Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ewigkeit | Hacker News Reader

The first time I was catcalled I was six. My friend and I were playing dress up and we put on very messy red lipstick and blush. She left to have lunch and home and we agreed to meet after lunch on the corner of street, her house was next-door to mine. I guess I didn't wash off all of the makeup, but a group of grown men shouted and whistled at me then quickly drove away. At 11 I went on short runs close to home, I was whistled at most days. When I turned 15 and took the bus to work at a nearby mall, I was often asked if I needed a ride by older men, and often had to brush off comments or offers by older men, twice they had sat next to me on the bus blocking my way out, I had to tell the bus driver and stand up on my seat to climb to the seat behind me. When I first went on the internet I tried asking people about about majoring in Physics and what their work was like, I was in high school and if they found out I was a girl they would usually try to convince me to date them, send a dick pic. I even had an offer from a 60 year old to fly me out to live with them. I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.

View on HN

> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.

There is a stats model as to why this is. I can't find the reference, so my recollection may be spotty.

Essentially, assume there are more men than women in some room. Assume that some percent of either sex will espouse sexist comments at the other sex. Running through the math, you find that women hear more sexist comments than men do. If you plug in some real world numbers (of sex imbalances, sexist remark frequencies, time in various environments, etc) to these percentages and not just some random ones, then something like 95% of women will get some very crude remarks thrown their way nearly every day. Again, I can't find the reference, but it has it's own eponymously named rule to it on Wikipedia (though it's not on that linking page yet for some reason).

Basically, one possible reason men don't hear a lot of very sexist stuff all that time is 'because math'. Men need to listen to their sisters, mothers, wives, friends, and coworkers and believe them more often.

This comment was so useful to me, as a man i consider myself to be sensible enough to not be an harasser but it's true that from the standpoint of a white male it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through.

I think exactly this is the reason why many mans perceive the sexual harassment and the sexist argument has overkill sometimes, basically it's an issue cause by a low exposure to it.

Thank you for this comment, i'll use it as an argument in sexism discussions trying to help other fellow mans to understand it.

> it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through.

“10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman”

https://youtu.be/b1XGPvbWn0A

Yes, this is what it's like. Most of the men seem harmless but when someone starts to follow you it gets scary. This was in a populated area thankfully. A few years ago I attended a women who code meetup and two men decided to try and follow two women home, arguing that it wasn't illegal to walk on the street etc. They had to be threatened with someone calling the police and the women had to delay going home and stay with the group leaving the building before it was clear the men would leave them alone and they could safely walk away.

I would love to see this same experiment repeated in other cities. For some reason this seems very specific to NYC. Has anyone tried this in Los Angeles for example?

It's definitely a thing in San Francisco.

Yeah, not a problem!

Word of caution though, I may be misremembering the model and may be totally off base. I couldn't find the reference very easily, so if you'd like to use this argument yourself, try running a similar model through Excel/Python/R first. It'll give you a pretty good idea of the issues involved.

Happy coding and empathizing!

Maybe it's a sexist thing to say, but in my experience, men are far more likely to make overt obnoxious comments.

On the other hand, it's my experience that women are far more likely to share obnoxious comments with their friends. But I admit that's based on a small sample, just close female friends and lovers, and wives. And perhaps I'm not the sort of guy who encourages such sharing by male friends. Or even has such male friends, for that matter.

Sure, Assume that there are twice as many men in this room, then if a sexual remark is made by a random person, then it will twice as often be made by a male. If the target of said sexual remark is always of the opposite sex, then a specific sexual remark made against a male will have twice as many males to choose from, meaning that a particular male has half the chance of receiving each comment than a female would.

So as a summary: if there are twice as many males in the room and everyone is equally likely to make a sexual comment against the opposite sex, then females would get 4 such comments for each comment a male gets.

Now, for normal everyday examples like walking down the street, asking a question in a class, taking the train, etc.. Does it seem likely to be twice as many males in this "room"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio says that there are 1.01 males to each female, I would say that this is not nearly enough to account for this difference.

> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.

Definitely. It's hard to fathom pretty much any "deluge of interactions" and their destructiveness at scale without having going through.

An other common case is online pileups e.g. a random tweet gets retweeted and is controversial enough that people now viewing it want to reply. For them it's just a reply, for the rando it's thousands of by and large useless repetitive and unoriginal message.

It's fundamentally a DDOS, and the skeeviness or even maliciousness of the interactions you experienced only serve to make things workse.

I feel like we're evolved to deal with this kind of concrete threat throughout the day. Go out into the world, avoid the saber tooth tigers and enemy tribes, gather some berries, go back home to safety, threats are gone.

On the other hand, the kind of existential dread many men experience now is something only modern society really made an opportunity to foster. Depression, loneliness, and feelings of abject hopelessness can eat you from the inside out. You feel anxiety as if there's a tiger outside but there is no tiger, you can never "escape" the tiger until you find a partner (and even then your past life can have a permanent lasting effect on you), and being clocked as experiencing all of this makes you "desperate" and less attractive creating a vicious cycle of misery.

If I could have chosen I'd rather have been born onto the other side of that experience instead of barely being able to enjoy life up until recently. Manageable specific threats presenting themselves throughout the day that go away when I remove myself from a situation (or mace them or something) instead of going through the motions day in day out feeling increasingly worthless with every failed attempt at reaching out to a potential partner, online or offline. Having too many options presenting themselves to you versus knowing that at least 500 people in a row online deemed you not even worth responding to.

You are presenting a theory that those primitive tribal living environments did not have the same social interactions and dynamics that we have in the present day. But you’re not presenting any evidence so support that assertion.

It’s entirely reasonable to assume people then had the same existential dread and fear of social exclusion we had today plus festering wounds, lack of hygiene, and poor dental care.

Come on, the whole point of tribal living as a social structure is that it has way more tightly-knit social interaction than a modern day, Western, late-stage-capitalistic, 'Bowling-Alone' society. OP's theory is entirely plausible, even though the sort of existential dread he posits has little to do w/ gender relations per se.

The gender relations point is any random woman is much much much less likely to have loneliness and finding dates as a problem so it doesn't come up in this scenario as much.

When I reconnected with one of my (attractive) female friends from high school (I was 2 years ahead of her) after graduation, in community college. We decided to take a walk together from her house. On the way we passed a construction site on the other side of the street.

She looked to the construction workers and seemed baffled. She told me she was she was surprised that they were 'NOT' catcalling her with me walking with her.

That opened my eyes a bit. She had walked by them before several times and they had harassed her many times, from across the street.

She was either 16 or 17 at the time. I am pretty sure she was not 18 at the time. The age of consent in California.

Yes, there are enough totally obnoxious men around, in many areas, for any women who happens by to be harassed. And maybe worse, you have the ones who are just subtly obnoxious. Or even unconsciously obnoxious.

But then, I'm a guy. However, I have been catcalled and propositioned, by gay men. In clubs, at parties, in restrooms, etc. Rarely, though. And sometimes I flirt, just for lulz. Almost got me knifed, one time.

And then there's all the other crap that we all need to deal with from obnoxious guys.

I feel like men need to hear stuff like this, just like white people need to hear what black people go through.

On the latter, I keep having the thought that in 2019, that comment should not be needed. I feel the same about your comment and how men act.

(I say all this as a older white man.)

Fine with that, as long as the "hear about it" part doesn't involve stereotyping all men (and specifically men) as potential predators.[1] Because that sort of misdirected moral panic can only make things even worse.

[1] (See also: "teach them not to rape!" and the like. You can't teach a rapist not to rape - the leopard doesn't change its spots. And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators!)

Historically, the problem was solved by not allowing women in public at all. In nearly all higher cultures, women lived in completely segregated and controlled world. Let's not forget that what is novel is not that a tiny minority of men are sex-obsessed low-inhibition asshats, but what is novel is that women casually sit in the bus right next to them. By this, of course, I do not intend to downplay the severity of some experiences some women make.

We already have things like segregated, female-only rail cars in Japan. So I'd argue we're slowly going back to that world. Somehow, we'll also develop new "non-predatory", "consent-respecting" sexual scripts that will most likely look a heck of a lot like the old-fashioned rules of public etiquette and courtesy.

Nonsense. In the upper crust maybe, but in tribes and farming cultures women were.alwqys full part of public society. It changed only with the industrial revolution - smaller families, bigger cities, more distinct gender roles.

No, gender segregated work was pretty common throughout human history: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1069397106297529

I'm not sure where you're going with this argument? It's not even all that true outside of the most patriachal communities of the Yawhistic religions.

I believe the word you are looking for is _Abrahamic_.

My parents were mostly absent, hence why I was 15 taking a bus to work so I could afford basic goods. If they were willing to care for me, I would have had way fewer encounters with men harassing me. People who never step out of the bubble have no idea.

> And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators!

The whole discussion around "rape culture" suggests that a lot of people need to be taught where the boundary is. They don't do it "deliberately" but declare that anything other than a clear repeated "no" counts as consent, which is not right.

No, the actual issue with so-called "rape culture" is the way it enables predators by providing them with cover, plausible deniability, social support etc. etc. That's why male-hierarchical and supremacist societies like we see in many places outside the West are a huge problem. (And they hurt males also, since sexual predation often targets them too - much like we'd see in the stereotypes about prison rape in the U.S. It's not homosexuality in the modern Western sense but sexually predatory behavior that's masking as homosexuality. The underlying dynamics are exactly the same as when females are targeted.)

>The whole discussion around "rape culture" suggests that a lot of people need to be taught where the boundary is.

They're taught by popular culture and outdated notions of masculine identity that the boundaries don't really exist, or that they're just an obstacle to be overcome. Plenty of popular songs teach men that women should consent to sex if a man is aggressive enough or rich enough, or handsome or gets a woman drunk, etc.

Rape culture sends men the message that consent is defined by what they want, and that they're entitled to sex, and that there's something wrong with women who don't give it to them (and, conversely, something wrong with men who can't get it at every opportunity.)

Yeah, maybe. But I'm sure everybody who's not a crazy fuck knows that catcalling a 6 year old is way beyond the boundary.

It's not about you.

Oversteer is inevitable. You'll somehow manage. Just like women somehow manage to power thru constant harassment.

Absolutely horrific. What country/language?

This was in the suburbs of a major city in the US. English.

You could find stories like this from every major city in the world. Most days.

> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.

This is generally true in both directions. While I have never experienced sexual harassment, I do experience nothing. As in, no woman (online) initiates contact with me. Every woman apparently initiating contact is a scammer and likely not actually a woman.

It's not "true in both directions" because one of those "directions" is a lifelong experience of harassment and intimidation and the other "direction" is nobody wants to seek you out to have sex with you.

What is true is that women typically do not understand what men experience online. That was my point.

Women do understand what men experience online, because many men have developed a massive victim complex lately and won't stop trying to derail every mention of something women experience online to talk about themselves.

> Women do understand what men experience online,

It is not my experience with the women I know that they are aware of this. Maybe they think it is somewhat reduced from what they experience, or perhaps they think that the only women who contact men are legitimate, non-harassing contacts, but they are not aware that the actual experience is zero initiated contacts.

> because many men have developed a massive victim complex lately and won't stop trying to derail every mention of something women experience online to talk about themselves.

I have observed no massive victim complex. My comment was not intended to "derail" any mentions. I flatly stated my experience and that women are generally unaware of this experience.

If there is no interest in considering the experience of a party for whom you have some desire to influence, what is the likelihood of successful engagement? If you want men, who experience no initiated contacts to fully understand that women experience large amounts of harassment, might it be critical to approach them with the understanding that they have a completely different experience?

>I flatly stated my experience and that women are generally unaware of this experience.

Yes but the subject at had was, specifically, womens' experience with harassment. There was no reason to make it about you, or about men not being engaged with by women. Sure, maybe some women don't understand what men go through in that case... it's not relevant, though.

The situations aren't even equivalent. Women have a right to expect not to be harassed online, men don't have a right to expect women to initiate contact with them online.

And this sort of thing happens all the time. Almost any conversation relating to women will result in someone trying to turn the conversation towards men, or calling such conversation sexist for not including men. It's as if we're not allowed to discuss women here except in relation to men somehow.

>If you want men, who experience no initiated contacts to fully understand that women experience large amounts of harassment, might it be critical to approach them with the understanding that they have a completely different experience?

No, it shouldn't be critical. Men who don't experience contact from women should be able to comprehend that women are often harassed despite their own personal experience being different. If anything, such men should perhaps consider that the amount of harassment women receive and the degree of personal contact women are willing to initiate are not at all unrelated.

> Women have a right to expect not to be harassed online, men don't have a right to expect women to initiate contact with them online.

No one is arguing this... they are simply saying women don't understand how men experience online dating.

> Men who don't experience contact from women should be able to comprehend that women are often harassed despite their own personal experience being different.

If this is true, then women should be able to understand that a man who has faced nothing but rejection during years of online dating will begin to get frustrated, and may lose their peachy demeanor. After the 100th "genuine conversation" you have online with someone that ultimately goes nowhere, and the 1000th message you send that gets no response, you may begin to resort to "ay bb want some fuck?" Obviously no one deserves to be harassed online, but ignoring the factors that cause these behaviors is silly.

You won't change these men's behavior by telling them to just die alone silently and accept their loneliness. You will change men's behavior by understanding their position and empathizing with them.

Which is true that both sucks.

You could list any two random things and say "yes those two things suck". If one person got mugged and another was short on bus fare, yes both would suck, but the comparison is wildly out of proportion. Not only is the impact much different, but the whole context is different. And it's especially frustrating and inappropriate when it's used to downplay an important issue.

There are good arguments that the situation is worse for men. The Contrapoints video on incels goes over it well.

I could easily say it's like comparing having a hard time losing weight because you have so much free food available to being homeless and starving.

So men just want sex? None of these men are grappling with loneliness and feeling unvalued getting nothing but radio silence trying to reach out to potential partners? Having the pressure of having to work out, get a high paying job, etc. just in order to try to increase their chances of not dying alone?

A tired, sexist attitude.

It's about sex, but it's also about entitlement. These men you're talking about believe that it's somehow unfair that they get "radio silence" when they "reach out". I'm sure they feel bad, but nobody victimized them. They're just insecure.

And, heh, hoooooo boy, yeah, let's talk about pressure. Let me tell you, as a man, I am pressured constantly to look good. All the makeup I put on every day, all the different outfits I own. All the work I have to do on my butt and abs, all the crazy crash diets I've gone on to try to slim down, the sheer amount of money I spend on my hair... You're right, it really is unfair how society pressures me, a cis man, to constantly look good and make lots of money, in order to be treated as a person.

I know lots of women that don't do any of those things and get "treated as a person" perfectly fine. None of that is remotely necessary to get dates as a woman. Including weight, lots of guys like heavier girls but it's practically a death sentence for men.

If you really think lonely people are just victimizing themselves then you need to make a better attempt at having empathy skills. It /is/ grossly unfair having to live like that. Unfair having to get catcalled too but as I said in another comment I'd have picked that over what my life had to be like in an instant.

You are responsible for your own life and happiness — not society and not some imagined social monolith of “all women”.

If you are unhappy with where you are today then it is your responsibility to take reasonable and appropriate action to change that.

Learn how to be an adult.

"It's not society's job to be fair to you," said the employer to the Irish immigrant in 19th century America. The Irishman needed to learn how to be an adult and stop whining about hiring discrimination - it was his responsibility alone to find a job and be happy, not some imagined monolith of "all employers."

This is a great example of casual misandry. You seem to think men have no issues, and only women have difficult lives. That simply isn't true. Men and women both face issues, and both have issues that are both significant and insignificant. Try to learn some empathy.

Possibly reading the wrong thing between the lines,but if anyone expects women to initiate relationships online, they're going to be very disappointed. For women, the risk\reward equation is astronomically biased against them.

If you're looking for a relationship, look offline. And not in pick-up joints - take any interests you have and make them sociable, invest in social gatherings with people your own age (anyone younger than a couple of years is going to think you're a creep), and tell women you find attractive that you find them attractive subtly, and don't be childish if they knock you back.

This is excellent advice.

> the risk\reward equation is astronomically biased against them

...what? An almost guaranteed date for a minimum of effort is a bad risk/reward how exactly? I suppose it is a little more effort than just replying to one of the 1000 messages in their inbox.

The risk of falling prey to a charming or good looking predator?

Idk, lots of sexual assaulters exist in the offline world. In the social dancing scene, you can meet lots of charming men who will push your boundaries beyond comfort and some will rape. Heard dozens of stories for just the scenes I'm involved in. And you'd think it happens once and then the dude is gone, nope. They stay around for 20 years raping people. And it's very frequently the people leading the community.

I'd love to hear if online dating is statistically riskier than offline but duck duck go isn't helping me much here.

I always thought the benefit of online dating is to avoid the need to muck up friendship activities with finding a partner. Like, don't people not want to be propositioned just because they like f.e. table tennis?

> This is generally true in both directions. While I have never experienced sexual harassment, I do experience nothing.

I'm trying to make sense of this comment and am drawing a complete blank.

Seems to me that zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers of the opposite sex would be an example of "winning", not an example of "men have it bad, too."

As a guy who wishes he'd had zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers, what am I missing here?

> I'm trying to make sense of this comment and am drawing a complete blank.

> Seems to me that zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers of the opposite sex would be an example of "winning", not an example of "men have it bad, too."

You may be struggling to make sense of this by inserting some sort of "who is winning and who is losing" query. I'm not positing winning, losing, better, or worse for anyone. I'm stating that men and women have different online experiences and most are not aware that the other has a different experience.

> As a guy who wishes he'd had zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers, what am I missing here?

Okay, so non-zero over what time-frame?

Without meeting IRL, is there any way for you to determine if these "creepers" are scammers? You may find they are nearly all scammers if probe even just a little.

You may have something in your profile most men do not have, making you a more attractive target, because, really, HN is full of men and although this is a really poor survey, you are so far the only person stating you experience elsewise.

I would be curious to hear if you receive initial contact from non-"creeper" women. Women also receive non-harassing contact from men, whereas men generally don't receive any.

No offense but think about the other side. I'm very lightly kidding here, I remember making a female account on a website to assist some girl (say an ancestor of tinder) and remember being washed by a torrent of messages from guys. It was a shock, I never ever imagined it was possible to get so much "attention" in so few. I understood a thing or two about girl's life all of a sudden. I also realized how our world were different, because at that time, on a myspace like website, I honestly wrote hundreds of long and fun message to women and maybe got 3 answers total. Men are frustrated, women are harassed. It's an absurd situation in a way.

ps: my story is very slightly related to the thread and your example as I was not a minor nor made a minor female profile. Strangers annoying young girls should be stopped immediately.

This comment is like if someone said they watched their parents burned alive in a house fire and it changed the person for life, and someone else replied "yeah, but think about the other side, my brother is a firefighter and he works so hard..." Sure, let's minimize the first thing and talk about something different.

> This comment is like if someone said they watched their parents burned alive in a house fire and it changed the person for life, and someone else replied "yeah, but think about the other side, my brother is a firefighter and he works so hard..." Sure, let's minimize the first thing and talk about something different.

No, it isn't like that because the discussion is regarding the same environment. within your analogy, both discussions would have to be about parents. So the one person provides the stated example of watching their parents burn to death while the other explains that their parents locked them in a 48" x 48" x 48" cage and tortured the person for 18 years. (I'm going very extreme here to demonstrate the point.)

nonono I didn't meant to put 'both sides' on the same level, especially in the streets.

That's the point, reading alternative perspective open up my mind.

No it is not nearly at the same level as "parents burnt alive".

Men are frustrated, girls and women fear for their lives. Most of the negative attention I received came from much older men, with the exception of one walking up to me at a train station at midnight and putting his hand on my shoulder while his friends cheered from his car and I had to aggressively push his hand away and walk away quickly hoping he didn't follow.

Have you considered purchasing a firearm? It is your 2nd amendment right and may come in handy when you are harassed or stalked. There are a lot of training programs as well, teaching the basics of storing a firearm, when to use it, how to use it, etc.

I haven't yet pulled the trigger and actually bought one yet, but I have taken safety classes and done some target practice. Unfortunately I live in an area where concealed carry is not legal.

With the exception of chicago (and a few other cities like newyork), concealed carry is usually granted. And I say this as someone whose paperwork for the application got lost by the department performing background check, twice (because of my name). Even in new york city and most of california, it is possible, just takes some doing (speak to an attorney that specializes in this) and don't forget the training.

I live in Chicago and concealed carry permits aren't difficult to procure, they're issued by the state of Illinois.

A can of mace might be less likely to end in tragedy and trauma of another kind.

Maybe learn some karate?

Many years ago, I was walking with a female friend, and some random guy slapped her ass. She kicked out one of his knees, and he went down hard. We didn't kick the piss out of him, though.

Made a okcupid account back in the day with some random pictures I found on non-English internet of a decently attractive woman. Holy shit, within a week there were tens of unread messages and likes.

What is the lesson there? Go meet women in person. Online/tinder/okc is for schmucks. Women have it so easy.

Also this article is submarine pr for bark. Honestly bark sounds like something that would be awful for parents mental health. Do you really want to know what your kids are doing? At 10-15 we (girls included) we were trying to be as offensive as possible on the internet.

> Women have it so easy.

I would not categorize having to dig through online harassment as “easy”.

The comment was directly referring to likes and direct messages received in an online dating profile.

In a platform such as an online dating app/game this in no way would be considered “online harassment”, if anything they world be considered validation.

If that amuses you, you'll love rfjason's "Craigslist Experiment": https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Sex-and-the-Cit...

> Women have it so easy

I find that offensive:

a) young or attractive will get attention; a large number of woman do not get attention (perhaps even when seeking it).

b) “easy”? The whole point here is that it isn’t easy at all dealing with bad attention.

Cool be offended. But I would still disagree with your attempted rebuttal of my original points.

a) Not just Young or attractive women will get attention. There are a lot of older/non conventionally attractive women that use online dating too. Who knows since we are thinking in hypotheticals would you deny them male attention if they wanted it? What about a younger man who wants to meet older/bbw/non conventionally-attractive women?Tinder et al. are great for that, and I would not dissuade anyone for trying to find someone they are sexually attracted to.

b) The point that I was making, and that you have created a straw man argument out of....is that yes women have it easy in regards to receiving validation and invitation to dates/encounters/sex in the form of likes and messages on online dating services. There may be undesirables/creeps out there but it is trivial to unmatched so it would arguably be easier than swanking with bad attention in in the real world.

I'm consistently flabbergasted people put forth getting a lot of messages on dating sites as some difficult situation that's hard to deal with. It's metaphorically like they want some cheese so they go to the cheese store and are so overwhelmed by all the cheese selection and free samples that they run out screaming without buying any cheese, somehow expecting me to feel sympathy for them and accept that I was in the privileged position starving in a cold wet cardboard box not having had any my whole life despite searching far and wide trying as hard as I could, not being able to get my first nibble of cheese until the age of 24 while they got pallets and pallets of free cheese offered to them their entire life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com