This comment starts off fine. Sharing personal experience is nearly always ok and interesting and good HN material. But please don't go the way of your last paragraph here. Escalations like "if you are not emotionally autistic" and "he is likely a broken individual" are guaranteed to activate someone, and that way lies flamewar—completely needlessly.
When you post to HN, you're broadcasting to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of readers. It feels like a small and intimate conversation, which has a lot of advantages, but on this point that feeling is misleading.
At no point did the poster wish (or anyone arguing for gender equality) for a kid to have identical relationships with parents. It is about each gender being able to invest as much time as the other (if they so chose), thereby making sure each relationship has the potential to reach the same depth (barely present father has been a trope for a very long time) and does not force one gender to sacrifice their carriers over the other (because getting children often boils down to that, and the numbers backing that up are contested by nobody).
In other words, you chose to attack a straw-man, and it is important for the discussion that you don't. Whenever I see a man doing that I assume that he is likely not very interested in hearing about problems others do experience.
> Personally, I find that this "gender equality" push winds up being extraordinarily anti-woman in effect, and whenever I see a man preaching it, I assume that he is likely a broken individual in his relationship with the fairer sex, certainly someone that I would care to keep far away from my daughters.
You could try getting to know people, instead of making broad assumptions. They might surprise you, and you might start wondering why you're in such a rush to assume things about them anyway.
The problem in contemporary culture is that we are not even allowed to have this conversation. To state the obvious fact that men and women are different and have different strengths and weaknesses (in general, as a sex) is tantamount to heresy, I guess because gender roles are associated with perceived past injustices.
> Personally, I find that this "gender equality" push winds up being extraordinarily anti-woman in effect, and whenever I see a man preaching it, I assume that he is likely a broken individual in his relationship with the fairer sex, certainly someone that I would care to keep far away from my daughters.
It is still unclear to me how forcing both parents to work full-time jobs is beneficial for anyone other than corporations. Parents today work more and spend less time with their kids than probably any period of time other than the early Industrial Revolution. This was not the case prior to opening up the work force en masse for women.
> The problem in contemporary culture is that we are not even allowed to have this conversation
So what type of conversation are you having right now? We have word in swedish for using that type of "arguing", it is "offerkofta". I dont think it is a good word for it in english, but starting a discussion in an open forum saying something and then stating you are not "ALLOWED" to discuss what you are discussing is just a way of victimizing oneself and make it more or less impossible for other people to argue against. If I argue against you can always call me politically correct or stating that I just dont see behind the propaganda. "Offerkofta" by the way is literally "putting on the victim cardigan".
This is a mostly anonymous forum which is slightly more open to controversial ideas than the average media outlet. Any person openly questioning the effectiveness of treating men and women as exact equals is usually treated as some sort of ultra conservative or fringe figure in the media.
People in general have a hard time understanding the idea that there are different scales of value. The old Einstein quote about a fish judging itself to be stupid because it can’t climb a tree is relevant here.
I’m also referring to American society. I don’t know how Sweden is.
As I said earlier, you have your right to an opinion, and can express it freely. If it feels awkward for you to not being agreed with or people not liking your views is not the same as someone not allowing you to have that opinion. So feel free to say and argue whatever you want, but people not liking what you say or people thinking you are having a strange opinion and rather not discussing with you have nothing to do with not allowing you to express that opinon. Saying that you are not allowed to have an opinion kills conversations.
The largest news Network in the US ran this story from multiple angles including yours, and even has a panel.
If you really need someone to pander to this perspective, American society is full of people loudly discussing it. It is obviously so.
So either you are angry that your local discourse doesn't treat this topic kindly, or you were just making a rhetorical jab that wasn't meant to be taken literally.
In either case it doesn't seem very fair to do, imo.
Not agreeing is not the same as not allowing. I think this is a false logic. I see a lot of people mistaken freedom of speech with some god-given right of being listened to.
And saying that "you are not allowed to have this conversation" is like saying: "If you argue against me you are part of the problem". So it is a good way of just throwing out an argument and killing conversation.
The original post was downvoted into oblivion in part because it explicitly broke HN rules and argued that people whom disagreed with him were autistic.
That's not a conversation. That's being deliberately inflammatory.
> It is still unclear to me how forcing both parents to work full-time jobs is beneficial for anyone other than corporations.
The point of these measures is not letting/forcing both parents to work. It's to make both genders equals in the eye of the capitalist employer. So, depending on the job and remuneration of the parents, maybe just one can work. And this working parent can be the mother.
In theory, yes, but unless the cost of supporting a family can be done with one job (as it used to be), then this is kind of a moot point. Both parents can choose to work part-time, but typically that means they'll be in poverty.
Well that depends on the social class and the country where the family lives in. But yeah, what you say is true for too many families even in the richest countries.
So, you extrapolate how the world works from your personal experiences? On top of that calls people who dont agree with you autistic and men who are into "gender equality" being broken individuals? Wow, you are really open-minded and up for discussion.
There's a lot that can go wrong for a family that can at least be softened if the mother has a career that she can go back to if she ends up needing to support the family, and in our economy, that pretty much means going back to work at least part-time within a few years of giving birth.
The friend I worry about the most: mom of 4 who had her first child a year after getting married straight out of college, and has never lived on her own or worked a job that could support even a young single woman, much less a family. I trust that her husband, being a well-paid financial planner, has a big life insurance policy and very good disability insurance, but what if he gets a wild hair and runs off? She was our high school valedictorian and had good grades in college, but would be absolutely lost if she had to support her kids, even with the relatively meager child support she'd get.
Having been forced to become a single dad over the last few years - your view is wrong in my opinion. But I will admit I had a similar view before my own experience. The thing is, society teaches boys/men to be self-focused and work-focused, and we subconsciously derive our own self worth from being good at those things. But that is not biological, I am pretty convinced of that now. If you were to single parent your children, you would see quite quickly you can develop a very similar relationship that a mother traditionally has. It's just a matter of spending less time on yourself and work, and more time on your children and the running of the family. Then those stronger bonds just develop naturally (and are the silver lining of my own experience).
You're projecting your own experience as if it's a universal truth for other fathers, but it simply isn't. You may even be an outlier amongst new fathers in developed nations.
> And, to put this delicately, but as something that needs to be stated because it's true and important for the discussion: she has a different relationship with our children precisely because she is their mother. The two of us are not interchangeable. There are a million ways this is true. I'm an attentive and a loving father, but the sound of a crying baby is something that I can compartmentalize when I need to. On my wife, though, it is an unbearable sound with physiological effects even. (One that she uses when pumping milk, for example.)
This is a subtle twist you've made to the argument. No one is saying that all relationships a child has are precisely equal. What they're saying is that families should have access to equal leave for both parents when a child comes into their family.
There are many reasons why this might be true. But it also has the nice knock-on effect of not giving sexist employers the opportunity to say "women are more expensive/less productive than men."
> If you are not emotionally autistic,
This little jab is probably why you got downvoted. Please don't make up nonsense about medical conditions or use the autistic spectrum as your synonym for dysfunction. It's not only unfair and uncivil, it's factually incorrect.
> Personally, I find that this "gender equality" push winds up being extraordinarily anti-woman in effect, and whenever I see a man preaching it,
If your argument is, "men shouldn't push an agenda onto women's rights movements" then I'm all for that message. Of course, what you're actually doing is holding a very narrow definition of "woman" and "femininity" and assuming that rights and options granted to women who don't fit that mold come at the cost of your specific image of women. Rights and freedoms are not obviously a zero sum game.
> I assume that he is likely a broken individual in his relationship with the fairer sex, certainly someone that I would care to keep far away from my daughters.
So either you're implying that all people who support broader definitions of women's rights are sexual deviants likely to molest your children, or implying that you are afraid that these freethinking individuals might put ideas into your daughter's head that will make them less friendly to your extremely narrow view of femininity.
Since clearly the former would get you flagged and banned, and we have an imperative to communicate charitably on Hacker News (and of course statistically the most likely source of child abuse is a relative, making your claim wildly implausible), I choose to wish you the best of luck getting over your reactionary fears of letting your daughters choose their own paths in life. I suspect they will thrive even if you try to stifle them.
