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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1229 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Aha, yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about below. It's easy to romanticise the other sex and believe that it's so much easier for them, but everything seems easier from a distance. You don't understand how hard it is until you've actually lived it.

Whether women or men in general experience greater happiness or life satisfaction is difficult to measure. Most surface polls show women reporting greater satisfaction, but that link suggests that women tend to use a higher scale than men and may actually be less satisfied. I don't want to make a general statement about which sex is, on average, happier, at least, not without a lot more research, but I would at least say that there probably isn't a vast difference.

I don't want to make a general statement about which sex is, on average, happier, at least, not without a lot more research, but I would at least say that there probably isn't a vast difference.

Yes, and for a lot of the intrinsic problems that men and women face, the coping mechanisms are discovered through hard learned experience. I think it's probably better to deal with 'the Devil you know..' then trade it in for perceived greener grass on the other side.

The transman I linked above for example. Most men have a gradual change from being a child, through teenage years, to being an adult man. They can slowly transition from being valued intrinsically as a child towards being more disposable as the years pass and develop emotional resilience to cope with that in a controlled manner. It must have been rough to go to sleep being valued and then wake up and realise suddenly no one cares about you at all expect perhaps for the value you can provide them (I'm exaggerating here to make a point, but guys will get what I mean).

Yes, I notice this with both trans women and trans men. In the normal course of development, you're socialised into your own sex and you learn a whole array of tools for how to be an adult man or an adult women. Trans people, even if they pass very well as their preferred gender, usually don't have all those tools. It's one of the reasons why they often look a bit uncanny-valley-esque, or can make natal members of that sex uncomfortable.

In the case of the person in that video, I think part of the issue is not knowing how men make friends, or how we express close, deep friendship. We don't do it the same way women do. There's a seemingly-endless genre of observational humour about how men and women have different languages for this sort of thing, and while the jokes are silly, they get at something real. Trans women have the reverse issue - they don't know the script for how to behave in female spaces. Thus that joke about how if a trans man is devastated, he hides and cries in the bathroom, and if a trans woman is devastated, she kicks a hole in the wall.

Anyway, resilience is definitely part of it. As a young man you learn things from your father, other older male relatives, role models, and so on, and one of them is how to suck it up when times are tough. When you've been a man your entire life, you probably don't realise how many things like that you do know. And the same for women in reverse.

I've always liked to distill complicated arguments like these, in an oversimplified way. So I tend to point to the 4-to-1 suicide rate between men as women as the final word on which gender has it worse.

My understanding was that women attempt suicide more often than men, but men are vastly more likely to succeed, since they tend to prefer deadlier or more direct methods.

My hypothesis is that girls/women do 'cry for help' methods more often, because they can rightly assume that they'll get more sympathy and care when they are discovered or tell others about it. Society is more willing to support sick women than sick men.

Not to mention men's attempts prior to "success" are significantly less likely to be recorded as such for much the same reason.

Quite. To paraphrase a statement that's stuck in my head since the first time I stumbled across it, attempted suicide for a woman is a cry for help. Attempted suicide for a man is calmly taking out a loaded gun, staring at it for an hour, and then quietly putting it away.

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