Comment by xbmcuser
18 hours ago
Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an account with an obvious female name and you will see a marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see how the other side lives. She created an empty profile, with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them, mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?" After that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<
You can try creating a profile as a woman. I did, five years ago, on a site that advertised itself as being dedicated to "affairs" between married people.
All I said was I was 20, was red haired, and open minded. Nothing more, and no photo.
Indeed, within a couple of minutes there were guys asking me if I liked to be whipped while handcuffed to a radiator, and offered to send me dick picks if I sent naked photos first. One of them added later "maybe I'm too direct for you, is that why you're silent?"
I didn't respond to any message, but the offers kept coming. It's insane.
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I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)
Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
I like her take-away from this experiment:
Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."
I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a better time than B, or that one needs more support and focus than the other. We’re all in the same, but different, shit.
I agree with that, although a giant amount of support and attention is one way, the sexes are going through different stuff into terms of the meta-problem of "how our problems are viewed".
> We’re all in the same, but different, shit.
We are not. This is the law of averages and is absolute poison. Sexism is not symmetrical. Men do not suffer from women like women suffer from men.
Norah Vincent killed herself.
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> We’re all in the same, but different, shit.
Can you elaborate on other cases where the words “different” and “same” are interchangeable?
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> They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better.
How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter: whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades, and most highly paid execs are men, not women. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-end...
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Social creditscore based cloning and ai crèche raising?
It's really telling how most replies to your message are about "sexual market" or online dating. That's all some men can think of when talking about women online.
When other men post about that, all I hear is a desperate cry for help.
I understand their struggles because I lived through them. However, after I got better at OLD, I understand how it gets tiring hearing about it after a while, specially from people who are clearly on a bad path. For example, treating like a market (which I don't consider a good approach) but not accepting their current value is not enough for creating any demand. And nowadays, with the gym culture being mainstream, it's getting even harder if you don't even try to be more "valuable".
It's almost as if we desire each other.
If I summarized men online as watching pornography and following hot women on social media, people would (correctly) point out that it does not encapsulate what men do online as a whole. A lot of people do these things, but that is only part of their online experience. However, these replies are talking about OLD apps and sexual market as if women only do that online, which relates to the point of the original comment.
Over the whole population, I bet the difference between sexes is very small when it comes to what % posts online comment. You're saying "most social platforms" - what's the biggest one in the world? Probably still Facebook. Yet I'm fairly sure it has a higher female than male DAU, at least in the West.
r/kpop has 3 million subscribers. Take a look at the most followed accounts on Instagram. How many of them have female-dominated comment sections?
> I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
You're saying this as a guy who doesn't understand the world the general population lives in, outside your highly-educated male-dominated tech bubble. You're considering only the spaces you have been visiting for most of your life.
Parent was saying that most men don't understand the amount of casual sexual harassment women are subjected to in unmoderated online spaces -- much more so than men receive.
Which makes me sad.
Apparently Y chromosome + enculturation = prerogative to send unsolicited photos of ones genitalia to random internet strangers.
I know. Parent, along with the reply, also said that women as a result are much less active online, but that's a belief caused by a lack of grass touching.
> "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
> Most of her friends are probably women
-> "Women don't comment on the internet (especially compared to men) because it's a hostile place".
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No, rather both are on opposite sides of an equation, and being buried in competition from folks trying to solve their part of it in isolation.
Women == get too much attention, often of the wrong type. How to get the right kind of attention?
Men == not getting any attention, of any type. How to get some attention?
So women either get ‘the wrong kind’ of attention, but plenty of it - or somehow figure out the magic of getting the right kind of attention? Not easy.
And men work hard to get any attention, often overdoing it on the only way they can figure out - which usually has poor (but not zero!) results. Folks good at playing the game get excellent results, however.
Meanwhile, everyone is getting played by the folks in the middle.
Notably, there are plenty of women taking advantage of the attention they get on Tinder. They just have no problem solving for what it works for, which is getting laid with near zero effort.
The way this previously got figured out was a ‘managed market’ - arranged marriages. Religious/social rules, etc.
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That old trope is pretty tired ("you can't possibly understand or talk about anything that you have not personally exactly experienced for yourself").
Of course men don't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, just like one person does not know exactly what it is like to be any other person. You can still have an understanding and talk meaningfully about things, in many cases.
The internet is not "dangerous for a woman", like you might say it is for a child. It can be much less dangerous because there is a very low risk of unwanted physical contact. I have never in my life "made an account" with identifiable names that are public on the internet. I don't post my sex, address, age, photos, bank account details, or mother's maiden name on internet forums either. So I have had exactly the same experience as a woman who had done the same thing in anonymous forums. I might even be a woman.
An identifiable woman will obviously attract unsolicited disgusting and horrible comments and content of course, not just sexual but threats of violence too probably more than men do. This is not some high mystery or something so complicated that we're befuddled trying to understand it. Offline is a completely different story, but online? I can see messages people I know get.
Online is about the safest a woman (or man) can be, and still talk and interact and collaborate and share with people. And I have been "stalked" (in an online anonymous account way), sent horrible graphic sexual and violent threatening things, for having differences of opinion. It's not nice, but it's not "dangerous" for me. I got ambushed and beat up walking in public one day -- offline -- that was dangerous.
They didn't suggest men couldn't understand, they actually offered a way to help foster understanding by creating the false profile. The ones who won't understand are those who make no effort to understand, and that's quite reasonable to say.
A woman's online safety relative to other spaces also misses the point about their online spaces being less safe than those of men; the suggestion wasn't that online spaces are the absolute most dangerous spaces for them.
That said I would raise the point of how easy it is to dehumanise people online and how easy it is to quickly gather various data like work addresses etc.
No you're wrong, poster I replied to explicitly asserted that "men really don't understand" it. And I that doesn't miss the point, you claim it does but you aren't actually addressing any of what I wrote.
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