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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps wider access to contraceptives still encourages more sex, but there were other forces even stronger in the other direction?

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Or: Teens are having more sex, but contraceptives are stopping more pregnancies.

Or... Contraceptives are stopping some pregnancies...

And teens being too busy texting and not comfortable enough actually engaging with others are having less sex... Or religion... or being busy feeling #TheBern... or stopped having sex after feeling #TheBurn... Or are too fat... Or...

(this is not meant to me inflammatory, but rather an honest rumination)

Keeping the feminism/SJW/manosphere shenanigans in my peripheral vision, there's been a huge backlash rallying against single mothers in recent years. There's even some anecdotal evidence in dating sites/posts that single mothers are increasingly more open of their demanding that men "man up" and accept another's child/children as part of the package.

Shaming single mothers for being on state assistance or child support only seemed to increase feminist resolve, but a tangible impact in reduced desirability in the larger dating pool may be pushing women to be more responsible.

I thought there were fewer single mothers because we have been decreasing the prison population. Lots of mothers were single because our Nixon era drug laws were aimed at locking up as many minority men as possible.

For all I know, that could be the primary factor. I'm not well versed enough to speak with any authority. I just tossed an idea out there based from my sphere of online observations over the past 5 or so years.

> There's even some anecdotal evidence in dating sites/posts that single mothers are increasingly more open of their demanding that men "man up" and accept another's child/children as part of the package.

If you're going to seriously date a single mother, what other option do you have?

I'm not suggesting that you meet the kids on the second date, but if you're seriously romantically involved with someone for six months, you're not going to be able to continue that relationship with the single parent without having some involvement with the kids, too.

It seems crazier to me to have the option of opting out of the kids in this scenario. Do you just live separately until they turn 18?

I think the prevailing attitude is to completely disregard single mothers (in spite of their overwhelming numbers) as viable dating candidates to begin with. Women are noticing this, then shaming men with the whole "real men yadda-yadda-yadda..." lists seen on posts.

That interpretation makes a lot of sense.

Its basically a dynamic system oscillating and settling into some steady state (until the next shock) where what men want and what women want is rebalanced and more accurately represented.

This explanation, if you want to call it that, doesn't seem to be borne out by anything in the study. More to the point, since most of these teens are unable to or unlikely to get married to begin with, I don't think any of the "single mother" nonsense applies to them.

Additionally, most people, but especially teens, don't think about some future "dating pool" when they decide to have sex. They usually just believe two of the oldest lies out there: "we're not gonna get pregnant" and "he's gonna still be around in 9 months".

So basically: your opinion is invalid, and it's also slightly insulting since it seems to put everything on the women in the relationship and blames "single mothers" for choosing the wrong gender, I guess, since they wouldn't be in the same situation by your logic if they did the exact same thing but were male.

And of course, when pregnancies occur they don't necessarily become births because of access to abortions.

Mathematically, sure, that's fine. Empirically/theoretically, you've dug yourself into a hole that is difficult to get out of. You're going against Occam's razor so now you've got a lot of 'splainin' to do.

It's not clear to me how (and if) Occam's Razor should necessarily be applied in this context. We are not choosing between a very simple, and a vastly complex alternative. Rather we are choosing between an unintuitive and probably complex option (contraceptives are causing less copulation - this does not sound at all like a simple suggestion to me), and admitting that our models and data may not be complete. Either way we need more research to be able to more clearly identify the root causes.

And Occam's razor is really more of a 'which one should we test first' kind of criterion, rather than 'this one is automatically true as it's the simplest.'

Teens are known to be rebellious and to like toeing the line

By making things more accessible and banal, you remove the urge to do it just to spite authority.

That simple argument justifies that teens who can sample alcohol at home are less likely to binge drink, and that kids who have ample access to sex ed and contraception are less likely to go and have sex both logistically and emotionally unprepared

>teens who can sample alcohol at home are less likely to binge drink

That's patently false. Cf. http://www.jsad.com/doi/abs/10.15288/jsad.2015.76.212

So far I find the argument far from convincing.

> You're going against Occam's razor so now you've got a lot of 'splainin' to do.

Where did this idea come from?

Occam's razor is a heuristic, not a law.

When found in the wild, it is more a fallacy than anything else.

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