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Comment by originalvichy | Hacker News Reader

I can't stop seeing the heavy gender skew in online communities centred around these topics. Both the sexual orientation as well as mental disorder communities like this seem to be most popular among teenager or young adult women. As a man I don't know how teenage hormones affect girls different than boys at that age, so I can't even give an uneducated guess as to what could be the source of this attraction towards quirky sexual orientations and pronouns or mental disorders.

Us boys certainly had our fair share of weird and destructive online communities, but not like this I am sure.

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Johnathan Haidt speculates (and I'm inclined to agree), that young boys tend to do a lot more of their online socializing through video-games and less time on the algorithmically curated feeds so they're less subject to the weird effects of radicalizing "peer" pressure that the feeds impose on girls and gay kids. The boys who do get into that stuff do seem to be at special risk of pickling themselves into weird communities around stuff like inceldom or other sorts of violent political extremism, but that seems to be more rare (though more extreme) than what happens with groups of girls.

I think LGBTQ curious kids probably tend to be especially vulnerable since the internet is such an important gateway for so many of them to seek out answers to the questions they're starting to have about their own identity and self-conception. But the logic of the curation model isn't a "natural" or "organic" friend group so they're really being jerked around by these things at a very impressionable and vulnerable age.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for sharing!

This is because women are under-diagnosed for most mental health disorders except for Bipolar and BPD, for which they are over-diagnosed. They build communities because their doctors aren’t helping them.

do you have somewhere where i can read more about this? i havent seen it before and am interested.

Shared a good article about this below. You can see the bias crop up in the comments here unfortunately. I would say there are as many uninformed opinions on here as there are with people on TikTok self-diagnosing themselves with a mental illness.

It is quite sad. I personally know that being diagnosed with depression when you have ADHD instead is debilitating. It feels like nothing will fix you. But then with an ADHD diagnosis it was much easier to be present in the world.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180523-how-gender-bias-...

“…diagnostic errors cause 40,000-80,000 deaths in the US alone…”

If it’s as high as 80,000 per year, that would be about the same as U.S. automobile and gun-related deaths combined.

Or in teenage years they are much more prone to infectious ideas.

(this is a fact, and was proven with things like the anorexia epidemic)

> in teenage years they are much more prone to infectious ideas

This is true in the broadest possible sense. It's why teenagers rebel against all social norms. The teenage mind mind is particularly geared toward identity discovery and without it, young adult minds would be simple inputs of their parents.

Besides that, nearly all big ideas are infectious. Language, gender, religion, politics, economics, &c are all incredibly infection ideas. You can look here and see any number of idea transmission vectors eager to transmit and propagate their strain of mental virus.

I'd encourage you to do some reading on childhood identity development (Marcia 1980). It seems as though you're advocating for identity foreclosure, by way of inoculating the teenage mind. But, you have to keep in mind that there are no anti-bodies here. It's virii all the way down.

Idea differ in the degree of virality however. They also differ in the degree of parasitism; some are designed to spread as much as possible with no regard for the longevity of the host. Cults, as an extreme example, seize upon vulnerable adolescents using relatable & poisonous ideas. Ideas designed to foreclose the identities of their hosts as fast as possible in order to add new members to the cult. Kind of like a "ponzi scheme" but for insecure and fashionable group identities.

One antibody could be questions about "time" that adults ask and teens do not. Teens haven't lived long enough to know that a dark feeling that feels like forever could just be one moment in their lives. I think my parents helped me avoid parasitic beliefs in my adolescence by asking me good questions.

I think what you're describing at the end is the most insidious and parasitic idea of them all. Teen angst stems from finally learning enough about how the world works and wanting to change it, but what I'm reading is the desire to redirect that want into a foreclosed acceptance of the status quo. It's the mental castration of a burgeoning will to power that leads to life long economic-social-political impotence. To reframe it as whims and folly of youth denies us of a billion possible futures. No wonder the kids today feel hopeless about the future, they've been infected with it on purpose.

People usually only think about sexual predators preying on young people, but there are lots of "ideological predators" doing the same thing. Libertarians, communists, religious folks (yes, I know that this post upsets the whole political spectrum).

Spreading a predatory ideology of “let everyone be free unless they hurt others” is a lot less damaging to society than spreading: “X group is oppressing you and you should be resentful and take revenge on them”

I've heard too many women share stories about predominately male doctors being completely dismissive of symptoms as a generality.

It really boils down to the basic cultural tendency for men to simply not trust what women are saying on nearly any subject. There's no way you could know what's wrong with you, there's no way you could understand math, there's no way you can tell me how to patch drywall, etc.

Ha I know so many completely feminine cisgender women that are “nonbinary” now and using the additional “they” pronoun alongside she/her

and that community has left zero ability to criticize or question that, since its a unilateral choice

does that make me Queer or Pansexual for dating/hooking up with a completely feminine cisgender woman who calls herself nonbinary or using they pronouns alongside she/her

I would definitely consider this a fad, even as “allyship” to actually nonbinary or even trans people its borderline offensive to pretend to relate if there are no consequences for doing so for the cisgender person compared to the persons being attacked and invalidated and fearing for their lives

The fad reminds me of high school girls being into “yaoi” which is just manga with gay guys

Women have always thought and talked more about their feelings than men.

It's probably how we're built to some extent.

As someone who has experience in both hormonal regimes, it's a mix of biological substrate and social license. Neither outweigh the other - they're self-reinforcing.

TikTok skews female very heavily.

i always thought the same for a while but apparently its not as much any more. my guess is kinda like ig theyre more likely to make content and post vs guys so we see them more. they do seem to be more active users by a huge margin tho.

Keep in mind it's going be very hard to get a "general" read on the kind of content TikTok has as a whole since it is extremely personalized for every user.

idk i always got the idea that at that age women can be more emotionally vulnerable to some stuff. same reason their bullying goes for social attacks, shaming, talking shit behind ppls backs instead of physical violence mostly.

Male on male bullying also moved away from pure physical violence. Men beat each other up much less often. The physical violence is mostly realm of very low socioeconomic status.

Bullying still exists tho.

Having been on the receiving end of some physical and social/psychological bullying, I think maybe we've gone astray by suppressing the former in favor of the latter. The times I got into fights I was left bruised and humbled, but in all but one case I was able to bury the hatchet with those people. The rumor spreading is different. With social bullying there's no sense of finality after a fight, no reconciliation or resolution. I've gotten and made apologies after fights, but never after social bullying.

Formalize it into combat sports, with rules, referees, and medical personnel on staff. Or just competitive sports in general. But don't permit physical bullying. Your experiences elide over cases where there was serious harm done to the victim, physical or otherwise, or led to disproportionate retaliation.

Heh, most of the fights I ever got in were in the context of a competitive sports team. There was always informal refereeing; other people on the team pulling the fight apart when they decided it was over. And there is an unspoken code of conduct; putting somebody in a headlock ended the fight, and you would never try to do something insane like gouging somebody's eyes out.

Of course sometimes a small minority of people are insane and decide to maim and murder people. But I don't think "zero tolerance" environments are good at suppressing that. These policies are ineffectual against psychological/social bullying; how do you prove anything about a maliciously planted word-of-mouth rumor? That stuff goes unpunished, and that sort of bullying does more long-term damage than a typical schoolyard fight. Those festering social wounds probably drive more people to homicidal insanity than anything else.

You're also overlooking that physical bullying usually goes hand-in-hand with psychological/social bullying. A bully is not going to be choosy about tactics. But this whole tangent is orthogonal to the original discussion, anyway: schoolyard fights aren't necessarily about bullying, as they may involve combatants who are on equal footing. The ones you're describing certainly sound like disputes between parties of parity, more than a situation when one party is being dominated by another. A fight where a bully pummels the victim and is free to continue the torment doesn't really solve anything.

most times i see people get into fights there's their friends around so nobody pulls a weapon and to break it up if somebody goes down so people don't start kicking the other guy or whatever. it's a controlled way to resolve differences and tbh i don't get why people don't like it. like if it's 1 person jumping another that's different but i've got friends i fought with first and friends i fought with so we stayed friends after.

>Formalize it into combat sports, with rules, referees, and medical personnel on staff.

So, what I'm hearing is, we need to bring back dueling.

Yeah but in a nonlethal way. I mentioned maybe it could be channeled into competitive sports- that could include esports.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0dr7hXabqI&t=36s

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