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Bit of a trick in this one. What are 'male responsibilities?'
I'd posit:
Almost any role men are expected to perform in society is one of these or a subset of these. Killing a spider in the house? 1. Tracking down and capturing a criminal? Blend of 1 and 2. Change the oil in the car? 4.
1 has been obviated by modern tech, and we prefer it that way.
4 is still a thing, but has been rendered pretty low status overall.
2 has been a nonissue in most places, especially the U.S., for a long time, and we prefer it that way.
3 DEFINITELY still happens, and we have systems in place to ensure it happens, but we have managed to mitigate much of the risk. And we prefer it that way.
But at any given time, if the need arises, men CAN be called upon to fulfill these responsibilities, to the death, if needed.
So the fact that most men haven't been called on to fight a war, kill a mammoth, or go down with a ship while the women and children escape doesn't change the fact that they could be called to do this at any time. And indeed, many of them spend a lot of time preparing themselves to jump into action even as the actual chances of needing to do so go down, since the impact of such events is still deadly and widespread.
So there's a disconnect. "Men don't live up to their responsibilities anymore" really means "men have managed to arrange a society that is mostly peaceful, robust against disaster, and produces more food than we know what to do with." And ignores "they also maintain readiness to take action to preserve this society if it is threatened" factor.
And this means mens' responsibilities are kind of invisible most of the time. So others (especially women) just assume men are getting all the perks whilst doing none of the work to earn them. Which might even be true... until its not.
This also explains why Firemen, Police Officers, and Soldiers still get some automatic cachet with women, since they signal themselves as a man who has actively sought out the male responsibility. Even though each of those jobs has only gotten safer/cushier over time for the reasons outlined above.
I do think its 'cheating' to suggest that women are excused from their obligations on the grounds that men aren't living up to their own standards, when the womens' obligations are relatively painless but very visible on a social level, and men's responsibilities are harder to perceive but extract a drastically higher cost when drawn upon.
So what seems to be the issue is that men DO maintain certain responsibilities... but thanks to successfully creating a highly advanced civilization, they've made it much less likely that they'll be publicly expected to perform those responsibilities at scale.
And yes, there are probably a lot of men who would reject the call to fight off an invader, track down a violent criminal, dive into floodwaters to save a child, or even to lift heavy equipment in the hot sun to construct a building.
And those that refuse those responsibility should, I say, be fairly ostracized.
But that's not really the question. As a man, I ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY want/accept these responsibilities.
With that said... I ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY want to minimize the chances of being called on to fulfill these responsibilities, by maintaining a civilization that is robust against such risks.
So bit of a contradiction there. "Yes, give me all the perks of maledom, and I will do my best to ensure that I am not called on to fulfill the responsibilities if I can help it."
But the problem I do keep hitting on, if you remove incentives for men to fulfill their responsibilities, and enough of them drop out of that role, its increasingly likely that the civilization they maintain will start to crumble.
I think your list is too anachronistic. In general, the role of men is to produce, refine, distribute and protect resources. All of these roles are still held by large majority of men, ranging from mining, farming, construction, infrastructure maintenance, police, army and manufacturing and virtually all the actually important things in the meat space. All of these things rely heavily on men with the participation ranging from 80% to 99%. And even then, the actual numbers are heavily obfuscated by specific support roles women do in these fields anyway. The same goes for STEM fields except medicine, especially engineering and other tasks. Even despite all the feminist progress, the general gender roles did not change - men still do construction and police work, women are still nurses and care for children as teachers and nannies and they deliver nice sandwiches to men with a forced smile as waiters and so on. They perform similar jobs as they performed in 18th century, only with some modern systems muddling the waters.
In fact it is a very common argument around in manospohere: if tomorrow all the women disappeared, remaining men would do just fine until they die of old age. If it was the other way around, women would starve and die en masse within weeks or months. The society is still one huge resource transfer from men toward women and children - if women decide to have them that is - as it was centuries ago. But it is now hidden under jargon of rights and political process and largess created by cushy positions in government bureaucracy and similar jobs.
As an example - it is "easy" to be a divorced mother, if government forces men to still do their part of the marriage contract of supporting the family financially in form of alimony and child support, while women have no duties toward their ex husbands. In one sense seeing women in such a power seems like matriarchy, but she still relies on men for everything - be it her ex husband, or overwhelmingly male police force for protection of her person and her legal entitlements. I heard quite a convincing argument that this is still a patriarchy - women appeal to men to provide and protect them as usual, it is just that the modern patriarchy is benevolent enough to grant them their illusion of power and laughable notion of "equality".
But it is still an illusion - just because the patriarchy is benevolent toward women and oppresses fellow men, it does not mean it is not one such. Men always oppressed other men under patriarchy. Heck men oppressed other men in favor of women such as in Sparta, where women formed their own hugely powerful class of magnates called heiresses by inheriting wealth of their deceased husbands, or many other nations, where men risked their lives in war of conquest and subjugation only to bring slaves and jewels to entertain their mothers, wives and daughters. That is nothing new.
The thing is that if men collectively, or even in majority minority refuse to participate anymore, the illusion dissolves within days. We saw it recently after Afghanistan withdrawal, when Taliban warriors just leisurely waltzed in and subjugated women without any fuss, literally laughing at the notion of women's political rights. Women are collectively incapable of putting up any resistance if men refuse to do so for them. There was never any female Spartacus waging war of liberation with her fellow Amazonians against oppression. All women can do is whine and appeal the patriarchy to entertain doing something about their position.
That video was funnier than I expected. The laugh at 0:14s or so could serve as a great reaction gif.
The initial defeated, hangdog look of the interpreter/first Taliban character adds to the hilarity. Before the question cracked him up, it could have fit right into the Dick Flattening meme:
Then he and the squad realized the absurdity of the situation and corpsed the interview.
There's the classic trope that makes an appearance, where a Western girlboss obediently throws on a headscarf and covers herself up to appease Muslim men.
I'd watch the shit out of one of those cinephile YouTube channels breaking down the first 16 seconds or so of that video as a short film. So much subtext and worldbuilding in just a few seconds.
Funny how this could also be used to summarise the men without women vs. women without men Thanos-snapping thought experiment you described. The outcome of the first would be depressing but life otherwise goes on. The outcome of the latter would be a mass extinction event. Women's collective capability lies in their ability to get men to voluntarily or not-so-voluntarily do stuff for them.
The feminist counterargument would be that women are just as capable of surviving without men as men are without women, but if women aren't it's only due to subjugation and internalised misogyny from the patriarchy making them dependent on men.
I remain convinced that the probability of a minority of women managing to sustain themselves through existing agriculture and sperm banks is higher than men inventing artificial wombs in one generation. Even if men cooperate on that, as opposed to going Lord of the Flies on each other.
That's because stealing sperm from a bank is ridiculously easy while inventing artificial wombs is ridiculously hard. They are just two completely different problems, and solving one versus the other doesn't tell you much about the respective genders.
It does tell you which gender, should the other vanish, would be more likely to actually survive past a single generation.
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You had to do it. You had to make me link to The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal.
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I mean, maybe I'm the weird one but I don't think being hypothetically willing to do certain things is worth much compared to actually doing things. Would I kill a stranger to protect my wife? Sure. Do I think I will ever have to actually do that? Almost certainly not. Does that fact, like, oblige some gratitude or something on my wife's part? Create some responsibility to me? I don't think so. If it were a thing I actually had done, especially more than once, I would think differently but I don't think my hypothetical willingness generates much of an obligation on the part of others.
There's a CHH substack post that gets at a pretty similar theme (if anyone knows how to un-paywall substack articles let me know): You'll Kill Marauders, But Will You Change a Diaper?
The gist is that a lot of men seem to envision being a husband or father as entailing a lot of willingness to do violence and their contribution to these roles as being that willingness. This is, however, not a practical description of what is required to be a husband or father in a developed country. It's not to say that willingness is bad, but it is not something that is likely to be very useful.
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Uh, you could have asked any chud what the man of the house's responsibilities are. It's to 1) pay the bills(as in earn the money to do so) 2) take the lead on security and safety issues, including those that are more annoying than dangerous(telling the salesman or political canvasser to go away) 3) do outdoor or heavier/more unpleasant chores(yardwork, taking the trash out, moving heavy objects) 4) provide final discipline for the kids(wait til your father gets home...). You might get some more awkward shuffling before admitting that women are supposed to cook and clean and take the lead on childcare and put her career second.
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I'm not sure what kind of obligations you are thinking of for women, but the first one that comes to mind for me is pregnancy and childbirth, and I would not describe that as "relatively painless". Sure, it's better now to have 2.1 children with an epidural instead of 10+, but I think it's still a more arduous obligation than what the average man in the west will be called upon to do in their lifetime.
You might need to recalibrate your perception the sort of work the average dude has to complete in his life, and the pains they will suffer as a result of them.
Looking at the top, call it 20% of guys and assuming they represent all men is the EXACT issue that leads to intersex resentment, I think.
And just as modern society has relieved a lot of the risks that men are otherwise expected to deal with... it has also made the entire childbearing process less painful and FAR, FAR less risky for women.
(thanks to men)
So this sentiment doesn't move me an inch, although I'm on record with saying that bearing and raising children SHOULD accord a woman high status!
Hmm, I think it's definitely true the average (as in the mean) man does more dangerous and arduous work than the average woman. The workplace fatality rate for men in 2023 (that was the year I could find consistent numbers for) was ~7-8x the maternal death rate that year.
However, I'm less convinced that the average (as in the median) man does as much dangerous work. About 65% of men work some kind of management/service industry/sales job, and I don't think these jobs cause as much pain as birthing a baby. Even if the do, there's just as many women working them as men.
Not only that, but the workplace fatality rate for men exceeds the maternal death rate + the female workplace fatality rate by a huge amount. For example, I looked into the BLS numbers surrounding this a while back and the number of men killed during 2018 by occupational injuries caused by transportation incidents, contact with objects and equipment, falls, slips and trips, exposure to harmful substances or environment, and fires and explosions is 4,119 men killed. This excludes injuries caused by "Violence and other injuries by persons or animal" as that category includes deaths by self-inflicted injuries on the job. Even excluding that, the number of male deaths exceeds the number of women killed in ALL occupational deaths (413 women) AND maternal deaths (658 women) added together (1,071 women).
Just to give you a sense of how large that margin is, in 2018, the number of men killed in occupational-related transportation incidents alone (1,929 men) exceeds the number of women killed in all occupational deaths and maternal deaths added together.
Define "dangerous". Work is something you do for most of your life, whereas childbirth is a very transient condition (especially today). Management/service industry/sales jobs are highly disparate types of work with highly differing demands, the stressors encountered there definitely impact health, and just because women are as likely to participate in that large category of work does not mean they are subject to all the same stressors. It's been brought up fairly often in the context of the wage gap, but even within the same occupational categories your median man is likely to work more, take more strenuous and demanding jobs, and prioritise flexibility less, which results in women having higher satisfaction with their jobs (a consistent finding within the literature).
Occupational deaths do happen in these jobs; proper numbers are hard to come by but have a gander at this BLS list of fatalities by occupation. Deaths in private sector jobs under categories like "professional services" (585 deaths), "financial activities" (108 deaths), "information" (31 deaths), "administrative and waste services" (497 deaths), "educational and health services" (168 deaths), "leisure and hospitality" (253 deaths) etc collectively exceeded maternal deaths in 2018. No breakdown by sex is provided, but as mentioned in the previous section, women can only make up 413 of these deaths at maximum, suggesting a large sex disparity in mortality still exists within these occupations. But even discarding that, there's a far larger and more insidious factor at play here; the indirect health effects of constant stress results in elevated levels of cortisol over a long period of time, poor sleep, and so on, increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, infections, strokes, etc. These kinds of pressures are endemic in many kinds of professional and service industries and is not a trivial source of health issues; for example WHO made an attempt at estimating the number of ischemic heart disease and stroke-related deaths linked to long working hours for the year 2016, finding that the worldwide number of deaths from long working hours was 745,000 from only these two causes of mortality. Men made up 72% of the deaths, and if you do the maths that means men represented 536,400 of these deaths and women represented 208,600. In contrast, worldwide general maternal mortality for the year 2016 accounted for an estimated 309,000 deaths. And there are undoubtedly more sources of death from long working hours than just those, and there are other job-related stressors which don't just amount to things like "death by lobotomy via a falling metal pipe". It is likely not the case that job-related mortality in even these kinds of management/service jobs is less of an issue than maternal mortality is for your average American woman of the same social stratum, and it is not the case that the prevalence of this mortality is the same between the sexes.
The costs of obligation manifest in many ways which aren't immediately obvious. In general I tend to think people overweight things that are obviously unpleasant but transient compared to stressors that cumulatively accrete over one's lifespan - and in general I think the latter tends to have a greater overall impact on health and wellbeing in spite of the fact that they're often overlooked as sources of mortality. Attrition is important; it's the difference between feeling intense temporary grief vs. clinical depression. Unexpectedly getting kidney stones, while more painful in the moment, would not impact my overall life as much as being stuck in a job I dislike. I have a sedentary job which sometimes requires me to work a lot of overtime and weekends during crunch time (in fact I did so earlier this month), if asked to make a tradeoff between spending large swaths of my life slogging away at an inflexible, stressful job and giving birth to 1.5 kids at any given point in my life I'm inclined to say that at least personally, I think the latter may be a superior value proposition. That's not to trivialise any of it, but I don't think this conception of unpleasantness actually aligns with how people experience it for the most part.
EDIT: added more
What it comes down to is childbirth and pregnancy are things men cannot do. So if you're weighing dangers or difficulties of men and women, you can assign an arbitrarily high coefficient to them and make the equation come out to "women suffer more and men are coddled" and men can do nothing about that. Checkmate, mistake theorists.
There's also the uncompensated Emotional Labor women perform in their personal and professional lives that aren't captured in misogynistic hate-facts involving trivia like number of working hours or deaths from workplace injuries.
Another amusing thing is the cottage industry of financial advisors that puts out content catering toward widows who suddenly have to deal with the brokerage and retirement accounts that their stupid husbands left behind after a lifetime of working. While some of it is out of self-interest to generate business, the "women have always been the primary victims of their husbands dying earlier" vibe is pretty funny.
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Management doesn't know what to do with a department that's "just a cost center, what does he even do, shouldn't we just eliminate the positions?". And once that happens, the consequences to a lack of maintenance usually don't show up for a while. Sure, they might be catastrophic, and often are, but that's future management's problem.
This is a common pattern across companies; it stands to reason that because the same people who end up managing companies also tend to manage a society more generally (something that is also a company, just a very large one, and when it fires people it tends to be more literal) societies inevitably end up sharing that failure mode unless something forces them not to be. In other words, any organization that isn't maintenance-first (or "isn't explicitly right-wing") ends up being wholly unable to do maintenance even when required (or "inevitably ends up left-wing", per Conquest).
Yeeup.
To take a direct example, Europe has gotten so far from the era where they had to worry about Russian/Soviet Invasion that they don't even maintain the basic military capacity to defend their own shores if there was ever a 'serious' outbreak of war.
This was brought into Stark relief with the Ukraine war, but they still seem to work on the assumption that the U.S. will backstop things.
Russia's big mistake was attacking one of the few countries in Europe with a will to fight back.
It’s clear they did not expect them to fight back much. It would be the same mistake to assume that of UK-FR-DE in case of russian invasion of estonia, say. The 20th century has shown that seemingly placid people can get quite excited about war, quickly. Okay, maybe the italians wouldn't fight. Then again, that may be for the best.
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In their defense, that's all the countries which border them except Belarus (which is already aligned). Maybe also excepting Norway.
How very coincidental!
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Yeah, the one they'd specifically been antagonizing for a couple decades and thus was actually geared for repelling them.
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