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Comment by catiopatio | Hacker News Reader

Hypothesis:

Isolated, mixed-sex social groups of unpaired individuals are inherently unstable.

We can improve stability by decreasing isolation — via external accountability and communication, surfacing problems to external authority with the power to act.

We can also improve stability by maintaining stricter single-sex spaces: separate, sex-segregated living quarters and facilities. It shouldn’t even be possible for an outlier abusive man to make his way to a woman’s door, after hours and without permission.

Both cost more, but that should be factored into the cost of putting humans through unnatural experiences like this.

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> inherently unstable

This comes far too close, in my opinion, to the view that men just can't help themselves and therefore don't really deserved to be blamed. I think you can take the view that a systemic treatment of the problem is needed without voiding the significance of personal responsibility.

Once you take personal responsibility into account, the potential treatments become more numerous (and less onerous) than permanently isolating men and women (with, one would hope, fair treatment for trans people, but they tend to get left by the wayside in discussions like this). We can ask questions like "how do you create a culture where all men see any form of sexual harassment as obviously unacceptable?" and "How do you make sure men are not incentivized to cover for each other?" and "How can we ensure that reports of harassment or abuse are properly and fairly dealt with, and that the credibly accused are not able to further harass victims?" Unless, of course, you think that evolution has just made male sexual aggression inevitable to the point where we can't rise above that as a species.

> This comes far too close, in my opinion, to the view that men just can't help themselves and therefore don't really deserved to be blamed.

A very small percentage of people will not behave unless they’re forced to behave, and held accountable when they don’t.

That doesn’t alleviate them of culpability, but it does mean that we cannot rely solely on individuals’ better judgement to keep people safe and healthy.

> the potential treatments become more numerous (and less onerous) than permanently isolating men and women

Providing single-sex living spaces and intimate facilities substantially reduces harassment and assault — we’ve known and successfully made use of that fact for a very long time.

  men just can't help themselves

all sorts of people can't help themselves and be bullies, sometimes violent. there's more awareness of mental illnesses in our societies but some men behaving in a threatening way and seemingly not being able to control it is not considered a mental illness

We can also increase stability by increasing the amount of paired individuals substantially. You know, make these places consist of actual communities with families, schools, and everything.

Maybe that’s utopian.

I strongly agree and actually thought about mentioning the same, but I worried it might come across as my implying that single professionals are unsuitable for such roles.

This ignores the contributions of alcohol.

And that station in Antarctica is known for its alcohol abuse.

https://www.today.com/news/are-researchers-antarctica-thin-i...

why is alcohol even available in antartica ? seems stupid and dangerous

long term, isolated, need of morale boosters, etc.

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