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Comment by b6 | Hacker News Reader

> What are these statements based on?

I have personally laughed at comments much worse than those in the post, directed at me, and so have my friends. All my male friends and my dad and my friends' dads and so forth love women -- they would die for women.

What I'm trying to say is, people bring out this word "misogyny" to make a claim about the origin of a problem, when the origin is unclear, or at least much more complicated than "hatred of women". Let's just agree about the clear evidence that there is discriminatory behavior and not insist on absolute certainty as to why it is happening.

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Wew lad, I can't believe I'm saying this, but you either don't understand women or don't understand love.

Women dont want you to die for them. That's your own need for chivalrious purpose, you selfishly romanticizing your own (or your male friends') sacrifice. I dont know if you've ever had someone sacrificing themselves for you, but lemme tell you first hand, it's not nice, and it makes you feel like shit. Women, and everyone for that matter, are adults, so they don't need someone sacrificing themselves for them. Why would you die for someone, when that person is capable of complete independance? The "love you to death" love isn't really love, it's obsession, and it's unhealthy. And it's either "women are an easy target for trolling" or "people love women". I dont know what kind of twisted love makes you harass your object of desire online.

I can think of a million different ways to harass Eric. Everyday men are also harassed online, usually for not being "masculine" enough. So why are people more likely to harass Julia or Rachel and not Eric?

I'm not talking about what women want, I'm saying that I know firsthand that many men I know love the women in their lives very much, much more than life itself. That's all.

There certainly are men out there who hate women, but it doesn't seem to me to be very many. Try it, enumerate the men you know and ask yourself, or even ask them directly, if they love the women in their lives. What fraction of women haters do you find? I think you'll find it's very low. And that's my point, that we are not actually facing an epidemic of misogyny ("hatred of women"), that it is actually something else, or at least much more complicated.

Personally I don't find it hard to come up with another explanation: miserable people want other people to be miserable too. And to make people miserable, you do whatever will be effective. Over the internet, mean words work a lot better against women than against men.

Your last paragraph is totally correct, in my opinion.

(It is probably also true that many people who use "racist" insults are not really being "racist"; they are just insulting in an effective, target-specific way. If they couldn't come up with a racist insult, but the target has glasses, they'd probably resort to "four-eyes". I'm talking about the UK here, by the way.)

If someone is being "just insulting in an effective, target-specific way" that comes across as racist, then they're being racist, no matter what they may really feel, or what they may think that they really feel. And it's the same for sexism or any other *ism.

You may choose to use words in a way that deliberately obscures an important distinction in the real world but please accept that other people may choose not to.

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