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Comment by throwaway1492 | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that young men have always been “optional” in society. Biology looms large. Women seek to mate with the most high status males, evidenced by the fraction of men who get the majority of the “action” on dating apps and in life. Thus throughout history we’ve died in the wars and otherwise exist in the margins.

An example of the desparity to me is the concept “mansplaining” woke culture disparages. Some women (and others) see a man explaining something as condescension. Whereas I’ve always been grateful that anyone would take the time to educate or otherwise try to share information and gasp, try to help me?! I believe this reflects a fundamental difference in experience worth reflecting on.

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>Women seek to mate with the most high status males, evidenced by the fraction of men who get the majority of the “action” on dating apps and in life.

I don't think you can really extrapolate to all of human history from a time when birth control is widely available.

They’ve done DNA anaylsis before and it was something like 13% of men in history successfully reproduced before civilisation enforced monogamy. Like how most male pack animals don’t get to reproduce.

> something like 13% of men in history successfully reproduced before civilisation enforced monogamy

Note that doesn't necessarily mean only 13% of men were having sex.

A woman could have sex with a 2000 different men over the course of 20 years and only at most less than 40 of those 2000 men could reproduce as a result of those couplings.

do you have this point when "civilization" enforced monogamy? I would think the explanation was more that Og the big violent caveman took all the women and clubbed any one who got to close which is very close to what mating has looked like in lots of human history.

Men locking up the women to mate with - harems etc. - is not quite the same as "Women seek to mate"

> An example of the desparity to me is the concept “mansplaining” woke culture disparages. Some women (and others) see a man explaining something as condescension.

Well, I don't know if you are being purposefully misleading or just ignorant of what mansplaining actually is, but here it goes. Mansplaining isn't "men explaining things". It's men explaining things because of an unfounded confidence in their (usually limited) knowledge in one area to a women who actually have an equal or higher level of knowledge in the area, because of internalized prejudices and ideas about the men being and "the wise ones" who come to "save the woman" from her own ignorance.

So yeah, I think the fundamental difference is people not caring to actually understand what "woke culture" is actually complaining about.

That may be what it means academically, but it is ABSOLUTELY NOT how it's used casually.

That is definitely not true from my personal experience

I don't think that makes sense. The average age gap in relationships is about 2-3 years in Western Europe according to Google. I certainly wouldn't expect "the most high status males" to be uniformly distributed across age. I expect "high status" and "old" correlate quite well, and if what you said is the case, I'd expect the age gap to be significantly larger.

I expect that "attention" has a power law distribution for women too. It do not expect it is at all easier being a less than average looking woman.

> “mansplaining”

> I’ve always been grateful that anyone would take the time to educate or otherwise try to share information

You should really read up the meaning of this word because that's not it. It specifically covers the case of downtalking masculine men towards women, I see it all the time and it's despicable.

While you’re right, I would advise to always take a step back and understand that it also might be a listener problem. People come out wrong many times too.

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