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Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

If an old man shows up to watch the high school girl's volleyball matches daily, maybe he really likes volleyball, right?

An old woman would definitely have the privilege of that assumption. An old man wouldn't.

Welcome to society, it will never be perfect and that's ok. Trying to turn the dials and create a perfect one is the stuff of comic book villains. It looks like the west has solved so much that it is starting to go backwards. In the third world we have actual cases of families forcing daughters to stay home or worse, get married at 17. Give me a break with this Nerf ball stuff.

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Yeah, I feel genuinely self-conscious when I take my son to the local park. Especially in the moments he is briefly out of sight and there I am just a lone male at a park with a phone in his hand.

The "all men are rapists" sexism is really getting to us too. I don't think I'm the only one.

I've come to the conclusion that life sucks in some way to some degree for everyone, everywhere and this is necessarily the case.

When you bend something into a shape that suits you it is bent out of shape for someone else. She even states it when she says now men are sometimes avoiding being alone with Women because it represents a risk they don't want to take.

It's the hard problem of delineation. We all need to take a little bit of crap in our lives but it's close to impossible to delineate what the parameters for yourself and others are such that everyone is taking the minimum amount of crap possible and the system is also stable.

An old man wouldn't.

Some time ago, there was this news article - an old man was turned away from a park, because he was alone and because everyone else in the park were "a family with kids" and they won't feel comfortable with a "single old man by himself" (don't remember the exact words, but this is the gist of it).

It gets worse. A woman with her son (just a kid) was asked by other moms to leave, because they were all mums with daughters and she was the only one with a son. I don't get the logic at all.

Society is weird...

Yup. And when I’m at the park with my kids and some other child asks for help with something like getting up on a structure I have to say politely say no (I’m a man) for fear of it being interpreted the wrong way by someone. Just the way it is and to some extent I get it.

I think this type of classifying phenomenon is a sort of low level Bayesian filtering. One of my best friends is African American and he tells me he notices staff at gas stations and grocery stores eyeing him intently like he's seconds away from shoplifting with higher frequency in lower income areas and people brazenly crossing the street in broad daylight if they are alone and approaching him on the same sidewalk.

I don't know if there is a easy solution to advance society other than the passage of time and I think it's unfortunate people face these daily injustices. Thoughts?

> In the third world we have actual cases of families forcing daughters to stay home or worse, get married at 17.

Uh... This happens in the US too.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-29/us-has-forced-child-m...

Did you even read the article? Third world problems aren’t in competition with its content, so it’s weird that you’d bring them up here.

yeah, but does the old man really care what other people think about him? so it kinda didn't matter what's his purpose of watching volleyball, if he doesn't care and doesn't break a law

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