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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 don't really agree with your assessment of the minimum deal for women. The minimum deal cannot be "get married" in a world where so many women are single mothers.
Let's leave aside the world of profoundly bad luck outside the scope of what might happen to someone posting on this site, like being drafted into war or dying of leukemia at age 10. I'm just going to look at fairly common Anglosphere life-paths.
A whole bunch of the women who I went to high school with are now single mothers working menial jobs. They work hard all day, then they come home to their kids and work some more. That sounds like a really bad deal to me. Now, you could argue that this could just as easily happen to a man who has kids young and gets roped into paying child support for 18 years. True enough. I could quibble that men are more likely to skip out, or that childcare is harder than child support, or that getting someone else pregnant is a lot harder than getting pregnant so you have a lot more time to reconsider your life choices, but fair enough.
A whole bunch more went into dumb low-paying fields. Their mentors encouraged them to do what they love, hormones told them that what they love is teaching or early childhood education, and now they're precariously employed substitute teachers making barely more than minimum wage. There was a girl who I went to highschool with who was neck-and-neck with me for grades, competing with me for awards and the like. All of her talents are now going to waste in a dead-end job. I am a software engineer. The fact that my teachers and peers were less encouraging to me than her is probably a contributing factor to the fact that I didn't sleepwalk myself into a bad decision like she did. I would not trade places with her today.
You could say that both of these are freely made decisions and therefore don't count. Maybe. But there's a weird interplay here. Yes, if women and men were both perfectly rational robots, being a woman would be an advantage. But humans are not perfectly rational robots. Women, especially young women, seem much more inclined to fall for misguided orthodoxy, like going into debt for a Gender Studies degree and hoping it all works out in the end (a lot of people point out that women go to college more, few mention that this is often not to their benefit).
Honestly, I would not want much of the "help" that women get from the various orthodox authorities. They do not have their patients' best interests at heart.
For men, the roads to Heaven and Hell are both overgrown with thistles and guarded by lions. For women, the road to Heaven might be slightly easier than for men, but the road to Hell is paved, icy, and all downhill. The absolute bottom may be lower for men, but women can literally screw themselves out of a fulfilling life at age 18 in under an hour. At least army recruiters can't have you sign the contract while you're drunk.
Very interesting point about college. It's a trap for so many people, so maybe the ease with which women enter college isn't the benefit it looks like. I'm not sure which comment I agree with more, which is a sign of a worthwhile debate!
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I think that a lot of people, of both sexes, are more able to make changes to their careers than they think. Three examples from my life: My parents divorced when I was a child. My mother had essentially no marketable skills. She started off doing temp receptionist work and gradually moved her way up and through various companies, eventually getting to a head of IT role, with significant remuneration. My wife grew up in an area that seemed to have not-so-bright employment opportunities. Was working menial jobs like McDonalds/call center. Was laid off, decided to take a one-year HR program, has already worked her way up to a director role. For a male example that is kind of extreme, I knew a guy who got an engineering degree, decided he wasn't doing enough to help people, so he became a nurse. Eventually decided that his passion was pig farming, so he up and did that.
EDIT: Fourth example: I knew a guy who was selling cell phones to businesses. Decided he didn't like it; went to night school for a year or two or however long it took (I don't actually know) to become a barber. Now owns a couple barbershops.
There's a regular stream of folks who comment here asking specifically about this - how do I make a switch in my career to something that isn't so dead end? Something that's not just stuck due to a dumb career decision I made when I was 18? Hard questions are things like: what percentage of people who are in this position get serious about trying to make a change? Is there a differential between rates along the lines of sex? Why is that? Tough questions, and I'm sure folks will be quick to jump in with conclusions, but without data. In any event, I imagine that a significant number of them could make significant changes.
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