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Notes -
I tried to make it quite clear that I don't blame women beyond the fact that they are also rationally responding to incentives.
The standard feminist line, that a man must make their life better than the counter-factual, is fundamentally true. The revealed preference of the majority of women is that pregnancy/childbirth/child-rearing is physically unpleasant, they enjoy the economic freedom provided by work, the state and childlessness, and that they disproportionately pursue hypergamy [in the same sense that most men would disproportionately prefer one-sided polygamy if they had the opportunity, it's no great failing].
I cannot blame them for responding to incentives any more than I can be blamed for responding to mine or the average citizen can be blamed for contributing to climate change; I merely wish that it didn't have to be this way.
There's a good post on the Motte, that I can't seem to find, that pointed out that an increasing amount of skills, from fitness to cooking, are becoming bi-modal. Most people, lacking significant incentive, will let their skills atrophy, and a small subset of people will compete at all costs to take those skills to the very limits.
I think it's a similar dynamic here, where it's indeed true that lots of men get coddled and drop out in the face of adversity, but there will always be strivers who will fight at all costs, and so competing for "prestige" or "status" still becomes ever-increasingly difficult even as more people drop out.
This is pretty much the point of this effortpost; sure, I'm pretty successful relative to the average young person and could grind even harder, but at the end of the day what's actually incentivizing me to try so hard when all the incentives are pointing the other way?
My father is the hardest working man I've ever known, who moved heaven and earth to bring himself out of poverty and broke his body to provide for the family. He is and will always be my hero for what he's done for my mother and I, and yet sometimes I look at him and I regret forcing him through so much pain and suffering.
He's never complained once; yet at the end of the day everyone likes to adulate heroes from afar, but how many people want to suffer as a hero does?
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