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Notes -
Life offers a Better "Minimum Deal" to Women than to Men - Change my Mind?
Men are vastly more likely to be victims of the worst kind of violent crime: murder. In the US, 82% of total homicide victims are male, 18% are female. Women probably endure more sexual violence, but men definitely endure more violence overall given the 4:1 murder ratio.
Men do the overwhelming majority of the nasty, dangerous work, such as roofing in the summer, oil rig operation, management of sewers, garbage collection, etc.
Men are much more likely to be homeless (70%:30%) or imprisoned (93%:7%). I think this speaks to the greater competitiveness of the male world: If a man fails in life, he's judged a complete fuckup, and ends up a homeless low-status loser. If a woman fails, she can almost always just get married.
Men are much more likely to kill themselves (4:1). Although women attempt suicide more than men, men use dramatically more lethal means (hanging, gunshots, jumping). Because I'm not so sexist as to claim that women are too stupid to know how to actually succeed in killing themselves, I conclude that the difference in suicide methods reflects a difference in willingness to die. (And in any case, even when controlling for method, men manage to kill themselves more effectively than women.)
Men spend much more time on the job than women (41weekly hrs:36.3hrs/week). (This remains true well after the children leave the nest. And no, I'm not persuaded that childcare is harder than conventional employment.)
The law heavily favors women in child custody and child support disputes, and the institution of alimony transfers far more male wealth to women than female wealth to men.
Men are much more likely to die in combat; in fact, during serious military conflicts, they face military slavery (“the draft”). (In Iraq, women were 2.9% of all American combat deaths, men the other 97.1%; in WWII, of the 292,000 members of the US military who were killed by enemy fire, only sixteen were female. Women made up only 0.1 percent of the military's 405,000 war-related deaths.)
Our culture automatically cares more about female suffering and wellbeing than male suffering: "The ship is sinking! Save the women and children first!" Male job candidates are significantly more penalized for crying than women; subjects express that it appears that a woman in distress is taken more seriously than a man in distress.
The dating market is more competitive for men than for women; women are far more selective than men about sex partners. Imagine an attractive person of the opposite sex walking up to you on a college campus and saying, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I fnd you very attractive. Would you have sex with me?” How would you respond? If you are like 100 percent of the women in one study, you would give an emphatic no. You might be ofended, insulted, or just plain puzzled by the request. But if you are like the men in that study, the odds are good that you would say yes— as did 75 percent of those men (Clarke & Hatfeld, 1989). As a man, you would most likely be flattered by the request.
Women are more likely to be superficially treated as mere "sex objects" by men. That said, men are more likely to be superficially treated as mere "success objects" by women.
Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of enrollment in universities and colleges and men just over 40 percent.
The "minimum deal" of life for men is worse than for women. The "minimum deal" for women seems to be "get married." The minimum deal for men seems to be: become homeless and kill yourself, if you aren't murdered first. Yes, men make more money and enjoy greater prestige because men are overrepresented at both the top and the bottom levels of society. But the degree to which being at the bottom of society hurts you is greater than the degree to which being at the top helps you. That is, it's so much more bad to be at the bottom than it is good to be at the top. Just ask yourself: would you rather experience the greatest amount of pleasure possible for 20 seconds, followed by the greatest amount of suffering possible for 20 seconds? Our response tells us that there is not a 1:1 ratio of pleasure to suffering. How about 30 seconds of the greatest possible amount of pleasure for 20 seconds of the worst possible amount of pain? 40:20? 50:20? I think this is why men kill themselves more.
According to Christian legend, God told Adam and Eve before their ouster from the garden of eden: "man shall live by the sweat of his brow, and woman shall suffer the pain of childbirth." Modern technology has greatly minimized the pain of childbirth, but has it equally lightened the burden on men's shoulders?
I won't deny that men do much less childcare and housework than women, and non-custodial fathers provide little financial or parental support for their children. Also, men are the perpetrators, and women are the victims, of the vast majority of sexual violence. (Although I'm not sure what the stats at prisons do to this balance; apparently rape in male prisons is a huge epidemic and is vastly greater than rape in female prisons. Considering the ridiculously disproportionate number of men in prisons, it's possible that this balances out.)
Anticipated objection: "But men are often the primary perpetrators of the issues facing men." This is irrelevant to the post title, but in any case, I think this is like saying "it's not bad that humans are victims of murder because, after all, all of the perpetrators of murder are also humans." The identity group to which the perpetrators belong is irrelevant to whether an individual was treated unjustly if the perps and victims are different individuals. This simple-minded identity-politics is like saying "someone with red hair beat me up when I was 12. Therefore, it's okay for me to beat someone up today, so long as they also have red hair (regardless of whether they are the same person)."
For some reason copy/pasting my post over to this website deleted all of the hyperlinks. It would be a big time waster to fix that so I'm just going to suffer the blow to credibility that may or may not cause. (For what it's worth, a simple google search should give you all of the same ratios above.) I originally drafted this for CMV on reddit, but the mods took it down.
My thoughts point by point:
Fair. Though if you aren't involved in criminal activity, your odds of being murdered drop dramatically.
True, but the vast majority of men in first world countries don't do work like this. I don't think it says much about the experience of the average man. A lot of very dangerous, hard work is also quite well-paying.
Basically no one who isn't severely mentally ill and/or addicted to hard drugs ends up homeless long-term. It's not like the majority, or even a significant minority, of men are living on the knife's edge of homelessness.
I'm not sure how this really relates to the concept of a "minimum deal." Unlike most of the other things on this list, suicide can't just happen to you as a result of extrapersonal factors. If you don't want to die by suicide, just don't kill yourself.
'Conventional employment' is a pretty broad term. Would I rather take care of children than fight in Ukraine or mine coal? Yeah, probably. Would I rather take care of children than work in an air-conditioned office or as a cashier? No way. Childcare sucks, even if some things suck even worse.
True, but ameliorated by the fact that a huge number of men don't even bother to contest custody, and that alimony payment is in fact very rare. The vast majority of divorces don't end in alimony settlements. The whole horror story where your wife divorces you and takes all your stuff so she can fuck chad is much less common than the internet would have you believe.
True, but the draft hasn't been a factor in half a century and IMO is unlikely to be one for the foreseeable future. Any American who gets killed in battle these days quite literally signed up for it.
Maybe (though I have posted previously on here about how I think the narrative of 'if you're a man nobody gives a shit about you, your existence is a lonely void' is quite overblown). That said, fair to point out that "women and children first" was not an old maritime law but a rather recent innovation at the time the Titanic sank. Through most of history, women and children have had much worse survival rates in sinkings because, well, the rule was 'every man for himself' and the men could swim.
I have great news for you: you too can have sex on demand. Simply download tinder onto your phone, set your preferences to 'men,' and start swiping. I guarantee you within a few hours tops you can have a hook-up arranged with an extremely attractive man. "But I don't want to have sex with men!" you cry. Well...
This seems like a wash even on your framing. But it does remind me of what I think is one of the sillier mansophere/PUA/redpill/whatever it's called now, slogans, which goes something like "women are loved for who they are, men are loved for what they can provide." Silly because it implies there's some kind of core essence of 'you' separate from your character and actions (what you can provide), and because what "women are loved for who they are" really means is "women are loved for their looks" which doesn't sound nearly as nice. Moreover this is usually said said in such a way to make women out to be the shallower sex, but when it really comes down to it I think loving someone because they make a lot of money or are a famous musician or something is less shallow than loving someone because they're hot (even if both are kind of shallow by the standards of storybook 'true love.') At least the former qualities are reflections of character.
Absolutely. I think the majority of men in the first world today would probably drop dead if they had to do the work their grandfathers did, let alone those grandfathers' grandfathers. I know I would. People, especially people who romanticize pre-industrial society, really have a tendency to underestimate how brutal and treacherous life was just a little over a century ago (and much more recently in some places, and still is in less developed parts of the world).
There are ways that life is easier for men. You have already listed female advantages. For men, it's mostly the fact that people take you more seriously, and that men tend to be physically much stronger than women. Those two factors divide into a lot of different smaller sub-advantages in social and daily life. Personally I think walking around knowing that about 75% of the population is physically stronger than me and there wouldn't be much I could do about it if one of them chose to do me harm would be very psychologically distressing, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with that, and no amount of cultural messaging will fix that particular problem.
As for your "minimum deal" for women being "just get married," again, imagine that your alternative to being homeless and killing yourself (though again, you can avoid the latter by just not killing yourself) was getting married to a man (and yes, you have to have sex with him). Would that be a great deal? Would you be happy to have that option?
They'd suffer a lot; I can't tell if it's hyperbolic, but most of them would be alive at the end of a year. The US military (at least in Vietnam) was able to round up a bunch of conscripts and get them doing a physically demanding, dangerous job.
It's hyperbole. A minority probably would literally die though. Also if the stories I hear from older relatives are any indication people even in the 60s were significantly tougher than people today.
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I think you're overgeneralising from yourself here. The majority of mothers I know not only work half time, but would actually like to work less than that and spend more with the children. Even when mothers complain about their husband not doing their share, they will often don't actually want to do more work - they mainly want more quality time with the entire family. Talking personally about my wife and me, she generally tries to actively maximize the time spent on childcare, while I try to have a balance. If we could afford it more easily, we probably would both work less. Also, by all accounts I know, cashier is a notoriously boring and tedious job that people only do if they have no other options.
Do you think this tendency for mothers to maximize their time with childcare, while men don't, comes from mothers experiencing more satisfaction with childcare than with work?
Or could it be that mothers experience less satisfaction with employment (income included) than fathers do?
Or maybe a mix of both?
Because the way you put it, it is very easy to just attribute it to mothers having an innate taste for childcare that men don't have, maybe even a taste for childcare above anything else, and completely disregard other very important elements in that tendency - such as that the woman's income is lower than the man's, that her career opportunities have already been diminished anyway, that childcare is too expensive to outsource, that there is concern over whether another person would be sufficiently competent to take the task, that men often weaponise their incompetence in order to avoid childcare. Just to name a few.
Anyway, I don' t even know what the goal of this thread even is. I just don't like it when claims that childcare is a lesser type of work or that childcare is an easier work for women than for men are supported by examples like yours without due critical contextualization of the conditions that take women to take upon themselves the task of chidcare.
Oh, the irony! I know talking about a lack of context is quite popular currently, and it is occasionally appropriate. If, say, a norwegian guy is dunking on native american casinos and how they totally could have other sources of income, and lists a bunch of options while knowing nothing, it's a rather reasonable charge.
But critically examine my post and your post, and who is lacking context here: The person talking about his own wife, friends & acquaintances? Or the person offering a bunch of possibilities while knowing nothing about us? If anything, you may say that I have an overabundance of context, that I'm steeped so deep in it that I can't see the greater picture. I don't think so, but it would make vastly more sense.
So, to cure you of your fatal lack of context: When my wife got pregnant (which was planned), we both were PhD Students in our first (me) and second (her) year. We both agreed to share obligations perfectly 50/50 and did in fact do so. She was 100% convinced that she would get tired of the little one rather fast and would be thrilled to get back to work. We both finished our PhD's, and we are both Postdocs now, at the same university (in different fields though), earning exactly the same per hour. But she realised that she simply cares much, much less about her work now. Finishing the PhD was an obligation she pushed through. We regularly have the situation that I'm technically obligated to take our daughter from daycare for the day, but she simply WANTS to do it and will hassle me until I agree. Or that I do it, and then she comes home 5 minutes later to spend more time with us. In light of the realisation that her priorities and mine are quite different after all, we agreed that I work full-time and she works ~80%, and that for the next child, she will stay home much more than me. In fact, she has gotten quite anti-feminist recently since she feels betrayed and tricked; All her life, she was told how amazing a career is, how women are held back by children, by wrong-headed social expectation and by unwilling husbands, and how having children should be postponed as far as possible (and if you don't have any, it's fine as well). But now her (and mine) view is the inversion: Women are manipulated into careers they don't really enjoy and talked into having less children later, to keep them in the workforce for longer (similar to the former claims, we don't think this is a conscious conspiracy, merely the automatic and implicit market forces of the modern world at work).
And this isn't just my wife, this is the majority of mothers I know. My wife's current (female) professor has a baby, and the plan originally was for her to stay home only 3 months and then her husband takes over (he has a rather flexible job as a programmer), since there was a large project that she was heading. It's now a year or so, and the project she was heading is now de-facto led by my wife. The professor is working waaaay less and when at work is regularly talking about her baby, how she wants to get back and how unimportant work feels to her now.
Another acquainted couple is a well-earning high-performance physician at a clinic and her husband, a programmer (you may see a pattern here; Yes we have A LOT of programmers, often in home office). They also split up obligations 50/50 when the child was very small, I know because I regularly met him alone with the child in the park or at the playground. But now that the child can go to daycare and it isn't necessary anymore, do you want to take a guess who is pulling back now? By your theory, it should be the husband; His job is less demanding and can easier incorporate a child, he doesn't really earn much more and they generally earn enough that they can afford it either way and he can't weaponise his incompetence since, just like me, he has regularly cared for his child on his own. Also, daycare is both comprehensive - as a shift-working clinician, she would have access to a round-the-clock daycare - as well as ridiculously cheap here, so neither really needs to pull back at all if they don't want to. But no, she decided that she doesn't want to sent him to daycare full-time yet and that she doesn't want to continue her work because family is now more important, so she switched to a part-time government (pre-school checkups etc.) job. He is working significantly more than her nowadays and you usually see her alone with the child.
We obviously also know traditional couples where the man does earn significantly more anyway, but ironically that makes them less conflicted than us.
Yes I know, if you're just doing some context-free pondering you can make up a an arbitrary number of possible explanations. But once you know a bit more, you'll see that they don't hold up.
Btw, don't put words in my mouth; I don't think childcare is a lesser type of work, in fact I think it's under-appreciated compared to its importance (as are having children and families in general).
That is fair; atomization and increased government surveillance (or the perception of it) means that the things that used to keep abusive assholes in check in ages past aren't as strong anymore. There's a greater chance you wind up in prison if you and your friends instruct your sister's husband on why it is not a good idea to be an abusive asshole. There are weaker family and community networks for applying pressure to people defecting from local optimums. So in order to not be vulnerable to certain kinds of exploitation, women need to work and have careers. Taking a couple decades off of work to raise children is admirable, but makes women vulnerable: I knew a woman that had a Master's degree, but could only find minimum-wage unskilled work after twenty years of homemaking. That led her to stay with her rather insensitive but mostly good breadwinner husband instead of divorcing her. Perhaps you can bite the bullet and argue that women need to be in relationships they do not want to be in because of economic and societal pressure in order to continue the species, but that is a rather hard bullet to bite and I sincerely hope that this is not true.
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Sure, I don't disagree with what you said. I even think your anecdotes are actually representative of a trend.
If I read it correctly, you interpreted my text as an speculation about the specific examples you have from your personal surroundings, which it was not. I was questioning the general scenario. So I will not comment on them, as they neither prove nor disprove my claim that, in general, the division of childcare work is strongly (not exclusively) affected by external factors other than taste.
I did not put words in your mouth, in fact you seem to be the one doing it, because I never accused you of claiming that childcare is a lesser type of work. What I admonished you for doing, though, was providing anecdotal support to such claim first made by OP without also adding the criticism that I deem recommendable to include when in a debate with someone who lacks (or at least doesn't show) nuance like OP
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Imagine two heterosexual people, one man and one woman, otherwise identical and of middling intelligence, attractiveness, etc. They both want to get married and stay home and take care of children, perhaps with a part-time job to help pay the bills. If you had to bet which one would be more successful in their search for a partner, who would you bet on?
You can't attribute everything or most of what's wrong with gender roles to things men do. Women have agency in the process and share responsibility for the outcomes, and you can't look at outcomes without due critical contextualization of the conditions that take men to take upon themselves the task of market labor to play the provider role.
Sure, I agree with all you said. You further endorsed my point that the division of childcare and income earning is strongly (not exclusively) affected by external factors other than taste. Both for men and for women.
And I don't. If you think anything I said implies that I do think like that, I appreciate if you point out to me exactly where you got that impression, then I can work on making it more clear.
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As you hint at, I think a good way of removing a lot of the bluster here is asking the people who think women really do have it much easier than men whether, behind the veil of ignorance, they would really rather be born a woman than a man in the West; I think most men here would say no.
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Does OP realise that he is setting himself up to be "Fuck you, six year old child, if you can't fist-fight me for this seat on the lifeboat you are shit out of luck"?
While cold logical rationality may say "I, an adult male citizen who is economically productive, am worth more than this young child and therefore my survival is more of a priority", I think the natural human instinct to protect offspring would lead us to regard a guy who let a child die in a burning building because they put getting out themselves first would consider that person not a sterling example of maleness who should reproduce his genes, but a shit head.
Or the likes of this guy, who certainly did not put "children first", right? Too many cases like that, where the mothers are also complicit in letting the new man in their lives harm their children. Those women should also be disgraced and ostracised.
This may have been how society functioned previously, but it most definitely isn't how it functions now.
As a male, why should I give up my life to save the children of someone from a different people? In the more homogenous societies of the past the moral (lol) calculus involved was a lot more simple, but in the current day those questions are far more difficult to answer. If I give my life up to save some children in a burning building, the actual identity of those children matters hugely to a degree that it didn't in the past. I would absolutely condemn and castigate a man who gave his life to save a boat full of drowning economic migrants who would then go on to make life worse (even if in some small way) for his native country.
The cold logical rationality here isn't about economic productivity, but about group interests - it isn't an accident that willingness to risk one's life to save others tracks remarkably well to how closely related you are to those others. Modern societies are diverse and multicultural enough that the selfish and easy approach is, often enough, the moral one as well. Why should I give up my life to save a group of people who are hostile to me and my posterity, when I can make things better for my tribe by simply not intervening when those hostile outsiders inadvertently decide to remove themselves from society?
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This is such a confusing response. The complaint is that society views men in particular as disposable relative to all other classes in society, responding that "don't you know you're more disposable than the other classes in society" is just agreeing with him. Which sure, I was also raised in this society, these are also my values. But can't you kind of see how viewing yourself, and society at large agreeing with you, that you're particularly expendable has a kind of visceral quality? To go around implicitly knowing that if it comes to it your place is to die, and not only accept this but relish it. Some significant part of at the very least my, and I suspect most men's, daydreams involve sacrificing myself for a worthy cause. And I won't lie, this insurance policy us men offer society doesn't seem like it is having its premiums paid in full, or at all. To have it taken for granted would be one thing but it often feels like this noble side of myself is resented, that we are not even entitled to be proud of and celebrate our responsibilities because it may imply that women are in some way lesser for not having this particular burden.
I don't think OP or many of the men complaining here are really angry that things like this are asked of men. I think we would for the most part welcome responsibility, it's just those responsibilities used to comes with some carrot to go along with the stick.
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Well - cold logical rationality's argument can be reduced to "my survival is a priority", really, unless my life is so shitty I'd gladly accept death over having to trudge on (with blood on my hands on top).
It can also be reduced to letting others survive at the expense of yourself, what is logical depends entirely on what your values and goals are.
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That's not my read of that statement at all. I always took this to mean that a woman is loved for her intrinsic traits (of which beauty may be one, but doesn't have to be), whereas love for men is conditional on their being productive members of society. I don't just mean "love" in a romantic sense, but also platonic and familial sense. This is difficult to express and back up with hard data, but I do think it's generally much more socially acceptable for the average woman to e.g. take a "sabbatical" or "career break", move back in with her parents and not work for several months, than it would be for a man to do the same. We have a hundred derisive terms for adult men who live with their parents and stubbornly refuse to find a real job and get their shit together ("NEET", "basement dweller", "hikikomori", arguably "incel"), but the reflexive assumption is that a woman who lives with her parents and refuses to get her shit together must be "going through some stuff" or suffering from some nebulous undefined "trauma". Consider also that there's no distaff counterpart to terms like "deadbeat dad", "prodigal son" or "failson". Generally speaking, a woman who is pleasant, agreeable, talkative and amiable, but who's moved back in with her parents, hasn't worked for six months and isn't actively looking for a job is "figuring herself out"; a man who does the same is an embarrassment to the family. I don't think the situation is fundamentally different if the woman is overweight and unattractive. This, I think, is what the "woman are loved for who they are" concept is getting at.
The phenomenon I'm describing isn't just a negative one (romantic, platonic and familial love being extended to women in spite of what they refuse to do - their "sins" of omission) but also positive (their loved ones extending them love and charity in spite of what they have done). It's variously called the "women are wonderful" effect or "hypoagency" or whatever, but my general impression is that whenever a woman does something bad (including criminal offences) people will scramble to find someone or something to blame other than her. I'm racking my brains trying to think of a time I read about a woman on trial for a criminal offense and her crime wasn't attributed to self-defense/justified retribution, "mental health issues", or manipulation by a (male, obviously) third party. The idea that Ghislaine Maxwell or Elizabeth Holmes could have just done really awful things without a man coercing them to is just too unspeakable to countenance, apparently. I've even read a feminist writer attribute the murder of Sylvia Likens to crypto-feminism. It's not just talk: I think there's a large body of evidence indicating judges give vastly shorter sentences to female murderers than male. And yes, this reflexive assumption of hypoagency does not depend on the woman in question being pretty. Aileen Wuornos was no supermodel, but people were still falling over themselves to attribute her killings to justifiable retribution against would-be rapists and/or pimps, even if the evidence strongly suggested otherwise (although said kid-gloves treatment in the popular imagination did not save her from execution).
So this is my interpretation of "women are loved for who they are": women tend to be loved and respected by their families, friends and romantic partners more or less unconditionally. Crimes of omission, derelictions of duty and shortcomings will be ignored; crimes of commission will be forgiven, excused or explained away. "Pretty privilege" factors into this but is by no means dispositive (e.g. there are no "plus-size men").
Yeah, these sorts of double standards and/or Russell conjugations are ubiquitous once you start Noticing. Not even the fatFIRE subreddit is immune. Threads with male OPs asking how to go about pre-nups often have several comments accusing them of being paranoid and misogynistic, whereas ones with female OPs have several comments praising them for being prudent and looking out for themselves.
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Society may take antisocial behavior less 'seriously' when committed by women, but I don't think it's to such an extent that it can be said "women are loved unconditionally." Maxwell and Holmes are still going to prison. Wuornos, as you note, was executed. At best there's a weak qualification of their crimes in the public imagination, but I don't think anyone is actually out there hoping Ghislaine Maxwell walks free.
I also think you underrate how much different the experience can be for an overweight/unattractive woman compared to a very attractive one. People, especially men, really are much, much more patient, indulgent, and friendly with good-looking women (and good-looking men, but I think the effect is stronger since a much higher premium is placed on women's looks).
This I absolutely do not agree with. Men absolutely don't love their girlfriends' unconditionally, it's entirely conditional on sexual attraction (which, again, reduces to "loved for their looks"). I don't think anyone has friends that love them unconditionally, that would actually be quite weird, the whole point of friends is they're pleasant to be around, and if they stop being pleasant you're not going to want to be around them anymore. In this respect I don't think women are any different from men. Families? I'm pretty sure my mom and dad love me unconditionally, but that's probably it. Is there any evidence parents love their daughters any more than their sons?
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Unhappily, males are disposable. See this about bull calves.
The flip side of "alpha guy in his society has literal harem of women" is that you don't need that many men to be reproductively active, you can populate your locale with only a few, selected men so long as fertile women are available in sufficient numbers. That means a pressure to winnow out men to find the fittest to reproduce and pass on their genes to the next generation, and that means competition among men and high standards for mates by women.
I understand the logic of where male disposability came from. The point of this thread is to raise awareness of the fact that it exists at all, when most of modern feminism seems predicated on the assumption that it doesn't.
Even if we admit that male disposability in some respects may be a necessary evil for a society or tribe to effectively multiply and flourish (I recently rewatched Titanic and am 100% onboard with the Birkenhead drill: I found the sacrifice of the men travelling in first class who willingly laid down their lives that women might escape unscathed far more moving and affecting than any component of the Jack and Rose A-story), I don't think that necessarily implies the "women are wonderful effect" or hypoagency are justified. Male disposability implies that it's wrongheaded to execute a woman for capital crimes even if we would happily execute a man who committed the same crimes, fair enough. But why does male disposability imply that women cannot be held accountable for any acts of wrongdoing, why we must scramble and contrive reasons that someone (some man) other than the woman in question was at fault for the crime she freely chose to commit? The male disposability hypothesis presumes that societies are loath to kill women because they're required for child-bearing and -rearing, but isn't there an argument that a systemic refusal to hold women accountable for their decisions prevents them from learning the skills they will need to be effective child-rearers?
I guess you could stretch it to argue that the successful men who haven't been disposed of are responsible, like captains at sea, for everything the women in their household do and fail to do. Therefore, if a man's wife commits murder or robbery or fraud, it is the man who is responsible and knows or should have known and done something to prevent it. His failure to do so means that he is unfit and must be punished. I don't exactly agree with this, as I am a Westerner and not a Talib, but that's my best argument for it.
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I never watched Titanic because I thought the story was idiotic. Why did Cameron feel the need to plug in an invented romance, I have no idea. Wanted to make a chick-flick? Who knows.
Women were executed for crimes in the past. Maybe the past was harder-headed. Maybe we're just softer about executing any criminals today. Maybe there's a difference in the type of crimes committed by men and women for which execution is the punishment.
I think everyone should be held responsible for freely-chosen actions. But we're in the throes of over-correction. Talking about how women disproportionately get custody in separation and divorces ignores that (1) men used to get automatic custody, and indeed often abusive husbands used that as a weapon against their wives - divorce me and never see your children again (2) women were and are disproportionately the caretakers of children. More men may be willing to be full-time fathers and look after their kids, but it's still catching up.
Is that used now as a weapon against men? Yeah, and the solution there is to work out how to stop vicious divorces and the best interests of the children, and I'm happy to go along with "don't rely on social workers who are too easy fooled by a sob story when deciding which parent gets custody". But on the other hand, I've seen examples from my workplaces of men who wanted nothing to do with their kids and indeed in one case was actively fucking over the kid just because he was still in a pissing match with the mother years after the separation.
Here's 1.8 billion reasons why. I remember when it was in theaters, and many of the women I knew went to see it multiple times. The music video was blared non-stop on MTV. It wasn't because they were moved by the sacrifice of the men in first class.
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Any man without a greatly above average social network is one bad tax mistake away from homelessness.
And any person crossing a road is one drunk driver away from being a corpse. Somehow, people cross roads without being miserable shut-ins.
My point was that the precarity exists, not that people should become miserable shut-ins.
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There are millions of unemployed men in America and very few of them are homeless.
If you get on the wrong side of the IRS (there are ways with stock options that you can end up owing far more than you ever had in spendable money, for instance) they don't make you unemployed; they take all your assets and garnish any wages down to near-nothing. You can of course beg the tax court for relief, but if you're not sympathetic (e.g. you're male) you won't get any.
So the ones who can be harmed by that are the ones who are rich enough to trade stocks?
No, that was just an example. A useful one, because it demonstrates that being well-off doesn't shield you -- the ways poor men can become homeless are quite obvious.
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Now subtract all of the men who
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I wouldn't say I have a greatly above average social network, but even if I somehow managed to bankrupt myself, at the very least my parents would let me move in with them...
And then the IRS would start digging into your parents finances to see if anything belonging to them could be construed as belonging to you... which they would then take. Your parents might not be too hot on that idea.
I guess it's like whatever TVTrope it is where people who know things about science or history or biology are more annoyed by movies that don't even try to get it right than normies, but the sheer ignorance people post here about how federal agencies work regularly astounds me.
The IRS is actually one of the more reasonable agencies. They are subject to a lot of oversight (auditors can get in big trouble even for accidentally mistyping someone's name and pulling up the wrong file), and they go out of their way to work with people who aren't being intentionally criminal. They don't go after people on whims, people who make innocent (even if really stupid) mistakes are generally able to work out repayment terms, and even for tax frauds, the IRS doesn't even have enough resources to go "digging into" the finances of everyone related to their target just for spite and punitiveness. This scenario you have conjured in which they seize all your assets and garnish your wages forever so you are forced to live in poverty, and then try to take your parents' house, because you "made one bad tax mistake" - do you have some particular example in mind of this happening, or did you make it up?
The IRS used to be known for doing obviously cruel things, which they did on purpose because they wanted to be seen as obviously cruel so people would pay their taxes. I've heard that's no longer policy for some time now. But they still want their money, they'll still go after you like a Terminator until they get it, and they absolutely will go after people they think might be helping a delinquent taxpayer hide assets from them. The scenario I described -- owing more than you ever actually had -- was a common one during the dot-com bust. They don't garnish your wages forever -- I believe the limit is 10 years -- but they do take everything you have and garnish your wages down to what they consider subsistence levels.
When was this era of capricious cruelty? Because it's not within my lifetime or yours.
Yes, if you evade taxes, they will pursue what you owe. This is called enforcement. I don't know that the IRS is particularly more "Terminator-like" than any other enforcement agency. There are two possibilities here:
You think they are pursuing people for things that shouldn't be enforced. Your complain is with Congress - they make tax law. (The IRS has been advocating for simpler tax codes for decades. It's not the IRS that wants a tax code system so byzantine that the average person needs help from software and/or tax preparation services and still runs a risk of making an expensive mistake. Guess whose interests are served by that?)
You think they shouldn't pursue tax cheats. So... don't enforce the law, because you think taxes are bad? Again, take it up with Congress.
Yes, if you are playing shell games with friends and relatives to try to hide your assets, they will go after you (and the people you're using). That's called tax evasion.
None of this remotely resembles the scenario you described where "Poor average guy somehow accidentally finds out he owes more taxes than his total net worth and the IRS impoverishes him and then goes after his parents." That sounds like the story a dedicated tax evader might tell that should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Again, got any actual examples?
I'm not familiar with how many actual cases of this there might have been. It's possible to have massive paper capital gains which you then owe taxes on, immediately prior to a bust, so while I am not a tax accountant myself, I can envision hypothetical scenarios where a heavily leveraged person might end up owing "more taxes than he ever actually had." Color me skeptical, however, that this was common or that it didn't involve some financial shenanigans on the part of the alleged victim.
The IRS helpfully posts this information on their website. You can be garnished until either you pay off what you owe or the levy is released, and it's calculated based on standard deductions and the number of dependents. I don't know precise numbers and it's certainly possible that if you owe a lot of money (which almost always is the result of doing a lot of tax evasion), you will be heavily garnished, though hardly down to "subsistence levels." Generally speaking, the upper end of what they will garnish is more like 50%, and that's after deducting what they consider necessary for you and your dependents (not as "subsistence level").
You are just repeating J. Edgar Hoover-era just-so stories.
It's within mine. It hit its nadir when the IRS decided to raid a co-op nursery school and refuse to release the children to their parents until they signed a form agreeing to be responsible for a share of the taxes. I think this was in the 1980s but it might have been the 1970s. But even without that sort of thing, the casual impersonal cruelty of the juggernaut is quite sufficient.
I never said he was an average guy. Several people have assumed that because they have even less sympathy for a man who this might happen to (e.g. a dot-com bust principal or early employee) than to an average guy.
No leverage is required.
And this is just-worlding.
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I mean without knowing what I did it's hard to say much on the topic, but unless we're talking about random and arbitrary tyranny in which the IRS makes an accounting error and insists that they're correct, and I somehow lose in court, I can't imagine owing more on taxes than I have in assets in the first place... You're really going to have to clarify how the average man can be fucked over by the IRS just like that.
The average man can't (though there are plenty of ways the average man can lose everything). Basically you can receive stock that you can't sell because of various securities rules, and that stock can drop precipitously before you are able to sell it. You owe the full tax on the value of the stock you received at the time you received it. The IRS now owns you for 10 years, and determines how much you're able to keep. If you're lucky you can make enough and keep enough under these circumstances to put a roof over your head. If you're not, the cash economy and homelessness is for you. You can beg the court for mercy but as @sun demonstrates, nobody has any sympathy for a once-well-off man.
Not like you'd believe me, but the key traits here are "a once well-off person who decided to fuck around with the Labyrinth that is modern finance and found out that the Minotaur lives there".
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If the boot was on the other foot and women made up a majority of suicides, advising women "if you don't want to die by suicide, just don't kill yourself babe" would be seen as shockingly callous and insensitive.
Indeed, suicide is a self-inflicted condition (I suppose by definition). I can see how it can be the odd-one-out among other conditions that are non-self-inflicted.
On the other hand, writing suicide off and handwaving it away feels strange, and substituting "women" in for "men" well-illustrates how. As usual, regarding women with the indifference and dismissiveness typically afforded toward men would be perceived as cruel, hurtful, and perhaps hateful.
Reading "if you don't want to die by suicide, just don't kill yourself" made me think of the cyber-bullying meme:
>Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Suicide Real Hahahaha Nigga Just Don't Kill Yourself Like Nigga Put the Gun Down Haha
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It applies to anyone who kills themselves, man or woman. My point isn’t that suicidal people should just be told not to kill themselves, but that it is ultimately not inflicted upon you by society like most of the other things on the list, unless you want to say that ALL of our choices are ultimately not our own. To say suicide is a choice isn’t to trivialize it. It can be an understandable, sometimes even (IMO) justifiable choice.
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Very much. I especially like Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" on this, since he goes into depth about everything terrible about being both a coal miner, and the coal miner's families, and how incredibly difficult it all was.
This might be a peculiarly modern phenomenon, though. My understanding is that while pre-modern society was much poorer, it afforded more time for leisure even for the average peasant and farmer — the Industrial Revolution provided working conditions that were much, much worse than what came before.
Even in ancient times there are jobs that are dreadful like salt mining, of course, but that wasn’t the norm.
Most of those memes about all the holidays medieval peasants had only take into account the time actually spent sowing and harvesting, and not all of the other work that farmers had to do constantly to keep everything in working order. Agricultural work is really, really hard. I've never done it myself, but I know people who have. And peasants always lived on the brink of famine. All it took was one bad harvest. Industrial laborers rarely starved. Pre-modern peasants might have had more "official" time off, but there's a reason they flooded the cities to become industrial workers in the first place.
Oh, no doubt agricultural work is very difficult, and I would much prefer my current lifestyle to that of a tenant farmer. But I am saying that the Industrial Revolution was uniquely bad for workers. I’m pretty sure I would drop dead doing factory work of a hundred to two hundred years past, but I’ve seen farm-work done before in rural China with limited modern equipment and amenities, for instance — it is hard work, but it is doable.
The risk of famine is well taken, though.
My understanding of why peasants flooded the cities was because of changing economic incentives — unemployment in farms due to industrialization and different crop preferences lead to massive unemployment amongst farmers, who migrated to cities to look for work.
My impression is that conditions varied greatly with population density, and that Industrial Revolution era Europe was unusually bad for Malthusian reasons. Pre-revolution China also sounded terribly grinding for similar reasons.
So I don't disagree that early 20th Century coal miners (and American cotton plantation workers, and men mining guano, and rice farmers) had it worse than men in a variety of other times and places.
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If we assume that suicide is not a common state of affairs but a result of either mental illness or a failure to achieve life's goods this is an asinine response.
The counter would be that, in determining how much society offers various parties, it should matter how many people go against our most basic urge to survive because they think the deal is just that bad. One side opting out vastly more is important data.
Otherwise you just seem to end up with the charter school issue where the school that drives out all of the difficult kids actually ends up looking way better than the one that tries to care for them.
This does create the rather intuitive answer that impoverished black men on average get a better 'deal' than the average middle-class white woman.
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He listed suicide as one of the ways in which life is worse for men, but if it's merely a reflection of the ways life is worse for men, i.e all the other things on the list, then it shouldn't be on the list itself, because that's doubling up.
Hell, I don't even think suicide rates are a measure of the way men's lives are worse, they're just a reflection of men being more committed and competent at the task. I'm enough of a "misogynist" that I expect men to be more committed and competent at almost any task that requires a capacity for violence, even if it's to themselves.
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The list was:
Given he then goes on to say that the point of that particular issue was that it showed willingness to die, I think it's a fair way to imply that one side finds their deal vastly worse.
I took the list to be “reasons men’s lives are worse.” If the list is “indications men’s lives are worse,” then my criticism doesn’t apply and yes, it’s definitely a point in the ‘men have worse lives’ column.
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Ah, were it that easy.. I've had suicidal ideation myself, in the form of intrusive thoughts at my lowest, but to claim this in general is to persist in blissful ignorance of how fucking bad it can get. If that weren't true, Suicide Watch wouldn't be a thing.
I'm sorry that you went through that, and I hope that you're doing better these days.
To the extent it is a "choice" (by Allah is there a lot to get into there), then it is usually a choice that is not advocated during the majority of a person's life where they weren't depressed. I think the right to suicide should be enshrined, but only for agents that are sane (no, wanting to die in the absence of a mental illness doesn't count as insanity, nor is it a mental illness itself). Most suicidal humans don't meet that criterion, loose as it is. The terminally ill and dying often do, if someone wants to claim I'm ruling out ~100% of people with that rule.
This is getting a bit off topic, but my hot take, which few regardless of their political or social views on other things seem to like, is that if someone is suffering from severe depression or some other mental illness, and other treatments fail to improve their self-perceived QOL they should be allowed to kill themselves. I don't think a person should be prevented from taking their own life based on supposed mental unfitness barring extreme cases "the patient hallucinates aliens from zeta reticuli ordering him to kill himself." I can't see an argument otherwise. If someone suffering from incurable illness has the right to take their own life, doesn't someone suffering from incurable mental illness have the right to do the same?
Sure, if their depressive psychosis was truly intractable under treatment. At that point, why not call it a terminal illness if their QOL is shot?
While I endorse that view, my hands would be tied IRL due to legal constraints and a desire to keep my license if I was a psychiatrist. (In most Western jurisdictions)
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