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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'm sympathetic enough to the general post that I actually want someone to debunk it (I've swung a little too hard towards Caplan and Hanania on this I feel) but this seems like the weakest point.
This can easily be put down to evolved sex differences: women have more risks and less benefits from casual sex..
See, this is actually the argument for feminism: why should men's internal experience and preference be the standard here?
Also casual sex tends to be a mediocre experience for women; you tend to orgasm even less than in relationships (32% vs 72% from a quick Google search), you’re at the mercy of someone much bigger and stronger than you (most men don’t seem to really grasp this), the risk is higher (STDs, pregnancy, sexual assault, etc).
I’ve been with a few women in the past (although I didn’t particularly enjoy it) and it was depressing how many would be surprised by the fact that I seemed to care about them at all.
How do you compare the experience of the two sexes. Tiresias at least experienced both conditions and voted conclusively for being a women, though it cost him his sight. "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."
I wonder which trans people prefer. Are there cases where transwomen feel that they have lost out in switching teams? Similarly, do trans men feel they are on to a good thing? My guess is that this effect is swamped by other issues.
I’m a bisexual trans woman so I got to experience some manner of both, but I do agree that the effect is greatly confounded by deeper issues like dysphoria.
My main experience would be that sex with men is a lot more variable, in that the bad is much worse but the good is a lot better, and the quality depends quite a lot on your partner, while with women it’s generally fairly average and depends more on your own state than the other person. So casual sex would be better for most men, but relationship sex would be better for women with the right partner.
The peak physiological pleasure is definitely greater when you’re a woman though, multiple full-body orgasms aren’t really a thing for men (trans men generally keep the ability to have multiple if they had it before, but they become otherwise closer to the male ones: brief and concentrated in the genitals). I certainly don’t miss the male sexual experience at all and see it as the equivalent of sexual fast food vs. going to a proper restaurant.
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Would you actually expect the experience of trans people to be relevant here? I would personally expect a trans woman to have an extremely different sexual experience than a cis woman.
If post-op trans women prefer sex as a woman rather than a man, then I would consider this strong evidence that the woman's role is more enjoyable.
I agree that the sexual experience is probably very different, but my sense is that it would be better for natal women than trans women.
Similarly, if post-op trans men enjoy sex more as men, then that would be evidence the other way. Here are a bunch of transmen talking about sex. They seem hornier and more comfortable, but none claim that the sex is better. In contrast, a plurality of transwomen seem to enjoy sex post-op more.
The effect of testosterone also muddies the waters, I think, since the anecdotal accounts of FtM do seem to be "I'm a lot hornier since I started T" (as well as aggressive, self-confident, etc.)
How well a neo-phallus performs as against a neo-vagina is something I have no idea about. And not every trans person does have bottom surgery, and (it seems like) a fair percentage of trans women are lesbians. All very much confounding factors.
"I had miserable 'straight' (with women)/'gay' (with men) sex when I was still living as a man" versus "I have great 'straight' (with men)/'lesbian' (with women) sex as a transwoman" would seem to depend on psychological adjustment as well as physical factors. How do you even go about getting data on "When I slept with men as a man I didn't enjoy it, but sleeping with men as a woman I love it"?
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If autogynephilia plays as large a role in the transwoman phenomenon as many posters here believe, then an autogynephiliac trans woman in a sexual encounter is getting off as much (if not more so) on her realised fantasy of being treated as a woman as she is from the actual mechanics of the encounter. This is a massive confounder making apples-to-apples comparisons with the experiences of cis women essentially impossible.
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