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Comment by natly | Hacker News Reader

The comments in this thread and this article is making me want to read HN less. (What a crazy incorrect take for most of the population.)

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My feminine instincts should have kept me out of here.

Turns out that despite all my achievements and failures, despite all my joys and pains, despite all my loves and losses, despite everything in my mind and body that makes me 'me', I've ever only truly been motivated by the desire to find a strong provider and reproduce before my eggs expire.

"Oh, but not you, you're different" - hears every women in a male-dominated field at some point or another. Nope, I'm not. No different brain-chemicals, no differently testosterone. Not in denial of my gender identity nor my sexuality. Just a plain old human slob like the rest of you.

The reversion to the mean here just reminds me of stuff I would read on 4chan back in the day as a high school student.

Many of my friends in those environments grew up, figured out how to navigate society a bit better, and stopped saying this kind of stuff. But these threads are a reminder that loads of people didn’t.

I dunno, don't discount that maybe there's a number of high schoolers on here. I forget sometimes that anyone can be on the other side of these posts.

That very few people are mentioning things like the AIDS epidemic (and the abstinence only education that came from it), plus the conservative effort to censor sex positive media from organizations in the 80s-90s like moral majority, PTC (probably in response to the free love of the 70s), etc., is telling that they didn't live through it.

Or maybe they're just intentionally ignoring it, I dunno, but young adults today are a product of this.

The thing is, you may dislike the takes but they are in response to a real problem normies don't think about or would have any advice to give.

The solutions may be seen as bad or the takes as not good, but the problem still is very real, and for many people bad solutions are better than no solutions or the advice people give that doesn't work at all. Things like this should alert you to the fact something is wrong, not make you recoil from all the bad people.

I totally acknowledge and sympathize with people (nerds) who strugge with finding love and sex. I don't recoil, I was a similar situation as a teenager. My point is mostly that it's far from a global population wide phenomenon. Plenty of people are having sex - it's alive and well - and it's not really going out of fashion would be my clarified expanded argument.

Reading HN almost always makes me want to read HN less, but you’re right. I have no idea what most of this thread is on about. I’m hoping it’s just my age (40s). Almost nothing in this thread resembles any subset of my total sex life.

Then don't read it.

But don't go out of your way to tell us how much you dislike reading it. That's virtue signaling and it's silly in this context.

"I dislike you so much I'm going to post comments talking about how much I dislike you"

I don't know why but there seems to be some outsized group of people that thrives on reducing social interactions to numbers. I remember seeing a lot of this in self-destructive subreddits (eg MGTOW). Maybe it's so they can write off self-improvement (you can't argue with math!)?

Isn't MGTOW a self-improvement sub?

MGTOW's major proponents will go out of their way to demonize women whenever they can. It's common for these people to turn towards things like RealDolls (the supposedly lifelike sex dolls) and anime starring under-aged girls. Raging Golden Eagle on YouTube is the poster boy of this kind of MGTOW advocate.

Self-improvement isn't at odds with pursuing healthy relationships with the opposite sex.

I've noticed most of those types of groups essentially use self-improvement as the vector to ship the hate message. Which is pretty classic cult behaviour in the end: build a support network, isolate people from other networks (by making them evangelists for you) and then threaten to cut them off if they don't go long with the rest of the message.

This is also how non-hate groups rope people in -- Scientology, for example, literally starts with the premise that they can help you improve yourself from t=0.

Self-improvement definitely isn't at odds with pursuing healthy relationships with the opposite sex. But from what I gathered MGTOW is(was?) simply a movement that wanted to improve their lives by being comfortable without being in a relationship for various reasons.

I never got a misogynistic vibe from them. But it's literally years ago I had read about them. They could very well have gone the Incel route over time. Which was a non-toxic movement in the beginning as well.

That's never what the MGTOW people asserted in any serious way. From the jump it was "the world is 'sexually prejudiced' against us men [or capital-M Men when they were being extra weird] and so we should separate from it entirely." It immediately leapt right into what would today be called "cope" how even if you do get married she'll just divorce you for a studly chad and take all your stuff, the fear of feminists (hiss! never mind that mainstream feminist study is pretty in on the assertion "this is bad for dudes too"! hiss!), all that. As a side effect of this insularity, for some people trapped in it there were definitely some self-improvement vibes. But that was never the goal of the people developing its, for lack of a better term, theory.

I used to study online right-wing and fascist movements as they evolved. The incel and MGTOW crowds absolutely went towards a fearful, hard-right-wing view of the world as fast as they could be led towards it. It is difficult to gin up another reading of the core stuff that doesn't depend on being super, super credulous.

ETA: 'XorNot, in a sibling reply to yours, raises a really good and thoughtful point about the self-improvement gimmick being a good way to rope suckers into your movement, and it's worth thinking about.

It's not "my" movement. I was triggered by someone saying it is a hate movement when this was not my impression. I just went back using the wayback machine to a random page from 2015: http://web.archive.org/web/20150813192410/https://www.reddit...

There doesn't seem to be any weird stuff there but I'm not a social scientist so I will have to take your word for it. I'm not so invested to start a heated discussion about this anyway.

If you go forward a few days or months you will start to see rabid hatred of women pop up from time to time. Frequently enough for the sub to earn its reputation.

From time to time is very different from being a hate movement. In any large group of people weird stuff pops up from time to time. I think you can only classify something as a hate movement if the hate is inherent to the large majority that make up the group, which didn't used to be the case for MGTOW.

Given you say you didn't see the misogynistic content I'm not sure you spent much time looking in to what was going on in the subreddit -- you may have missed how hateful its members were, especially in the latter years.

Like I said I didn't check the site for years so I didn't know it evolved into a hate group. The only thing I'm saying that at the very least they didn't used to be like that.

It was that from day one. These groups notoriously prey on those with low social and rhetorical literacy by pretending to be anodyne until they are not. That you did not see the okeydoke does not mean it was not there.

I always got the feeling that MGTOW was nonpartisan, or rather, apolitical at their core

Most right-wing movements of which I am aware would definitely like to be seen as apolitical (and thus reduce the critical eye aimed at them). But the line you can draw from there (and similarly from "apolitical" rage-movements like GamerGate) to the current state of things is a straight one.

This seems at odds with Stephen Colbert's famous quote "Reality has a well known liberal bias". Regardless, there isn't anything in MGTOW that indicates either left or right wing views as far as I can tell

There was a lot of anti-Clinton hate in the MGTOW sub.

Conversely it's very easy for people to label any group they don't like as a hate group to try and sway public opinion to discount them.

If it started that way, it probably ended up going down the incel hole. It's banned now, obviously.

> If it started that way

It didn't. In this pipeline, the incels are an earlier stage; MGTOW is for the incels that (ostensibly) are giving up on women entirely. Of course in practice they do no such thing - instead they focus even harder on blaming women for their problems.

No not really. As a person that nominally fits the label as stated, those MGTOW dudes are just toxic women haters. They have some kind of fucked up unresolved issues with women but it's all couched in some self-justifying logic.

Personally I'm just a lazy, irresponsible, and selfish person, so I think a life of relationships and children is not appropriate for me, so I don't pursue those things. That does not appear to be the case for most of the men who adopt the label. There seems to be genuine hate there.

It's just the leftovers from the incel sub, now with more Jordan Peterson quotes.

While I agree MGTOW is cringe, dating is initially a numbers game. I have way more matches in a densely populated area such as SF Bay area. Timing and luck play in to it as well, multiple people in my social circle would have dated me if they weren't LTR'd prior.

There are some topics that are excellent on HN, from which I learn an immense amount almost daily. This is not one of them.

Agreed, some of these assertions I’m reading are just absurd.

Reads like a topic HN can’t discuss like adults.

What is a non-crazy, correct take in this situation?

The fact that commenters are just taking the author at their word is something else that makes me want to read HN less.

There's one claim about the amount of sex people may or may not be having, GRANDPAS HAD MORE ACTION IN THEIR TIME, but it is totally unqualified in any real way. Today's Grandpas could have been born in the 80s-90s... What time are we actually talking about?

The next sentence talks about boomers having more kids, and the next sentence assumes they only had marital sex. If that's the only evidence given for having sex, then this is nothing more than a thinly veiled think piece from the religious right (and the subsequent casual racism doesn't help), and I fail to see how that meets any of HN's standards, either.

>The comments in this thread and this article is making me want to read HN less. (What a crazy incorrect take for most of the population.)

Yes the comments in this thread is surprisingly bad and I got flagged on my comment.

HN seems to have had their eternal september event.

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