Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I am a regular reader of Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" and the sheer number of terrible boyfriends/husbands is jaw-dropping. And that's probably always been true, but what has changed is the extent to which women now have agency through having decent jobs and not being social pariahs if they're not married and pregnant by 22. The stuff my grandmother put up with just doesn't fly today.

So if the content of AITA is any guide, we could solve a lot of these problems just by training the bottom quartile of men in the basics. Hygiene. Being a good roommate. Being a good friend. Being a good economic partner. Etc, etc. There appear to be a lot of guys out there who want to go from having mommy do everything while they play video games to having a bang maid [1] who does the same. It's no wonder they're having a harder and harder time getting any.

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bang%20maid

View on HN

> training the bottom quartile of men in the basics ....

I always thought schools should teach children "how to date". I went through sex-ed in Delaware public schools in the mid 1990s, and it was all the clinical physical aspects of sex, and the dangers of HIV. There was nothing about intimacy or consent.

I did have a separate class in 7th grade called Conflict Resolution. It felt like a low effort attempt to teach basic social skills that should have been a regular part of schooling since kindergarten.

Absolutely!

Well into adulthood I came across a book, "Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men". It is the single most astute thing I have ever read. It's written by somebody who was a therapist for men in court-ordered programs. He spent years listening to their BS and at some point had enough and broke it all down.

I truly believe that if everybody spent 2 weeks on the topic at circa 16 years old, the world could be radically different. It wouldn't take that much longer to educate them on other relationships basics. Just the kind of minimum stuff and basic techniques that you see from, say, the Gottman Institute.

But I expect that will never happen because there are quite a lot of powerful people who benefit from and/or positively enjoy power differentials and exploitable ignorance. Harvey Weinstein comes to mind here.

I'm sorry I have to be the one to tell you this but AITA is about as credible as newspaper advice columns and 4chan greentexts, that is to say not at all.

Rage bait, karma farming and creative writing exercises all rolled into one!

i did pretty well in a brief experiment of using chatGPT to write responses to new posts

Oh, sure, a lot of the posts are made up. But a lot of them aren't. And most of the replies grounded in personal experience appear to be sincere, as they tend to come from established accounts with consistent histories, at least when I look.

But in some sense, that doesn't matter, because even popular fiction serves as an important mirror for popular concerns. I hear enough verifiable real-world stories of entitled, lazy male partners to know that it's not all fiction. I think the extent to which things get upvoted on AITA is a pretty good indicator of popular concern. And a lot of replies clearly come from people who, whatever the truth of the original post, have lived through similar things.

There's also 2X which is often quite grueling.

But the people experiencing sexual loneliness aren't bad boyfriends and husbands. They can't even get a significant other or spouse. Counterintuitively, being a disagreeable or even abusive partner is positively correlated with sexual success: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-roman...

That blog post is -- and this is putting it charitably -- so horribly misguided and confused I hardly know where to begin.

I'll just say:

> being a disagreeable or even abusive partner is positively correlated with sexual success

Citation needed. That blog post does not provide anything resembling evidence of your claim.

For your sake, I hope you're not basing your views on sites like that.

> That blog post is -- and this is putting it charitably -- so horribly misguided and confused I hardly know where to begin.

The post is horribly misguided and confused. Yet despite being so horrible you can't bother to explain what's bad about it? It always amuses me something is evidently so horrible as to warrant this language, but apparently not quite horrible enough to actually explain why.

Ultimately, i'm not really looking to make an empirical claim here. Just read this sentence a few times and maybe the contradiction will make sense:

> the sheer number of terrible boyfriends/husbands is jaw-dropping.

If someone is a boyfriend or a husband, they are by definition not single.

Don't you think the "Am I The Asshole" subreddit is going to have a bit of a selection bias towards describing men who are assholes?

You seem to be using AITA as evidence that some huge percentage of women want to date/marry asshole/abusive men. It does not provide evidence of that.

You and the article you linked are suggesting a correlation between being an abusive/asshole man and having a large number of women want to have sex with you. But there is no such correlation. It's false.

I just want you and anyone else who ever comes across this part of the thread to not believe in such garbage.

And you conclude that this is incorrect and garbage on the grounds of what, exactly? I'm more inclined to believe the licensed psychiatrist over a random internet commenter.

That guy is not just some random licensed psychiatrist, and I have a hard time taking seriously anybody who tries to pretend he is.

To spare the HN community from this whole discussion, feel free to find my contact info in my profile. We can have a respectful debate over email if you want.

I will just end by saying, you are the one making claims which require evidence to back them up. Especially on a site like HN, it is a good idea to provide evidence for broad, sweeping claims. Or else dial those claims back.

I shared a source making this claim. You don't think it's a good source, which is a totally valid position, but you've not shared any evidence for this assertion. It'd be good to follow your own advice and back up your own claims with evidence, or dial back your claims about the blog. I'm really baffled why someone who called a piece of writing "horrible guided and confused" with nothing to back that claim up is in any position to lecture someone else about substantiating claims with evidence

As I said, I'd be happy to continue a respectful debate over email. Please engage me in that way, so that we can help each other and understand each other. This web site is not the right venue to continue this debate ad nauseam. I would like to respond to many of the things that you have said, but it doesn't make sense for us to do it on HN. If you really feel strongly about keeping the discourse public, you can always make a new HN submission showing our emails.

Again, my contact is in my profile. Whether or not we continue to talk, I wish you all the best.

Or we can skip this and just post the messages straight to HN - if you're fine with the submitting emails to HN then this is just and efficiency gain by skipping one layer of indirection.

So back to where we left off: I shared a blob post by a psychiatrist, which you disagreed with and called "horribly misguided and confused" yet neglected to explain any particular explanation why. Furthermore, you insisted that I post additional sources to back up the article I shared, yet you've shared none to support your criticisms. Do you think this is an effective way to argue your point?

For sure. It's true that men in abusive relationships are definitionally in relationships. But the reason for that isn't, "women like abuse". Many people of all genders have abusive bosses, but nobody uses that to conclude that people like having abusive bosses. The way it works is that successful abusers are good at fooling people to get them into contexts where they can abuse. The ones not good enough at that end up alone, of course.

For anybody who wants to actually understand the dynamic, "Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" is a great resource. Recently discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34497066

Again, the question isn't whether people like having an abusive partner. The question is, is being an abusive (or just bad) partner positively or inversely correlated with sexual opportunity? Your linked post doesn't engage with that question at all. It does explore why people perpetrate abuse, which is an interesting discussion in its own right, but not relevant to this OP.

Is that the question? I'm not sure why you're asking it or what you'd do with that answer.

Too bad this was flagged, since the OP 1) not only described himself as "a regular reader" of reddit (embarrassing enough), but of a particular reddit where people post made up stories (that he takes at face value), and 2) that he has the physiognomy (google him) of a male feminist undone by sexual assault allegations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com