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Comment by hyperdunc | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed over the last 20 or so years that men in the West, in general, appear increasingly effeminate.

I've also noticed that a lot of male pop stars have really high voices.

I've long suspected these observations are more than cultural. Recent studies seem to back this intuition.

Is this sort of pseudoscientific anecdata what passes for discourse on HN now? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - where's yours?

This is only the most egregious comment in here, not the only one in general. Someone above is talking about gut microbiome (which we know vanishingly little about) as being a primary causer, diet is apparently 100% the issue (colinear effects in other populations throw water on this theory pretty hard), plastics are a real problem (no evidence supports this, though there is a significant lag), etc.

Basically no one wants to just say "No one knows, let's keep researching." Everyone has to chime in. That'd be one thing if it was relegated to HN or forums, but it's true in the "scientific" community [1] and the media as well; perhaps moreso.

[1] Of which I am sadly a part of, so don't think I am an anti-science person, just anti-parts of this ridiculous industry.

I think the thing that's worth remembering about HN is that it's far more of a forum for engineers than scientists. The user base here is very well read, very interesting, a pleasure to interact with, and a lot of the time very obviously technically skilled. They are not, as a general rule, particularly scientifically literate.

Isn't that was research is, a bunch of people putting forward various theories which are then subjected to rigorous testing?

Just because he's not referencing a survey or study doesn't make it useless data. Anecdotal data is not useless.

There's been a noticeable increase in effeminate men in NYC over the last 6 years. Maybe it's due to the increased acceptance of LGBT, maybe it's something else...

Are you sure you aren't falling victim to a frequency illusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...

I get where you're coming from, but the increased effemination in men has been so pronounced in my own experience over the past 20 years I'm still chiming in on it.

Wow, I'm just as dumbfounded as you.

The rate of males identifying as gay has been rising either because of the changing culture, and/or something in the water.

Such a statement claiming western men as becoming more effeminate is obvious.

Well homosexuality being more accepted I guess would be a cultural change, yes, but that doesn't mean there are more gay men now than there were before, it means there are more men who are openly gay than there were before. It's a bit hard to tell whether there was an actual increase in gay men due to the known fact that many men hid their sexuality prior to it being more acceptable.

I think this is a far more sensible and defensible position and a simpler explanation than something in water, unless that was a facetious comment.

Auto-tune is probably more of an explanation than hormones. I've been to more than one of concerts in recent years where the lead singer couldn't actually hit the high notes live.

> I've also noticed that a lot of male pop stars have really high voices.

Male pop stars had really high voices long before 20 years ago - the BeeGees, the Beach Boys, Freddy Mercury are three off the top of my head. I'm sure I could come up with some more if I thought about it for more than 5 seconds.

Not that the op comment has any basis, but singing falsetto or having vocal range has little to do with the high/low-ness of the baseline voice.

In the 1700s castratis were quite popular throughout Europe. Does that mean they had low sperm count then, or was it just something people liked?

I really don't believe you can explain cultural phenomenon through medical science.

Well, castrati certainly did have low sperm counts...

Castrati means literally castrated, normally boys before puberty to retain the soprano/mezzo-soprano pitch on adulthood. This got forbidden in 1870 in Italy and by the Roman church in 1902.

castratis have exceptionally low sperm count

Is there a direct correlation between sperm count and appearance though? Its probably more relevant to consider testosterone.

I can't help but have noticed that same thing, anecdotally (very anecdotally, but seems seems so pronounced that I'm commenting). Higher voice registers, smaller frames, more effeminate postures and body language.

Effeminate by what attributes?

Western cultural values, I guess.

This seems to be a really weird talking point of the right wing (although I'm not saying that it's only the right, or that hyperdunc is right wing), that people have stopped caring about hyper-masculinity, and it must be caused by hormones and not just a change in cultural values.

I had gynecomastia from when I was 10 years old up until I was in my early 20s, when I had surgery to remove it. Wonder if I can blame plastics for that.

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