It's already a bit dodgy when people respond to other's experience by telling them what's wrong with them, especially when their experience is painful. But blunt one-liners and internet tropes ("lose the incel angle") should be right out. Upping the ante like you did in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21721545 is seriously not ok.
What to do instead? First edit out personal criticisms—they're unlikely to land well. Second, it's always ok to share your own experience. For example, if your comment here was based on experiences or observations of your own, it might have been both interesting and respectful to share some of that.
Also, men are lonely and this reflects heavily in suicide rates by gender. If someone is lonely, they should be allowed to complain. Casting them away with a label only makes things worse for them. Don't you have empathy? Can't you garner sympathy for a person who is missing out on one of the basic human needs (emotional connection)?
The amount of women in stable heterosexual relationship is the same as amount of males in heterosexual relationship. If you talk about people having one night stands randomly, there is no connection except sex there.
The most lonely isolating experience I ever had was being at home with children. It may just be that this gives one training for how to deal with being alone and tilts female culture towards behavior that prevents loneliness. Plus it makes it more acceptable for woman to display behavior that prevents loneliness in long term.
> The amount of women in stable heterosexual relationship is the same as amount of males in heterosexual relationship.
Yes, you're completely right. However (in the culture I'm in) men usually take action to ask out/talk to women. This asymmetry theoretically leads to men getting rejected until they're not, and women meeting unworthy men until they don't. So each gender has an entirely different perspective on the same dating market. Personally speaking, it is hard for me to fully understand my female friends' difficulties with dating (or friendships) because I've only experienced it as a male, so many things they have difficulty with are things I take for granted (this usually goes the other way too).
Unless there's a huge cultural shift, men and women will keep having completely orthogonal experiences and until then, empathy remains the biggest asset for us to treat each other with.
It is not binary either choice. And ideally partners have shared friends.
One of the things you learn when being in situation I describes is value of causual connections and friends. And the need to work for them in various ways.
From my understanding, explicit, fatalist despairing of your sex life is the red/black pills to which incels refer. It is definitely an attitude to be concerned about, regardless of what labels you want to use, because it's a worldview that will reproduce itself without intervention.
> Can't you garner sympathy for a person who is missing out on one of the basic human needs (emotional connection)?
Do you think the advice to lose the incel angle (i.e. and actually admit the possibility of future relationships) was bad advice? That strikes me as more helpful than pitying him.
Proof: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5492308/
"For suicide attempts, for which the rate is estimated to be 20 times higher than that of suicides , the gender gap is less pronounced, with females demonstrating a disproportionately higher rate of suicide attempts compared to males ."
One theory is that things we code as suicide attempts are instead acts of self-harm intended to act as a cry for help instead of a genuine attempts to end your life. In which case, if women do have stronger social support networks that would respond to these cries for help, you'd expect exactly that kind of weird imbalance and difference in success rates.
I believe this accounts for part of the difference. Another element is that someone who attempts suicide and fails is likely to attempt to commit suicide repeatedly. If the average man attempts suicide once before succeeding, and the average woman attempts suicide three times before succeeding, even assuming equal propensities to suicide women will show up in the statistics as attempting it three times as often as men.
There are countries where women die by suicide more often than men.
You need to be careful with how you're defining a death by suicide too. Someone who shoots themself in the head is more likely to be counted as a death by suicide than someone who overdoses on prescription meds, because the intent is clearer.
> Another element is that someone who attempts suicide and fails is likely to attempt to commit suicide repeatedly.
This is incorrect. Some people do make multiple attempts, but plenty of people don't.
Agreed. We might take the fact that more women die by suicide than men in those countries to say that women are relatively worse off than men in those countries than women are to men in countries where the ratio is reversed.
> You need to be careful with how you're defining a death by suicide too. Someone who shoots themself in the head is more likely to be counted as a death by suicide than someone who overdoses on prescription meds, because the intent is clearer.
Agreed, but it's unclear which direction this would push the numbers: more men die by drug overdose than do women, though I can't find a breakdown by gender of prescription drug overdose. And plenty of other methods can also be miscoded, e.g. intentional car crashes, which are one of men's preferred methods. The only ones that I'd expect to be coded correctly most of the time are exsanguination and hanging. But we've got to do the best we can with the numbers we have, and try to improve accuracy while we're at it.
> This is incorrect. Some people do make multiple attempts, but plenty of people don't.
Correction noted. A previous attempt at death by suicide is a significant risk factor for future attempts at suicide, with somewhere between a third and a half of deaths by suicide being on a second-or-more attempt, but my "likely" was incorrect. It also seems like reattempts aren't likely to account for the gendered divergence in attempts versus deaths, because the large majority of first attempts at suicide don't result in future attempts.
But there's this meme that any time you lament a negative experience about dating as a man, you're called an incel, an epithet that comes with so much baggage it has no place for HN, imo. Just speak to their points independently.
Being disabled sucks pretty bad. Here's a paraplegic justifying his suicide at the end of his essay: http://www.2arms1head.com/ -- I think stepping in to call someone an incel is just some weird shaming. I'd attract a minuscule fraction of the women I currently if I were a blind guy assuming I even hold it together enough to remain positive. I completely sympathize with their catharsis.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/a6e5mm/and_women_c...
> Men used it a ton more and women didn’t because they didn’t have to since men mostly did the reaching out. Basically men and women used the rating system differently.
> Also the study the data came from stated that despite the ratings, women consistently messaged both guys they ranked attractive and guys they ranked below average, while men consistently ONLY messaged the women they ranked absolutely topmost. Thus demonstrating that the messaging habits of the sexes are the reverse of the rating data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBtF3I7fDfU there's many such videos ... is anyone surprised by the results a great deal of men say yes, when reversed, and a jacked model looking guys asked women for sex guess the results 0.
The reality is that men are willing to have sex with broader range of women while most women want the same guys as all other women ... this is evolutionary as for a guy to reproduce bears no risk so he wants quantity while a woman is incapacitated for 9 months minimum, therefore the choices.
The above guy who called the poor dude an incel just acted like an idiot.
If you want to help, the first question is how to create a felt connection with the other person, which will give them some reason to be open to what you're saying. That's not so easy to do on the internet, though maybe sometimes possible. Words like "I have significant sympathy for him" and "his understandable distress" aren't sufficient though.
You cannot discount my experiences and observations unless you have gone through this yourself.
Are you saying this seriously? Go to a local club for blind people, or some club for people with some other disability, and you'll find many living perfectly normal lives, in relationships, etc. You will also find several who don't have a relationship (which also true in abled people). But it's in no way like you need to be a famous artist/billionaire etc to be blind/disabled/etc and have a relationship. Not even close.
>You cannot discount my experiences and observations unless you have gone through this yourself.
You can, if they are not accurate.
What I found might surprise you. Blind people have normal relationships just like anyone else, and conferences tend to be a hotbed of dating and connection-making beyond just the topic of the day. My best friend is happily married now for more than 10 years, and I am in a long-term relationship coming up on my 2nd year anniversary. I've since met multiple blind people in the tech industry and found most of them to be successful in their career and in their relationships.
I'd heavily recommend you get involved in local groups and also to go out and do whatever activities interest you. Most people are more accepting than you might imagine. There's a lot of things that might be difficult due to visual acuity, but people are understanding are willing to give you space to be part of the group. For instance, I've found that board gaming and D&D are very popular activities with the geekier folks I know in the blind community, and for those who are partially sighted using assistive technology like magnification cameras on their phone or similar makes these things possible to do without significant impairment. You'll be more likely to meet someone you're compatible with if you get out of the house and go participate in mixed gender hobbies.
You may not want to hear this, but it's the truest observation I've made. Those folks who are struggling in the blind community have often put themselves in a situation to struggle. There's pervasive negative feedback loops when someone becomes disabled, especially if they become disabled later in life. It's easy to become hopeless, and it's easy for your own insecurities about your disability to sabotage the relationships you'd otherwise have, both professional and romantic. In the words of my best friend, "You're blind. So what? So am I. Go make something of yourself." Don't get fooled into throwing yourself a pity party. Instead go do the things necessary in your life to be an attractive romantic partner, and you will find that your disability is not the impediment you imagine. Romance is about emotional connection, first and foremost.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5ajj7/how-dating-works-w...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2017/01/09/wh...
You might consider finding a local support group for people who've recently lost their sight.
Any examples of men successfully dating after starting to lose their eyesight? Or other disabilities?
I think I've read other articles in the past about women with disabilities having a relatively easy time dating, but men with disabilities having a lot more difficulty.
The first mentions dating within the blind community, which would likely make things substantially easier on both parties.
I've seen enough weird parings and horrible people in relationships to feel quite comfortable with the statement "blind isn't a guaranteed deal-breaker". I do suspect the recency matters a lot - grief after loss can be all-consuming and take time to come to terms with.
Side note: My spouse is disabled, so I'm also quite comfortable with the concept of dating someone with a disability.
I got married after symptoms began. It was not easy but life doesn't stop. I'm still coming to terms and searching for something that works meds/supplements/physical therapy. However, I don't considered myself disabled even though this is quite limiting and I require more rest.
I think once one accepts your alignment and find ways of still being a member of the society, one will have a much better luck dating. I think the depression that these problems bring is just really hard to deal with and affects people around us.
That would be such an unacceptable response in any other context ( eg: there are plenty of women who are CEOs, there are plenty of <minority> millionaires. Please lose the victim angle). But somehow such cruelty is acceptable towards "incel" men.
I personally know someone who is an wheelchair and was abandoned by their SO ( can't really blame her ) after his condition and has ever since been unable to find someone.
I don't know what to make of that anecdote. Maybe it means nothing. But it has stuck in my mind ever since I read it.
Yeah, so? And I know people who stick to their spouses.
GP already said that? not quite sure what point ur trying to make
> plenty of disabled men in functional relatioships
There are plenty of disabled men in functional relatioships (and not-so-functional ones, there is a subset of people, male or female, that are specifically attracted to ill or dying partners for problematic reasons). Please lose the incel angle.