faceh
2d ago
I don't think they are.
Everything is interconnected and degradation in one part of the system will propagate.
You can get that 25% of men to do the core, indispensable jobs but there's still so much infrastructure built on top of that which needs maintenance.
Something is likely to give.
faceh
4d ago
very few jobs these days really require raw strength.
This seems obscenely optimistic.
Even driving an Amazon truck will require some amount of raw strength on occasion.
Moving furniture around the house, let alone between houses.
Trimming trees, installing windows, changing tires, just dozens of systems where physical strength is a massive bonus when interacting with them.
Just because most humans aren't working on farms these days doesn't mean there are a ton of jobs which demand the physical strength, which we all pretty much rely on.
faceh
4d ago
Until we have robots that can build other robots, this is all still founded on the need for some core of strong physical laborers who can boostrap the rest.
And the powered exoskeletons we do have (forklifts, earth movers, cranes, etc.) are still overwhelmingly operated by males.
And finally, in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, when electricity and fuel are hard to come by, humans with physical strength are an absolutely critical resource to kickstarting rescue and recovery efforts.
faceh
5d ago
That's closer to how I'd model it.
A hot, high status guy looking to get his rocks off can find a naive but physically attractive woman with self-esteem issues, and use his talents honed on much more selective girls to gas her up enough to bang him with relative ease. But the sheer truth of it is that being seen with her would detract from his status (and hurt his odds with the more selective girls) so its a bare, unvarnished fact of the universe that he will absolutely NEVER advance a relationship with her.
In a world where physical altercation isn't allowed, the girl's male family, and her other potential suitors, cannot actually slap the shit out of an interloper to discourage this. So males that can flex pure status and high verbal IQ have no real risk here, they don't have to fight their competition like deers locking antlers.
So I'd say the male-male competition aspect is narrowed by the fact that the only two factors you're allowed to compete on are pure attractiveness + status. The real challenge for getting laid is overcome the lady's defenses.
I mean, we could probably take a look at the economic productivity of given nations who lost some significant portion of their male population in a short period of time.
Like, say, after a war.
We usually do indeed see the female population shift in to cover some of the shortfall.
Somehow I doubt that shift actually covered all the missing labor, and more likely certain less critical services were left to languish in the meantime.
More likely, I'd expect the aforementioned wage premium for strong laborers to encourage men to do more work so as to make up some of the difference.
As I said, I suspect there's a baseline hard laborer requirement needed to maintain the workings of civilizations, and as long as a society is barely above that line it can keep advancing.
I do not know where that baseline would be. I honestly do not want to find out.
faceh
5d ago
So we're taking an efficiency/productivity hit since now entire industries has to be designed around standards based on what slightly above-average women/teams of women can do.
And we can expect a much higher injury rate which means more downtime, and higher medical costs to boot.
Women are just not outfitted for heavy, repetitive labor.
Although this also means exceptionally strong laborers will command quite a premium.
faceh
5d ago
I appreciate that you're bringing some actual data and nuance.
But its still slamming headfirst into the reports that half of young men just... aren't dating.
And that the average # of sexual partners reported by females (prior to marriage) has climbed over decades... even as marriage rates fall. Women are clearly having more sex with a variety of men.
This can still all track if the average man is having more sex than they used to. But that doesn't appear in any data, although we can see signs that some small subset of men are getting laid a ton. Women are not having sex with a random selection of the male population. There's a lot of overlap in who they're having sex with.
Whether this rises to an 80/20 ratio is debatable, but I don't think you can look at one of those guys in the 50% of non-daters and say with a straight face "statistically, you're having sex somewhat regularly."
faceh
5d ago
Scroll to the actual list of occupations under that category.
It includes, non-exhaustively:
- Automotive service technicians and mechanics
- Construction laborers
- Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators
- Landscaping and groundskeeping workers
- Refuse and recyclable material collectors
- Industrial machinery mechanics
The categorization is due to the fact that those jobs would "occasionally" require lifting of "26–50 pounds".
Whereas in order to classify as 'light' work, it never requires lifting that much.
I don't think I'd want to implement this sort of move unless we had our robot factories up and running.
Maintenance of advanced civilization requires a lot of back-breaking work, constantly, day in and day out.
Fixing roads, disposing of waste, farming, butchering, building construction, fixing cars and heavy machinery, fighting fires, and running and maintaining electrical wires (lowkey, the most important one is that last one).
These needs spike in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster. Natural disasters are not a solved problem.
There's going to be some baseline need for physically strong laborers just to maintain what we have, let alone push us forward.
Here's interesting stats I didn't know existed before:
"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."
It looks like "Medium Strength" occupations and above are the ones that really need male capabilities. So we're sitting at around 40% of jobs that will need males to fill them, on the physical side. Then some overage of that for the mentally demanding stuff too.
Not a lot of headroom to start reducing the male ratio below 50%.
"Oh but we can outsource a lot of our industry/labor intensive work."
That just shifts the problems elsewhere, not eliminates them. We already do that in the U.S., and there's still 35+% of jobs that need upper body strength to perform effectively. China did its one child policy and now has an excessive number of males... which we get a benefit from by buying their labor at a discount.
That can't last.
Historically, I think the actual solution was always to create 'tiers' of males. In short, expendables and non-expendables.
So you have one class that is basically or literally enslaved, and was expected to die early after a hard, miserable life. That would reproduce only at the will of their betters to ensure a consistent supply of such labor to maintain the lifestyles of the rest.
Then the upper class, where the male-female ratio WAS much more favorable to those males.
That 'solves' your problem of needing males to do the work that upholds society, whilst also keeping the 'problem' males on a short leash, and giving the upper-class males a favorable gender ratio.
It is my opinion that any maintenance work that requires much spatial reasoning and physical/brute force to complete is just far more efficiently done by a male than a female of 'equal' training.
I have watched women try to change a tire. While I don't doubt many could be trained up to complete the work 'quickly' with the proper tools... the steps required to jack the car up, force over-tightened nuts, remove the old tire and position the new one, and then physically tighten the nuts sufficiently, in the proper order, are easily done twice as fast by a dude with median male physical capabilities.
There's that famous examination of grip strength where only the very strongest females are actually able to compete with the overall weakest males.
The average guy in his 70's is stronger than most women in their 20's. The gap is absurd.
Its not hard to extrapolate from there that most women won't be suited for most physical tasks that the average dude completes.
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