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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

If you're ever in doubt about tech's sexism problem, revisit one of the HN comment threads where gender roles come up and marvel at the unchecked support for the idea that women should be stay-at-home mothers. Then, for bonus points, check out a divorce thread.

Civilization was built on all sorts of identity-based subjugation relationships and as we chip away at them, in the long run, it gets better.

If your implicit assumption is true (women only stay in relationships because they require a partner's income to survive) then we have a moral imperative to provide escape hatches from those toxic relationships as quickly as possible.

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There's no "unchecked support" for anything on HN, let alone "the idea that women should be stay-at-home mothers". HN is divided the way society at large is. All sorts of comments appear here, and inevitably some are noxious. This is what happens with any large-enough sample of people, especially on the internet.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795530 and marked it off-topic.

If you're ever in doubt about the regressive left's tunnel vision and lack of critical thinking, just visit one of these threads, and watch the people unable to distinguish descriptive from normative claims come out of the woodwork, dropping the mandatory moralising chastisement about toxicity and sexism.

From the article it seems the problem is that women continue to seek providers, despite what decades of feminism have tried to tell them they should want.

Do you see what you did here? Someone comes up with a hypothesis that is scientific and not a moral question, and you succeed in politicizing and moralizing it in one fell swoop. Why is it important to derail this line of questioning? If government and welfare systems effect the organization of families, relationships, reproduction, courtship - and the like - then isn't that a worthy thing to study?

Actually, the GP made a pretty blatant assertion, not "we should study this" but "this is the way I believe it is".

"blatant assertion..." Blatant: (of bad behavior) done openly and unashamedly. Assertion: a confident and forceful statement of fact or belief.

Are you implying that we should be closed and/or ashamed of beliefs we might hold in this category of discourse?

Nope. I'm implying that trying to suggest an assertion that affects political discourse and thus real people's lives is "just a scientific hypothesis" is not on.

You just don't seem to be able to take any nuance without failing. My comment wasn't about what you put in quotes - I don't know who you're quoting.

It was not scientific hypothesis nor proposal for research, it was statement of opinion presented as fact.

I'm not sure how fearing that universal basic income would significantly decrease monogamous relationships is opinion presented as far. I'm not going to defend this other commenter, but it is a reasonable topic that I don't like to see get derailed so easily.

This is what's wrong with politics today. Every question gets moralised. Every opinion gets evaluated on a scale from angel to bigot instead of true to false.

It is a bit problematic that the original comment doesn't seem to consider women as potential provider for a family and the narrative is centered around a male provider.

True. The study found that women are coping better with deindustrialization than men are. It's just that they're raising children alone.

Evolution has made men the provider. In the old days (not even that long ago) being pregnant makes a woman vulnerable, while raising children takes time and effort. It made sense for a male to provide for his family while the female was less able to do so. The gender roles are a result of evolution, and womens desire for a man with social and/or economic standing are just as ingrained as a mans desire for visual signs of fertility in a woman.

>Evolution has made men the provider.

Evolution works on the level of genes. It literally cannot prescribe complex social roles. "In the old days", both men and women worked full-time at various tasks: hunting, gathering, mending, caring, building, planting, harvesting, etc.

Citiation? I would think that evolution certainly plays a role in selecting for instinctive behaviors (such as preferences in a mate) that benefit survival

> It literally cannot prescribe complex social roles

It absolutely can. Evolutionary psychology is science, and it's based on the scientific method (ironically, unlike the sociology that's obsessed with "gender roles", which isn't based on science at all). Check out Gad Saad's podcast on Joe Rogan.

>revisit one of the HN comment threads where gender roles come up and marvel at the unchecked support for the idea that women should be stay-at-home mothers.

As someone who's hung around this place along time, I'd love to see a link of a discussion with "unchecked" claims that women should stay home.

> If you're ever in doubt about tech's sexism problem, revisit one of the HN comment threads where gender roles come up and marvel at the unchecked support for the idea that women should be stay-at-home mothers. Then, for bonus points, check out a divorce thread.

And then look how many people have ideas about what's "natural" that come straight out of Victorian etiquette books.

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