Regardless of the criteria you choose to establish a ranking, males dominate the bottom of that ranking.
People in power want you to have this "I don't have what I want because this other minority takes it from me", but it's simply wrong, even though this argument seems to capture the mind of simple-minded people.
We don't have what we want because we're in a ruthless capitalist society, directed by stupidoes like Trump and Musk
Knee-jerk much? How on earth did you get "put down women" from what I wrote?
> People in power want you to have this "I don't have what I want because this other minority takes it from me", but it's simply wrong, even though this argument seems to capture the mind of simple-minded people.
Where did you read that in the tiny little snippet I wrote?
Let me be clear, so that there is no misunderstanding -
1. Men dominate the bottom of almost every ranking. This is just another ranking.
Maybe before we try to fix this specific ranking, we should be asking ourselves why men are at the bottom in every ranking.
For sure you don't have to put women as a whole down. But society and media these days are generally dominated by the most toxic voices. Toxic feminism is a big issue, that's what we have to put down for this particular purpose.
The reverse of this has been what's been dominating for a decade. Anything pro-men (or even just neutral) can be accused of being anti-woman, which creates a chilling effect as female-dominated HR departments can make life very difficult for men looking to provide for their families.
It might be worth Googling James Damore as an early example of this chilling effect.
This seems like a very roundabout way of saying there was no evidence of discrimination against women :-/
Where are you going with this? Because if "no evidence == did not happen", then that's true for the decades prior to the 90s, right?
(It’s literally the society for cutting up men)
The force needed to stab someone is the same force needed to hammer nails or lift 30kg bags. If you fear the former then you also don't deserve the latter.
A wise feminist would be doing everything she could to create a world of strong men who lead compassion. A world of confused, frustrated men will never be safe or sustainable.
Also I don’t think I’d risk being e.g. a teacher - the girls in my high school would casually joke about accusing their teachers of being creeps if they failed a test, etc.
The discrimination pendulum swinged the other way. And as with a lot of discrimination, the criticism is in reality aimed at what you are, not what you do. So you will never get it right in the eyes of those critics. On the other hand the roles of men in society are changing and it's not at all clear "to what". "Be a man but don't really be one, it's complicated".
I mean, I’m lonely and I’m married. Middle age is a tough time for friendships.
Of course there are going to be people telling others to be vulnerable and open, and of course there are also going to be people telling others not to complain because that's dumping their problems on other people.
While the first step should be to join a hobby club or do some volunteer work or find a sport to do (and definitely not the gym or running or any other solo sport). Just find something where you regularly interact with people, and especially the same people over a longer period of time.
Low family income means less options. Most of your mentors at a young age are going to come from schooling, which still generally has a gender tilt towards women for multiple reasons. But lower income schools are going to be more resource starved with larger classes and less time for teachers to interact with students individually.
edit: fixed wording to better emphasize what I meant
> 72 percent of boys from households earning $100,000 or more reported having a male mentor for schoolwork.
> A similar trend appeared regarding relationship advice. Only 45 percent of boys in the lowest income group had a male mentor for relationships. This compares to 67 percent of boys in the highest income group.
Even 30% of rich kids don't have access to a proper male role model, those are terrible numbers!
This survey can be seen as comparing people in poverty level income vs everyone else.
If you correct for that the numbers would likely get closer, not further apart.
Also, that specifies "for schoolwork." Surely there's many boys that have a male they can turn to for other things if not necessarily schoolwork
I believe poverty is the natural state of man and I wonder how non-capitalism (= socialism?) makes people rich?
What I think you mean is that equal access to education is a promise of the state that is too often broken. But then we're talking about incompetence or corruption at the state level, paid for and sustained with your taxes, and you have those problems in socialism, too.
Smaller family sizes over the previous generation have also contributed to this.
I have 9 uncles in total (including all my aunts' partners). My kid has one.
Also, if you grow up in a household that rents (moves often or is surrounded by neighbours who move often), you are less likely to have long term reliable neighbours available to form adult-child relationships with.
Of course it is, because as we all know capitalism only affects males /s
(Once I perish, no one is going to remember any of my business projects, clean codebases and unit test coverage. But that little hobby of mine - oh, these deliverables are gonna last).
Anyways. Happy to be a mentor to teenagers but it seems to me that in the US that's impossible on multiple levels.
You are part of HN, now is your chance at helping.
Discussion means that you will see opinions that are plainly wrong. That's a good place to argue and present better opinions. If you don't present better opinions, no one will be convinced. If you don't voice your opinions, you might not known that they are wrong or harmful. I've voiced a lot of opinions on HN, which after correcting by others, helped me become a slightly better human.
Besides, after 18 years here some things have become a little predictable.
I would agree, I sometimes browse your comment history for insightful comments. But it was a suggestion that you can help out some more on this specific topic.
> Besides, after 18 years here some things have become a little predictable.
Maybe that's why "the problem" is not corrected yet, because it's harder to make money on strong independent men who do everything themselves... Otherwise someone would already make an LLM to help men.
If you ask the question "what proportion of girls and young women have a male mentor", the problem becomes even more obvious.
All the abusers I've heard of by name were in the category of "some we unfortunately didn't know about" (with the exception of the Epstein clique, I imagine, which were more in the category of "some we collectively didn't want to know about").
I think part of the discrepancy is that you're talking about abusers you've "heard of by name". The other is that people like Weinstein and Epstein clearly have power, and by default the powerful are left to their own devices (of course their victims and many others around are aware, but don't speak up). I think that, knowing that, one can calibrate a more accurate predictor. I think, if one hangs around a crowd long enough, one can typically gauge who's who in that crowd.
A friend of mine was sexually abused by a family member. To this day, the family refuses to believe it. I've heard of other stories among people I know. None of the abusers were flagged out as creeps until the story came out.
Almost all the only cases I've heard of easy-to-spot creeps doing the abuse are among the rich & powerful, and it's possible they might be considered easy-to-scope solely because it was already known that they were abusers.
The one case of abuse by easy-to-spot creep I've heard of among my circle was that that of a rape in a high school, by a 15yo who had been flagged as dangerous in his previous high school, and nobody acted upon it in the new high school because the file had apparently been lost in transfer (possibly at the behest of the parents).
So, my anecdata suggests that profiling is hard.
[0] https://womens-safety.com/blog/rapists-often-familiar-faces-...
I want to go back to a world where I can be affectionate toward children without an implication of something more sinister.
The good news: He still has a job. This took several weeks of negotiating, and he got the biggest possible warning the job could give him. The police is not prosecuting anymore.
Consensus of fathers here is: He's not a pervert, just someone who did not think things trough for a moment. But everyone agreed in him taking an extremely dumb risk. This is Western Europe, BTW.
I’m a father of six. One of my oldest kids’ friends wrote me a great little letter out of the blue. I wrote her a short, heartfelt, and funny (IMO) reply, but after I talked with my wife, we decided I really just could not send it. There are too many risks. She thought the only safe thing to do would be to ignore the girl’s letter. And she’s right. That’s what I ended up doing. But it still makes me sad that that’s where society is these days.
But your own kids have seemingly this special superpower to get you pissed off to extreme levels (both for men and women) that no other situation in adult life can ever come close to. We as adults learnt the easy or hard way some form of basic empathy required when communicating with others, while kids lack it. Like doing 20x the same thing that pisses you off while ignoring your kind calm words - where else do you experience it, in your face, with big grin on top of that?
I've see it many times - people who are otherwise calm and relaxed get turned to 11 in seconds by their offsprings doing something stupid, arrogant or dangerous. Bonus points if its any form of unprovoked aggression towards other kids, especially younger/weaker.
all those fellowships and fanboy cultures and follower counts and network and everybody gets all they want to evolve and raise their children to be witty and snappy and vibe with that pan all the chill kids are playing in those pretty red forests nowadays and some researchers found a shortage of male mentors?
is this one of those "we want you" recruiting scarcity tactics?
In other words i think a post gender society would allow the distribution of occupations and knowledge to better match the populations skills and interest and children having access to better mentors.
Nothing in there has been double-checked by reviewers :/
dang, mods, this is getting ridiculous. A couple of people are deciding what the community is discussing. Something needs to change.
the HN community wants to discuss this issue (37 points / 65 comments). One guy (234000 karma) doesn't.
This is not right and it's making HN a worse place.
I think so too, but It's not a strong opinion from me. Some things are offtopic. The problem is that there are no other good discussion places to discuss this. Maybe it's because such topics attract a lot of people with strong opinions who don't engage in good-faith discussion (I'm not talking about you or that one guy).
> One guy (234000 karma) doesn't.
I think one guy flagging is not enough for article to be [Flagged].
If I'm mistaken, the mods can clarify how many flags does it take to bury a post, and if there are people with special flagging rights or if karma plays a role in flagging.
Accounts that inappropriately flag too many posts have their flagging privileges revoked
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836
I believe you can also email the mods to get a post unflagged if you think it's valid.
But it's not the community, is it? It's literally a couple of people that can flag and bury a post. One or two, not more than that needed.
A quick look through some of the responses here will reveal the reason - for some people, any discussion of an exclusively male problem is perceived as anti-female.
Those people (who have been active in this thread) are probably the ones who have flagged it.
Then a large amount of $, time, and effort was spent on women to solve this problem, but since they refused to understand the cause. It really was just a boost to women. This shifts men behind. Government intentionally caused this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/upshot/boys-falling-behin...
Then men needed a role model. Men would need to work extra hard to just come up to parity. But government didnt like the messaging of those role models, so they censored their speech and deplatformed them.
Creating the gap/shortage in role models; but men moved to beyond their control. This new role model became huge. He'd talk for hours upon hours with anyone who would listen.
The people who wanted to censor/deplatform but couldnt. So they publicly killed him.
2. The article is right. Boys without good fathers/mentors are worse off in many ways. Readers, please consider helping Boys and Girls Club, scouting organizations, etc.
Urahandystar•2mo ago
yetihehe•2mo ago
sunrunner•2mo ago
yetihehe•2mo ago
[0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/why-ev...
[1] https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/etiquette/how-to-se...
[2] https://www.artofmanliness.com/skills/outdoor-survival/9-way...
[3] https://www.artofmanliness.com/career-wealth/wealth/money-sa...
piva00•2mo ago
I don't think his channel is the only one, it's the only one I'm exposed to so kinda tells me there should be quite a bit more of those around, hopefully that way of masculinity gets traction instead of Andrew Tate-esque buffoons.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@SpeeedCo
Fire-Dragon-DoL•2mo ago
piva00•2mo ago
Culturally there's a lot of differences that won't be patched for generations, social expectations can come from parenting and/or environment, including their society, interactions between genders shaped by those cultural differences from an early age, so on and so forth. Such expectations shape their worldview and place in it, males being told to be tough, not be "a sissy", being shaped into clamming up emotionally. Females being told they can't achieve things solely due to their gender, having to learn to be guarded against potential male aggression, etc.
There's just too much to even start enumerating in a comment but it boils down to cultural expectations from early age, and how those shape people into gendered behaviours as a reaction, not only from the expectations but also the feedbacks happening across gendered higher order effects of those expectations.
Fire-Dragon-DoL•2mo ago
A simple example is that I can lift my wife's body but she cannot lift mine. Wouldn't that affect our social behavior in some form? My thinking is going to how other animals have different behavior based on sex
piva00•2mo ago
Reducing the comparison to other animals don't really make sense since our societies are many orders of magnitude more complex than other animals, e.g.: the fact of being physically stronger don't explain why until some 100-150 years ago women were considered less intelligent and unsuitable for intellectual work compared to men.
There will be different behaviours due to biological differences, it's just not possible to reduce the vast range of gendered pigeon holing into that, culture is a much higher drive of those, and is empirically visible in societies that moved away from traditionalist views of genders.
Could it be that at some point the biological sex differences sown the gendered culture? I can see that, doesn't mean the perpetuation of it in modern times is due to physical/biological differences.
sunrunner•2mo ago
Those examples you posted that actually are good would also seem to me to be universally important for everyone across all genders. '80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money' seems useful for everyone, and while I doubt a lot of people are going to need '9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches' immediately, what makes that specifically 'manly' and not good for anyone either going seriously outdoors or prepping.
Yes, I picked those examples deliberately, but I don't see why any of the qualitatively good ones are 'manly'.
lelanthran•2mo ago
For the same reason "Be strong and independent" is a message targeted only at women, even though it can easily double as a universal message.
yetihehe•2mo ago
What was your goal? What was your argument? I said that we need men to be more manly (strong and able to do things that are historically considered to be done by men) and you said that those can be also done by women? I would consider woman able to change a tire, play cards and start fire without matches to be manly. If she wants to, she can of course.
Currently the problem is that we indirectly say to men that being strong is for women and not for men. We say to women "be more manly" and to men "be more womanly", which just perpetuates old cliches, but in reverse.
sunrunner•2mo ago
I think the thread has been a bit derailed in terms of my intention, which was more to point out that I don't feel like the qualities that are mentioned in the original article (mentorship, guidance figures, schoolwork, relationships, future planning) are really represented well by a clickbait website with articles mostly split between 'Top N things you really need to do for X' and things that would be useful to anyone.
I'd even say the 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social' and 'Get Skilled' categories always appear to wander towards (while never approaching) Andrew Tate territory, in terms of their goals.
> Currently the problem is that we indirectly say to men that being strong is for women and not for men. We say to women "be more manly" and to men "be more womanly", which just perpetuates old cliches, but in reverse.
This I agree with, but I don't feel that website is a good example of a role model for the qualities that the original article mentioned were missing.
yetihehe•2mo ago
I agree. Going into "Andrew Tate" territory represents that toxic masculinity for me, it's the far end of spectrum of manliness. But we men don't need to go all the way into absurdity when trying to be more manly. But not all of us are in the same place. Some are too close to unmanly end, some are too close to toxic end. artofmanliness contains articles for both of those people, to move them closer to the center of good manliness (expressed by ideals 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social', 'Get Skilled' and I would add 'Be dependable', 'Be honest').
And being womanly is not an end of spectrum of manliness. Being unmanly (0 of qualities we mentioned, a weak man without style, social or any other skills) is the lowest end of spectrum of manliness.
> This I agree with, but I don't feel that website is a good example of a role model for the qualities that the original article mentioned were missing.
You would have to look more. You have only seen a small sample from each section.
Balgair•2mo ago
Amazing site and filled with great male content.
But, umm, anyone know of any other good male-centric sites out there?
All I got is Esquire.com, and it's clearly not the same kinda thing.
lelanthran•2mo ago
Disney has seen a bunch of Marvel flops since they switched the focus to Marvel properties that target women (they've since publicly indicated a course correction on this).
Take a bunch of IP that primarily males are interested in (super-heros), water it down so that it's less male focused, and then find that neither males nor females are interested.
ml-anon•2mo ago
It’s also quite telling that your main complaint is Disney superhero movies. It’s difficult to think of something more juvenile and unimportant.
lelanthran•2mo ago
1. It's been about 30 years since the "strong independent women" meme first started in popular media.
2. Where is the vitriol and backlash in my post to which you are referring to?
Your response looks like a canned one that can be inserted into any discussion about males.
pjc50•2mo ago
Much longer than that. While there was significant pre-war feminism, it really took off in the 1960s. Perhaps what people mean is a sort of post-"Bechdel test" world, where people will be sharply criticized if they make a piece of media that only has (properly characterized) male characters.
I see it as a co-existence problem. Trying to insist on male-only spaces or male-only values isn't going to fly any more. A lot of traditional masculinity is framed around being "not a woman", an inherently denigratory concept. It needs a programme that is (a) positive and (b) a concept of personhood and value that's not tied to gender.
ml-anon•2mo ago
Co-existence indeed.
lelanthran•2mo ago
That wasn't a women-only problem, IIRC. The Hollywood casting couch (and similar problems) was used against both men and women. Some actors (like Kevin Spacey) were called out/blackballed for unwanted sexual attention/acts that they perpetrated against men.
As far as women being allowed to speak out - everyone is allowed to speak out, but the rich and influential silences people who they have left aggrieved. These include both men and women.
To put things in perspective, you joined a thread discussing a singular male-only problem, and dragged female issues into it, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be not female-exclusive anyway.
This is the problem.
FranzFerdiNaN•2mo ago
But its up to men to do the work. Women needed decades and decades to figure out what it meant to be a women and how to get what they wanted. They took the time and effort to organise, resulting in suffragettes and women's clubs and feminism and all that. Men could so far skip this all and just coast by on being the default. And now we're stuck with the situation that there are barely any male role models (except incredibly vile and toxic ones like Tate and Peterson), and trying to figure out what it means to be a man in a world that is rapidly changing, where men no longer can just be the breadwinner.
Not only that, but women are also demanding more from men (more emotional maturity, more support with chores and child raising, having a fully developed personality). And too many men seem either incapable or unwilling to change, preferring to lash out against 'woke' and voting for extreme rightwing politics that aims to put women back in the kitchen.
lelanthran•2mo ago
What work would this be? Any organisation to the benefit of males would instantly be shutdown.
What do you have in mind that won't get backlash? I mean, after all, even just a quantitative study has elicited, in this thread, much anti-male sentiment in the form of strawmen.
So I am curious how you see male-advocacy groups proceeding in a manner that has no or limited backlash.
pjc50•2mo ago
One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids, (b) inherently a bit fascist even if you make it textually anti-fascist, and (c) ultimately like popcorn, something that should be only a small part of a more varied diet.
Now, that's not a terribly strong opinion, and I know it'll make a lot of people mad, but I have personally got fed up with the oversupply of superhero stuff and believe that there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like. Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions. Probably the problem is that audience has now fragmented, moving the genders further apart.
lelanthran•2mo ago
You must not have seen The Boys (Prime Video) :-)
>
> ... there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like.
Maybe has the same problem that changing super-hero movies has - you make less money.
The movie Killers with k-Something-Heigl, that guy from The Butterfly Effect and Tom Selleck was a rom-com that I enjoyed, but AFAIK it wasn't as popular with females as standard rom-coms, and wasn't as popular with males as action movies.
> Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions.
That's not why people see movies, though; I might find that entertaining, and you might find that entertaining, but it's a pretty hard sell if if doesn't make enough money.
wincy•2mo ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL•2mo ago
akimbostrawman•2mo ago
That's the plan
Fire-Dragon-DoL•2mo ago
Now of course he has a bigger sister he deeply loves and that's probably a big part of the deal