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Comment by mayaross | Hacker News Reader

One thing that struck me about this is that all the messages from people worried their data are from men. Troy even states that explicitly: "very close to 100% of the emails I got were about men having accounts on the site".

Why is that? Is it because men are more likely to cheat, or because men are more likely to need the help of online services to do so?

I suspect both are true, but can say with confidence that the latter is definitely true. Women don't need sites to help them cheat; all they have to do is go out and they will be hunted down. As a woman I find this a clear sign of the remaining, quite sinister, gender inequality.

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Or perhaps there are alternative explanations(?): Women don't care enough to check if they were exposed; less women are aware of the breach; men aren't paranoid enough to check up on their women; men don't care as much that their wife/spouse/gf may or may not have been on there at some point (or currently) and could have been/is cheating; perhaps there were even some couples that were into that together. [Not saying that I believe any of these are true statements, just that one could draw some odd conclusions from what isn't being said, just as easily as what is being said]

It's funny that there seems to be an assumption that most were either men checking about themselves or paranoid/untrusting spouses checking on the status of their men. From the information that's being reported, there seems to be remarkably few men checking up on their women...

Not sure if that's a valid observation, but it's an interesting one that is telling of the mental/emotional differences between men and women on the whole.

Who knows, people are a weird bunch. The more you know about them, the more you realize that all this shit that goes on behind closed doors that people judge in public eventually leaks and then when you analyze enough data about the state of humanity, appears to be "completely normal behaviour"... Then when everyone realizes it's completely normal behaviour they're like "okay then, perhaps we should just change the rules so that we can all stop hiding and be publically equal and love who we are in public again."

We're all human, we all fuck up from time to time and we all get caught in embarrassing moments where we hope the ground would open up and swallow us occasionally. Perhaps not in ways that get leaked all over the internet, or to be used as blackmail against us, but it happens.

Given the few women on there (by all accounts), one would have to wonder how many men could actually have ended up cheating with anyone... from the sound of things, all the female accounts were either fake or sex professionals... so who were all these millions of men cheating with?

Yes, technically men cheat a little more than women, according to studies that aren't done by dating companies.

But the 'why' is varied. It's illogical to say "they cheat because they are more likely to cheat". They cheat because of many factors, but according to surveys, they cheat more often out of a need for physical satisfaction, while women cheat more out of a need for emotional or intimate satisfaction.

As far as need for online services to help? That's completely dependent on the person, again. True, women get hit on more often & indiscriminately, so they'd have more choice. But they also can't necessarily get the emotional satisfaction they're looking for, so that narrows the field. Men just need to be attractive enough to get laid, which again definitely depends on the man.

As a side rant: Assuming sex and gender were considered about the same, gender inequality is a function of gender differences. In other words, it's not only inevitable, it's normal. Women request [and should get] special care for breastfeeding/pumping, maternity leave, they have higher incidences of breast and ovarian cancer, they naturally have less muscle and are shorter on average, etc etc. These aren't controversial statements, and yet, they show simple examples of how women are different, and in some cases should be treated different in order to provide care. How would one make these differences "equal" among the genders? (obviously sex isn't gender, but clearly there's more cis-women than trans-women)

> men cheat a little more than women, according to studies

Women admit to cheating less than men, and this is reflected in a bias of studies whose methodology includes self-reporting. In general, women self-report about one third less sex partners than men. That presents a curious mathematical problem: who are all those extra men partnering with?

Let's say the average reported number of sex partners for males is 11.7 [1]. Now that means that the set of men has a number of connections into the set of women times 11.7. Say, the number of men in the set is 31M [2], then the number of connections is 362.7M. For the set of women, the numbers are 7.7, 32.2M, and 247.94M, respectively.

The connections can terminate in either of the sets, so we can have M-M, M-F, or F-F connections.

At one unlikely extreme, we could have no heterosexual (M-F) pairings at all, so that means 11.7 gay partners for men, and 7.7 lesbian partners for women. Clearly, this isn't the reality, not even in the UK. But even if we map all the connections from the female set to males, we'll end up with 247.94M hetero connections, no lesbian connections, and 114.76 connections from the male set onto itself, or 8.0 hetero + 3.7 gay connections per male, and 7.7 hetero + 0 lesbian connections per female.

There may be a large number of spinsters, and a small number of gay people may be skewing the mean away from the mode for the males, but the important take-away is that, mathematically, hetero-sexual partnerships always draw from both sets equally, and therefore the mean number of heterosex partners is always the same across the whole population.

[1] http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/11November/Pages/Results-of-UK-S... [2] http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/population-...

> mathematically, hetero-sexual partnerships always draw from both sets equally

Uh, no, not from the sets under study. You've ignored time and space. The sets under study are the set of men and set of women currently living in a particular countries. The sets from whom their past partners are drawn (even assuming purely heterosexual relationships) may include people no longer living at the time of the survey, as well as people who are alive, but not living in the country under study (either at the time of the survey, or even ever.)

If you managed to get responses from representative sample of all men and women who had ever lived (which, you know, is logistically tricky), then you could validly argue that all heterosexual partnerships must draw evenly from both groups. But you don't, so you can't.

The imbalance could just be that UK men are more likely to have had past relationships with women not currently living in the UK than UK women are to have had with men not currently living in the UK. (It could also be the kind of reporting bias you suggest, and there are certainly other sociological reasons to suspect that such reporting bias is at least partially to blame -- its just not, even without bringing into it questions of same-sex pairings, the kind of mathematical necessity you make it out to be.)

Time and space are good retorts, let's talk about them. The UK is a relatively cosmopolitan kingdom, and those trips to Magaluf & Basra must lead to some monkey business, right?

Time. Women live longer on average, and there is also on average an age gap between heterosex partners (males older); therefore it is more probable that the male sex partner will be deceased, not the female. The numbers for females, if anything, should therefore be higher.

Space. If the UK is a net exporter of male sexual partners, that would mean that some other country or countries would be net importers. Regardless, the worldwide number of heterosex connections must be the same for women and men. But that's not the case. In every country, with the notable exception of New Zealand, women report less sex partners than men, and the worldwide aggregate for men is still unexplainedly higher than the aggregate for women.

Some studies suggest the gap to be due to women underreporting, some studies suggest prostitutes are underrepresented in the samples, but in the end, whenever somebody wants to argue that men tend to have more sex partners than women, let them know that (a) one number is pretty useless in telling the whole story, and (b) if conclusions of a study present a mathematical paradox, they should be taken with a grain of salt.

The design of the study has more to do with this than anything else. Still, there's been several decades (at least) of independent study on the subject, and all of them i've seen conclude that more men cheat than women, even if more recent studies show the frequency of women cheating is increasing. Regardless of your math, the fact that every study leads to the same conclusion is what I would call strong evidence that this is more likely than not to be true.

The simplest answer to your question ("who are all those extra men partnering with?") is incredibly simple: there's a smaller group of women who sleep with a greater number of men than vice-versa. And this makes total sense if you consider that women have more choice of partners, and men have less, and that there's a larger pool of men looking for purely physical/sexual relationships. Basically the availability of men is greater, the availability of women is smaller, and so the reported number of women cheating is smaller, and the reported number of men cheating is larger.

> there's a smaller group of women who sleep with a greater number of men

That's a falacy. If a small number of women raise the number of their sexual partners, the rest of the women must lower their number of sexual partners, to keep the average the same. That's not the way to explain the deficit.

The average number of women who cheat? Or of men? Either one doesn't change if a small group of women has a larger number of partners, though the average of men who cheat may increase.

"Women admit to cheating less than men, and this is reflected in a bias of studies whose methodology includes self-reporting."

I remember reading something that said something along the lines of "A married man in a bar, cheating, is more likely to do so without thought to the wedding ring - either oblivious to taking it off or apathetic".

Women doing the same thing were much more likely to make a conscious point of removing the wedding ring in the same situation.

The membership seems to have been a sausage-fest. Lots of men, lots of fake female profiles and lots of female sex workers, but very few legit female profiles.

So the worried responses would be from users, and the user base displays bias.

> Women don't need sites to help them cheat; all they have to do is go out and they will be hunted down. As a woman I find this a clear sign of the remaining, quite sinister, gender inequality.

Can you expand on what you mean by that? (Specifically by "hunted down" and how what you're talking about relates to inequality)

Have you ever been to a bar? A single woman will attract lots of male attention. A single man won't have a similar level of females flocking to him unless he's got movie star looks.

These are vast generalizations with plenty of exceptions, but surely you have noticed that in most cultures men tend to pursue women more actively than vice-versa?

Right, but it wasn't clear to me that that was mayaross's point exactly, or if it was her whole point. I'm interested in what women think about the dynamics of dating and courtship, as it's something I think a lot about and sort of struggle with in some ways.

of "the remaining" gender inequality?

I'm not quite sure what you're confused about. The gender inequality that still exists. It's pretty straightforward.

There will always be some form of inequality. That's what happens when you have two distinct things and compare them.

And that's honestly what you think people mean when they say gender inequality?

You don't understand what it is like to be a man then. It has nothing to do with "inequality". When it comes to sex it is woman that hold most of the cards. For a man, unless they are handsome, wealthy and well endowed (i.e. perfect) then they are at the mercy of women. Which means they have two choices, they either "beg" for it or try to "take" it. Both come in a variety of subtle and overt forms. In either case it is a very insecure state for a single man. And ironically woman can sense that. Woman are always more interested in the taken man because that insecurity is no longer present. So in a cruel twist of fate, a taken man who struggled to woo his current mate discovers now he has many more options for the taking.

I agree with you that women (and men for that matter) find confidence attractive. You don't have to be in a relationship to be confident. I would be careful of conflating the two.

From my experience, most women are not interested in holding sex as a trump card. Like you and I, they are simply looking for companionship - for someone they can count on for support and non-judgement during times of crisis, but who will also push them to become better and achieve their goals. Like you and I, most are at least partially attracted to looks, confidence, humor, power, intellect, etc.

It sounds like you're pretty bitter about something or other. I think you should make more friends that are women so that you can talk to them about the way they view relationships.

> It sounds like you're pretty bitter about something or other. I think you should make more friends

That's a pretty unkind thing to say to a stranger on the internet. I lose a bit of faith in humanity every time I see such things.

I don't see that mean, it matches the impression I have from transfire's comment. Nobody is saying that transfire's comment fully reflects the person who made it, but based only on the comment, it is an appropriate response, as far as I see it.

Something can be both accurate and mean at the same time. Example: "hey, you're fat". I feel that "hey, you're bitter and need to get some friends" is about the same ballpark. Maybe other people have a thicker skin, though.

So how would you write that message? The big part of the statement was skipped by you:

> I think you should make more friends that are women so that you can talk to them about the way they view relationships.

Which definitely doesn't sound near to "hey, you're fat."

And that "fat-like" part is also in fact different:

"It sounds like you're pretty bitter (...)" -- note that it discusses the impression of the written comment not the person.

Btw I don't think it's OK to remove your claim that roymurdock's response was "mean" as the responses then lose the context, maybe deleting the comment would be more appropriate?

> So how would you write that message?

I guess I wouldn't write it. When I read transfire's and roymurdock's comments, it's not obvious to me whose opinion is more informed, or if the question even makes sense. Their experiences with women could just be different, and one ended up more cynical than the other.

> Btw I don't think it's OK to remove your claim that roymurdock's response was "mean"

Yeah. Sorry. I was just trying to make my own comment less mean :-/

> When I read transfire's and roymurdock's comments, it's not obvious to me whose opinion is more informed,

Please watch Monty Python's sketch "Nudge nudge."

I'm not trying to be mean. I'm pushing OP to reflect on why he holds some of the viewpoints that he does.

I'm also not trying to imply that OP does not have enough friends. Just that he might get a broader picture of women in general if he had more female friends.

I read your edited comment about how that made you sad. A lot of things on HN make me sad - there are many unnecessarily mean, rude, snarky comments posted here with amazing regularity. I try to make helpful comments without putting others down. I'm sorry if my comment came off in a negative manner. I'm not trying to add to the general negativity of the site.

Fair enough. Sorry if my own comment was unnecessarily harsh.

No problem. See you around HN :)

>It sounds like you're pretty bitter about something or other.

What did they say that made them sound bitter? I often see this response for points similar to the one GP made, so I was wondering what about it makes one seem bitter?

    What did they say that made them sound bitter?

When they bemoaned the state of male/female relationships and claimed that females somehow dominate men who are anything less than "perfect." That sounded very bitter to me.

There are definite gender imbalances in our society. Is someone bitter when they point out that women make less or that men die more at work? Or is it particular to relationship issues? I wouldn't call Clinton pointing out the wage gap as her being bitter.

Is it perhaps some view that those who complain about social relationship norms are generally those not in, but wishing to be in, such relationships?

   There are definite gender imbalances in our society. Is someone 
   bitter when they point out that women make less or that men die 
   more at work?  [...] I wouldn't call Clinton pointing out the wage 
   gap as her being bitter.

Those are objective facts, backed by statistics. Completely different than:

   For a man, unless they are handsome, wealthy and well endowed (i.e. 
   perfect) then they are at the mercy of women

If that doesn't sound bitter to you, see a therapist.

Myself and plenty of other men I know, who are far from this definition of "perfect," manage to have perfectly healthy relationships with women in which nobody is at anybody else's mercy.

>Those are objective facts, backed by statistics. Completely different than

Not really, considering that the gender wage gap often pointed out (the 70-something cents to the dollar) is not standardized for time worked, experience, career choice, or a number of other factors. I would say Clinton is wrong to bring up the 70-something cents to a dollar, but I wouldn't call her bitter.

>If that doesn't sound bitter to you, see a therapist.

Even if they meant actual perfection and weren't using hyperbole, that would still just make them wrong, not bitter.

If I were to say that the average worker's pay is at the mercy of their boss, that doesn't make me bitter, even when you consider it is often wrong (direct manager often has limited input on overall salary).

Your argument is that this guy feels that women hold men at their mercy unless they meet a bunch of unrealistic criteria, and he's not bitter about it?

Oooooookay.

Sure. Maybe the guy is totally cool with his bleak, transactional view of male/female relationships.

Or maybe he's been hurt by past experiences that he views as unfair. Which is the literal definition of "bitter," by the way.

An objective fact doesn't stop being an objective fact because one can debate whether it is the most appropriate fact for the discussion.

An objective fact presented in a way to mislead should no longer be considered just an objective fact. Consider how many racists like to throw around 'objective facts' about the rates of crimes between different races. Devoid of the sociological understanding and comparisons of other base rates and correlations, such facts are worse than useless.

> Like you and I, they are simply looking for companionship - for someone they can count on for support and non-judgement during times of crisis, but who will also push them to become better and achieve their goals.

transfire explicitly was addressing the condition of men seeking sex, which is not the same as mean seeking "companionship - for someone they can count on for support and non-judgement during times of crisis, but who will also push them to become better and achieve their goals".

Insofar as women are seeking that (whether or not that's like you), that would likely be a problem for men who are simply seeking sex and not to find or provide companionship.

To the extent that there are asymmetries in the degrees to which (heterosexual, for simplicity) men and women seek sex vs. mutual companionship in relationships, this will produce advantages and disadvantages to some people on both sides. For instance, to the extent the stereotypical idea that men are more prone to seek sex and women more prone to seek companionship is true (note that I'm not claiming it is), men who seek sex will have a more difficult time, as will women who seek mutual companionship (while, conversely, women who seek sex and men who seek mutual companionship will have a comparatively easy time.)

Its a simple issue of poor alignment of supply and demand (but it doesn't make it worse to be a man than a woman -- it makes it worse to be a man or woman seeking what people of your gender are most prone to seek, and people of your preferred gender are least prone to want to provide.)

Interesting. I like your argument a lot. Its logical conclusion is the prostitution industry, which is dominated by men paying for sex with women.

Still, I wanted to draw attention to the fact that most people are looking for some mix of physical intimacy (sex) and emotional intimacy (companionship).

There will always be imbalances where needs are not met, but to posit that most women use sex as a tool to manipulate men that are less than perfect doesn't sit well with me.

There will always be imbalances where needs are not met, but to posit that most women use sex as a tool to manipulate men that are less than perfect doesn't sit well with me.

First, don't get so hung up on "perfect". I think the poster intended it to mean "passing some standard", presumably a high one, and possibly one they themselves are unable to meet. Their word choice just wasn't very good.

As for the rest, it doesn't have to sit well with you: it's simply the way things have been in any culture where we expect long-term relationships and especially any culture where you have heredity concerns. Consider the stigma around, for example, "being a slut"--a great deal (if not the majority) of which is perpetuated by women against other women, from mothers warning their daughters, and so on!

The entire mythos surrounding virginity and monogamous relationships and whatnot hinges on the notion that women control the supply of sex, that men voluntarily prostrate themselves to obtain that sex, that men punish other men who take it by force (because, frankly, women are ill-equipped by mother nature to do so), that men need to know that their children (historically and especially the eldest male) are in fact theirs (something hard before paternity tests and so a piece of the slut-shaming puzzle), and so on.

To deny that women are at least somewhat shrewd and discerning in their sexual exploits is patronizing.

You're painting an incredibly immature picture of how real relationships work.

Relationships, sure--but courting appears to be what is being talked about here. A subtle but very important difference.

You're making a distinction that I wasn't; what I've said applies to courting just as well.

   For a man, unless they are handsome, wealthy and well
   endowed (i.e. perfect) then they are at the mercy of 
   women.

This isn't true at all. I know plenty of average guys with great relationships.

You're right about insecurity being a turnoff for most people, though.

It seems to me you ignored the following part. The point is unless you have attributes that scream "status" in some for or other, as a man you have to put in effort to find a partner that women are more likely to be able to avoid (that said: women who want good partners still have to put in a lot of effort too).

Women have a whole different level of choice. Not necessarily good choices, but choice nonetheless. Just try to put up a fake profile on a dating site as an experiment and see what ends up in your mailbox over the course of a few days. It's an "enlightening" experience. Not necessarily very pleasant.

Didn't ignore it.

Yes, in Western (or at least American) society men do tend to pursue women more actively than vice-versa. This is probably true in most cultures though I don't have firsthand experience.

No, you do not need to be "handsome, wealthy and well endowed (i.e. perfect)" in order to avoid being "at the mercy of women."

   Just try to put up a fake profile on a dating site as
   an experiment and see what ends up in your mailbox over  
   the course of a few days.

I ran a dating site, actually. Saw lots of guys who weren't "perfect" have a great time and find success in relationships. Me included.

> Saw lots of guys who weren't "perfect" have a great time and find success in relationships

That's not the point. The point is the relative difference in effort. And it's not just that men tend to pursue, but that the starting point on dating sites is so extremely uneven - the threshold to message someone is so low that men approach at a far higher rate than they dare to in real life, and approach women well outside of the "range" they'd normally do.

What's indisputable is that women get flooded with offers on dating sites. We agree there.

Whether or not this means that women can more easily find successful and enjoyable dates and/or relationships on dating sites... is another story.

An inbox full of unwanted advances from a bunch of strangers is not exactly a liberating experience, I wouldn't think. Certainly women I know don't think so.

They clearly have a greater number of suitors to choose from, yes, but like you say - men tend to approach women in such great numbers that there's no way to know who's worth pursuing.

How do you have a quality conversation with a stranger when 100 strangers are trying to talk to you simultaneously?

To top it off, the stakes are a little higher for women. A woman is one mistake (or one instance of violated consent) away from getting pregnant. A woman is always one step away from being sexually assaulted. Obviously men can be victims too, but adult female-on-male sexual assault is vanishingly rare.

Whoa!

That is some seriously messed-up stuff!

Imperfect men can either beg for sex or attempt rape?

No! Just, no! A thousand times no!

I would strongly encourage you to talk to a professional mental health practitioner if that's your view on sexual relations. Something has gone seriously off the rails for you, and I hope you'll put in the effort to try and fix things up.

You seemed to have missed what I said about subtlety. When a man takes a woman on a date and pays for it, it's a subtle form of "begging". When a man is forward with a woman in hopes she will like the advances it is subtle form of "taking". You're the one reading only the extremities into what I said.

> When a man takes a woman on a date and pays for it, it's a subtle form of "begging".

That might be what you are doing when you take a woman out on a date and pay for it, but I can assure you -- as a man who has dated (now happily married) that that is not even close to universally the case.

> When a man is forward with a woman in hopes she will like the advances it is subtle form of "taking".

That doesn't seem consistent with any reasonable definition of the word "taking", differing in kind rather than degree from anything for which that word is a good fit. Its more like offering than taking -- you are putting your desire on display in the hopes that it will get a positive response; that's not anything like "taking" anything. (Unless its in a context where there is an implicit power dynamic where the expression of interest amounts to an implied threat to take, or an implied threat to impose adverse consequences if the interest isn't fulfilled. But that's a rather special case.)

You really need to pick better terminology here, because "begging" and "taking" both have unfortunate additional connotations that are throwing people off from whatever point you think you're making.

I kinda figured you were looking at a distinction similar to inbound/outbound marketing, but your example elsewhere of taking somebody out to dinner vs. asking them directly is just bad.

I'm sorry you have come to view human relationships as variations on "begging" and "taking."

I hope that one day you have happy, healthy relationships where you simply enjoy each others' company and things aren't so transactional.

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