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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.
One thing that I think is often overlooked is that society gives men better incentives, which is actually nothing to sneeze at (though I won't get into "who has it worse").
Women value economic success in men much more than the reverse, while men value a woman's appearance. The upshot for men is that if you spend 10 years developing your economic value you're now richer. You can argue that developing economic value is more difficult than maintaining/developing good looks, but that misses the point I'm driving at.
Consider two identical twins. The parents force one twin to get good grades, play sports, practice piano, etc. The other twin is completely ignored and follows his base instincts (video games, probably). Unsurprisingly the first twin ends up with better life outcomes, and, while one could argue the first twin "deserves" this, in the sense that he worked hard to improve his life, this clearly illustrates that incentives matter immensely -- people just aren't good at abstractly reasoning about what's good for them in the long run and then doing it, otherwise both twins would have been fine.
I contend that society works similarly for men -- yes the constant pressure to be successful is a burden, but it is a legitimately good burden to have -- it's the reason men are more likely to pursue high-income careers. I contend that women lacking such incentives hurts them in the long run, and complaining that "women don't have to worry as much about being economically successful" is like the first twin complaining that his brother is allowed to just play videogames all day. Is it unfair that the first child has to work more? It certainly seems that way to a 12 year old.
I am not saying women have it better or that women have it worse. I've just never seen anyone make the point that, whether it’s your prospective girlfriends, your guy friends (via internal competition), or your parents, having an external factor drive you to improve your life is incredibly valuable, and seems like a pretty significant advantage.
And the downshot for women is if they spend 10 years on their career they are now 10 years older.
The tragedy of female doctors: they go through med school, finish residency, and say okay, time to find Mr. Right. But they're 30 years old. They want to marry another doctor, but male doctors are busy marrying 22 year old nurses.
Eh. A lot of the doctors in my class are...with other doctors. So too, there's plenty of shorter doctors - 5'7" and under - that would be thrilled to date and marry a 30yo resident or doctor.
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This is a failure of the US medical education system and not representative of global norms.
I find the very idea of pre-med disgusting, an utter waste of 2 years of one's life, especially when it's glaringly obvious that most of the world produces competent doctors without it. (I still think the average US doctor is modestly better than the average elsewhere, simply through selection pressures).
Then you have med school and then a mandatory residency without which you can't practise at all (barring rural Texas), taking up anywhere from 4-7 years of your life making less than minimum wage if you account for total hours worked.
The final payoff is huge, but even then you're just wasting years of your life, and for no better reason than that's how it's always been done. Fuck the notion of needing "well-rounded" doctors, when I go the ER the last thing I want or need is to debate the underpinnings of stoic philosophy when I'm dying of acute appendicitis. And if they're a palliative care doctor, they can just go read Seneca in their free time.
On the other hand, it's perfectly possible for an Indian or British doctor to graduate med school at 22, finish a good deal of their training by 26 or 27, and then just work.
Now, I'm unashedly elitist and would rather date other doctors, and while doctors marrying nurses was once common enough in India, it's become a rarety as the sex ratio has flipped to be in the favor of women in medicine.
Maybe the gulf between the two professions is smaller in the US and the UK, but in the latter, most docs marry other professionals or doctors themselves.
I also have doubts about the importance of a doctor's education in the long run.
Given two doctors who have been practicing for 10 years. One had a much more thorough education, but the other has a good habit of reading the latest advancements. Which would you prefer? Under these conditions it seems a bit silly to make such sacrifices just to maximize the capabilities of doctors at the moment they enter practice, with much less attention paid to their continual training.
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