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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.
A few weeks back, @RococoBasilica remarked:
Which is a good way to put it.
The Male class also has a massive weakness in that basically all of them want to simp for and protect the Female class in varying degress. If not for this attribute, the Male class would likely be overpowered in gameplay and the Female class non-viable. Some even characterise gameplay as the Female class to be “Easy” or “Tutorial” mode in the current patch.
In modern Western societies, women can enjoy higher floors and higher medians when it comes to life outcomes courtesy of feminism, Women-are-Wonderfulness, and evolutionary biology. To add some points to your list:
Historically or in modern times, a given woman has a greater chance of having descendants (men are much more likely to die childless)
Pussy put option: there’s a limit as to how bad life can get
Women are human beings; men are human doings—men have the burden of performance, from sexual to romantic to social to financial
There’s always the possibility for women that they “meet someone,” and all their financial needs are taken care of
Occurrences like “meeting someone,” courtship, romance, or sometimes even job opportunities just happen for women like Acts of God while they exist passively
Women have automatic social value and legitimacy, and rarely have to justify their presence anywhere
Women are less mocked and more readily forgiven for saying dumb, banal shit and there is little expectation for women to be funny or interesting regardless of their looks, relative to men—for example, ugly, unknown girls can wallflower during academic and professional networking events and have people see them and initiate conversation: wallflower guys will often just get ignored and even get mocked for being shy cowards
Friends, acquaintances, coworkers, potential romantic partners don’t really hold it against women if/when they flake, lie, or just generally don’t maintain their word compared to men acting similarly
Greater familial support (as fathers want to keep their daughter off the pole) and less judgment for living at home or with family
Unlike for men, living at home or with family can even be a positive signal for women, as it suggests they aren’t such a hoe and/or otherwise insufferable to have gotten kicked out
For half-decent looking women or greater, the world is but a playground for looking cuUuUute—and if hiccups ever occur, they can always play damsel in distress to summon a simp army to do their bidding
I don't think men really suffer too many of the risks either these days. It's always rather laughable when fairly comfortable young men LARP about men being killed down the mines or on the battlefield; the number of men engaged in genuinely dangerous work grows ever smaller in the West and no American has been drafted for over fifty years. Now, some of the points raised by such people are clearly serious issues; homelessness, crime &c. Yet too many glibly dismiss the serious problems women disproportionately face too, partly because, ironically, so many internet posters live in young, urban, liberal environments.
This, for instance, just absolutely reeks of terminal online-ness.
It's perhaps a product of the fact that for any problem that women in particular face, there's likely a large, well-funded organization or government program dedicated to addressing and minimizing it.
Compare how much attention and funding the issue of breast cancer gets (42,000 deaths/year in the U.S.) to, say, prostate cancer (34,700 deaths/year in the U.S.).
Is it 'glibly dismissing' breast cancer as a risk to point out that prostate cancer is causing deaths of the same order of magnitude and thus probably should get similar funding and attention?
Which is different from being incorrect.
And you haven't actually claimed he's incorrect. In fact, by rushing in to to attack him personally for insinuating that women can exploit their attractiveness... you've actually bolstered his point that "they can always play damsel in distress to summon a simp army."
You have literally come rushing to the defense of some theoretical women who aren't actually under attack presently.
Just so.
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