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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.
Good times create Weak men is predominately about this very issue, where daughters are favored over sons in the family and society.
To cite examples, it's easier to look at the mirror image: When do families and society most want sons? Two example in modernity come to mind - Soviet Union post WWII, and China during One Child policy era. In the words of the saying, Hard time create Strong men.
The way that happens, I posit, is hard times cause society to re-structure the rules to incentivize men to be productive and have loyalty to the system or family. Unfortunately for women, these social rules means shame if you don't marry by a certain age (ridiculously low to our sensibility), family constantly implying you are a burden, and cutoff from many avenues of independence.
In the good times, the lower X% of men are seen as the burden. From both society's and the individual family's perspective, they are not threatened by any attack, and have no shortage of food or material goods. Thus no need for aggressively catering society to the working class man. While some men will still be valued for being highly charismatic leaders, risk taking entrepreneurs, even charming rogues, there is no reason to supply a floor for failures. For society, this social darwinism may be considered feature not bug, after all these low ability males are still potential competition and threats. And for family, daughters are far more "a joy to have in the household" than sons, being more clean and less subversive, especially in teenage through early twenties. Since productivity/defense is of no concern to the family, the daughter is the better deal and she will likely take care of the parents more in old age.
Yikes, if we're creating weak men, hard times can't be far off! Which of course will apply to all the genders, but as the joke goes (and my analysis portends) Hard times occur, Women most effected.
Would you even need to posit a deliberate restructuring? Hard times mean capital is expensive, which makes physical labor (relatively; not absolutely!) more valuable, which disadvantages men less than women. Hard times mean survival via crime or conquest is more tempting, which makes the physical ability to deter or fight criminals more valuable, which disadvantages men less than women. And if hard times increase child mortality, then even though the need for more childbearing to keep up the number of surviving kids makes women more valuable, it's a form of value that doesn't cash out in power and independence.
I'm not saying there's never been a deliberately patriarchal rules-structuring, just that the explicit restructuring would be a subset of entries on a much longer list full of implicit changes. One might expect that hard times increase the demand for young people to go to work immediately (which relatively energetic ADHD young men might be better at) vs studying for years for a more lucrative professional position (which relatively focused, socially dutiful young women might be better at) ... but for most of human history it's not like women were pushed toward the "study for a lucrative professional position" option anyway, hard times or not. And that at least feels more like a cultural decision than a natural consequence. I vaguely recall reading of a culture (Ba'hai?) in which you were expected to focus on girls' education in hard times, because giving boys education they wouldn't use was a waste whereas girls would be more likely to pass along their education to their children when times improved again.
Indeed, deliberate patriarchal rules structuring seems like it’s generally been a much better deal for women than whatever was arrived at through implicit changes, as the Abrahamaic religions can attest.
This is probably because even patriarchal fathers care much more about their daughters getting a good deal under the terms of the society they live in than they do about men-as-class.
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