6 ms·

I’m not here to deny that short men face challenges, the same way that anyone with any characteristic deemed negative by the prevailing dating culture faces cha

by jl6 5y ago

I’m not here to deny that short men face challenges, the same way that anyone with any characteristic deemed negative by the prevailing dating culture faces challenges (plenty of examples to choose from - age, weight, ethnicity, wealth, disability, education, class, caste, language). I am here, though, to throw cold water on the ridiculous borderline-incel hot takes from men here who have drawn a blank on dating sites and thereby divined the true nature of women. As if women are a monolithic bloc conspiring against your genes. As if women are spherical horses acting out the simple laws of your evolutionary psychology. As if women don’t face their own challenges in finding meaningful relationships. As if “women” just means “attractive white 18-25 year old heterosexuals” and you don’t see the double standard. I didn’t read all the comments but didn’t spot a single one from anyone female. My advice to y’all is to get out of the sausage factory and start meeting some people in real life. It’s not women making you forever alone, it’s your monocausal mindset.

PaywallBuster 5y ago
> My advice to y’all is to get out of the sausage factory Certain cities/countries can be day and night! Imagine SF is one of the worst places to be for single men
- seanp2k2 5y ago
  San Jose is worse. They call it “Man Jose”. Plenty of profiles on dating sites won’t even consider someone outside of SF / Oakland since it’s so much trouble if the city person doesn’t have a car.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    I’ve talked to plenty of women why I get out where I am. They just tend to have 5 to 40 years me.
- koshergweilo 5y ago
  Single straight men
siva7 5y ago
This! I am shocked how often men act as if they have to be someone else and then wonder why their dating life went nowhere.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  > I am shocked how often men act as if they have to be someone else Look at the advice for dating profiles on Reddit. This is apparently the ideal for online dating. Remove any eccentricities, actual hobbies, and create some contrived person with staged pics and hobbies you don’t actually care for but are more socially presentable, etc…
0dayz 5y ago
There are some good points here (stop listening to uptight young women), but you ruin it completely by essentially ending it with a less condescending version of "have sex incel", effectively making the entire comment a very lengthy filler until that point. But yes women aren't monotone, but that's not what these men are complaining about, it's the same complaint you may face as a female but instead it might be your butt, breasts or weight. In other words that the dating game IS unfair because it's hyper fixated on one element of a person effectively objectifying them. That said, dating online is always a handicap no matter how much of a precived 10/10 you are, since it'll never be able to make a stranger able to validate you as a whole and vice versa, in contrast to a reoccurring social meeting it gives you ample time to allow both you and the stranger to validate you. The issue there of course is that at least in the west that you have a lot of old myths and norms taught to children that warps our perception on how we form social connections (i.e. We go on autopilot in school expecting friends to be handed to us).
- mxkopy 5y ago
  - leereeves 5y ago
    I wondered how someone so hostile could survive moderation here, so I looked at your comment history. It seems like your hostility started just 10 days ago, when you started posting things like: > What the fuck kind of misanthropic sociopath are you? > How disconnected from reality do you have to be for me to have to make this comparison explicit??? > Because you probably can't do anything other than voice your useless opinion. What happened to make you so angry?
    - mxkopy 5y ago
      - leereeves 5y ago
        > It gives me quite a lot of catharsis to call an idiot, an idiot. I don't think Hacker News is meant to be a place where people find catharsis by calling other people idiots. Then again it's not my site; perhaps dang will indeed allow it.
langitbiru 5y ago
Life is both unfair to men and women but in different ways.
imtringued 5y ago
I'm starting to think that those "20% of the men get 80% of the women" statistics are actually a property of dating apps rather than the real world. When you think about the food industry it is convenient as hell but it is also bad for you over the long term. Dating apps are just like that. If you are lucky and you find someone good for you. If you stick around too long you are discovering the terrible business model the hard way. A lot of industries have been building their business model around creating artificial needs. Mobile games and dating apps are the most extreme. Pay to win games are intentionally designed to be terrible to get you to pay up. Dating apps make their money off the misery of unsuccessful men.
- dm319 5y ago
  Yes, I'm also convinced that dating apps aren't a good way to match-make. I've had some experience of them, and there are clear problems for both men and women on it. Men struggle to get matches, women struggle to get good quality matches. The environment is artificial. A few words on your profile, a few photos that probably don't represent you in real-life, and then an artificial 'date' where it's hard for people to be natural. I met my wife in person at work. Not saying that is great either, but I find my attraction to someone is based far more on who they are in real-life than the 2D representation that a photo or some text messages can represent.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Dating apps are horrid. Reducing someone to a snippet of text and some photos. Then ofc it’s a competitive game so we’ll assign an internal ELo and punished you for not paying to win. Unfortunately almost all my friends continue to use them. For some reasons it’s odd to find people irl within a few years of my own age, outside the online world. Meet plenty of people irl but the demographics are always very skewed offline.
- dominotw 5y ago
  wasn't there some research where women only rated top 20% men as attractive while men had a wider range. If that's actually true then dating apps are just magnifying whats already there and aren't the cause of the phenomenon.
ellen364 5y ago
> I didn’t read all the comments but didn’t spot a single one from anyone female. To be honest I only skimmed the article because there was so much pain and unkindness in it that I didn’t want to carefully read the whole thing. More broadly, I tend to stay out of these threads. The first of its kind that I read on HN (about divorce, I think) shocked me a little. I left with a feeling that some people commenting both loathed women and really wanted female attention. It was strange and uncomfortable. It was also quite sad because I realised that someone behaving like that probably would struggle to get dates, because it would scare the women they want to date, and that would feed into the feeling of anger. So now I tend to avoid these threads.
- psbp 5y ago
  A scary amount of men just don't think of women as people.
  - flyandscan88 5y ago
    It's really quite simple a lot of men just want to be able to experiment sexually before they settle down. A lot of women do too. The difference is for women this is easily available in the dating world.. for men.. especially short men.. it's a distant fantasy. If these needs were met they would harbor no resentment towards women.
    - psbp 5y ago
      I honestly think a lot of men just don't like women, or at least don't respect them. Maybe it's because I was exposed to a lot of sexism in my CS undergrad (and even some jobs I've had), but it really does seem like some men think of women as inferior.
      - jseban 5y ago
        Maybe because it's a male dominated field, you'd probably find the same bias against men in the field of child care for example.
twofornone 5y ago
> As if women are a monolithic bloc conspiring against your genes. As if women are spherical horses acting out the simple laws of your evolutionary psychology This is a borderline strawman. Such conclusions are based on population level trends. And yes, just like any other sexually dimorphic species, there quite literally is a "conspiracy" against undesirable genes, though it isn't necessarily conscious or absolute. I think post feminism people generally are unwilling to acknowledge that femininity can be just toxic as masculinity in its own ways, so they deny the absolute cruelty that women can collectively and inadvertently impose on less desirable men. Perhaps norms which enforce monogamy are a compromise which optimizes for overall happiness and societal function, as an alternative to legions of demotivated and disaffected young men in a hypergamist society. >My advice to y’all is to get out of the sausage factory and start meeting some people in real life. Did it ever occur to you that these observations might be coming from short guys who have experienced this negative selection pressure in real life? It's not like it's limited to dating, we all know about the research into the correlation between stature and salary, position, and other metrics of success; are short guys just not trying hard enough in their professional lives too? Think of it like microagressions, except there's no one to advocate for you, and your immutable trait is objectively, defensibly negative, unlike racial/sexual discrimination. I would bet that short guys in (especially multicultural?) societies with a wide height variance are severely underrepresented in social settings like bars, because the soft stigma is always there. Reality is unfair. Have some compassion.
- satyrnein 5y ago
  Is there also a "conspiracy" against overweight women? Black women? Women with disabilities? These groups also get lower than average messages and responses.
  - langitbiru 5y ago
    Both short men and overweight women get the short end of the stick in their life. Rather than dragging this into a gender war, perhaps we should have more compassion to unattractive people (both men and women). https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2016/03/09/short-men-and-overweight-women-may-not-go-as-far-in-life/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2016/03/09/short-m...
Giorgi 5y ago
This is most stupid comment I have ever read on hacker news.
533474 5y ago
You write a lot and yet explain your point so little
dominotw 5y ago
> My advice to y’all is to get out of the sausage factory and start meeting some people in real life. > It’s not women making you forever alone, it’s your monocausal mindset. Agreed. Don't sell yourself short.
crossroadsguy 5y ago
It’s just like those “desired” characteristics such as supple body parts, the thigh gap, the wide hips but not too wide, swinging subtly but not flailing etc. Sounds not very politically correct? It’s just how it is and this is how most people see these things and desire. Yes, most. And it goes both ways. So, it’s really ingenuous to label all those comments with that incel-something buzzword. Something of a “not all women” comment? This is real. How it ought to be or not is an entirely different story.
- mxkopy 5y ago
  On the other hand, this article read almost like satire. This man described almost nothing other than his shortness, as if it were the only reason he couldn't find success in dating. I refuse to believe that any one thing could hamper someone's ability to find a date like that; especially not shortness. If a woman complained in the same way that men don't like her because her breasts aren't big, we'd be equally incredulous.

by jl6 5y ago

PaywallBuster 5y ago

> My advice to y’all is to get out of the sausage factory Certain cities/countries can be day and night! Imagine SF is one of the worst places to be for single men

seanp2k2 5y ago
San Jose is worse. They call it “Man Jose”. Plenty of profiles on dating sites won’t even consider someone outside of SF / Oakland since it’s so much trouble if the city person doesn’t have a car.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I’ve talked to plenty of women why I get out where I am. They just tend to have 5 to 40 years me.
koshergweilo 5y ago
Single straight men

siva7 5y ago

This! I am shocked how often men act as if they have to be someone else and then wonder why their dating life went nowhere.

the_only_law 5y ago
> I am shocked how often men act as if they have to be someone else Look at the advice for dating profiles on Reddit. This is apparently the ideal for online dating. Remove any eccentricities, actual hobbies, and create some contrived person with staged pics and hobbies you don’t actually care for but are more socially presentable, etc…

0dayz 5y ago

There are some good points here (stop listening to uptight young women), but you ruin it completely by essentially ending it with a less condescending version of "have sex incel", effectively making the entire comment a very lengthy filler until that point. But yes women aren't monotone, but that's not what these men are complaining about, it's the same complaint you may face as a female but instead it might be your butt, breasts or weight. In other words that the dating game IS unfair because it's hyper fixated on one element of a person effectively objectifying them. That said, dating online is always a handicap no matter how much of a precived 10/10 you are, since it'll never be able to make a stranger able to validate you as a whole and vice versa, in contrast to a reoccurring social meeting it gives you ample time to allow both you and the stranger to validate you. The issue there of course is that at least in the west that you have a lot of old myths and norms taught to children that warps our perception on how we form social connections (i.e. We go on autopilot in school expecting friends to be handed to us).

mxkopy 5y ago
- leereeves 5y ago
  I wondered how someone so hostile could survive moderation here, so I looked at your comment history. It seems like your hostility started just 10 days ago, when you started posting things like: > What the fuck kind of misanthropic sociopath are you? > How disconnected from reality do you have to be for me to have to make this comparison explicit??? > Because you probably can't do anything other than voice your useless opinion. What happened to make you so angry?
  - mxkopy 5y ago
    - leereeves 5y ago
      > It gives me quite a lot of catharsis to call an idiot, an idiot. I don't think Hacker News is meant to be a place where people find catharsis by calling other people idiots. Then again it's not my site; perhaps dang will indeed allow it.

langitbiru 5y ago

Life is both unfair to men and women but in different ways.

imtringued 5y ago

I'm starting to think that those "20% of the men get 80% of the women" statistics are actually a property of dating apps rather than the real world. When you think about the food industry it is convenient as hell but it is also bad for you over the long term. Dating apps are just like that. If you are lucky and you find someone good for you. If you stick around too long you are discovering the terrible business model the hard way. A lot of industries have been building their business model around creating artificial needs. Mobile games and dating apps are the most extreme. Pay to win games are intentionally designed to be terrible to get you to pay up. Dating apps make their money off the misery of unsuccessful men.

dm319 5y ago
Yes, I'm also convinced that dating apps aren't a good way to match-make. I've had some experience of them, and there are clear problems for both men and women on it. Men struggle to get matches, women struggle to get good quality matches. The environment is artificial. A few words on your profile, a few photos that probably don't represent you in real-life, and then an artificial 'date' where it's hard for people to be natural. I met my wife in person at work. Not saying that is great either, but I find my attraction to someone is based far more on who they are in real-life than the 2D representation that a photo or some text messages can represent.
the_only_law 5y ago
Dating apps are horrid. Reducing someone to a snippet of text and some photos. Then ofc it’s a competitive game so we’ll assign an internal ELo and punished you for not paying to win. Unfortunately almost all my friends continue to use them. For some reasons it’s odd to find people irl within a few years of my own age, outside the online world. Meet plenty of people irl but the demographics are always very skewed offline.
dominotw 5y ago
wasn't there some research where women only rated top 20% men as attractive while men had a wider range. If that's actually true then dating apps are just magnifying whats already there and aren't the cause of the phenomenon.

ellen364 5y ago

> I didn’t read all the comments but didn’t spot a single one from anyone female. To be honest I only skimmed the article because there was so much pain and unkindness in it that I didn’t want to carefully read the whole thing. More broadly, I tend to stay out of these threads. The first of its kind that I read on HN (about divorce, I think) shocked me a little. I left with a feeling that some people commenting both loathed women and really wanted female attention. It was strange and uncomfortable. It was also quite sad because I realised that someone behaving like that probably would struggle to get dates, because it would scare the women they want to date, and that would feed into the feeling of anger. So now I tend to avoid these threads.

psbp 5y ago
A scary amount of men just don't think of women as people.
- flyandscan88 5y ago
  It's really quite simple a lot of men just want to be able to experiment sexually before they settle down. A lot of women do too. The difference is for women this is easily available in the dating world.. for men.. especially short men.. it's a distant fantasy. If these needs were met they would harbor no resentment towards women.
  - psbp 5y ago
    I honestly think a lot of men just don't like women, or at least don't respect them. Maybe it's because I was exposed to a lot of sexism in my CS undergrad (and even some jobs I've had), but it really does seem like some men think of women as inferior.
    - jseban 5y ago
      Maybe because it's a male dominated field, you'd probably find the same bias against men in the field of child care for example.

twofornone 5y ago

> As if women are a monolithic bloc conspiring against your genes. As if women are spherical horses acting out the simple laws of your evolutionary psychology This is a borderline strawman. Such conclusions are based on population level trends. And yes, just like any other sexually dimorphic species, there quite literally is a "conspiracy" against undesirable genes, though it isn't necessarily conscious or absolute. I think post feminism people generally are unwilling to acknowledge that femininity can be just toxic as masculinity in its own ways, so they deny the absolute cruelty that women can collectively and inadvertently impose on less desirable men. Perhaps norms which enforce monogamy are a compromise which optimizes for overall happiness and societal function, as an alternative to legions of demotivated and disaffected young men in a hypergamist society. >My advice to y’all is to get out of the sausage factory and start meeting some people in real life. Did it ever occur to you that these observations might be coming from short guys who have experienced this negative selection pressure in real life? It's not like it's limited to dating, we all know about the research into the correlation between stature and salary, position, and other metrics of success; are short guys just not trying hard enough in their professional lives too? Think of it like microagressions, except there's no one to advocate for you, and your immutable trait is objectively, defensibly negative, unlike racial/sexual discrimination. I would bet that short guys in (especially multicultural?) societies with a wide height variance are severely underrepresented in social settings like bars, because the soft stigma is always there. Reality is unfair. Have some compassion.

satyrnein 5y ago
Is there also a "conspiracy" against overweight women? Black women? Women with disabilities? These groups also get lower than average messages and responses.
- langitbiru 5y ago
  Both short men and overweight women get the short end of the stick in their life. Rather than dragging this into a gender war, perhaps we should have more compassion to unattractive people (both men and women). https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2016/03/09/short-men-and-overweight-women-may-not-go-as-far-in-life/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2016/03/09/short-m...

Giorgi 5y ago

This is most stupid comment I have ever read on hacker news.

533474 5y ago

You write a lot and yet explain your point so little

dominotw 5y ago

> My advice to y’all is to get out of the sausage factory and start meeting some people in real life. > It’s not women making you forever alone, it’s your monocausal mindset. Agreed. Don't sell yourself short.

crossroadsguy 5y ago

It’s just like those “desired” characteristics such as supple body parts, the thigh gap, the wide hips but not too wide, swinging subtly but not flailing etc. Sounds not very politically correct? It’s just how it is and this is how most people see these things and desire. Yes, most. And it goes both ways. So, it’s really ingenuous to label all those comments with that incel-something buzzword. Something of a “not all women” comment? This is real. How it ought to be or not is an entirely different story.

mxkopy 5y ago
On the other hand, this article read almost like satire. This man described almost nothing other than his shortness, as if it were the only reason he couldn't find success in dating. I refuse to believe that any one thing could hamper someone's ability to find a date like that; especially not shortness. If a woman complained in the same way that men don't like her because her breasts aren't big, we'd be equally incredulous.