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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

I resisted the urge to joke that this finally explains millenials, because it’s exactly that response which leads to the dismissive reactions this trend is being met with.

A couple days ago I shared a NYT article with my wife because it was such a strange window into evolving gender standards [1] and the next day a friend of hers shared another story which took it to a whole new level [2].

I could not help but tie it all together in my mind with TFA and dropping testosterone levels, but god help me for admitting it here.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/style/modern-love-he-aske...

[2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/imagining...

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Jesus Christ, #2 sounds dangerously like the parent pushing her viewpoints on the poor kid.

Where do you see that? I don't get that at all. It clearly sounds like his decision to wear dresses — the mother is just reflecting on the implications of that choice.

To me, it sounds like it’s got that tone. Like if your communist friend tells you, “My younger son just asked me why the proletariat allow the capital class to maintain a reserve army of labour. He also told me he wants to go to his third grade class dressed as Engels to protest the violence inherent in the system.”

Makes me a little ... queasy.

FWIW I’m not particularly bothered by the concept that a little kid may want to wear dresses. It’s just the tone in the story seems a bit ... not reputable.

I read it almost exactly halfway between what you two do: She read waay too much into one of her kid's specific preferences, and accidentally pushed him into dresses because of her own beliefs.

Take myself for example, and imagine what that mother would have thought: Up until ~14 I wore various old shirts from my parents to bed and on weekends, which were long enough to look like a dress on me, but it had nothing to do with liking dresses. It had to do with regular clothes being too stifling to be comfortable on the weekend, pajamas being too warm, and me not having confidence to just go around in only underwear.

For children, it's always about what the parents want. Children will do anything for their parents.

Kids don't put themselves in news articles. It's the parents who do it, but they always say the child spontaneously behaved that way.

How do you guys get past paywalls like #2? Seems increasingly more sites have paywalls and I can’t imagine people are subscribing to multiple news providers.

Sorry, just fixed the link to go direct to The Atlantic where there doesn’t appear to be a paywall.

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