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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.
I think your points overall make sense, but you don't account at all for variability and social mobility. As @rae mentioned below, men tend to live higher risk lifestyles. Their appetite for risk is higher, so the rewards are greater and the failures are more steep.
On top of that, women tend to rely on immutable traits i.e. beauty, and to some degree the social network they were born in, to confer them status. If you're an ugly woman born into a poor family, there is not much of a chance for you to get out. In fact, this Brookings study on male vs female social mobility says:
For men, there are many things that don't seem fair on the surface. That being said, the variability inherent in being a man is worth quite a lot. Having the ability to rise out of your circumstances, despite a bad throw on the genetic lottery, means that men innately have optionality that women generally don't. Sure you can argue that programs and other things biased towards women help them move up the socioeconomic ladder, but at the end of the day most women don't seem to have the mindset to let them take the risks they would need to take to climb.
Ultimately I do think men get the short end of the stick in some regards, and women in others. It's not clear to me at this moment, and I doubt we'll have clarity for a while yet, who gets the 'better minimum deal' overall.
I think at least some of this is culture. Men are taught — from day one — that it is their responsibility to make themselves employable, to do whatever job pays the most even if they hate it, to fight their way to the top of any job they get, and to job hop when the pay isn’t rising fast enough for them.
Women have the privilege I call “second income privilege.” They get to not prioritize wealth generation. They get to think about whether they want a good paying job in a demanding field or not, whether having more money is worth being bored or working somewhere unpleasant or long hours. Their money isn’t “feed the family” money, so they get to think of work as fun, as a calling, as almost a hobby.
May I ask what women you know like this? Because the women around me working are damn well helping to keep the family going; one co-worker is saving huge amounts of her wages to pay her son's college fees, for example. If you're going for a mortgage, you better have a two-income family. And there are some of us who are still single who work to pay our own bills.
While I think men may have a hard time of it today, the amount of pure whining and pussing on here makes me want to tell you all to grow a pair and man up. Not very sympathetic of me, I realise, but I had a sort of male-brained upbringing so I'm not the nurturing, supportive, "Oh Clive you are so wonderful and manly and I adore you" type of female.
Women still bring in disproportionately less than men in two-income households and work fewer hours. And in the jobs they do work, they have a higher job satisfaction than men do.
There are always tradeoffs that people make when choosing if they want to work and what job to take. Men tend to trade their time and happiness for more money; women tend to trade money for more time and happiness.
Looking at my own life, I know of multiple women who gave up high paying, high stress careers to be yoga instructors, writers, and life coaches. I know of literally no men who have done the same. That's not to say that all women have that option, but at the same time more women than men do.
Well, then - since we espouse equity, let's see if any government will fund initiatives to lower women's job satisfaction, a goal I consider eminently more achievable by a government than improving men's job satisfaction.
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