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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.
Um yes and no. As others have pointed out, the "minimum deal" offered to both sexes is that you die in infancy or end up as "a product of human conception" in a miscarriage or abortion. (Lord do I despise that that particular euphemism)
That said I do think you are gesturing towards something real, and I find it indicative of just how thoroughly left-wing post-modernist nonsense has poisoned the intellectual discourse, that this is in anyway controversial. Through both accident of biology and explicit design, society has always expected more from men than it has from women. Why? because it is a simple biological fact that adult males are expendable. A tribe/society that loses 3 quarters of it's adult male population, can readily bounce back inside a generation so long as it's women and children remain safe and fed. Meanwhile a tribe that loses 3 quarters of it's women and children in a single go will find itself significantly diminished (if not on the verge of extinction) for centuries to come. Cultures evolve accordingly.
Thus we arrive at the nagging question at the heart of every man's existence; "what value am I bringing to the table?", "what is it that makes my continued presence anything other than an unconscionable waste of protein, oxygen, and other people's attention?"
The conservative answer to the above questions is simple. What does a man do Walter? A man provides. Chris Rock frames it a bit differently but he is illustrating the same fundamental (and I would argue universal) truth. A man's life does not belong to him, it belongs to God, it belongs to his family, it belongs to his friends, and to his tribe. No man is an island. From womb to tomb we are bound to others.
This of course flies in the face of the secular liberal gospel of "I am my own" and I think this is where a lot of the confusion and observed cognitive dissonance stems from. Much like the feminists who whinge about "where have all the good men gone" we have a generation of men raised by women who are trying to invoke rights and privileges without taking up the associated responsibilities.
If we remove the "and children" part of this, because we're talking about the relative value of men and women, not children, this isn't true at all. The growth of tribes was limited by food far more than the number of women. Consider, as you stated, a tribe that lost 3/4 of its women. Recovering to its previous population only needs each remaining woman to give birth three times. Easily done within a few years as long as you have enough food for all of them. Compared to the time it takes for a child to grow to productive age and the resources needed in that time, the time a woman needs between births is insignificant.
If you want to grow a tribe quickly, territory and the labor needed to work it are really all that matter. Under that framing, you could conclude that men are more valuable for growth, as they have a greater labor output and can defend territory!
Back to the question of why men are considered expendable: It's simply because men, being generally stronger, are more useful in war. They're the ones you want on the battlefield (pre-modernity). Naturally, culture adapts to make this palatable by adopting an attitude of male expendability. It's not that they are expendable, it's that we need to consider them expendable because we need to be willing to expend them in war.
You're conflating maximum sustainable population with transitory growth rate, these are two very different things.
I'm arguing that the maximum sustainable population, which does not depend on preserving women, is the only relevant factor. The rate at which you can produce babies doesn't matter much because it takes so long for them to grow.
Most tribes could produce more babies than they can support within a few years, regardless of losing 3/4 of their women. Unless you think 5-year olds can contribute to the defense of territory, the slight delay in baby production caused by a loss of women doesn't matter.
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