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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.
I think your points overall make sense, but you don't account at all for variability and social mobility. As @rae mentioned below, men tend to live higher risk lifestyles. Their appetite for risk is higher, so the rewards are greater and the failures are more steep.
On top of that, women tend to rely on immutable traits i.e. beauty, and to some degree the social network they were born in, to confer them status. If you're an ugly woman born into a poor family, there is not much of a chance for you to get out. In fact, this Brookings study on male vs female social mobility says:
For men, there are many things that don't seem fair on the surface. That being said, the variability inherent in being a man is worth quite a lot. Having the ability to rise out of your circumstances, despite a bad throw on the genetic lottery, means that men innately have optionality that women generally don't. Sure you can argue that programs and other things biased towards women help them move up the socioeconomic ladder, but at the end of the day most women don't seem to have the mindset to let them take the risks they would need to take to climb.
Ultimately I do think men get the short end of the stick in some regards, and women in others. It's not clear to me at this moment, and I doubt we'll have clarity for a while yet, who gets the 'better minimum deal' overall.
I think at least some of this is culture. Men are taught — from day one — that it is their responsibility to make themselves employable, to do whatever job pays the most even if they hate it, to fight their way to the top of any job they get, and to job hop when the pay isn’t rising fast enough for them.
Women have the privilege I call “second income privilege.” They get to not prioritize wealth generation. They get to think about whether they want a good paying job in a demanding field or not, whether having more money is worth being bored or working somewhere unpleasant or long hours. Their money isn’t “feed the family” money, so they get to think of work as fun, as a calling, as almost a hobby.
Men work because they have to; women if they want to.
Such a saying would be hyperbolic in an absolute sense, but it'd be true in a relative sense.
Women have far more latitude to dabble in "fun" jobs to the extent they want to work at all. It's essentially a meme at this point that a lot of women in PhD programs among the softer sciences (and, in certain cases, smarter ones among the harder sciences) are basically doing it for a hobby because the alternative would be having to say you're a Stay-at-Home Girlfriend, Wife, or Mother (which sounds low status and not GirlBossy). Any higher-earning opportunities that may or may not arise from that are just a bonus.
For men, you can have won the game, secured a bag for you and your wife, and she still might resent you if you retire early. Ugh, stupid husband... what have you done for me lately? And people will act like that's normal: because that is the normal, the normal state of affairs, that men have to constantly justify their worth. Many third-parties will even advise the husband to Get A Job, rather than encouraging the husband to tell his wife to get over herself.
While I've seen young or not-so-young men get fired or pushed out from a job, I've never to my recollection seen them voluntarily resign without an exit opportunity lined-up. In contrast, I've seen many young and not-so-young women drop-out of their jobs with no exit opportunity lined-up to become stay-at-home girlfriends, wives, or stay-at-home single-ladies when they felt their roles were too heavily focused on Excel graphs and PowerPoint slides (and too lightly focused on looking cute and girlbossing, too unfulfilling and too little self-actualising).
@ThenElection mentioned he or she knew "multiple women who gave up high paying, high stress careers to be yoga instructors, writers, and life coaches." At a previous job, one of my former coworkers (more senior than me at that time) left because she wanted to have more time to relax, do yoga, and get more in touch with herself. Not even instruct yoga, just do it as a hobby at most.
In my reasonably high-degree-of-difficulty degree program, there were a decent number of women. Don't get me wrong, we were still on the 'wrong' side of the ratio, but there were more than a few. After the program, I saw some of them go and use their degree to significant effect. Some others stood out in the other direction. One in particular openly said that she had essentially zero plan to use her degree for any work; her plan was to get married, have kids, and stay home with them. Sure enough, she did exactly that. I hate to say it, but if I were the woman who didn't get accepted to the program, the one who would be next in line had this woman not taken the slot, I'd probably have been pretty furious with her. (I liked her; we were friends and worked together on some pretty cool projects.)
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May I ask what women you know like this? Because the women around me working are damn well helping to keep the family going; one co-worker is saving huge amounts of her wages to pay her son's college fees, for example. If you're going for a mortgage, you better have a two-income family. And there are some of us who are still single who work to pay our own bills.
While I think men may have a hard time of it today, the amount of pure whining and pussing on here makes me want to tell you all to grow a pair and man up. Not very sympathetic of me, I realise, but I had a sort of male-brained upbringing so I'm not the nurturing, supportive, "Oh Clive you are so wonderful and manly and I adore you" type of female.
Before I start let me preface with I love my wife, none of the following is malicious and I don't think these things are fully conscious. I do know women who are better at finances then their husbands. So people don't think she is a bum she came in to the relationship with about 200k of equity in a house, she brags to everyone how awesome I am with finances, she likes to help on major projects around the house or organize things while I'm working on the vehicles, and I would be 100% fine being the breadwinner if she decided to be a stay at home mom.
She struggles mentally keeping track of cash flows and balances. Mostly it's little things that aren't a big deal. Like when we were dating we went to Costco, spent about $100 dollars, and I had forgotten my wallet. While walking to the car she reminded me to transfer her half the bill. During that period in our relationship I had regularly covered full shopping runs and I had been picking up the tab of our weekly dates to the tune of $75-$100 a week. One time she saw the bill and was shocked that that's how much we'd been spending. A few months before I'd floated her $8k to get her into grad school before the student loans came in.
When we got married we agreed to combine finances but didn't close her bank account because there were some bills tied to it and so she could have some autonomy. The one time I put up some resistance was when she wanted a couple grand because she felt she'd spent thousands more than me on the wedding and transferring her a couple grand would be fair. This was hard for me because it meant I was going to have to dip in to the emergency fund for the first time in years. She suggested we make a spreadsheet only to find that I'd spent thousands more than her. She polished off her $20k inheritance before we got married because she wanted to have some fun before the wedding saying "it was her money" (I had never asked for justification or protested).
She recently suggested that we should follow Dave Ramsey and become debt free by paying off $60k in student loans from a couple failed attempts at graduate degrees by liquidating the emergency fund and the rest of the crypto, all of which I had accumulated before we started dating. She recently talked about how after kids she wants some cosmetic surgery. I remarked that was going to take awhile to save up for, and she said not to worry she'd save up the money. Apart from the inheritance her cash flow has been negative for years and I don't see how that's going to change. She has lamented how she is doing a disproportionate share of the housework, I told her to wait until I get home and I'll help. She doesn't like it being dirty in the 2 to 4 hour difference between when she gets off work and I get off work. I also leave for work an hour and a half before she does.
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Good on you. I know plenty of each type. The difference between men and women is that the above-described kind of economic behavior tuned for self-actualization instead of for supporting the family, especially with kids involved, is widely unacceptable for men who have not previously saved up large stores of wealth, but is widely accepted for women.
Of course you can deny this, and maybe your personal experience when it comes to this differs greatly from mine, but from where I stand, given what I see, what MaiqTheTrue wrote above is 100% on the mark.
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Well, don't. Men don't get to say that to each other here, and neither do you.
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I’m not suggesting that they don’t work hard or that the money doesn’t go to family finances. What I’m suggesting is that since they are not the primary breadwinners, women get to think of the fringe benefits of the jobs they want, whether or not the environment is nice, whether or not the work is fulfilling or fun. They get to decide if they want a promotion at work. And they can generally do so because if they don’t make as much money as they possibly can, they have the income of a higher earning man to fall back on. The difference isn’t work ethic but job selection, and whether or not they push hard for promotions or job hop for better wages. The men I know have to prioritize their careers, work longer than is healthy, push very hard for training and plumb assignments and promotions, and are always looking for more money. Not because they want to, but because as the primary breadwinner if they don’t get as much money as they can, the family suffers.
Women as a whole don’t tend to do that. They aren’t hunting for better paying options, they don’t job hunt or put themselves in the limelight looking for promotions or assignments to pad the resume. They don’t tend to spend their free time trying to upskill so they can move up. They sort of find a pleasant environment with people and tasks they like and rest there until they retire.
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You know. I was on the volunteer mod page, and this post was in the queue - but it was initially anonymous and I didn't know who it was from. I was baaaasically leaning toward marking it as Neutral anyway, or Bad at worst, but then when I clicked on the context button and saw that it was from you (a woman), I suddenly felt quite strongly that I shouldn't mark the post as anything worse than Neutral! I don't think I'm the only man who would have that reaction.
I don't know what conclusions everyone wants to draw from that, but, it may be relevant to the current topic.
I would have no such qualms myself. I don't just advocate for equality of opportunity between the sexes, I also embody it to the best of my ability.
Well it felt like something that came prior to conscious deliberation or propositional knowledge. A reflex. One that can easily be overridden, but, the reflex is still there.
Could just be the WAW effect. Or it could be that it strikes me as weaksauce to call for mod action against a woman who’s telling you to man up.
I don't mean to say that I reported it (I didn't), it simply seems utterly irrelevant to me whether it was a man or woman making that statement. Well, not exactly, because I think women have less insight into male affairs (and vice-versa), but you get my point.
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Women still bring in disproportionately less than men in two-income households and work fewer hours. And in the jobs they do work, they have a higher job satisfaction than men do.
There are always tradeoffs that people make when choosing if they want to work and what job to take. Men tend to trade their time and happiness for more money; women tend to trade money for more time and happiness.
Looking at my own life, I know of multiple women who gave up high paying, high stress careers to be yoga instructors, writers, and life coaches. I know of literally no men who have done the same. That's not to say that all women have that option, but at the same time more women than men do.
Well, then - since we espouse equity, let's see if any government will fund initiatives to lower women's job satisfaction, a goal I consider eminently more achievable by a government than improving men's job satisfaction.
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A woman not having sympathy for men is a very woman thing that has very little to do with upbringing. Women naturally ingroup other women and outgroup men and a woman that doesn't do this is exceedingly rare. The only open example I know of is Karen Straughan.
Generally the type of sympathy men get from women is a sort of backhanded sympathy. Where it exists more to excuse the actions of women and any negative consequences those actions may have, and to alleviate any negative emotional pressure. Like the classic 'You're a nice guy, don't worry, you'll find someone, there's someone out there for everyone'. It's completely vapid and empty as anything else.
Listening in on two married co-workers talking about their home finances, both had the situation that their money was the families money, the wife's money was her money. And they could both share stories of how hostile and defensive their wives got if they ever questioned where 'her' money was going or if it could be better spent somewhere else. That's on top of stories from former co-workers working as fishermen , all of whom had stories to share on either their own former partners or a shipmates where all the money that had earned on tour was gone by the time they got to shore. One particularly inventive spouse had, as a way to make amends for wasting all the money on clothes and alcohol, wasted what was left of it on buying the dude an Xbox as present for when he got home.
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It's about 20% of women and ~0% of men in my experience. For example (details slightly modified):
Alice went to college, got a professional degree, and now works part-time as a pilates instructor after her husband became a manager
Betty worked full time as a physiotherapist, then switched to part-time reiki after marrying an accountant
Carol may not have stepped down in workload, but she's working part-time at an NGO while her husband is a civil engineer
Denise and Evelyn both stepped back from professional work to spend more time on their art while their husbands worked full time
That's from a single, constrained pool of a few dozen people (half men, half women). If you extend the criteria to taking reduced (but still "full time") workloads and regular sabbaticals, then there are another several women and two men.
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Honestly from having done a bunch of dating in the modern era, the rise of obesity means that unless a girl is like... bottom 10th percentile genetically she's got scope to get to 6/10 simply by being in shape. I feel like a lot of the takes around the immutability of beauty made more sense before 30-40% of the population enthusiastically nuked themselves in the foot and modern cosmetics.
It's interesting how these discussions always reflexively equate "women" to "women age 17-35", well under half of the adult lifespan. No amount of makeup and toning is going to make a 55-year-old woman physically attractive to the broad majority of men, much less a 70-year-old woman. And as evidenced by the shape of this conversation itself, for a woman to be unfuckable by men is for her to not exist at all: nobody's interested in her plans, nobody's interested in her capabilities, nobody wants to hear from her apparently because nobody wants to look at her.
This is going to shock you, but there are older men who'll enthusiastically pursue the same level of simping for an older woman in reasonable shape. I know 50 year old women who are essentially still existing off flirtation and prettiness
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Irrelevant to the OP, which posits that they are still given a much greater degree of deference, empathy, and social support than an equivalent 55 or 70-year-old man. Who is getting sexed up is a different issue altogether.
I mean, if you see people in everyday life deferring a lot to the views of older women while ignoring older men, then I guess we'd have to hit the sociology literature to resolve it, because it seems very much the opposite to me. In my experience, at least, if a 60-year-old male customer complains about the poor service at a coffeeshop, people may think he's an asshole, but they will listen respectfully to him and try to correct it. A 60-year-old woman complaining is a Karen, a ridiculous figure, the object of derision and deep resentment, and people will roll their eyes and try to get her off their backs rather than addressing what she has to say. Ditto in work meetings, when knocking on a neighbor's door, in political action, etc., etc.
IME, men on average don't seem to want to pay much attention to any person who's not (a) a sexual target, (b) sexual competition, or (c) a potential physical threat. Other men get to be at least 1-2 of those three from about age 18 to age 75. Woman get to be at most one, from age 14-35ish with steep dropoff thereafter. Maybe they're pitied a little thereafter, just because they're obviously physically vulnerable,. But that doesn't equate to being effortlessly treated as a peer in social relationships, the way older men seem to be.
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Meh, intelligence is probably less mutable than beauty is. Intelligence is probably the biggest single factor determining social mobility etc.
True, although in fairness a man's intelligence is a much more durable resource than a woman's beauty.
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