Men are disposable? Men are to Blame!

Do you know if this is the same Allegra who used to post at Alas?

God, I hate tumblr. It’s just a complete shithole from top to bottom.

I hope you realize you’re talking to someone who’s tagline is “I like Misandry”

TB:

“Or does that only go for male enclaves?”

Of course. I can’t tell you the number of “tumblers” I’ve seen defending (or being outright proud) of the idea of hating men. These women feel that even if they “don’t really hate men” they have the right to express man-hatred from time to time because of, er, well… Patriarchy, I guess? And the men in their lives (if they are worth a damn at all-by the estimations of these women- should endeavor to be understanding of this fact.)

Highly ironic that to be “privileged” gives others the right to mock scorn and assault you, yet your “privilege” denies you any right to defend yourself. That is, apparently, the world we now live in.

Diesirae:

Thanks for the video link. It was both hilarious and sad all at once.

These people are just plain stupid. Too bad we can’t harness circular reasoning as renewable energy. I’m not even offended, I just feel bad for them.

“when did the supposed disposable quality of men (esp in war) become a thing?”

You wouldn’t know, would you, you sheltered, pampered, privileged little thing.

The problem with these people is not just misandry. Their problem is an airless in-group parochialism that blinds them to anything that is not young. white and female, preferably college. Women of color have been calling this out for two or three decades, and the response has been a bunch of clueless apology and ass-covering and refusal to make the actual necessary change of attitude and focus.

Their treatment of older feminists has been and continues to be appalling; basically it reflects their indoctrination into the very modern patriarchal estimation of a woman’s value they so adamantly claim to oppose.

They are a classic toxic elite – peevish, entitled and unaware of how entitled they are, feeding off of privilege they deny and which they have an interest in denying, and so entrenched in the invented and vehemently defended victiomhod that they think justifies thier privilege that it’s only natural that they would deny anyone else’s victimization.

Whenever the subject of racism comes up, white feminists make all the right noises and give all the rihgt lip service and go on making all the same easy mistakes. They all acknowledge with white privilege and all that, and then Amanda Marcotte comes along with her shit comic, and it’s not just that oen instance, it’s a sready pattern of framing every issue as if only the ones that affect young white women matter.

So this kind of erasure or simple ignorance of men’s reality should surprise no one, nor should their howly denials that they know men better than men do because “women’s way of knowing” and the “oppressed” always know the oppressors etc….

Nice analysis Ginkgo.

“refusal to make the actual necessary change of attitude and focus. ”

I’m afraid they’ll never change their attitude and the reason is that “they” in this case is a group that constantly renews itself. Even if some of them grow up and start getting a broader perspective, younger versions of themselves join the group much faster and in greater numbers than the older ones grow up.

That’s why they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Well, if it was just about making babies, it would be women and men in the lifeboats first, screw the children

@Typhonblue…

Society now consists of four men and fourteen women.

One of the men is gay.

The second has his genitals removed in a jealous fit by woman number thirteen.

The third is suffering PTSD from years of intertribal warfare and cant get it up.

The fourth is such an ugly little gnoll that none of the women will go near him without holding their noses.

Their future is grim.

@Equilibrium: Obviously once the children have been made they get priority. All female privilege can be related back to reproduction and child-care.

@Typhon: Not necessarily. It was an extreme example, but a society with slightly less men than women, which encourages men to be agressive, risk taking and disposable, is more capable of defending itself than a society which encourages men to value their lives equally to women.

And yeah, if it were an actual case of ten women and two men they’d be so inbred in a few generations that they’d die out. Even during world war one less than a tenth of the British male population was killed. I still maintain they were more reproductively fit as a result than a society which was willing to pose equal risk to women.

@Peter, your hypothetical begs the question of why it is that the society of 4 men and 4 women survived to the present day whereas the 10 women and 2 men didn’t. The human species gravitates heavily towards pair bonding, with the most successful, longest lived individuals being pair bonders.

The answer is simple. That we have evidence to suggest that in our species’ past, there had been fewer male breeders than female breeders suggests that our ancestors spent a great deal of time on the brink of annihilation. Each generation starts with roughly the same number of men and women, which means that if all of them survive and reproduce, it is because their society is strong and successful. If only a fraction of the men reproduce, it is because they were weak and died trying to fight for their group’s survival. Men are disposable in societies that are weak, struggling, and dying.

Has anyone here played *Tribes*?

It’s a semi-cooperative game about a very small band of hunter-gatherers. It’s very easy to get lopsided sex ratios, and if the culture decides that fertility is a virtue which will bring blessings on the band, and that only females can hunt, and males may gather or make tools but never hunt, it can get quite difficult. If you have lopsided sex ratios, you can’t afford gender roles that you might be able to afford with even sex ratios.

“But something in-between that extreme and “men and women risk their lives 50/50″ may still come out ahead.”

For tribes in danger of extinction, maybe. Not our case. Ever.

Maybe when we colonize Mars or something it might have some actual relevance.

But, whether or not Male Disposability is a rational attitude, in game-theoretic terms, today, has almost no bearing on whether it could plausibly be an evolutionary entrenched instinct.

Home Sapiens has spent millions of years living closer to Schala’s “tribes in danger of extinction”. Humanity has spent much more time living without “societies” as we know them today at all, so for most of evolutionary history dungone’s “weak societies that are on the verge of total collapse” weren’t even relevant.

If you guys are arguing that it is not rational for society to hold attitudes of Male Disposability today, then I agree.

But if you are arguing that, since it is not rational today, no such entrenched attitude could possibly even exist – well, are you seriously arguing that it never happens that people today act according to irrational yet strongly ingrained cognitive biases?

Easy. “Biology is not destiny”.

@dungone

I agree that Male Disposability is maladaptive today, and for quite some time before.

I must point out when you say “humans would have never evolved strong pair bonding instincts if they were solely adapted for male disposability”, it seems you are lapsing into a bit of an all-or-nothing logical fallacy.

I’m not aware of anyone here arguing that mankind evolved to consider men totally disposable, in the sense that any man could be disposed of at any time and that no-one would care at all about it, or solely responsible, in the sense that no man had any value other than that.

We are merely arguing that we evolved to see men, on the whole, as relatively more disposable than women.

That “relatively more disposable” still leaves ample room for pair-bonding and the like to form.

” Only problem is that individuals who die either fail to reproduce or curtail their reproduction severely so, over time, would have been weeded out of the gene pool.”

It depends. A man who sacrifices himself for two sisters, for instance, has a good chance of his genetic legacy being passed on, even if he never himself reproduces. What matters is that the genes are reproduced, not who does the reproducing. That’s how bee colonys with only one fertile female remain evoultionary viable- since the workers can’t themeselves reproduce, it makes sense for them to raise sisters.

Shoutybloke is correct, altruism is possible to propagate, genetically.

However, from a purely practical purpose, male disposability is only adaptive until a certain threshold sex ratio is reached, at which point female disposability becomes adaptive. What I mean is, the usual justification for the genetic component of male disposability is that “it only takes 1 man to impregnate 1000 women.” But if we flip this situation on its head, and we have 1000 women and 1 man, it becomes painfully clear that now those women have very little reproductive value, about 1/1000 that of the man. And I believe that is what dungone was getting at when discussing game theory (NB, he was talking about real game theory, not picking up chicks, man) and how a successful strategy in the short term can be disastrous in the long term. That successful ratio is extremely likely to be 50-50, since the vast majority of successful cultures hover near that range.

Male disposability was, in historical times, likely to “make up” for the high mortality rate for first-time parturitioners. Due to the pretty horrific birthing process in H. Sapiens*, in order to make sure men don’t outnumber women, some men had to die young. Now that we have this little thing called medicine, it no longer benefits humans to treat men as disposable. And indeed, we are certainly less disposable now than 500 years ago, or even 100.

*I always laugh when women try to treat childbirth like it is the most painful process known to man. Especially when this is 1st world, 3rd wavers who have never given birth. And who have never passed a kidney stone through a penis. Also, if you want to see a really terrible childbirth process, go ahead and peruse the wikipedia page for the spotted hyena. OWOWOWOWOWOWWWWWW

“I’m lead to believe that most wars of the past (with exceptions of course) were rather bloodless in comparison to the Industrial Warfare that dominated things from the 1860′s to the 1970′s.”

Bingo. Clarence wins the thread.

That difference is called chivalry. It applied foremeost to opposing forces officers and then also to civilians on all sides, because civilians were the real loot in pre-industrial wars. So much so that the Prussians preferred using mercenaries to drafting thier own civilians for as long as they could do it.

Note the semantic slippage in the term”chivalry”. It’s a sign of our degenerate age.

Now chivlary is culturally dependent. But even where it did not apply, as in China, there was a completely utilitarian explanations, Sun Zi’s, that suggested it was counterproductive on several levels to massacre captured enemey soldiers. As for killing civilians, that defeated the whole purpose of war.

ES, on the pain of childbirth – my mother has borne four kids and had a couple three kidney stones. She says kidney stones hurt worse. Men get kidney stomes too. And I echo your point on the silliness of childless internet feminists lecturing anyone on the point.

TB,
“Only problem is that individuals who die either fail to reproduce or curtail their reproduction severely so, over time, would have been weeded out of the gene pool.”

But their siblings would not. And it’s quite possible that the number of nieces and nephews would exceed the total of grandchildren if they had rramianed alive and had kids.

Humans have a range of non-breeding behaviors that enhance reproductive success. We did not become a pandemic weed species (7 billion and still cacking them out) by having a one man to 1,000 women breeding ratio. We are not herring.

Gingko:
More tomorrow but you are correct.
Though it was pretty rare, historical incidents of total “cleansing” of an opposing tribes males (and sometimes females and infants) did occur. Killing all the men in a tribe *if you could get away with it without losing much of your own* probably, sadly, had some evolutionary advantage as well. But it wasn’t the norm, and it’s a risky strategy. I think most war works better with rules, and rules tend to limit casulties.

“I’m lead to believe that most wars of the past (with exceptions of course) were rather bloodless in comparison to the Industrial Warfare that dominated things from the 1860′s to the 1970′s.”

Bingo. Clarence wins the thread.

This is actually a huge mis-perception. The wars of the past have been far more bloodier – as an individual, your chances of dying a violent death due to war were far greater prior to the “industrialized warfare” of the 1860’s to the 1970’s, or since. I’m really swamped right now with work, or else I’d look up some links for you guys on this. I’m sure someone who is really interested could find it.

What I mean is, the usual justification for the genetic component of male disposability is that “it only takes 1 man to impregnate 1000 women.” But if we flip this situation on its head, and we have 1000 women and 1 man, it becomes painfully clear that now those women have very little reproductive value, about 1/1000 that of the man. And I believe that is what dungone was getting at when discussing game theory (NB, he was talking about real game theory, not picking up chicks, man) and how a successful strategy in the short term can be disastrous in the long term. That successful ratio is extremely likely to be 50-50, since the vast majority of successful cultures hover near that range.

@EquilibriumShift, certainly. Anyone who has actually done any real strategic planning and understands game theory wouldn’t spend more than a few moments thinking about this. I will try to clarify your comment, though. If your strategy is to kill all your men on turn 1, then when turn 2 comes around and you have no more men left to kill, your strategy fails. To further go into what you said, it’s not that the “1000 women and 1 man” scenario diminishes women’s reproductive value merely in sexual terms. It’s that men do far more than just impregnate women. People seem to forget that people need to grow food, build fences for livestock, chop down trees, build roads, mills, granaries, homes, tools, furniture, etc. All of these things, over the long term, contribute to the long-term viability of all of the offspring that the community produces. The whole idea that you can have a sustainable society of 10 women for every man is ludicrous, especially if what you’re doing to achieve this is killing off your men. Male disposability is pretty much suicidal.

@Schala

Tabernac, c’est vrai! 😉

@Dungone: “I think the logical fallacy here is that a man dying does not actually add an extra womb to the group. It’s not like trading a pawn for a queen in chess. A man dying only leaves the rest of the group further exposed and less able to fend for itself.”

True, but in order to defend the group said pawn has to be willing to sacrafice itself if necessary. If queens were exposed to equal risk then the game would be over alot sooner. Men dying isn’t an ideal outcome, it’s just a more reproductive outcome than women dying.

“Exactly. It was necessary in the past, but isn’t presently, so it should change”

hi, Ptere. welcoem!.

“so it should change…..”

Not so fast. Mintaining society requires disposability, on many levels. What should change is that it needs to be shared evenly, as a feature of adulthood rather than this or that gender role.

True, but in order to defend the group said pawn has to be willing to sacrafice itself if necessary. If queens were exposed to equal risk then the game would be over alot sooner.

And what part of “it’s not like trading a pawn for a queen in chess” didn’t you understand?

@Dungone: Ok, it’s not like trading a pawn in chess. But whatever metaphor you prefer, a defender is pretty useless if they’re risk averse. Defence of the group necessitates disposability.

Yep, coal mining and meat processing probably have more casualties than the US army (<-out-of-my-ass guess)

But those kinds of risks are probably more or less avoidable, whereas combat will always be a dangerous environment no matter what regulations are involved.

@Dungone: Ok, it’s not like trading a pawn in chess. But whatever metaphor you prefer, a defender is pretty useless if they’re risk averse. Defence of the group necessitates disposability.

You’re failing to understand repeated game. So let’s actually stick to chess for a moment longer. Imagine you had to play repeated games of chess against various opponents. But when your pieces die, they really die – you have to start the next game with the pieces that you ended the last game with. Playing aggressively with your pawns is a great short-term strategy that may even win you a single game. But it’s a losing strategy in the long-term. In fact, long term, you need your pawns just as much as you do any other pieces.

You can’t look at the long term viability of an entire society over many years the same way as you would for a single “battle.” That is the folly of male disposability. This idea of treating the womb as somehow more important than a man, it’s only telling half of the story. The other half of the story is that modern society wasn’t built by dead men, it was built by living, healthy men with living, healthy fathers. To the extent that societies don’t protect men and men’s ability to raise children, those societies are holding themselves back and potentially they’re even falling apart.

“You’re failing to understand repeated game. So let’s actually stick to chess for a moment longer. Imagine you had to play repeated games of chess against various opponents. But when your pieces die, they really die – you have to start the next game with the pieces that you ended the last game with. Playing aggressively with your pawns is a great short-term strategy that may even win you a single game. But it’s a losing strategy in the long-term. In fact, long term, you need your pawns just as much as you do any other pieces.”

So much so that Sun Zi spends more ink talking about taking care of troops than about officers, so much so that he advises treating enemy captives well so you can turn them to your side.

Also: “Either way, the core reason why we are facing a global warming catastrophe is because our society thinks it is appropriate to send men into coal mines and oil fields to die for fossil fuels. It all starts with the cheapening of men’s lives.”

That’s completely unrelated. Even if fossil fuels grew on trees and were completely safe to harvest we’d be facing global warming. The reason men’s lives were risked to get coal was because it made other things possible, like the internet and gender blogs.

One side has pieces which are willing to sacrafice their own lives, the other has pieces which might decide to jump off the board and hide under the box. Which side would you really expect to have more survivors after three games? In for defenders to be worth anything, they have to be disposable.

Pieces can’t jump off the board any more than the player can take out a gun and shoot his opponent. I only made a slight rule change, I didn’t anthropomorphise the pieces. But even if we were to do it your way, you’d be screwed either way because playing aggressively on your first game you’d be left with is a bunch of anthropomorphically pregnant chess pieces who can’t even move more than half a square per turn.

But here’s what really happens at a repeated-game chess game tournament. Guys such as yourself who are in the “pawn disposability” camp sacrifice their pieces to win one, maybe two preliminary games. Everyone else goes for a loss-free draw as a matter of survival strategy, which then allows them to easily dominate the risk-taking players after they’ve run out of pieces in later games. But – enough about chess, really.

In terms of reproduction men *are* worth less than a woman, because a woman has to be kept safe for the full nine months of pregnancy, followed by a similar period of nursing and related care. To return to the original argument, if women are exposed to equal risk, the whole community produces less offspring.

As Gingko already pointed out, that makes men more valuable, not less. Being vulnerable is not the same as being valuable. It doesn’t make you more valuable to be vulnerable, it actually makes you a burden onto others who need to take care of you. By being vulnerable, you increase the value of those who take care of you. Having a womb is important, yes, but as it turns out that by your description of it, childbirth is a way of “using up” that individual’s value, as they can offer very little else in the meantime. Men, by not having to focus on giving birth, can continue to do everything else.

This goes well beyond 9 months of pregnancy. Men, right down to their very own physiology, can focus on becoming experts at other survival skills. “Survival” being the operative word, as opposed to sacrificial. They are needed for humans to be able to live a lifestyle that is anything beyond a starvation-level struggle. Without men’s continued survival, the next generation isn’t going to be in a good place to reproduce and provide for itself, anyway. So the 9 months of pregnancy are just a single “stage” in a repeated-game.

P.John Irons:

Thank you. I was going to comment but I kept waiting for Dungone to bring up his argument about ancient warfare (which is probably really an argument about pre-civilized warfare) but he never did, so I’m going to skip that.

You’re right, and there are other things that Ginko and Dungone are overlooking.
1. The most risky wars can have the biggest rewards.
So let’s say a smaller tribe takes a larger tribe by surprise, kills all the men and boys (over a certain age) enslaves the rest, takes and rapes the women. If the smaller tribe loses few or any males (because its a surprise) then I don’t see how this is not favored by evolution. Clearly you can’t count on surprise “extermination” warfare as a consistent strategy, but it’s clearly advantageous enough that it’s always been in the “real world” strategy books.

2. With most classical wars being rather low casualty, the incentives for warfare would have remained constant for most of the past 25000 or so years. Humans have evolved along WITH warfare, even in fairly modern times.

3. Gingko seems to be doing special pleading: supposedly it’s just as important to have a man around AFTER the pregnancy is successful as before. From a strictly evolutionary point of view, this is wrong as the ONLY important consideration is that the genes get passed along, NOT that every child grows up in the most ideal environment.

So sorry, but male desposibility IS useful in extreme conditions and under certain types of warfare. The GOOD thing is that there is a limit to how many males can be killed before this attitude becomes counterproductive, not that one needs to believe in a 1:1 exchange of valuation.

I mean seriously, do Dungone or Ginko want to take say 100 female volunteers and 100 male volunteers, put them on a battlefield with axes (or any weapon good for hand to hand combat) and train them an equal amount of time – and see which group is going to “win”, almost all the time?
And that’s why when it comes to warfare and most dangerous things men are considered more disposable.

Nowadays (except maybe in certain jobs like Fire Fighter where strength and endurance are big things and very very very few females can pass a firefighter fitness test) these attitudes are often useless or even counterproductive and romance and bad history often combine to exaggerate the importance of male desposability. And these attitudes have to be fought, esp since there’s no reason that females can’t do 99 percent plus of most of the crappy and dangerous (there will still be exceptions…areas where females just can’t almost ever hack it)work that men do, esp since they aren’t tied to having babies. But I will NOT apologize for recognizing that pregnancy is a time when women need protection if you care about them successfully having your baby.

@Ginkgo: Is it possible for a mother, or other member’s of society, to replicate a man’s role by protecting her and providing for her? Yes. Is it possible for a man to replicate a woman’s role by carrying the child during nine months of pregnancy? No. So men are dispensible if necessary and are thus selected for disposibility.

Again, as pointed out above, men’s ability to defend is related to their willingness to sacrafice their life. It’s not that a man getting killed is ideal for reproduction, it’s just less bad than a woman getting killed. “Women and children first” is a concept that occurs in every human culture without known exception, it didn’t come from nowhere.

@Dungone: They’re not capable of jumping off the board any more than the losses in one chess game count towards the next. We both made changes to the rules to illustrate our points. You pointed out that men dying means less men to defend, I pointed out that unless men are encouraged to sacrafice their lives there is no defence, regardless how many or how few men there are.

“I mean seriously, do Dungone or Ginko want to take say 100 female volunteers and 100 male volunteers, put them on a battlefield with axes (or any weapon good for hand to hand combat) and train them an equal amount of time – and see which group is going to “win”, almost all the time?”

playing devils advocate….

there is a fair chance the women would have an upper hand, not because they were quicker or stronger but the men would have more kill reluctance…

Clarence, the point you are missing is that you are starting from an assumed 50/50 ratio, and that your arguments are only true if the sex ratio is 1:1 already. For example, when you say that men are not needed as greatly after the conception as women are, because it is only necessary to pass on genes, not to ensure that the child grows up in a good environment, you are forgetting 2 things.

1) Each child is only 1/2 of the man’s. Therefore, in order to truly pass on his genes, a man needs more than child.
2) You need to produce VIABLE offspring. Your child isn’t viable if it dies before puberty, due to any of the following: disease, famine, exposure, or being slaughtered by a foreign tribe. All of which the man can help to prevent, with only the emphasized point requiring disposability.

Also, in your scenario about a smaller tribe overpowering the larger tribe, you are suffering from a misconception of imposing culture on genetics. The women of the larger tribe are relatively happy, because someone is still taking care of them (and likely impregnating them). Sure they are likely not treated as well as the “first” wives, but that is more about the men ensuring that they are valued (see ladies, if we go, you will end up like this with someone else) than any kind of set in stone behavior. I can guarantee that on an aggregate level, if captured women have better baby making hips than the “first wives”, those first wives will get dumped on their asses PDQ. So in general, women don’t necessarily care who is doing the providing/protecting, as long as that man is ensuring her genes are passed on. (Which is why, on a genetic level, it makes just as much sense for women to engage in infidelity as men – especially when our very sperm engage in the same kind of warfare we do, on a cellular level).

Peter,

a man getting killed is less bad for reproduction than a women getting killed, up to a certain point. And I still believe that that point is at, or very close to a 1:1 ratio. If anyone can provide a solid reason why it might be something else, then please enlighten me.

We are all failing to account for something very vital. Humans have an extremely difficult birthing process, and for a long, long time, a lot of women died in childbirth. I would be willing to bet a lot of what I have that the number of women who died in childbirth was very, very close to the number of men who died in war. Because, as Clarence correctly pointed out, most war was less lethal than today, for a number of reasons. One of which might be the fact that death was often dealt up close and personal, and even today, when death is relatively anonymous on a battlefield, the vast, vast majority of expended ammunition is not directed at killing the enemy.

But my pet hypothesis is that war became a more and more necessary endeavor as the ratio of males to females got larger and larger. Essentially, win or lose, the goal of a healthy society is maintained, since either their will be less males of breeding age, more females, or some combination of both. When the balance is restored, the desire for war turns sour, and people seek peace.

Of course, this dynamic changes drastically when nationalism becomes stronger. All of a sudden, enemies are existential threats, and need to be dealt with accordingly. And of course, the greatest atrocities always occur when the nationalism, or even just tribal identity is the strongest. Music, art, dance, etc. are tools of genocide in the wrong hands.

Clarence,
“3. Gingko seems to be doing special pleading: supposedly it’s just as important to have a man around AFTER the pregnancy is successful as before. From a strictly evolutionary point of view, this is wrong as the ONLY important consideration is that the genes get passed along, NOT that every child grows up in the most ideal environment.”

No, I assumed that it was obvious that the genes don’t get passed along unitl the offspring breeds. In other words birth is not the end of the story, it’s only a midpoint. That’s not special pleading.

Wait, ES got there first.

He makes a good point. We are so used to the protections and security of civil society that we think they are natural and inevitable, or at least we tend to take them for granted.

“I mean seriously, do Dungone or Ginko want to take say 100 female volunteers and 100 male volunteers, put them on a battlefield with axes (or any weapon good for hand to hand combat) and train them an equal amount of time – and see which group is going to “win”, almost all the time?
And that’s why when it comes to warfare and most dangerous things men are considered more disposable”

I don’t see how this example proves your contention, Clarence. What it proves is that women are more vulnerable, so actually your example argues for male indispensability! Who is going to protect those women from those other men?

You can have a Virtual Father set up such as Peter posits, some societal system of support, but even that is based on men and so men are not dispensable.

“So sorry, but male desposibility IS useful in extreme conditions and under certain types of warfare.”

The record is pretty clear that this is absolutely the case. The issue is 1) how to reduce this need if that is possible; I am dubious, and 2) how to spread the risk evenly. And no, having a uterus does not make you more valuable alive than out risking your life for the rest of us. Can we not all think of women who would contribute a lot more to society by not having children than by having them?

@Peter,

At what value of x does it become impossible for a man to take care of x women, and c*x children (where c is the average number of children each woman bears in her lifetime)? Keep in mind that ‘take care of’ includes ensuring safety from marauding bands of other men, intent on taking their women and killing their children. When you say “its way off of 1”, give me a little evidence that that is the case in the context of the conditions under which we evolved, considering we are discussing the possibility that male disposability (i.e. the viability of a society where x is larger than 1) is genetically inherent.

Today (and indeed, during WWI, excepting certain locales) we have a food surplus. We generate enough food to feed the entire world, plus some. Therefore, the rules of the game are different than say, the 90,000+ years of human evolution when we did not have a food surplus, ever. I totally agree that male disposability is beneficial, on an aggregate level, to our society, under post-industrial revolution conditions. I would also point out that female disposability is beneficial, on an aggregate level, under the same conditions. We don’t need every single woman to reproduce to sustain our civilization. A few women producing many babies each would work just as well. And we are at the point that we don’t need to worry about childcare, etc.

The abundance of one disposability, and dearth of the other is why this issue is discussed on this board.

I get the feeling that you argue so strongly that male disposability has no evolutionary advantage, because you oppose it on moral grounds.

Implying that I have hidden motives is ad-hominem and an appeal to emotion. Characterizing my position as “dogmatic” is equally unfounded. It doesn’t help your argument for you to take this approach. I’ll explain what my “motivation” is in a moment.

However, factors in that it might quite well be that a single male may provide these same services (protection, hunting, and the like) for 1.2 women (for argument’s sake).

Where is your actual reasoning that makes you say that .8 men per women is just as good as 1 man per woman? You’re just saying it, your only argument seems to be that it makes sense to you. We have evolved countless physical traits that give us such minor advantages that it’s inconceivable that it helped our ancestors survive except by the skin of their teeth. You’ll never convince me that any detail is too small to affect our survival. But if all of this is for the sake of argument, then why not say that the most advantageous situation is actually have 1.2 men for every woman? There are 105 boys born for every 100 girls, typically. If every womb was needed for reproduction and men weren’t needed, why not just give birth to more wombs? Why invest those extra womb-resources to making “less valuable” men?

I get what you’re saying, really. As anyone in business knows, it’s better to suffer a small loss than an even bigger loss. You don’t just close down shop because you weren’t profitable in the last couple of days. But the same rule says it’s better still to enjoy a small gain rather than a small loss. Acknowledging that last part seems to be missing from those who are on your side of this discussion. The only reasonable conclusion is that groups that “suffer” small gains will end up far better positions that groups which “suffer” small losses.

What really bugs me here is the way that terms are getting thrown around without any attempt to understand them first. On the one hand, male provider-ship has some clear evolutionary advantages, whether it’s mitigating losses or improving gains. Male disposability, on the other hand, is a strictly cultural term used to describe societal attitudes and the socialization of men. Trying to say that this socialization is advantageous even when it’s clearly detrimental is just a bizarre way of begging the question. Sure, if it was truly evolved as some vestigial behavioral trait, then fine. But throwing fathers out of their children’s lives, sentencing men to draconian prison sentences, and forcing them to work in coal mines because it seems more convenient than investing into cleaner energy sources? Those are social policy decisions, all of them objectively bad, all of them as far removed from evolution as things get. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Male_Power#.22Why_Men_are_the_Disposable_Sex.22

@dungone

I apologize if you felt I was ad-homineming you. The hidden motives that i imputed to you are neither more nor less nefarious than the hidden motives we are all of us prone to, at some time or another.

You’re right to point out that I merely stated, for argument sake, the possibility that 1.2 men may look after 1 woman, without evidence. It could, as you point out, just as well be the other way around.

The point of all that is just to show how many possibilities exist, that need to be explored and ruled out, before one can end up confidently stating that the “disposability ratio” is exactly 1:1 between men and women.

As for throwing fathers out of children’s lives, I agree with you that these are horrendous social attitudes. But those are present-day social attitudes, which to my mind have no bearing on whether “male disposability” had some advantage in the evolutionary past.

I am not arguing that “male disposability had some evolutionary benefit in the past, therefore it is morally OK to throw dad’s out of children’s lives today”. My argument is rather that one needs to understand, objectively, where such attitudes come from, before one can best decide how to counter them.

Bottom line: male disposability is not the same thing as male provider-ship. It is a term invented for the strict purpose of describing societal attitudes towards men. It is, at very best, a reaction by ingrates upon seeing men toil on behalf of their families: a developed sense of entitlement that normalized self-sacrifice as the only redeeming attribute of men. Not, as it were, the hard work and potential sacrifice itself. It, quite frankly, is an ignorant attitude held by selfish, sexist assholes. Nothing about male provider-ship says that men have evolved to expect others to bring nothing to the bargaining table, or to throw their lives away for women whose only sense of humor is their bellicose laugh at the thought of having sex with a sacrificial pawn. Yet society says to these men, “Fuck you. Die anyway!” They no longer toil for the sake of their family and loved ones, but for people who are disgusted by them and hate them. That is what makes male disposability what it is.

Absolutely true, Ginkgo. If the MO of a victor is to sweep through the loser’s camp and steal women for slave taking and raping and whatnot, then you would be less likely to fight with someone who is married to your daughter, no?

I have a female friend, a woman who served in the Marines with me, but she never got deployed because she got pregnant right before the Iraq war started. Recently, there was a news story out of her home town where some woman’s baby fell into a wild dog exhibit at the zoo and was immediately mauled to death. This former Marine wrote a long Facebook post about how disgusted she was that there were men standing right there but yet not a single one of them dropped whatever they were doing to fling themselves head first into a pit of marauding dogs in order to get themselves killed along with the kid, just for a good show of chivalry, apparently. This entitled attitude is, as best as I can describe it, asking men to perform an act of cuckold martyrdom. To be stupid enough to sacrifice their lives for some inattentive mother who most likely would never want to have babies with the vast majority of the men who are being asked to kill themselves as if it’s nothing is, at the very least, an act of genetic suicide. This is where I get off at. Male Disposability to me, with what I see of it in our own society, is exactly that: genetic suicide. It’s especially so in a modern, metropolitan city where men’s Y chromosomes are all mixed up. Saving some other woman’s kid in that scenario is downright stupid for a man to do, since he is in no way guaranteeing the survival of his own genotype.

I want to say one last thing in this thread about what makes male disposability different than male provider-ship. We know the philosophical underpinnings of male disposability as a societal attitude. It’s the ultimate way in which the rich elite have pulled the wool over everyone else’s heads.

It is, as ES coined it, the Emir-of-Saud fallacy. You’d get ignorant assholes such as Emmeline Pankhurst who argued about how oppressed their rich asses were for not having the right to vote, even as poor men were dying in the trenches by the millions without having any such right to vote, either. But boo-hoo, women were oppressed by the Patriarchy! This concept is literally an inversion of Marxism, and just as ridiculous. Now, using sex, the rich can claim to be oppressed by the poor! Clever lot, those proto-feminists were. They pretty much handed class struggle over to the rich on a silver platter. And it suited them, since they themselves were rich.

What kind of Marine would think like that? That’s not a former Marine, that’s an ex-Marine.

Current Air Force… now I wish you hadn’t asked.

JP Irons,
“This debate is going in circles.
There are pros and cons on the tribe’s ledger whenever a man or a woman dies.”

Yes. Period. As I said above, disposability for the sake of the group is clearly adaptive, or it wouldn’t have developed and it wouldn’t be praised so universally as a moral value.

The issue is equality of disposability.

Damn, hit the button too soon: But we can probably all agree that male disposiblity is at least of reduced necessity in the first world and that we can work towards easing the cultural pressure on men to risk their health and lives for other people.

@ES, I read that one this morning as well. I don’t think it’s off topic at all. That author’s recollection of the gale of laughter he heard when women were asked if they would have sex with him is what made me mention the “bellicose laugh” a couple of comments up.

For the sake of placating everyone here, I’m willing to amend my terminology to say “cultural male disposability,” even though I think it’s redundant and there is no other kind. I live in New York City, so that article hits it right on the nail. More-so than in any other place I’ve ever been (and I’ve lived all over while in the military), New York women are just awful. I can walk into a bar in SoHo right now and I know exactly what I’m going to hear: “What do you do for a living? Where do you live?” Answering those 2 questions correctly guarantees at least a 10 minute chat, even if the girl has a boyfriend nearby. Answering it incorrectly (such as when I lived in Queens) and you get passed over in an instant. I don’t mind so much because it seems like the “sum of my assets” gets me further than most, but it’s pretty insulting nevertheless.

Could you provide sources for the statements that “the conviction rate for rape is right in line with other violent crimes” and that female on male rape has a virtually 0 percent chance of conviction? Thank you!

super tags didn’t work, so any strangely placed 1,2,3 or 4 in the text refers to the footnotes numbered (surprisingly) 1 to 4.

Mass homicide of all male children in the world followed by the mass suicide of all men means the end of humanity. All us men are disposable anyway, right?

@ grey

Do you want some privacy while you rub one out over your power fantasy there?

SOme fascinating stuff here, and great fodder for my own arguments elsewhere.

I do have one issue- the claim that women are by and large equal to doing all the same jobs men have to with (minor)exceptions.
Thats a disingenuous statement- many jobs require a physiciallity that most women do not naturally have,
Sure there are some women who have more brawn than normal,, but to hold them up as proof is ridiculous.
to this VERY day men are still engaging in and being seriously injuredor killed in a multitude of professions women can neither do with any great success, nor do they try to.

Someone brought up military service. f the argument that men and women can do the job equally was valid- then i hope that claimant would claim that an army composed of men and an army com,posed of women would do all tasks equally well, which we all know is not the case. If it was militaries would not have LOWER standards of physical fitness for women.

No matter how many teacher, banker and lawyer jobs these misdandrists hold up as proof of equality, there are and always will be a ton more physical jobs that kill men that women can not and will not be able to do with anywhere near the equivalent effect.

Sure a woman can move a 50lb bag of grain, but not nearly as fast nor as for as long. SO technically she can do the job, but its a moot point in the long run if she only gets half as much done.