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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

What are the things that motivates them, and what do they themselves want to do in life?

I ask this because much of the undertone in the article and in this thread is about the failure of meeting the gender role expectations that are put on young men. Do they have a job and a car? Have they studied hard so they can get a good job in order to support a wife and kid?

Culture in the last several decades have hammered down on the negative aspects of stereotyping. A person who is 35 has gone through a life time of TV, movie and politics that on repeat has talked about the negative of gender roles for women, while the expectations on men has remained fairly unchanged. I do not find it strange at all if an increasing portion of men under this culture has rejected the role put on them.

Which goes back to the original question I started with. What motivates them and what do they want to do with their life? If we want to avoid the slow motion tragedy, maybe the way forward is to help them answer those question in the absent of imposed gender roles.

View on HN

On a related note, on mainstream TV/articles about declining marriage/birthrates in the West, it's common to see criticisms about modern Western men. How women can't find life partners because men aren't masculine enough anymore, don't want to grow up, don't get educated etc.

But very rarely do you see any criticism or even questioning about modern Western women and what men want in a woman. Only what women want. The journalists never seem interested in asking whether modern Western women are marriage material? Degrees don't make you marriage material. Are men still attracted to feminine women, and are there enough feminine women? Are there potential reasons why Western men find it risky to commit to Western women? Do Western women have realistic standards? Do Western women need to be less picky about superficial characteristics? Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women, could women in a lot of instances be ending relationships and wrecking their own homes over trivial matters?

The mainstream coverage of this topic is usually very one sided/gynocentric. Women questioning the value of modern men is acceptable, while men questioning the value of modern women will often get you labeled a misogynist/woman hating incel.

This imbalance/lack of discussing what men want in women/lack of criticism of some aspects of modern women really hurts marriage minded women as well, because a lot of women are growing up without hearing what men want in a woman to marry.

> Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women

Hey, there's actually a study [1] about this!

> The author uses a new longitudinal study of relationships in the US, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together surveys, to examine the gender of who wanted the breakup for both marital and nonmarital heterosexual relationships for the first time. The results show that only in marriages are the majority of breakups wanted by the female partner. Men and women in nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the US are equally likely to want to break up. Furthermore, wives report lower relationship quality than husbands, while men and women in nonmarital relationships report more similar relationship quality.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_gender_of_break...

> The results show that only in marriages are the majority of breakups wanted by the female partner. Men and women in nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the US are equally likely to want to break up.

Incidentally, the courts generally don't get involved in the later sort of breakup. If a for-profit industry were made for nonmarital breakups as divorce attorneys have made for marital breakups, I bet this discrepancy would narrow.

> Degrees don't make you marriage material.

This gets said so much on fora with men who regard themselves as “redpilled”, but it makes no sense to me personally. As a bookish and arts-inclined person, so much of my worldview, the things that occupy my thoughts during the day, has been formed by the canon of literature, music, films. No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect. It has been the number-one factor driving all my relationships over my life.

Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.

> Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.

If a woman is basically the mirror image of a man (degree, high paying job, spends most of the day at an office), then what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman? Maybe intimacy, but that feeling will wear off after a few years. A vagina? Well, that's kind of depressing on its own. Expecting men to love and accept women who serve the exact same role they do in life is like wondering why companies aren't run entirely by managers, or entirely by assembly line workers. Men can already make a bunch of money and find intellectual stimulation from other men, and a woman has to compete with that. So what does a woman necessarily provide a man in that case?

Related to that, an intellectual woman probably isn't going to have a lot of time for anything outside of a few hours of eating food, watching Netflix, and maybe sex. That's all fine and good, except there's a kind of relationship that already fulfills those things, and it's called friends with benefits. Why make a contract with the state that gives half your possessions to the opposite party if things go wrong when you can get the benefits without any of that baggage?

No offense, but it can be really astounding how people simply can't understand that the programming they received about college degrees can be wrong. Man spent millions of years mating with women who didn't have a college degree (and vise versa!). A woman with a college degree does little more than what the man already can do with his own college degree.

It's just like the field of software engineering. No one really wants to work with a jerk with credentials. They want someone with good qualities that they can get along with.

Sure, one can get intellectual stimulation from other men, but having an intellectual partner means one can have intellectual stimulation around the clock – if you think of something interesting at any hour of the day, you have someone to share it and discuss it with. I value my male friends, but you can't reasonably expect to see them more than a few hours a week, and many gradually fall away as they e.g. get bogged down in childrearing that no longer leaves them time for the intellectual things that once bound us together. Your feeling that the woman won't have time to provide companionship doesn’t necessary hold in this day and age when more and more people doing knowledge work are working remotely, so you might be sitting together most of the day.

Also, if one's particular interesting in learning extends to longterm travels, immersing oneself in foreign countries to study the languages or aspects of culture there, your male friends are probably not going to accompany you for more than a brief time. When people go on longterm travels, it is their partners that they rely on for companionship. (That holds, of course, for non-intellectual people traveling, too, as anyone in the bikepacking or overlanding scenes can tell you.)

For a bookish person, being in a relationship with a partner who merely has "good qualities", but who doesn't share that basic context, can mean feeling like one is not truly understood and there is a barrier between you. There is nothing worse than being in a relationship yet feeling alone.

I agree with most of you're saying, but I don't believe this requires a woman needs a college degree or hold down a "job" to be a good companion or that a college degree likely helps her at all in that context. I would even argue the same for men. The thing I'm arguing for is that it shouldn't be surprising that most men are indifferent to women's college education. Yes, some men on the edge of the bell curve are going to require a woman of a university background. The rest of the time, it doesn't add anything to a man's experience with a woman and can even potentially detract from it.

A college degree is not at all mandatory (or always sufficient) to be educated. However, people, regardless of gender, that aren't educated just don't tend be that interesting. Do you really want to spend your life with someone your found uninteresting?

I personally think that the more educated people a society has, the more interesting people there are to meet.

Of course there are dull people out there but do you think that most people without college degrees are dull?

While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.

In many ways education makes us more homogeneous. To an extent this can help make each other seem more interesting because it gives us common language and intellectual frameworks to have discussions, it dispenses with some boring preliminaries. But beyond that point, I think sharing common education makes people actually less interesting, not more.

There is a huge social stigma to non college educated folks. Many feel ostracized and inadequate their while lives even when monetarily they are as or more successful than most college folks.

If this is something you, or anyone else reading this, feels like you're suffering: I can offer that you won't necessarily feel this way forever.

Particularly, that kind of feeling inadequate in spite of success is a likely a form of imposter syndrome. Many other people experience it, including people with degrees (there is always someone else with more or more illustrious degrees). Many people feel better just knowing that other, even obviously super-accomplished people, have felt that way and many people seem to more or less age out of it.

While I can't refute the existence of that social stigma, at least I found that there isn't much of that in actuality... but that doesn't prevent it from existing in your head. Of course, there are people who always find something to be snooty about. If it's not the pedigree of your academic credentials it'll be about the brand of your sneakers. Surrounding yourself with thoughtful and emotionally healthy people can help.

At least that is what I experienced and heard from others.

Cheers

You are very presumptuous and should consider changing your rhetorical style as it is very off-putting.

> Of course there are dull people out there but do you think that most people without college degrees are dull

I meant precisely what I said. I don't intend to make a broad statistical statement based on my limited personal annecdotes.

> While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.

I don't have a college degree. There are many thing I don't know about, which is why I like talking to educated people.

> In many ways education makes us more homogeneous.

I strongly disagree. ”Education” only creates homogeneity to the degree to which educational institutions focus on indoctrination over education.

I strongly support enouraging education for people of all genders, ethnicities, intelligences and socio-economic backgrounds because I think it will make the world a more interesting (and better) place.

> if a woman is basically the mirror image of a man (degree, high paying job, spends most of the day at an office),

I have to be perfectly honest, but to me, this is entrepreneurialism, not intellectualism. Someone might go to college and get some massive degrees to become i.e a lawyer or a senior dev, or a doctor, but ... those are trade skills. There's a fair amount of overlap, but to me, intellectualism is something distinct.

For many of us, intellectualism is the "philo" part of "philosophy"; the love of knowledge. Not knowledge as a means to an end; as a means to a high-powered, eat-your whole-day career. But rather; knowledge for its own sake - knowledge that exists as a sort of purpose for life (whether secular or spiritual, it's practically the pursuit of curiosity and knowledge-seeking as a sort of borderline religious calling).

Guys like that are looking for a woman (or man, if they're so inclined) they can have fulfilling conversations with, every day, for the rest of their life. And it's not something you can do with your "pals"; there are some of these conversations you can only have with a soul mate. Hell, there are some of them you can only have with your lover - not a friend-with-benefits (which, sadly, includes a lot of spouses), but someone you've been willing to be truly vulnerable with and expose the depths of your soul to.

But yeah; for a lot of us, they have to have the same deep love of knowledge, curiosity, and sense of wonder about life - or there can't be love, there.

The basic flaw in your argument is someone with a degree, high paying job, who spends most of the day at an office doesn't necessarily have the same personality as me so isn't necessarily a mirror image.

I chuckled a little at your comment because you are sort of the anti Henry Higgins, the character who sings "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" in the famous play set in 1917

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY

>then what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman?

Jack Donovan has a great corollary to this in "The Way Of Men" where he says that society is nowadays trying to "fix" men as if they are "imperfect women."

this is outrageous?! and I feel totally on the outside of like 80% of these comments in a bad way for saying that.

I started copying and pasting lines and responding to them but on edit it seems pointless.

I would just say that good relationships work in both directions, 1+1=3 idiom, and come in vastly many forms.

Intimacy doesn't fade in a good relationship it grows stronger.

For sure the type of women you seem to be looking for exist and enjoy that type of relationship.

But a lot of people, of all genders and orientations, find the things you don't seem to think are good qualities, are in fact the things 'that they can get along with.'

And I would maybe suggest instead looking more at the 'programming' of gender and roles.

Women aren't simply a transaction or variable in your equation of an ideal relationship.

Yeah he lost me in the first sentence.

> what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman?

What a strange and confused perspective, to pose such a question.

You think a better relationship would be built on a "cook and clean and take care of kids for me" role? I can pay to have that done for me these days!

$15/hr * 40 hrs/week * 4 weeks/mo = $2,400/mo and that's only during working hours. Which, chances are you're going to pay more than that, as that doesn't include that person's healthcare, that's pre-tax, and more.

Sure one can pay for a child care center, but that's not covering the whole cleaning and doing the chores around the house. Its also only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

An at-home caregiver (note: I didn't say wife either spouse can do) can provide an immense amount of value.

Yeah 2400 probably sounds right though come a bit differently. That buys you 10 hrs of shared child care and a cleaner every month. Totally worth it if you both make decent money

> That buys you 10 hrs of shared child care and a cleaner every month.

10 hours a month doesn't cover doing a full time job. What world do you live in where one can do a full-time job for 10 hours a month?

If that's what someone is looking for in another person, then yes. But the concept of "better" is purely contextual. What seems to be better for marriages, or any team of people, is when the participants bring fulfill different roles that serve the shared mission. Two people doing fundamentally the same thing isn't necessarily helpful, although some people may thrive together that way.

That kind of labor is ultra expensive these days. You need 500K or more for this to be realistic to have done for you at anywhere approaching 24/7 levels

Would a 21 year old woman with a high school education who is extremely attractive be more sought after by more men than a 40 year old woman of average attractiveness who has a PhD? I'd guess yes, and I don't think it'd be a close contest. I'd guess about 90 percent of men would go with the former if they had a real choice between the two.

It's not that the PhD doesn't add to the attractiveness. It's just not the most important variable for most men. You might differ, but unusually intellectually curious men on HN aren't really representative. Most people have very little intellectual curiosity.

Some of that has to do with evolution. At 40 a woman has almost passed her child bearing age. Evolutionary this match has low advantage.

For a life partner i would and did pick the PhD tho

You studying social subjects that almost only women study is the exception, you can afford to be picky about this. Lots of guys would love to have a woman who shares their interest, but since so few women study technical topics they have to settle with women they have little in common with. And at that point whether they studied some social topic or no topic and did other stuff isn't high up on the list.

"so few women study technical topics"

I don't even know what to say to this. Is [picks from list] speech pathologist, dental hygienist, nurse, payroll clerk or hairdresser NOT a job that involves a fair amount of knowledge, training, and skill?

Just because it's not EE or CS doesn't mean there isn't a wealth of technical and scientific understanding (or even just an understanding of the legal environment) going on behind the scenes of a profession.

So you're probably not going to find a girl who has exactly the same job as you and wants to date you -- but if you ask them to explain their profession to you, you might just learn there's a lot going on under the hood.

"they have to settle with women they have little in common with"

Again, this is just a lack of imagination. I studied a bit of chemistry, my wife studied a lot of chemistry, we appreciate that chemistry is cool. Just because I went with computers and she went with medicine doesn't mean we have "little in common"; we just find other topics to geek-out about.

"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't." ― Bill Nye

[1] list was https://fourpillarfreedom.com/visualizing-u-s-occupational-e...

debt is likely acquired with the degree; fields that skew female are also low-paying.

that's basically it: debt is not attractive.

Thanks, that is some insight into why men who are primarily concerned with technical subjects would be unsatisfied with the dating market. However, I wouldn't claim that "almost only women" are concerned with the humanities subjects I mentioned above. Film criticism and scholarship on many branches of literature and music are still fields that draw either predominantly men, or have a pretty even gender balance.

If you take the subject and the adjacent subjects you get mostly women though, even if specific courses are more balanced. It is the same in technical courses, some of them like chemistry and biology have more even balance but overall there aren't a lot of women.

You seem to have this assumption that the only expression and development of interests comes through taking courses. I have a degree in CS, yet care much more that my partner shares my non-technical interests than my technical ones, cause I can talk shop all day long at work already...

I responded to a guy who argued that he wouldn't date a girl without a similar degree to his own, I am arguing against that position not for it.

I didn’t actually argue that. The erudition I have always sought in dating or marriage material does not depend on the degree I have, and in fact my own degree is in a field different than the canon of art to which I mentioned above. But sure, having a degree of some sort does greatly boost the chances that one will have had access to an academic library (or awareness of alternatives like LibGen), and potentially made use of it for subjects beyond one’s own degree programme.

The average women has a degree, it doesn't say much about her at all.

The proportion of women with degrees differs from country to country, and often isn’t “the average woman” at all. And sure, having a degree is certainly no guarantee of erudition, but in most countries, women without a degree are even less likely to possess the kind of erudition I was talking about. To the point where a degree does function as a basic prerequisite.

My point is that when degrees are so easy to get that an average person has one then they don't have any meaning as a filter. There are plenty of reasons not to get one that aren't "I don't like learning" so it doesn't work as a filter in the other direction either.

Well, no, they said "No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect" but being erudite in no way requires or is the same as having a degree. That's just one way of many to get exposed to things.

I knew a few women who went to college specifically for the purpose of finding a man to marry, with their goal being a stay at home mother and wife to a lawyer or doctor or something wealthy sounding.

They were as physically attractive as they were emotionally shallow. There is much much more to a person than an education.

What is what you believe men want in a woman, that's being unfulfilled for these men?

The common male complaint I see isn't "all these women I date are simply not going to fulfill what I need," it's "no women will date me at all" which points at a breakdown in the process way before the point of "what are these men looking for." Hard to imagine these men even have any idea of what they're actually looking for in a relationship, with that lack of experience. You only find out one way...

And for that situation, a woman complaining "so few of these men I see have their shit together" and a man complaining "so few of these women are willing to date me at all" are two sides of the same coin. I think at a societal level, though, you'd be hard pressed to push the view "everyone should simply give up on contributing to society in traditional ways" so the coverage is going to look negatively at the "freeloaders" in the same way it disapproved of someone like Paris Hilton. You see it through a lens of sexism, I see it through a lens of it being hard to sympathize with someone drifting through life chatting meaninglessly on the internet and playing games. BATNA comes into play, too - the person with no options at all seems to be the one with the incentive to make changes. (While for the women here, and the men they are currently dating while ignoring these stay-at-home-and-do-nothing men, there's other, plenty-well-trod advice about compromise being necessary, etc, that's been repeated to death in media of all sorts.)

Maybe we should encourage these men to go become nannies for a few years, to both give them a job and boost their dating profile that way AND to prepare them for being a full-time homemaker if traditional employment simply isn't what they want! I certainly think that should be an option for both genders.

> Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women

Citation please? I would LOVE to know if your number here also includes stuff like "he slept with me and then ghosted me," too.

> Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women

I suspect what the poster meant to write was that most divorces are initiated by women. Which is a different statistic but still somewhat relevant. It's actually true, it's around 69% that are initiated by women. Here's the study i quickly found for it which seems credible https://www.asanet.org/press-center/press-releases/women-mor...

Interestingly it explicitly states that there's no large difference for non-marital relationships. So the poster is incorrect about breakups in general.

Speaking anecdotally from my own experience, there is a pervasive fear of marriage and raising children amongst men. Most believe that if you get divorced you'll be left destroyed financially and denied access to your children regardless of the circumstances and that getting divorced is extremely likely. Whether that's actually true or not, I don't actually know, but it's still widely believed and influencing men's behavior/plans all the same. I suspect that's a big factor in the frequency of men who don't seem to care about having their shit together. From my own observation of divorces within my extended family and those of my close friends, it does seem to be true to me. Many divorces I've been privy to, seem to almost always end with the man living a much lower standard of living by himself with restricted access to children, while the mother lives in the family home with a higher standard of living that the ex-husband pays for. Totally anecdotal of course, but it certainly makes me extremely cautious when considering marriage and it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of young men don't even consider it.

> Whether that's actually true or not, I don't actually know, but it's still widely believed and influencing men's behavior/plans all the same.

On average I think it's probably not true. Most men probably stay married, and most divorces probably aren't ruinous. I say "most", but I don't mean a comfortable majority. The ruinous divorces happen a lot. I've seen it destroy more men I know/knew than alcohol or any drug. Even if it only happens one in six times, that's Russian Roulette odds. Those are bad odds.

Statistically, men do better financially after divorce and women do worst. Men are more lonely, depressive and more unhappy. Women are more happy after divorce. Men find new partner sooner after divorce.

Where men ask for custody, they tend to get it. But they are less likely to ask.

Also, alimony for adult women are more of rare. Where they exist they are time limited and awarded only if she stayed at home for multiple years. As in, in double income situation they wont happen.

I think what you said is a very unforgiving and slightly misogynistic way of describing what has been spelled out many other places before: women are increasingly opting for more education or career advancement in lieu of becoming homemakers. They don’t make those decisions for the benefit of men. They don’t have to. This has little to do with observed femininity or the “attractiveness” of getting a degree.

>They don’t make those decisions for the benefit of men. They don’t have to.

But isn't that the parent poster's point? They don't make decisions that make them more attractive for marriage, therefore they're less likely to end up married.

The same argument applies to men too. Men don't have to do things that make them more attractive to women, but they shouldn't be all that surprised when they end up not being attractive to women.

There's a group missing here. We're discussing stories talking about a demographic of women that are unhappy with the men they date, and also about a demographic of men that aren't dating at all.

The men unable to get a date at all clearly have some work to do - even when there's so many unhappy women, there is something they're still doing or not doing that makes them even less appealing.

The unhappy women and the men they're currently dating are a more curious situation. Are the men unsatisfied with them in particular, and so these women have work to do to convince a man they're "marriage material"? Or are the men simply not looking for anything that serious at all?

The general position of the media coverage is that it's the latter: the women can't "make themselves good enough for marriage" because the men just want the casual merry-go-round to continue. And there are certainly men quoted in articles about this who feel exactly that, but I can't say for certain that we're missing another group who just finds these women lacking.

My personal view is that we've shifted a bit, so the "growing up" that would've normally happened for these men in their early 20s is now ten years behind or so, but I see it happening in my cohort now as everyone is in their mid-30s. So I'm not too concerned for that side of things.

When you have 4 women who wants to date 1 man then they will feel fierce competition and that everything just gets handed to guys. Similarly the 3 men those women refuse to date will feel that dating is a woman's game.

So your belief is that these guys are just in constant relationships, jumping from one to the next with so many options that they never take those relationships to the next stage? The parent poster claimed that the vast majority of breakups are initiated by women, though! So there's a curious adjacency between the idea that everything just gets handed to them and the idea that women disapprove of them and find them wanting. Their standards are simultaneously too high and too low? Do we just believe women are stupid? "I need to give this man whatever he wants because there's only 1 of him for every 4 women, but then I'm gonna dump him the first time I get annoyed!"?? Really? None of these ideas really fits anyone I personally know, either.

The idea that only some small fraction of men get any dates at all flies in the face of everything I've seen. Is there any solid demographic data suppporting this idea that only 1 in 4, or 1 in 10, or whatever, men is actively dating or in a relationship? Not message data from a dating app, because there's a LONG process between "sent a message on a dating app" and "in a relationship" but actual data on relationships. In the world as its being described here, you'd have a huge perpetually-single population...

I believe the actual "can't find a date to save my life" crowd is much smaller and less representative than it thinks it is. The internet is very perspective-distorting here. These are all surface-level-plausible claims that don't seem to hold up to any real scrutiny.

Those men doesn't even enter relationships, which is what women complains about. They feel those guys have way too high standards, and they destroy themselves trying to live up to them.

And ultimately women have to settle, as you say the math doesn't work out and in the end they want a relationship. But that doesn't help the young men who aren't old enough to be in the strike zone of more mature women. And since the women felt they settled when they went with this man of course it is they who initiate divorce and end the relationship since they always felt that they could do better.

Aha, so it's men that you have a low opinion of! "All they care about is sex so they never commit so these women sleep with them in hopes that they'll have a real relationship but then the men never let it go anywhere, and all the women are competing over this small pool of sex-obsessed assholes." In which case a narrative blaming men is bang-on accurate, but IMO this is nothing like the majority of relationships, especially as you get further from age 20 or so...

"Live, try things out, settle down when you're ready to" sounds fine to me, since again, these groups of unhappy women and undateable men tend to be loud but I see no evidence that they're demographically dominant percentages. Way too many ... not-the-most-attractive... dudes out there getting married for the math to add up...

> Aha, so it's men that you have a low opinion of!

Why are you making this about sides? I don't have a low opinion of either side, I'm just making observations. Stop looking for a fight.

You could just as easily say it’s women’s fault for finding only very highly desirable men attractive. But ultimately this is about biology, there’s no one to blame but Mother Nature. The sooner we can automate away the infrastructure that supports society and disappear into a virtual reality of our design the better - just like every other sentient species that has ever existed.

Biology is certainly some of it, but culture also plays a major under-acknowledged role in determining what attractive means.

28% of men and 18% of women between the ages of 18 and 30 report having had no sex in the past year. So, that would be 1 in 4 men, approximately. That's as of 2018, with a trendline going very distinctly up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...

Wow, that is a shocking chart. It looks like it was 10% in 2008 and by 2018 it's already 28%. That's a huge jump.

Just wait till you see the chart for 2020.

> There's a group missing here. We're discussing stories talking about a demographic of women that are unhappy with the men they date, and also about a demographic of men that aren't dating at all

We are not doing that. There is a lot of discussion about men who cant find partners. The common assumption in those is that women are never single if they dont want it. There is occasional pearl clutching about women who dont seek stable long term partner.

On HN, there is basically no discussion about what women think or want. And where such discussion is, what women say is ignored and instead male guesses are taken as gospel - even if man making those guesses interacts exclusively with males and dont know any woman close enough for her to tell him what she thinks.

“Unforgiving” and “misogynistic” are words unrelated to whether something is true or false - just something to keep in mind

You’re absolutely correct, which is why I chose to phrase my post to say that the parent was taking a truth (women are increasingly choosing career over kids) and expressing it in what I consider to be bad faith. I don’t think that’s acceptable.

I also seriously doubt that the claims about women not living up to some standard of attractiveness or femininity are true, misogynistic or not.

70%~ of women in the US are overweight or obese. within the US, the amount of physically attractive women is steadily decreasing.

Why is it ok to blame men but not women though? Either we blame both or none. I'd say blame none. Ultimately on a population level you don't have lazy or cold, just politics with policies, incentives etc, so it doesn't make sense to blame anyone in particular. Instead of blaming just look at what policies would be more impactful for fixing the problems.

i agree 100% that the conversation is one-sided.

It will go mainstream soon enough.

Alternative talk shows like Kevin Samuels are gaining traction.

The queen is naked.

Kevin samuels is a trip. I mean I intuitively understood a lot of what he says but to see all these women claim to be 9s and 10s when they are 3s and 4s and expecting men to make 500k+ is unreal. Women today are seriously delusional

What is the rate of metabolic affordances created by women in relation to men? Isn’t this biologically necessarily male due to its sexual dimorphic traits in the biological life kingdom? What are the compounding utilization rates of income from women who elect not to marry and create life in relation to men which have evolutionary selective pressures to bring home the bacon and therefore become more active investors, ie entrepreneurial, by necessity?

The displacement of men from the labor markets has created a lack of stable patrimonial family formation, which is consistent with the Marxian doctrine’s intellectually revolutionary advocacy and its propagation into the American educational institutions over the last century in time. See the top cited references in the last century in the Western World for corroboration.

[For those unaware, Marx was violently opposed to family creation as necessarily female enslavement (see the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto).]

Patrimony has natural merit for creating principled savings and investments demonstrative in civilized record. Yet most American children are educated by the Nanny State and lack the proper tools to learn how to survive and thrive at being human - a universally patrilineal hereditary trait known as culture.

This form of culture is distinct from one which is unnaturally formed, such as by profit-motivations or ultimately temporal, metabolic functions rather than spiritual contemplation. This is seen consistent with decline in the American population’s affirmation of a transcendental existence conferred by the rise of an Atheistic population. What quantity of atheists were raised not simply with a spiritual life, but a natural one, existing outside of the metabolic motivations of federally legislated education? How does this correspond with the growth of Marxian publications in Academia compared to British Enlightenment literature including the great works of the Occident, such as Aristotle? We ought to be able to compare catalogs over time of the shift and denial of Western Patrimony as good. And I believe the shift exists, demonstrating a disintegrated sexually dimorphic society with transsexual cultural phenomenon as manufactured. Viz, unnaturally formed and therefore biologically morbid. See the overweight phenomenon as further evidence of the morbid nature of the civil authorities.

I honestly can’t tell if I’m too stupid to decipher this comment or if this is incredibly poorly written

How knowledgeable are you of the biological phenomenon of homeostasis as it applies to humans?

I know of the concept but nothing specific. Is this related to your comment?

Yes - isn’t that clear?

Yeah, TV and related is a pretty big psyop and always has been. I'm going to invoke Godwin's Law but even the Nazis knew how to use movies back then to brainwash people into doing their bidding.

The audience here is (wrongly) responding to you by thinking that you're somehow targeting women in your questioning, but I get what you're trying to say - you see a strange imbalance of personalities being portrayed in popular media and it's setting off alarms in your head, like someone is trying to sell you something or they're trying to push an agenda on you that you don't quite buy into. They are, but you're resisting. Keep doing this. Eventually, find out who the owners are of all these channels and products that are being pushed on you. What do they have in common, and what would they stand to gain from this. Follow the money.

When I was probably 18 I asked a friend/coworker who was going to community college what they wanted to do after college and they just didn't know. I couldn't wrap my head around that. As far back as I can remember, I always had an answer when an adult asked me "what I want to be when I grow up". It wasn't always a coherent answer, but I always knew what stuff I found interesting.

I don't know why it's different for some people, but it is. I have to think it's something we just don't put emphasis on in our education system or by parents. So pop culture does it for us. When I was a kid everyone wanted to be someone famous; a singer, an athlete, an actor, etc. Today is no different, everyone wants to be an influencer, a streamer, etc.

I think we need to make it a point for kids to understand from a young age that not everyone can be the famous person, neither should everyone want to be. There are so many other options, they only want fame because they don't know anything else.

As an adult, one of the main observations about education is how little it showed me about what jobs are out there.

People pick degrees based on the advice of counselors who seem to know of 8 kinds of job, and half of them are not something you can advise a kid in a striving high school to follow (binman, factory worker, etc) .

It's actually nuts how people will do an internship and then decide this is the thing they want to do. Or they get a visit from someone at school and now they're gonna be an author.

If there's one thing we need in society, it's experiential information about jobs.

For instance I've known many people who went into management consulting. None of them think it has any value. If I was a kid I'd want to know that.

Accountants come across many types of business and are employable in many types of firms. The job is closer to a lawyer than many people expect, esp irl to tax. Your math degree is minimally useful.

Recruiters talk to people all day and are paid in proportion to the salary of the placed person.

Anyway those are just jobs that I don't do, and I know a tiny bit about them through contact with real world people.

Kids need these contacts.

It's a natural phenomenon. Potential for anything turns into realization that hard work and passion need to also be coupled with capability. It's debilitating in some ways but a coming of age for others. Those who can cross this chasm succeed and pivot accordingly.

I think you might be the odd one out here. I don't have stats for it, but looking at myself and people around me, most didn't really know what they want to do for a career after school. School typically doesn't really prepare you well for figuring out what you want to do, especially secondary and prior.

Oh I totally agree, the US education system doesn't put any emphasis on helping kids figure out what they want to do after school. If a kid asks "when am I ever going to use this?", it's a sign you need to back up and lay some more groundwork. I don't know why it was different for me, but looking back I think it was important.

The vast majority of employed people are not doing "what they wanted to do when they grow up", and quite many are doing jobs they didn't even know existed.

I wanted to be a Ninja Turtle for quite some time when I was growing up, so I really don't know how much emphasis we should be placing on "what do you want to be when you grow up" anyways.

In case anyone is wondering, I didn't become a Ninja Turtle.

> What are the things that motivates them, and what do they themselves want to do in life?

I suspect quite a few people are looking at the odds of achieving various goals, and simply changing the goals. Such as owning a home in desirable areas, or having kids if you cannot afford a food school district or a job that allows you to be home for dinner.

Or if you have experienced income instability, and you do not feel comfortable bringing children into the world. I probably would not have if I did not find a spouse with income in the top two quintiles. Not that there’s nothing wrong with the alternative, but different people have different risk tolerances and higher (perceived) volatility can be a cause for change in some population wide changed we are seeing.

That’s about how I ended up at having zero interest in raising children. Back when I was still with an ex, I was ambivalent about children. They were in the “probably will happen but I have no concrete plans to change my life to accommodate them just yet” bucket. Said ex had a sudden shift in heart and realized she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom after all while we were discussing whether to get married or not. She was also one of my many classmates who should have said “college is a waste of your time and your dime” when calculating how many student loans would be necessary. It was then that my feelings on children clarified that I would only consider them if I could have a reasonable guarantee of granting them at least the numerous leg-ups I had as a child and that would be infeasible if we were that busy paying off mommy’s student loans. After we broke up, my feelings drifted toward just not interested at all: put flippantly, “spread ideas, not genes”.

> Or if you have experienced income instability, and you do not feel comfortable bringing children into the world.

Yet poorer developing nations have higher birth rates than developed nations. Is it because they have lower expectations for what their children need to live a "good" life, that they just have more hope that things will work out somehow, or that they somehow don't care about these concerns?

They're largely subsistence farmers with high infant mortality and little to no automation which accounts for about 2 billion people. They need children to work the fields and it makes sense to have a lot of children when the labor turn around time is five years and up to a third of them will be dead by then.

The adults pay the "fixed costs" to keep the farm running so each additional child produces more in labor than they consume in resources. They're too poor to hire other adults for labor because they have their own "fixed costs" that are much higher than a child in the family.

> Is it because they have lower expectations for what their children need to live a "good" life

Yes, I think the minimally acceptable quality of life is certainly relative.

> that they just have more hope that things will work out somehow

Possibly, if everyone around you is on an upward trajectory, I can see that changing people’s calculus.

> or that they somehow don't care about these concerns?

I think a big factor is how (financially) independent women are and what kind of access to birth control (especially IUDs) they have. I suspect many of the women who have or had 3+ children would not have if they had similar options to those in developed countries today.

Costs for raising a child is almost certainly lower, and they can likely work towards their top pay range before the age 25

So the country getting richer made us poorer?

Imagine you are a farmer - you don't have trouble finding space for your kids to play or where to house them, like a person living in a modern megacity might. You probably live with or near extended family, and they can often take care of the kids while you are busy, whereas we now have expensive daycare and carehomes, etc.

> You probably live with or near extended family, and they can often take care of the kids while you are busy

You have to reciprocate which is completelt ignored on HN. They do help you with kids and you have to help them with kids, elder care, sick care house fixing amd what not. You also dont get to make that many individualistic decisions either and many people have to accept their decisions made for them.

But that does not go away with choosing not to have kids so might as well use the resources.

Basically my point - that having kids in easier, not that all of life is better - which you could devate till the cows come home

I would think that the regulations around childcare/childbirth in the third world are basically nil.

if I don't provide for my children in America, I enter the legal system.

Some species gravitate towards an r selection stategy when the living conditions are unfavourable. It might well be encoded in our lizard brains.

The growth trajectory and differing priorities.

US is on its way sideways or down for many of its citizens.

The developing world is on its way up.

Even for those with money, self-imposed targets are so high that having children seems like a distraction. Too much work, not enough time.

No condoms

We've got it ladies and gentlemen. The secret to halting population decline in the developed world is banning condoms.

Also banning sex-ed. Do that and unintended pregnancies (and by extension abortions, BTW) will skyrocket.

I don't feel like the effect of contraception on population growth is a secret...

The second order effects get a bit complicated though...

It's reductive to say that developed countries aren't having kids because of condom availability, while ignoring all the underlying social factors that don't go away even if condoms weren't available.

In developing countries, more likely than not. But there's also the factors that make people choose to use condoms when they become available. Condom availability has no effect without the whole marketing/education/social pressure around why people should use condoms.

> It's reductive to say that developed countries aren't having kids because of condom availability, while ignoring all the underlying social factors that don't go away even if condoms weren't available.

I didn't say that. Many, many other things affect the reproductive rate. However the availability of contraception (and other tools for family planning) has a significant and obvious impact on the size of those effects.

Education about familly planning and availability of contraception do in fact influence fertility in developing countries. Also, spcifically education for women does a lot too.

As in, when people are able to reliably plan children, they have less of them.

According to the NGO sector it's because women in developing countries don't have the power to say no when the husband wants sex.

I don't think a lot of people know what motivates them or what they want to do in life. If you could play video games all day and have fun or force yourself to study or work at a hard job all day, what would you choose? Wouldn't most people prefer the easier and fun option?

Do you have a solution to this? (I've been thinking about it for a while and I don't know)

In part the solution I would point to is the same that is often said by parents in how one get well adapted children. Provide social support and introduce hobbies. They are not a silver bullet for everyone, but it catches a significant larger portion than stereotypical gender roles.

We can also draw inspiration from the cultural change that we have seen for women. How often do you see in movie a person say to a woman "Are you happy? Is this really what you want...". Lifting personal motivation as an actually question is a early good step towards making people think about it.

There seems to also be a possible error in how people perceive the problem. In the absent of video games you would not suddenly get motivation. Even if you would throw them out on the street with no money, food or shelter, the result would not be a sudden aspiration to become what society expect men to be.

Finding what motivate oneself can either be done through the help by others, or alone. It not as much of a question about what is easier as all hobbies are more work than no hobby at all.

I don't think many people are motivated to do much of anything, and so by consequence they prefer the easier, "fun" option of wasting their time. A motivated person doesn't have to force themselves to work hard, it's the default. That's how I see it.

The gender role for men in TV the last 35 years has been to be stupid like Homer Simpson. Studies show it worked?

"The Simpsons" and "Married With Children" were the only two shows my dad wouldn't let me watch at home for basically that exact reason.

I wonder if it's more inherent than just culture. Women are more, for lack of a better word, desirable to men than vice versa. A man can value a woman who does nothing but exist. But a man needs something extra to provide some value to the partnership. (The previous sentences are, obviously, meant as an statistical tendency, not a universal truth.) Thus, while the negative constrains on women were mostly baseless in a modern society (with violence and manual labor being increasingly devalued), the negative expectations on men are not as baseless. Of course, in so far as monogamy and the roughly 50% sex ratio mandate some kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease, these cultural expectations will lower over time, but I fear that the tradeoffs of the male sex will continue to become more and more out of touch with what is needed to prosper.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477783. (Just trying to prune the top-heaviest threads.)

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