Granted, as has been pointed out by the parent comment to yours, this study is referring to the US specifically, where there are more women than men in 40 states (https://www.statista.com/statistics/301946/us-population-mal...)

The same young men then tell me, that I should be worried about race-mixing, and I should be worried that most men are not having sex.

This is, quite frankly, a fascinating duality of thought.

I wonder, if this is a dating app phenomenon, if there's anything that can be done thats healthier for our society. Banning the apps isn't the right way, but is there some means of adding balance?

Channel that desire into hobbies that are actually interesting to you, and enjoy life.

Sex, intimacy, relationships, marriage and the like do not automatically guarantee you happiness, as perfectly illustrated by this masterpiece: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147612/

That is, the top 20% of men are the ones that are most desirable(however defined) .

In the past the desire to have kids(and the result of needing the man to stick around), and the shame of being considered a slut if a woman's slept with many men, kept much of this in check.

Second, to explain the effect, I offer the following two theories:

- degraded sexual endocrinology. Hormones are very important in arousal and libido so this is likely the biggest effect.

- society punishing male sexuality. The low evidence standard (in the court of public opinion) to female fake accusers, creates substantial risk for men. Under this theory, the age group effect can be explained as bigger on the young, who are still forming their attitudes about sex and observing society's discourse, than on older people who came of age in a less risky era.

It's unclear to me how "downregulating sex" by social / hormonal mechanisms is affected by the massive viewership of porn.

The other most interesting theories I think are the economic ones (changing income), because sexual biology is intimately wired with resources seeking in our brains, in ways more pronounced for women than for men.

In general, even happy "normal" relationships are a ton of work. They also anchor you to certain expectations and when you try to change something in life, you risk upsetting your partner. Want to study for an exam? Good luck having scandals about "not enough attention."

Furthermore, a lot of the time your partner won't grow with you. That's why you see a lot of people divorcing once they "make it".

Along the lines of sex and reproduction, the real dark-horse is CRISPR-CAS9 and the genetic revolution in general. That's not just readjusting the mating process/markets, it's a wholesale tinkering into heritability and sex as an idea. Eukaryotic sex goes back about 1.2 billion years. Suddenly leaping back to the 'genetic transfer soup' of bacteria is going to rock the boat in way we can't really see today. The entire idea of 'family' and 'child' is up for debate soon.

I am very convinced this would be the case.

I remember reading about a study a while ago about relative attractiveness in heterosexual couples (i.e. how the attractiveness of the man compares to that of the woman). The finding was that there was a strong correlation in relative attractiveness in couples who started dating shortly after meeting, and less of a correlation in couples who knew each other for a long time before dating. Both groups of couples reported similar overall relationship satisfaction.

It makes sense if you think about it: if you get together right after meeting, you probably didn't have much to go on besides the superficial. Things like personality take longer to understand. Tinder is like a distillation of the superficial.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601799

I know it's basically part of the language at this point, and I'm definitely guilty of it too, but really, it's dehumanizing and implies a static unchanging nature to attractiveness that really isn't there.

Women aren't the borg. We're a collection of individuals, each with our own personal preferences, which can and do vary wildly from the personal preferences of other women.

If someone considers relationships with other people to be an "incomprehensible minefield," then the problem is with them, not the nature of human relationships.

Too many people overthink things, seeing each potential relationship as a puzzle to be solved, or searching for some general purpose sexual algorithm for which they can provide the inputs and recieve sexual or emotional fulfillment, or they expect hostility and deception and treat dating like an interrogation.

And of course some people just don't have empathy for the opposite sex and don't understand social boundaries or cues.

This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative I'm talking about.

> Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate.

The stress has absolutely NOTHING to do with that. BUT, since you brought it up, OkCupid had a pretty detailed analysis that showed much the opposite when it comes to the age that people are interested. Linking because you might be interested, not because it's relevant.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*q95i3Ma24k-hxBtK....

https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8...

At what point does lack of ability to engage socially become a disability? Your statement already acknowledged their difficulties.

And yet we know that humans isolated from other humans generally do not turn out well and sexual isolation is a very significant milestone on that spectrum.

So it's unrealistic for you to just dismiss it as "unhealthy obsession".

Edit: life would obviously be much easier and better if we were perfectly natural and had complete control over our instincts. But we're not (well most of us) and we have to deal with it somehow. Maybe sex robots or VR :)

And personally as someone who favours individualism -- despite having grown up in a culture where arranged marriages are the norm -- I would not go back to "traditional values" especially as there is no indication whatsoever that traditional societies were any more authentically happier than we are today.

The only way forward is individual autonomy (mentally, emotionally not just economically).

As for the extroverted person , maybe they only go to bars to pickup people for quick lays, they don’t contribute to community like helping build a house or work on community plots of land or help paint a mural etc , it could balance it out

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

--------------

To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial. See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre. It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. In fact, it only briefly pretends to be a data driven piece by including a graph at the beginning and citing an informal social media poll. It might be something interesting to discuss, but in my opinion this is not the forum for it.

The human race, if it wants itself to continue, will make that decision just fine using its thinking brain (we are evolved enough to no longer need to rely on instinctual desires for the continuation of species; if anything it only gets in the way--just look at all the wars and suicides and murders and so on).

And no one here said anything about denying a feeling. Your offense is triggered by something you seemed to have imagined. Is sexual desire the new religion? Is questioning the validity of it to be automatically taken as an act of blasphemy?

By the way, aggression is "biological curse" too. So why are we not equally going about killing others and rationalizing it in a similar manner?

> I decided it would most likely generate the sort of discussion that does not belong on the site.

The current thread as well as the two linked threads have plenty of positive discussion. Again, every topic is a double-edged sword. You're going to get people who agree and disagree, people who are serious and others who are trolls. That doesn't mean threads should be completely destroyed. The best course of action here is to flag the offending comments, rather than the entire thread.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698237

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18332012

Oops! I'll keep this in mind for the future. But the cat's out of the bag already here so...

> Articles should not be flagged for how their words and numbers make us feel, they should be flagged if they are off-topic, spam, or not intellectually stimulating.

I maintain that I am flagging this because I consider it off-topic and not intellectually stimulating.

The best moderators use objective criteria when exercising their powers. You might want to say that you're not a moderator and that you're just a user, but this also misses the point. HackerNews has been kind enough to give users a moderation tool (flagging), so you should treat the tool with respect. You have great power with that tool, and your contributions are very important, so it's important that we contribute in a good way.

It would be interesting to see more formal studies on the topic, but as far as I know there is no collaborating data to support the theory that the data we have is an artifact from the dating app.

It seems that things are even getting to that point.

"Social skills (not only) for aspies" and "Nice guys, friend zone and creepiness". Though starting is easy, finishing is hard.

Young men have it worse list like older women have it: because men are attracted to youth and beauty and women are attracted to resources and status.

The Extension of the Domain of the Struggle (Whatever) is his first novel. The motif is that similar to economic inequality, due to sexual liberation, the sociosexual arena has become more winner-take-all, hence the extension in the title. The plot chronicles the disillusionment of a sexless programmer in denial after going on a road trip with a similarly dysfunctional co-worker who ended up commiting suicide. The story ends the protagonist going postal but offers no practical solution.

His next book The Elementary Particles follows two half-brothers who were dysfunctional in opposite ways. One was a complete sex addict who failed to individuate and the other became a monk like molecular biologist responsible for making sexual reproduction obsolete.

His next novel Platform is an in-depth analysis of the discontentment of sex tourism from the perspective of his alter ego, which is clearly formed by his own lived experience in Indonesia. I think it's his least coherent work FWIW.

The Possibility of an Island arguably follows the timeline of Atomised and describes the nature of love through the narrative of three clones of the same person from the hedonistic present, totalitarian future and hunter-gatherer post-apocalytic future.

Submission is about the return to traditionalism after a Muslim party won the election in France. The effect is complex but nominal as we all know there is no going back.

I am waiting for the English translation of Serotonin which should be released before end of next year.

Well, it's an effect which would explain the results. It's not really my theory, which is that it's a complex of different things, including several that the author explicitly dismisses without any significant basis (or by citing a basis which seems incorrect.) The homosexuality one is one of them.

Most of the series of things the author asserts affected both sexes similarly (“obesity, porn, video games, social media, dating apps, and wariness re harassment claims”) seem likely not to have done so similarly (that's seems particularly true of both porn and wariness re: harassment claims.)

I do realise though that you're posting in the context of a society in which the necessary causal chain between sex and pregnancy has been broken, but the moral systems we have built around sex and relationships are predicated on that link for perfectly rational and valid reasons. Also ultimately we still need people to have children and bring those children up. The moral factor in sexual behaviour can't simply be discounted.

At a deeper level, both morality and evolution are all about encouraging survival of genes.

A better advice would be for men to understand this tendency of women, what it means to be attractive to women and make an informed decision if they want to play the game of becoming more attractive to women.

They can also learn to reverse the game in their thirties and only date women 4-5 years younger, thus penalizing women who wait until their last fertile minute to settle down.

And wide spread religiously backed monogamy stabilisation didn't save us from two world wars.

The gender wage gap is the clearest example at the moment, which was able to get people riled up on the 77 cents on the dollar figure, as purportedly being not only due primarily to environmental reasons, but specifically due to patriarchal socialization and sexism. The thing is, the initial figure was incredibly irresponsible, as it didn't control for field worked in, let alone specific profession, let alone seniority, output, hours worked, rate negotiated. The more of these figures are controlled for, the more the gap diminishes. But the problem is, people still look at the remainder as "okay well then there's a 7% gap, and that's still a problem." But my question is, "why?" They default back to the assumption that the remainder after what has since been controlled for is specifically the result of patriarchal sexism, simply because of a remaining disparity. That is ideological.

Though, I used to interact (online and offline) with quite a few such people. In this case, even bringing a possibility that there may be any biological differences was crossing a taboo.

If you believe that were are both products of innate biology and culture, we are in agreement.

This is really only true at the margins.

> Why would a woman settle for a friendly 165 cm guy with a good job, if a 185 cm "lumberjack" is only few swipes away (in theory, because there are many more women competing for him)?

For the same reason most people choose friends based on who they get along with instead of who has the most money/status. After all, why spend time on a friendship that only gets you a beer now and then when you could spend your time befriending people with yachts and ski lodges?

People crave closeness and belonging. Being close with someone who you actually enjoy spending time with feels better than having sex with someone you don't care about.

Note: few people enjoy the company of another person merely because that other person "has a good job" or is merely "friendly". How many of your male friends do you enjoy spending time with because they make good money and aren't assholes? Probably very few. For the rest, you have something in common that drives the friendship. The same thing is true in romantic relationships.

https://i.imgur.com/HO430mM.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/4WPshhw.jpg

This has been done many, many times. The keyword is "chadfishing"

I don't think this is true at all, since the ideological role of capitalism (and its class role) tends to encourage accumulation of capital above all else, so whatever can be made into capital-accumulating value will be, for instance over the past 50 years digital goods (and other otherwise freely reproducible goods) have been subsumed into capital - capital did this through its political arms, e.g the creation of copyright law. In the same way, capital may use its political arms to encourage 'family values', in a non-obvious alliance between the neo-conservatives in the 80s and the neolibreals. I understand value in the Marxian sense as a social relation, not value as in a purely "subjective" judgement. Value is both objective and subjective, in that it exists supersensibly but that existence is conditioned by a variety of objective social factors.

> Many women do not want to reproduce at all.

I find this line of argument relatively unconvincing, because it only works by assuming we are in total control of what we want, and that being ignorant of the origin of our desires, we assume them to come from within ourselves. It's a neat ideological point, but from social psychological perspectives is too simplistic to have much explanatory power. The point of my critique is that capitalism not only arranges society in a particular economic mode, but that this arrangement is therefore reflected in culture and society. Your argument is that capitalism gives the choice, and the choice is being taken, but this does not at all explain the context in which the decision is made in the first place, which is usually for economic reasons (whether the choice maker knows it or not).

>Many women, however, do want to reproduce, and the fact that women and men tend to diverge in their roles regarding child rearing is not simply something that can simply be asserted as being a consequence of capitalism.

I didn't claim that the difference in roles is solely due to capitalism, my claim is that the division of the roles between men and women works well with the liberal distinction between public and private - what is private ostensibly cannot be touched (by capital, by the state, by anyone) but what is public can be regulated by society in general (through the market) or by the government. The choices to remain an unmarried woman or to marry and have children are greatly dependent, before they reach the forefront of the mind, on the economic conditions of society.

The "family unit" is ideological, the free choice to "work hard" is ideological (see Weber's dissection of the "protestant work ethic" and capitalist society), the notion that many (even today) hold that women should be primarily caregivers in the home is ideological (along with its cousin, the belief that emotional or even reproductive labour does not truly count as labour because it is not valorized). These ideologies come about due to the economic system that underlies them, capitalism. Under different economic systems, or even different time periods, these ideologies are not present, or they are in a different form (see the last paragraph of my comment).

Good question - IDK! Based on what I've heard and seen (I have a lot of close friends who are women my age), there are a lot who talk about wanting someone super attractive, but all of them have also dated people who are noticeably less attractive than they are. So I'd guess the answer is somewhere between "a lot" and "a good amount". I'm sure if someone's absolutely hideous it will be a lot harder, but outside of the bottom ~10% of males, being good at conversing can make up for a lot.

> Specially since you can't do that much with photos.

As someone who isn't very attractive, I disagree. Photos can be a chance to make someone laugh or show them you have a (not-boring) personality. You can show people that you travel or do something adventurous, show people you like cute animals or are affectionate, show people a party pic so they see your wild side, etc. You just show them the attributes you want them to see, and make them want to be with you based on what they see.

Those curious messages in your inbox are not just as your personal trouble (why don't more suitable mates show up?) but also as a symptom of a changing society that sees growing individualism, stratification, weird one-way relationships with social media and much more... and that all of this produces many losers that no one gives a shit about.

My point is: the perception that most gamers are men, who on average spend more of their time gaming than women, lacks supporting data. It is easily explained by psychological factors such as confirmation bias and stereotyping.

This is what I mean by overblown. People's perception on this issue is just ridiculously out of whack. Young men aren't as dangerous to civil society as a lot of people like to imagine. The violent ones get jail and the rest grow up.

Are you arguing men have a right to sex? Disenfranchisement is the taking away of rights, that's it's definition. If not, you should be more careful using that phrasing.

Of all the women I've dated, only 1 said she noticed me (either way) before first developing a reasonably close friendship.

For the big middle, personality has a huge effect on perception. See e.g. https://psychcentral.com/news/2007/11/30/personality-influen...

> why won't you care about your physical appearance? Why leave something that important on the table?

Well, certainly don't be a slob. And not just because of dating! Dressing poorly and appearing unkept effects other parts of life too (e.g. career). Also, exercise is important for all sorts of reasons aside from attractiveness.

But other than being generally healthy and well-kept, I don't focus on my appearance because grooming is boring. Why spend your time grooming beyond a level of general acceptability when you could learn to play an instrument, learn a new language, read a book, or go for a hike?

If all you focus on is appearances, don't be surprised when the only people who find you even remotely interesting are other people who focus a lot on appearances.

There are cultures where sex ratio has been manipulated, e.g. India and China, to favor males, but this is not the point of the research and I lack relevant data for these.

- 6th grade - extraordinarily unattractive to the opposite sex.

- 8th grade - not outwardly reviled.

- 9th grade - outwardly reviled again.

- 12th grade - actually dating, with a bit of interest here or there.

- Freshman year of college - lower relative interest.

- Senior year of college - enough girls are interested that they're fighting with each other.

- 1st year in the workforce - outwardly reviled again!

- 5-10 years into the workforce - hard say, got married, so I must have been doing something right.

So, did I change much between 8th and 9th grade? Or between 12th grade and freshman year of college? No, obviously not, but my status relative to the bellcurve of available men did change quite a bit. This was most evident from my senior year to college to my first year in the workforce. I went from amazing, to worthless all due to graduation!

Please bear in mind, I'm not complaining about the nature of female preferences here. However, I do wish someone had explained that this would occur, and also why it would occur. I remember being quite surprised at the time.

Which is another problem men in their 20s face. They're competing with men in their 30s for the same women. There's simply a larger number of men trying to date a smaller number of women. The numbers mean someone gets left out.

Also, if you survive the war and come home, being a war hero is very attractive to the ladies. You can speculate about an evolutionary background to that.

True, but this isn't the problem we have yet. So start getting more interesting/funny/hot pictures. Once they all become mundane, people will start to look for other things (maybe even normcore pictures)

> A lot of men lack confidence and humor

I agree on this, and it sucks. Low self-esteem does a lot of harm, and yet is so easy to fix because "fake it till you make it" literally solves the problem. Not being funny is also easy to solve by just watching and imitating funny videos, and learning about popular things so you can make jokes about them. But if you have low self-esteem and are told you aren't funny, it probably seems like becoming funny is an impossible feat, and unattainable. Definitely sucks.

Granted, there may be some sort of lag between economic changes and the effect on sex lives. E.g. a boyfriend loses a job in 2009, fails to find work in several years, and then gets dumped. But that seems like more of a stretch, and it seems like the pattern of less sex particularly among men is occurring even among people in age cohorts that weren't affected by the economic downturn during the end of the last decade.

Also I think you're referring to the trap of the law of averages incorrectly. The trap of the law of averages is the erroneous notion that because a random even has diverged from the average then the likelihood of it returning to the average is higher. "The coin toss came up head five times in a row, so it'll probably be tails this time" is falling into the trap of the law of averages.

"Acceptance of promiscuity" is a bit of a contradiction in terms since "promiscuous" is inherently pejorative. I will say this: "promiscuity" has always been far more socially acceptable for men than it has been for women. Despite "enforced monogamy" prostitution is called the "oldest profession" for a reason and extramarital affairs have been happening for a long, long time. If you want to get nuanced, "enforced monogamy" doesn't really mean "enforced monogamy" because affairs were accepted in certain sociocultral contexts in England and France far before the sexual revolution.

* dating apps aren't the only way to meet people; you can still meet potential partners at parks/bars/work (Americans love office romances apparantly)

* dating apps do favor the conventionally good looking folks but its also about presentation, which can be gamed and its not a secret how to.

I agree that its a little unfair that the men who are good looking get all the benefits without having to put in any effort. But hasn't that been the case with inherited wealth too?

Of course, "attractiveness" is exactly this, the amount of partners you can get. We are certainly wired to consider the latter as an indicator of the former. Like a share's value is only marginally determined by its fundamentals, and more by how much is bought by others.

They switched from TCP to UDP because speed/reach is more efficient (in their mind) than deliverability/customisation

What else would they be?

> Did you ever get reviews from women about how you were good at conversing?

No, but women rarely respond at all so I'm not exactly surprised by that. Even the women I eventually went on dates with never mentioned it.

> Would you are cognizant of messaging social norms

I would say I actively detest messaging social norms. I write legible full English sentences just like you see here because I'm an adult. I specifically ruled out women who obviously felt differently.

> If you're very attractive, yes.

If anything I would say that being very attractive is the only circumstance under which you can reliably get results without spamming low-effort messages.

> But if you're aren't very attractive and you're sending bad messages, how is that more successful than sending good messages?

Numbers. What my experience taught me was that message content was basically unimportant, what mattered was reaching out to as many potentials as possible in the hopes of a few being receptive.

It was a strategy I detested. Combined with the general tediousness and awfulness of the online dating experience I decided I'd rather not date than engage in it.

By "low-effort" I mean messages that are basically form letters one can apply to anyone so you don't have to put any thought into crafting them for the person you're trying to talk to.

I think by recent history, the mean thousands of years, not the last ten years. So most of the time before contraception was available.

Men being able to reproduce for most of their lives doesn't help much if they have nobody to reproduce with. I guess it helps if you can afford young wives even as you get older.

It’s not clear to me how the first three would lead to social instability though. There have been plenty of religiously authoritarian cultures that were quite stable. Similarly gender inequality and reduced education for women have been common historically and it’s hard to see how they would lead to social instability and violence. After all it’s not very common for women to rise up violently against gender based oppression, that just doesn't seem to be the dynamic.

I can certainly see how low productivity and standards of living could lead to violence. Desperate people can reach for desperate means. Nevertheless there are many very poor countries round the world and only some of them are significantly polygamous. The fact that the most unstable 20 are all to some degree polygamous seems to me to be a pretty strong correlation. If polygamy can be a driver of social instability though, it’s fairly straightforward to draw a logical causal link from that instability to all sorts of other social and economic ills.

If you read my post carefully, you'll see I only estimated the percentage for societies where monogamy is enforced (either through peer pressure, religion, or both)

I also did not cite the source you did, because I consider it of enough poor quality to be unreliable in debate.

It USED to be be the same thing when you were in highschool before tinder and social media: as a male, the more senior the higher status you had -- i.e. 9th grader males will just drool at their female coleagues going out with more senior males, until in 12th grade you finally hit payday.

Not so anymore because tinder and social media allow females to reach a much broader male audience.

It's the same thing with women in their thirties -- they notice they get a lot less male attention -- first the bad boys stop noticing them and a couple of years later even the nicest of guys won't give them that sweet validating attention women crave, so the smart ones settle down with a nice guy in her early thirties, the not so smart ones end up basically cat ladies.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7bdwyx/inside-the-global-...

It is how women are genetically programmed to be; it is why the Sabines accepted their raping-roman husbands, why Helen left with Paris, it is why Cleopatra accepted to be the mistress of Caesar and Anthony.

It is why women lubricate when they percieve a threatening male, it is why the Stockholm syndrom exists -- because it increases the chances of survival of a woman and her children if she can become the 10th wife of a man who just recently slain all her male relatives.

It's much more prone to manipulation than direct, spontaneous contact.

Edit: below you wrote:

> Basing status and self-worth on sexual conquest makes no more sense

which I profoundly disagree with and sounds to me about as tone deaf as "let them eat cake".

It almost seems as if you’re saying this is how things should be and that men should be the ones to change their views to accept it. From a sociological perspective, men (or any specific population) who aren’t able to form meaningful relationships) can cause problems for society just as the original post stated. Women are the ones who headline this discussion only because they lead the power dynamics which happen to be extremely unfavorable to a large population of men.

I may have missed part of this conversation but I don't think there's a suggestion that women are doing something /wrong/ or that they need to be the ones to "fix" this problem. Although admittedly the framing kind of makes it look like this because it appears to be women's behaviour and attitudes that have changed over recent decades, rather than men's.

I agree with you; Since this is the way things are going, men need to find a way to change their expectations and entitlement and adapt. Unfortunately discussions around this often get over-run with misogyny and bitterness (MGTOW/red-pill) and it's remarkably hard to find safe spaces for men to talk openly about their issues while keeping out that subset of men. (shout out to /r/menslib)

I'm not sure that's so true. Plenty of people are talking about that. It's hard for them to get a fair hearing and a good-faith discussion, given the modern state of affairs, in which the most extreme voices are given all the attention.

Reproduction is at the core of our existence, we are programmed to want to do it. This 80 % of men aren't simply going to roll over and say "oh well, I guess I'll forgo sex and female attention".

It certainly is not an "old" model since most of society still ascribe to it. Men with many partners are still seen as more desirable due to network effects.

Historically if you weren’t celibate there was going to be a baby.

Maybe their preference would by monogamy - with George Clooney. But since that is not an option, the bets are off. In general, there may not be enough rich men willing to take on multiple women for a significant number of women to choose that option.

I'm married and have been with my wife since our early 20's and we have a baby daughter, there is no bitterness towards women in general.

I just find that monogamy is a pretty good compromise and the kind of bullshit happening in the western world spreads everywhere and ultimately is responsible for so much missery in both women and mens lives and society in general.

I don't want to impose my views or tell people how to live their lives, I know not all people are the same, some(overwelmingly men) are quite ok in the long run with polygamy/polyamory, BUT I'm against the modern bullshit "anything goes,go get it!" -- I'm absolutely on the "think very carefully how you live your life, the years where you can mess around without big consequences are far fewer than you realize" camp.

I am absolutely against enforced monogamy, I am 100% for honesty and people understanding the consequences of their behavior-- and MGTOW or the herbivore men of East Asia is such a natural consequence. I am absolutely disgusted by how people try to spin this from "natural consequences" to "it's the mens fault, of course young women go and have sex with top men, it's the herbivore mens fault that women do this".

I am however bitter at the vilification of men in general, the brainwashing of young men, the mistification of women and the relationship between the sexes.

I am against false naratives such as: "men are expendable violent pigs that just want sex and are responsible for all the bad things in the world and women are good fairies, women should pursue careers in their 20s and have fun and settle down in their 30s, and men and women are exactly the same biologically".

It's not jarring, in the context of the comment. The first letter of MGTOW mentioned in the earlier sentence is "men". "Nice guy" is a trope which has seen some usage when talking about relationships.

Perhaps this is the part where they need to change and improve? Rather than expecting the world or men to align to them.

This is more about toddlers than school-age. By the time they hit school, they're already building on top of early age experience. Which is crucial for later development.

The problem is they don't know what to expect. Humans are pack animals. As long as they know what rules to follow, they tend to follow. But once they don't know what to follow... They start making their own rules since, well, they need some sort of rules.

This is one of the reasons why dropping the kid off at different places with different people at early age (like 0-2 years) is not that good. My wife used to work at kindergarten and according to her experience, there's a massive difference between classes where they have same people working with them and where staff changes every few months. Same applies to elementary school. Much less effect after that though.

> There is a lot of overlap but a lot of exceptions/infractions depending on the context. Plus kids are more or less constantly probing for edge cases and try to push the boundaries naturally.

Yes. But the problem is when there're lots of people with different edge cases and different boundaries. Then they learn that if one person doesn't bend, they can just go to someone else and that person will do what they want. Thus boundaries effectively don't exist. Only obstacles you can go around.

Isn’t this observation kinda the point of the assertion kids need a stable set of rules at home going back to one source above others whether that is either parent or both as a pair. That’s what prevents them from endlessly pushing their boundaries out.

Also this kind of reasoning is hard in forums because people on forums seem to have a lot of difficulty not crossing generations for groups with specific examples and hypotheticals.

The risk is also in sort of men attracted to this proposition. They are literally dangerous ones to date, whether physically or for mental abuse.

Having to run out of abusive marriage sux big time and have long term consequences for women.

Men are not some robots that us pessimists programmed to turn into all the list of attributes that you just now prescribed when met with so and so situation.

Just because I bought a cat or dog doesn't mean I am going to abuse by feeling entitled and owning it.

With mail order women, women get just the same rights as any other women in marriage. Police would be after me otherwise. It is the responsibility of such women who voluntarily participate as mail order brides to educate themselves of their rights to assert them whenever apposite. Mail order transaction is perfectly legal and has no more abuse risk statistically than other kinds of mainstream marriages.

>It is not like they would be ordering her for any other reason.

Actually plenty said it is like they would be ordering her for other reasons - love, companionship and marriage.

You are again and again drawing premature conclusions like "People who own a kitchen knife are damn sure to be murderers!".

Udik explains it better -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19622835