.
This new NIH survey still offers no reason to doubt the timeline that the virus emerged around October 2019 in Wuhan and only became a serious threat in late November/December, when hospitalizations began to rise and some doctors started warning of a SARS re-emergence. A widespread COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan during August 2019 continues to seem unlikely to me.
What I remember was people arguing that it was present earlier where also making the argument that infection was widespread. And thus the case fatality ratio was 100 times lower than the 0.7% the Chinese were reporting.
no one is deleteing anything...they are simply learning, as science does, and noting that prior knowledge was incorrect.
That is fundamentally different from people screaming without evidence. A broken clock is right twice a day, but it is not an accurate clock at any point.
I'm sorry no, this is not "they are simply learning, as science does"
People were against this emotionally since Trump suggested it first and no one wanted to be seen agreeing with him on something, even though a broken clock can be right twice a day
> People were against this emotionally since Trump suggested it first and no one wanted to be seen agreeing with him on something, even though a broken clock can be right twice a day
Trump wanted to use some inappropriate names for the disease and wanted to ban travel for people holding PRC passports. Neither of those things make sense to do from a disease control standpoint. If you wanted to ban travel for people who had been in the area of exposure, that might make sense, but nation of passport isn't the way; and after not a whole lot of time, the disease had spread widely enough that there weren't really many places that should have been whitelisted.
We very regularly associate things with their origin. We did so almost this entire last year when we talked about variants of COVID-19. And in the early days of COVID-19, in China, in their airports, the virus was called "Wuhan virus" on signage. Those names were also used in news reports regularly. I agree that something like "kung flu" is inappropriate, but I don't agree that "China virus" or "Wuhan virus" are inappropriate, and don't think they were controversial until they were deemed as such for what seems like political reasons.
> wanted to ban travel for people holding PRC passports
Banning by passport makes some sense. We can't prevent US citizens from returning to their homes. But we can prevent others from traveling to the US. It might make sense to ban all passports except the US for flights originating from China, but then you end up dragging in connecting flights through China from other countries. In terms of a quick, easy to implement measure, that will at least reduce the number of imported cases, banning travel based on PRC passports seems logical.
> the disease had spread widely enough that there weren't really many places that should have been whitelisted
Surely, given that we do care about just controlling the numbers even if it is not perfect (like with "flatten the curve"), it makes some sense to focus on the epicenter.
> We can't prevent US citizens from returning to their homes.
SCOTUS has ruled that the US does have quarantine powers for medical emergencies, even for its own citizens. Maybe a complete ban if poorly orchestrated might run afoul of the Constitution, but a policy like "all travelers [US citizen or not] from X region must present at <specific port of entry>, whereupon they will be transferred to a quarantine facility for 14 days" would totally be fine. Note, for example, the way that the quarantine on dogs because of rabies is being handled.
> But we can prevent others from traveling to the US. It might make sense to ban all passports except the US for flights originating from China, but then you end up dragging in connecting flights through China from other countries.
Why should you exempt people whose only presence was via connecting flights? This generally involves long layovers inside of airports, where a large enough fraction is potentially susceptible to already be concerned about (due to local people making their flights), and you're likely to be spending a decent period of time on the plane with such people as well, too.
I'm not mad, I just have been taught that retcon'ing evidence to fit a narrative is not the same thing as science. It doesn't matter how well it fits or evidence, it should be rejected because the base structure of the argument fails.
These people aren't 'right' in the sense that they figured something out, they screamed about something without evidence.
Whatever happens next cannot change that fact. Its notable that what is happening is the evidence is getting constantly substituted to fit an explanation not the explanation emerging from the available evidence.
It absolutely had everything to do with Trump. He was slated to be the clear winner until two events (COVID-19 and George Floyd) presented political opportunities. In an election year, everything becomes about the election. People wanted to attack Trump at every turn, even when he suggested reasonable measures like controlling travel, and equally they wanted to ensure all blame was directed at Trump rather than the Chinese government or state governments or elsewhere.
To address your claim more directly, there was never any justification to dismiss the lab leak theory, or claim it was debunked (as many news outlets did), or censor conversations about it online. This isn't about believing it is the only possibility, but that it is a likely possibility that deserves serious attention. The reason it was instead cloaked in dogmatic terms like "conspiracy theory" and shutdown outright, is purely because of politics. There was no "real evidence" to dismiss it as it was. And guess what - that dismissal also allowed the Chinese government to avoid a site visit for months, and even when the WHO visit happened, it was under the terms of the Chinese government with an untrustworthy outcome. Those who shutdown the lab leak theory and other such claims aren't interested in evidence. They're interested in political opportunism.
> there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.
First, there are credible, credentialed virologists saying that the lab leak hypothesis has not been ruled out, and that it has been inadequately investigated [1].
Second, there are real anomalies in the Covid genome [2] that seem unlikely to have occurred naturally:
however, several characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 taken together are not easily explained by a natural zoonotic origin hypothesis. These include a low rate of evolution in the early phase of transmission; the lack of evidence for recombination events; a high pre-existing binding to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2); a novel furin cleavage site (FCS) insert; a flat ganglioside-binding domain (GBD) of the spike protein which conflicts with host evasion survival patterns exhibited by other coronaviruses; and high human and mouse peptide mimicry.
In particular, the furin cleavage site is extremely interesting because it's exactly the type of genetic manipulation done in gain of function research that was ongoing at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. More on the FCS:
Because the presence and coding sequence of a FCS is important for pathogenesis, host range, and cell tropism (Nagai et al. 1993; Millet et al. 2015), the addition of a FCS into viruses has been an active area of gain-of-function research. A FCS can be easily inserted using seamless technology (Yount et al. 2002; Sirotkin and Sirotkin 2020) without any need for cell passage, as previously performed in experiments on virulence and host tropism (Cheng et al. 2019). Insertions to change the properties of SARS-r CoV viruses are documented by Ren et al. (2008) and Wang et al. (2008). Considering that natural mutations have a very low probability to result in a stretch of 12 amino acids coding for an optimized FCS without any known intermediate form in Sarbecovirus, an artificial insertion of the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 may provide a more parsimonious explanation for its presence than natural evolution.
In summary, the FCS confers SARS-CoV-2 enhanced human pathogenicity and has never been identified in another Sarbecovirus. At the same time, FCSs have been routinely inserted into coronaviruses in gain-of-function experiments, and we provide a hypothesis through which the specific amino acid sequence of SARS-CoV-2′s FCS may have been generated through cell culture.
> extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.
The claim is not exactly extraordinary - you have a lab with a history of poor controls, performing gain of function research relating to SARS-like viruses, knowing that SARS (the first one) had broken out of labs multiple times. That's not hard evidence, but it is a strong set of priors that makes the lab leak theory an obvious candidate for an origin story. It shouldn't be surprising that there isn't hard evidence when the world hasn't been allowed a timely and transparent investigation. And why would China allow such an investigation when there's no pressure to do so, when people are rushing to their defense to dismiss the valid lab leak theory as a "conspiracy theory"? Their work was done for them by news media and tech giants who institutionalized that dismissive attitude, again motivated by their own political biases. You can't have evidence until you take the speculation seriously and perform the necessary investigation properly, so I'm not sure how you could for "extraordinary evidence".
> weird how that works, huh?
You're ignoring the point I was making, which was that the people opposed to Trump were desperate for any way to attack him, given that he was on a clear path to re-election. Since this was the only crisis at the time that they could leverage, they did so (and did so viciously). That included dismissing any scrutiny directed at China, even though it was valid.
I would argue, philosophically, the broken clock isn't right twice a day. That clock is simply saying the same thing as people who are right. It's claim about what time it is has no credibility.
I have a friend who's Toddler knows that things have colors but only knows one color - Blue. If the child calls everything Blue it isn't showing understanding of the concept, even if the kid responds 'Blue' when asked what color the sky is. To claim that is 'right' is projecting my beliefs and knowledge onto the childs.
It was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and note the word “attempts”. This one is much too big/high profile to delete, thankfully.
The “this is just how to do science” defense is cute, but a lot people died and will die over it, and in general the conduct we have seen from formerly-trusted authorities is inexcusable. Most people are not going to let that gang of narrow-minded bullies “do science” to them ever again.
I installed Twitch on a just unboxed NVIDIA Shield TV, not yet logged in, the first recommended stream was a lady in very revealing bikini doing "ear licking ASMR". The second one was another in generous and prominent cleavage, just chatting with her thousand of viewers.
It's not exactly segregated, nor separate, but actively promoted.
Except it IS segregated from an advertiser PoV (aka companies that don't want to attach their ads to that sort of content can opt out of it when setting up their ad campaigns).
The category never seems like it gets above 20k concurrent and that’s mostly for a couple of streamers. Right now it’s the 55th most popular category with 4.4K concurrent viewers which is two orders of magnitude less than the most popular category.
That is if you equate viewership with revenue, but most Twitch streamers I have heard talking about this is that the income from advertisements (scales with viewership) is lower than income from subscribers/donations (also scales with viewership, but more so with willingness to donate).
Right but we don't have access to conversion rate by category to compare. And it'd have to convert ludicrously well and the other categories ludicrously badly for it to get anywhere near being relevant to Twitch's revenue. Personally I'd suspect the advertising revenue for the Top 10 streaming categories (over a million concurrent viewers right now) to far outstrip the sub revenue from the Hot Tub category (4.5k viewers) all by itself.
Doc had a multi million $ contract with Twitch, while I bet these bathtub streamers don't, so they're cheaper, and get even more money in donation from very lonely viewers.
SFW and NSFW content is like oil and water, they naturally want to be separate from each other.
When it comes to monetization, I am not aware of any platform, service or business that has been successful at both at the same time under the same brand.
I doubt OF will be the platform to change this (or Twitch for that matter, as they rub the line between SFW and NSFW it is clear the majority of their advertisers are seeking them to be a SFW platform. )
This article doesn't really talk about it but the Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 source code (including engine and whatnot) are up on torrents now. I suspect this one will be as well in the coming weeks/months. For those curious and with nothing better to do than to have some +ORC styled martini-wodka and spend an evening reading source code, feel free to google at your own leisure. It shouldn't take too long.
Afaik the Witcher 3 and Witcher 3 RTX archives are passworded and have been around since mid march without the passwords surfacing, so you can't really browse those. Cyberpunk has recently leaked without pw, even though it's included in the passworded dump as well.
>The fact that men don't tend to be a socially adept doesn't help.
Men are socially adept in their society and a society of their peers. Just not in this one which seeks to break them down and punishes them for not being women.
This is a bit too reductive. Men have a wider and flatter curve of outcomes than women. The ones who are doing really well are winning the Fields Medal and becoming C-suite executives; the ones who are struggling drop out of higher education, move back in with their parents, or get sent to jail.
A lot of the gender wars happen because what's true for Jeff Bezos is not true for the guy who spraypainted "Let Them Eat Fent[anyl]" around Civic Centre in SF, and the same traits that are rewarded in directed male CEOs are punished in directionless male fast food workers.
This is one of the most interesting insights into gender divides, and years ago I think I recall seeing a link here on HN to an essay by someone who tied this insight into dynamics down to a cellular (ie sperm have a wider and flatter curve than eggs) and genetic level (men seem to have a higher incidence of both genetic defects and beneficial mutations).
I can't seem to find it again (much less speak to its accuracy). Does anyone have an idea what this might be?
There’s a lot of validity to the social struggles of men in a lot of online discourse, but to say “society“ punishes us for not being women flies in the face of almost every useful metric of socioeconomic success.
Women did not create the society that is hurting men emotionally and economically. Buying into that victim complex is a distraction from your own self-development and healing.
Women control or influence 85% of spending, for example.
I would say the amount of goods and services you actually purchase and consume would be a better indicator of socioeconomic success, compared with earnings that may be enjoyed by someone else.
Working really hard to the point of destroying your health in order to provide a good life to your family would show up as "highly successful" by the earnings metric, but I would say the family benefits more than the one who is destroyed.
Assuming a traditional household here with a working dad and stay at home mum, if the woman is mostly responsible for childcare, that's also a huge load. Just because the mother here isn't bringing in money doesn't mean she isn't working. Personally I'd take the employment (and have).
Quality of work too. Like one person may be going to a soul-crushing office job while another is doing something undoubtedly meaningful and enjoyable, if not also stressful.
But the wife of a c suite executive is actually the biggest winner. She gets all the benifits and the au-pair to do the child care not none of the 80 hour weeks and late night phone calls.
Most kids spends their first 15 years mostly surrounded by women. Their doctors, their kinder garden teachers, their school teachers etc. Almost every authority figure is a woman there. If those boys have problem I feel it is ok to say that it is mostly those grownups fault, and they happen to be mostly women.
This is a weirdly sexist take: to give yourself license to blame women, you’re erasing all of the men in those kids’ lives. For example, most of them have fathers and uncles, and while there’s a gender skew teaching in younger grades it’s not absolute and you’re leaving out the skew in the other direction for administrators and older grades - and if you’re talking authority figures you should be talking about principals and deans, not to mention cops.
Kids spends their whole days getting bossed around by teachers. Kids usually doesn't even know who the dean or administrators are, those aren't authority figures to kids. And I choose 15 years as the cut-off since that is roughly when you start seeing male teachers.
You've managed to identify a few of the consequential problems from collective, societal child rearing, and deduced that these problems are the result of a dominant female influence from the years of 0-15. Sexism aside, that is a gross and lazy thought process. I'm curious how else you came to those conclusions?
If every person of race X who is taught by teacher Y fails, does that mean that race X is the problem or that teacher Y is the problem?
Either male children are born bad or were raised incorrectly. If you accept the first option, what is your evidence? If you accept the second option and there are only women raising the child, how can men be the problem?
According to the US Census, 20% of asian, 34% of white, 42% of hispanic, and 66% of black families are single-mother homes.
In 1980, 30% of teachers were men. Today, it's around 15% (a mere 3-6% male for grades K-6). When you remove sports and PE teachers, it's the low single digits overall. The reason for this shift is rather obvious. Society assumes that men are predators. When a single false accusation will ruin not just your career, but your entire life, why take that risk?
That same risk applies to other male role models as well. A 2 year old drowned in England a few years ago (irresponsible daycare let them into the street IIRC). It was noticed that a van was nearby when the child was walking down the road. The driver was found and asked about what happened. They said they saw the child, but a man in a white panel van stopping to help a kid would face accusations of kidnapping. The man had his own family and did't want to put them at risk if anything should happen to him. The child was a victim of society's demonization of men (I'd add that studies of female predators are almost non-existent and what little research has been conducted indicates that there are tons of female predators who society simply refuses to look into).
Children raised by single mothers are much more likely to have learning issues, bad grades, be in trouble at school, not graduate, and have mental health problems. Single mothers are also much more likely to have mental health and anxiety issues. This is just as true for the 20% of asians and the 66% of blacks, so the inverse proposal of the mothers passing these issues on to their children is not likely (if it were true, then the claims of racists would also be true). These rates also track upward over time. Remember that only around 25% of black mothers were single parents in the 1960s (before the civil rights act). It's even notable that the single mother rates under slavery didn't come close to the rates today.
The most notable and undeniable single mother statistic is crime. Somewhere around 85% of all people in prison had no significant father figure. Incarceration rates per capita per race track single mother rates closely (as a surprisingly large fraction of those homes).
Here's the surprise -- this is NOT true for single father households. Is this because fathers are better parents? I think not. Instead, I'd put forward that female role models are everywhere and women are willing to get close to kids while male role models are very scarce and men are forced by society to remain aloof. I haven't seen studies, but I'd be interested to know if societies where the pedo scare didn't happen have the same issues.
Male teachers who are not retirees have been removed from the teaching pool. Why? Schools do not pay enough to build a career or family. You cannot afford to have male teachers who are not retired and doing it for fun.
The absence of men in these fields is part of the problem, as you say! However, the absence of men in these fields are by choice. To place the blame on only those that are present in raising everyones children and ignore the fact that most men choose not to be part in this hugely important societal task is (imo) wrong.
The only way that you can be surrounded by women for your entire upbringing is if you don't engage in sports. Sports are typically hours per day. Coaches are absolute authority figures, and there are very few female coaches.
I can't think of any men that never played sports but are somehow punished for being "so masculine"
"Sports" may be hours per day for boys --- and even this is probably but organized sports definitely aren't, and that's where the coaches are. Unless he's playing AAU basketball or club soccer or something, I really don't think a boy is spending even a few hours per week under an "absolute authority figure" coach.
On reflection, the parent comment jibes with my experience growing up in the suburbs in the early 2000s. Literally all of my elementary school teachers were women. The only man I remember was a PE teacher, and I don't remember ascribing any authority to him at all.
Same era, same experience here. I don't think it's fair to ascribe too much blame on women teachers, though.
The overwhelming majority of them genuinely care about their male students, acknowledge their different learning styles professionally and give them as good an opportunity as any competent male teacher would.
If you wanted to make a big difference, you wouldn't need to change gender ratios through social engineering. The small minority of female teachers that undermine boys' education are all known by the student body and other teachers.
Competitive highschool sports often practice for several hours a day. It's not really a serious sport if you're only going to practice a few hours a week, is it? Maybe badminton club practices an hour on thursdays, but the swim team is going to be swimming for at least two hours every weekday for much of the year. Sometimes we had practice in the morning before school as well, two practice sessions in a day. There were days I spent almost as much time in the water as I did in a classroom.
But to the point raised in comments above, most boys were not participating in sports. Maybe 1 in 4 were at my school.
I think we agree? I was responding to a comment claiming, I think, that the serious sport participation you describe is the norm among boys, and as you observe, it definitely isn't.
As far as I know boys playing sports do far better than those who don't, so this you'd conclude that adding grown men to their lives helps them and that "toxic-masculinity" isn't really the main issue boys have.
"Most" boys play some kind of sport. I have to assume it's the vast majority. My argument is that in those kids' lives, I would wager many of the authority figures that they spend significant time with and respect the most are men.
Most kids doesn't even get the recommended level of physical activity, I doubt they spend that much time playing organized sports. An hour a week isn't really a significant amount of time compared to how much time school takes.
And to add, if you go to less privileged neighbourhoods you'll see sports participation drop significantly, most don't do any sports at all. And the problems are much worse there. It might have been even worse if they did more sports, who knows, but I doubt it.
> According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, only 24% of youth ages 6 to 17 engage in at least 60 minutes of physical activity per day, down from 30% a decade earlier. B
>>>>"Most" boys play some kind of sport. I have to assume it's the vast majority.
There was a TED Talk a few years back from a US Army General about how the terrible physical fitness of America's youth is becoming a national security problem.[1] I think the "low quality" of adolescent males over the past 2 decades is partly behind the push for more women in the military: we have so few physically-fit high-testosterone males that we have to cast a wider net and recruit physically-fit, comparatively-high-T females; they are better than soft fatbody guys. If boys were seriously engaged in sports at the rates that you are suggesting, teen obesity shouldn't be so widespread.
In my experience as an army officer, the “wider net” is cast for positions in the army where that fitness isn’t really necessary; ie, logistics units, cooks, admin, etc. I spent all of my time in infantry units and the people in those physically fit, high T jobs are still almost all men that are physically fit and aggressive. And that’s in normal units, so not even counting special forces and rangers. I also met some guys that looked fat and soft that fought like devils when pressed and would run exactly as fast as they needed to to pass a fitness test.
Well put. I had a much less constructive take on this comment, since deleted, because it wreaks of insecurity that's causing so much of this problem.
My dad was great, but through divorce, I had other great male role models, none of which you'd consider "feminine." However, it helped me understand the plurality of what it means to be a man. There are many ways to embrace your "natural" manhood that are beneficial to society. Animals rape each other, but we're not animals. Don't fall for the naturalistic fallacies.
> Women did not create the society that is hurting men emotionally and economically
The extreme elements of 3rd wave feminism has influcenced society in ways that unfairly and negatively impact boys.
Specifically the concept of "toxic masculinity". Toxic people are toxic. Toxic behaviors are toxic. Toxic people should be shamed and toxic behaviors should be discouraged.
Boys should not be shamed for being masculine, and masuclinity should not be discouraged.
This is not what toxic masculinity means. It's not saying masculinity is toxic, toxic is a qualifier not a description. It's used to talk about those attitudes which are ascribed by some people to be super masculine, but actually are just unhealthy (like hyper aggression, or the idea, ironically, that men shouldn't ask for help or complain about anything)
The way you phrase a word affects its interpretation. Imagine for a minute if the term "neurotic feminity" was a common thing, and described how anxiety, depression, and other negative aspects of stereotypically female behavior are actually just unhealthy. People would be upset because the phrasing implies that feminity itself is bad, which is wrong.
The term "toxic masculinity" creates a subliminal negative association between "male" and "toxicity".
Although you can rationalize the association away, it still exists and influences listeners. It's marketing against men.
If you really wanted to address issues with hyper-agression, you would use the term "hyper-agression", which is gender-neutral.
If you really wanted to address the consequence of not asking for help or compaining, you would perhaps use the term "stoicism", which is gender-neutral.
If you really wanted to address people overly affected by irrational fears, you would use the term "neuroticism", rather than "toxic femininity"
I think it's also been promoted like that as a straw man by vested interests. Like I said in another comment outrage sells wat better than assuming the best.
All these traits together are a subset of those denoted by "masculinity". I would not have a problem with toxic femininity being used in the same context, for example to describe the idea that a woman shouldn't earn her own way, or that one should manipulate men to get ahead or whatever else.
For the record I'd be far happier if the concepts of masculinity and femininity didn't exist at all, I think it just puts us in boxes and makes us insecure, but unfortunately they do.
And it's also wrong. With no other phrase that I can think of does that apply. Yellow birds, American presidents, main road, farmer's field, tall tree.
Yes, and generally when the term "toxic people" is used, few assume that the speaker is saying that "people are toxic" and "people should be shamed for being people."
And yet... you've done pretty much that with the term "toxic masculinity." It's almost as if someone has persuaded you that adjectives are actually appositives.
The phrase "toxic masculinity" no more implies that masculinity itself should be discouraged or shamed than the phrase "toxic food" implies the entire world should fast forever.
And like "toxic food" would suggest there's some subset of foodstuffs one should avoid, it does suggest that there's some subset of masculine-identified behavior that are unhealthy for either those acting those behaviors out, or those on the receiving end of them.
Ok. What phrase would you use? Presumably you do agree that there are elements of masculinity that are harmful, both to men and women. How should we describe these in a way that is impossible to misinterpret?
The difference is that "toxic food" directly implies food that is poisonous.
"Toxic masulinity" has no obvious or direct meaning. It's a made up term. It's marketing. It itself conveys no useful meaning other than to associate masculitity with toxicicity.
To tie such a negative term to any other social/gender group would be called out as the biggotry it is.
I've encountered a lot of it before it had that name. It appears as bullying, talking over people, arrogance, aggression, threats of violence, violence, condescension, etc. Generally, efforts gain dominance over others in ways that harm them rather than being genuinely better at dominating constructively.
I think it's fine to call it toxic masculinity as long as people don't get it confused with healthy masculinity (not the same as femininity) or forget that toxic femininity exists or assume all men have toxic masculinity, or all the other misunderstandings that come with simplistic judgements of popular issues.
There was a study on domestic violence a few years ago. It broke down DV into asymmetric violence (one violent person) and symmetric violent (both people).
It found that the overwhelming bulk of DV was symmetric. In asymmetric cases, it was actually perpetuated by the woman in some 2/3 of cases. Further, in symmetric violence, the women admitted to starting the encounters 2/3 of the time.
Likewise, if a weapon is involved in DV, it was used by a woman in something like 4 out of 5 cases.
In most places, the law is to arrest the bigger party even if they were NOT the aggressor. Further, the law often dictates that an arrest is MANDATORY. This combination makes it easy to arrest large numbers of men which then plays havoc with the DV statistics.
As another data point, DV between gay (male) partners is several times less than heterosexual partners while DV between lesbian partners is several times higher.
In my country, there are 50% more women in colleges than men, and our colleges still work more to attract more women (with eg. girls-only workshops, etc... we used to call this segregation and/or sexism back in my time).
Lets say you have Alice and Bob... they both finished college, both are looking for a job, and they both decide to start their own company - Alice will make plastic spoons, and Bob will make plastic forks. Alice can get 5k eur from our government, because she's a woman.
Men also tend to work more (hours and years), and live less (less years of retirement), but in many countries still get lower pensions than women for the same money paid in the pension fund. In my country this has been equalized now (same payments, same amount of money, only for new retirees), but relatively shorter lives are not accounted for anywhere.
Safe houses for men?
Lets say Alice and Bob meet at a party, get drunk, have sex and a condom pops... we give Alice numerous ways to get rid of the unwanted baby, and Bob just has to hope, she won't want a kid at the moment, so he'll be able to avoid 18-26 years of child support. Paper abortion ideas are laughed at and oposed by "he shouldn't have sex if he doesn't want to take care of the baby"... but the same argument can be used for a normal/real abortion (except in case of rape).
Media treats women more preferably then men, pointing out the greater tragedy in case of women deaths, and even in cases of paedophillia use "nicer words" for women - eg "schoolteacher had sex with 13yo boy" instead of calling it statuatory rape.
In other countries (eg. usa) there are many more cases of casual sexism against men, even some that are illegal in many other countries, eg. women-only scholarships.
The openminded-ness towards how a woman deals with a pregnancy vs the fact that the same anti-abortion thought process is still being applied to only the man is very frustrating.
If she wants to abort, that is certainly her choice. If a woman wants to keep a child, that is wonderful, but the man should not be forced into child support. Moreso because the choice about the child's existence should only be in the woman's hands since she gives birth to the child.
The irony of people who support abortion saying that if a man didn't want to pay child support he shouldn't have had sex is just staggering.
It would appear to be Serbia. His username is supposedly a reference to celebrity, "Vladan Aksentijević, better known by his stage name Ajs Nigrutin, is a Serbian rapper and actor."
From the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia[1], a quick glance at the Higher Education statistics would seem to indicate there are 32% more women.
This is the "nicest" image I could find (our statistics bureau has a shitty page, where you cannot directly link to a graph/table, but only to a full dataset where you have to choose 'filters'). The ratio is 60%-40% (which sounds "nicer" than 150% women, but yeah... 15.072 men, 22.802 women (for university of ljubljana, our largest university).
You are probably directing this at men, but I've also heard this directed at women who were surprised to find out that working unpleasant jobs full time is actually not the greener grass they thought it was.
Or women picking a physical fight only to be shocked at a man fighting back.
Or women being surprised at being sentenced to jail when they expected a slap on the wrist.
But why is equality of outcomes necessary? We see worldwide physical and psychological differences between the sexes, and the reproductive strategies typically used are different. Why shouldn't that reflect in broadly different social norms and roles?
Where did I say equality of outcomes? This is just about holding people to the same standards. Equality of opportunity would be nice, but the majority of women (worldwide) don't have that either.
I’m reminded of a joke, which I’m often reminded of when I think about this (excellent) point.
Two revolutionaries, one young and bright-eyed and the other old and grizzled, are sitting together. The older asks the younger what he fights for, to which the latter responds “For there to be no more rich people!” The older one sighs and says “How times have changed! Back in my day, we fought for there to be no more poor people.”
The point of this comment was not that men should be bought down, but that being asked to consider someone else feels like an imposition when you're not accustomed to doing that.
We are not suddenly all equal, but it's becoming more so, and that seems to be a problem. Eventually hopefully anyone will be able to do whatever they like in life without expectations put on them because of things they have no control over. I think there is a communication issue where "mostly men" has been shortened to "men" which is read as "all men"
This sounds like the kind of equality that communism created in the 20th century. The sort where all but a few are miserable and impoverished.
Of course, that’s most of human history. Until very recently life was nasty, brutish, and short. We seem to be trying our best to revert to that condition.
I second this. Maybe it's some echo chamber effect or a minority stirring shit up, but I've hardly heard anything over the years about transmen-as-men vs men-as-men. It seems like most of the focus is on transwomen-as-women vs women-as-women. Maybe we're not as vocal? Maybe we care less? I don't think we have much of a dog in this race so I'm often confused as to why this topic comes up on HN considering most of us here are men. Boring day at work?
I do feel bad for the women's Olympics, but I'd like to ask the Olympics committee what the hell were they thinking long before I start any kind of anti-trans crusade. This is one discussion that doesn't seem to be happening much. The diatribe is as always directed among the proles and the decisionmakers get a free pass. Someone must have said, "Yes, lets allow a 35 year-old recently transitioned man to compete with early 20 year-old women," and some approval process must have happened. Those are the people you want to start asking the hard questions, not look at LH and blame her for participating in the Olympics that she's allowed to participate in.
Or as someone else put it: "A female POC just lost her spot to a white, middle-aged, male-born son of a billionaire. This is supposed to be progressive?"