Okay. So this is history as it played out. What about moving forward then? Should we keep at it as it is?
Men Inequality: are men falling behind in society?
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Alternatively, in your view, is it right to limit our identities, including the capacity of our minds, to our biologies?
I think that yes, men are falling behind.
One thing that's interesting to me is how this is tolerable to society and individuals to the same extent that human beings are hard-wired to protect women and expect service and sacrifice of men.
I think that the fundamental biological imperative of 'protect women' has never changed. What we saw with feminism in the West was simply a change in how we were expected to do that. 'Protect women' stopped being 'keep them in the home and provide for all their needs' and became 'grant them freedoms and privileges'.
I don't think it's reasonable to believe that this was ever about power and oppression in the relationship between the sexes. In the relationship between capital and labour yes, but not between men and women. Many believe it, however, conflating 'men' with 'capital' (or 'elite men' as it is slightly more accurately but still erroneously labelled) in a Ryleian category-mistake.
In any game in which women and men are forced to compete for some kind of 'protection', women will always come out on top, and so the privileges of women will continue to accrue as long as they say 'protect me by giving me privileges'. Women will always have all the power in this conversation as long as the conversation is fundamentally undergirded with 'protect me by...'.
A fascinating way this is playing out is in the contest between women and transwomen in women's sports. Ironically, the 'winner' of this 'protect me by...' contest will be whichever category is coded as the 'most' female, ultimately likely to be biological women. Men will never be able to compete in a 'protect me by...' contest with biological women even if they go to extreme lengths to try to 'become' women.
The 'solution' for men is thereby a counterintuitive one: men cannot compete in this 'protect me by...' game, but must unfortunately instead confirm to their own fundamental biological imperative that is imposed on them - service and sacrifice.
They must begin to play this game: 'help me better serve and sacrifice by...'. Only there will society consider returning any privileges to them, as this was always the social compact between the sexes. Men said 'I need this authority to serve and protect women', and it was granted to them on those grounds only; it was not granted to them by means of might, 'power' or 'oppression'.
If they start to say this again, and play the only game in which they are actually advantaged by the instinctive sentiments of human beings, then maybe they will have some priviledges returned to them, but it will never happen if they believe they are entitled to any kind of 'protect me by...' priviledges. This might feasibly happen in a wartime scenario with mass male conscription, but I'm not sure how else.
One thing that's interesting to me is how this is tolerable to society and individuals to the same extent that human beings are hard-wired to protect women and expect service and sacrifice of men.
I think that the fundamental biological imperative of 'protect women' has never changed. What we saw with feminism in the West was simply a change in how we were expected to do that. 'Protect women' stopped being 'keep them in the home and provide for all their needs' and became 'grant them freedoms and privileges'.
I don't think it's reasonable to believe that this was ever about power and oppression in the relationship between the sexes. In the relationship between capital and labour yes, but not between men and women. Many believe it, however, conflating 'men' with 'capital' (or 'elite men' as it is slightly more accurately but still erroneously labelled) in a Ryleian category-mistake.
In any game in which women and men are forced to compete for some kind of 'protection', women will always come out on top, and so the privileges of women will continue to accrue as long as they say 'protect me by giving me privileges'. Women will always have all the power in this conversation as long as the conversation is fundamentally undergirded with 'protect me by...'.
A fascinating way this is playing out is in the contest between women and transwomen in women's sports. Ironically, the 'winner' of this 'protect me by...' contest will be whichever category is coded as the 'most' female, ultimately likely to be biological women. Men will never be able to compete in a 'protect me by...' contest with biological women even if they go to extreme lengths to try to 'become' women.
The 'solution' for men is thereby a counterintuitive one: men cannot compete in this 'protect me by...' game, but must unfortunately instead confirm to their own fundamental biological imperative that is imposed on them - service and sacrifice.
They must begin to play this game: 'help me better serve and sacrifice by...'. Only there will society consider returning any privileges to them, as this was always the social compact between the sexes. Men said 'I need this authority to serve and protect women', and it was granted to them on those grounds only; it was not granted to them by means of might, 'power' or 'oppression'.
If they start to say this again, and play the only game in which they are actually advantaged by the instinctive sentiments of human beings, then maybe they will have some priviledges returned to them, but it will never happen if they believe they are entitled to any kind of 'protect me by...' priviledges. This might feasibly happen in a wartime scenario with mass male conscription, but I'm not sure how else.
Just seems like a waste of time worrying about things you can't control, but if it makes you sleep better at night then I guess have at it
I believe you are probably correct, but I will also add that I think a lot of men are completely tired of playing that game and are not willing to embrace that solution, even if it is the only one on offer. I think a lot of men might well prefer continuing to fall behind over doing what is required of them. That is to say, what you're saying is perfectly correct, but also perfectly obvious... if most of the men falling behind were happy to do that, they would already be doing it.
This is why you see things like MGTOW, or male hikikomori in Japan, etc. A lot of men out there have just decided that they do not care for the "game" you describe, and would rather withdraw from society in one way or another than play it.
There may not be a solution. It may just be that this is how things will continue to be for the foreseeable future, because there is now a misalignment between what society (and biology) expects from men, and what a lot of men are actually willing to do. A lot of them reject what's been put on their back.
Indeed, generally I think many if not most ideas and concepts that people tend to bring into heated and debatable topics are not well understood. Historically, I think construction and clarification of topic and concepts are what dialectic and debate arose in there most distinguishable forms as an activity to serve civic functioning in the Athenian polis. I don't disagree, scientist and mathematicians are working to understand the evolution of humans, language, geographical events, ecosystems, and economics, but these models are precisely that models, we're indeed making progress, but I wouldn't say we understand what it means to be human as well as we do the objects of general relativity as well as the models predictive limits. Human beings are social, relational, thinking, tool wielding, religious animals, so of course we're all capable of thinking whether women or other gendered. Our historical prejudices against the humanity of other genders as inspired by patriarchal power structures is unfortunate. I'm not saying biological sex is why history unfolded the way it did; I'm saying biological sex, particularly the evolution of biological sex is why gender exists and not historical or cultural forces, not that gender constructs aren't relative to culture, geography, and history, but much like language isn't merely a factor of our biology and one can't predict the changes and appearances of language by merely examining our biology, we have language only because of our biology and its evolution, so there is a limit to what language can be or thought of as. Similarly, humans' beings are gendered because of the consequences of biological sex on human morphology, because like other animals, the morphological differences in members of our species comes down to sexual selective factors across environmental conditions, so think carefully because gender isn't as trivial as people tend to talk about it as. I think it's awesome as well. Reflect on.
Yes, they are, and they evolved to be those ways because they make sense for the demands of their environment which is largely influenced by geography and climate as mentioned by @John K , yet I think patriarchies dominated because they were a superior model of culture when famine, plague, disease, war, and death by child birth were prominent in regions with open arable lands near mountains and rivers, basically agriculturalism and pastoralism emerged and then patriarchies emerge as they compete with one another for land, resources, reproduction, and goods. I've been doing some of my own predictive modelling and thinking about these things.
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I don't think we should keep things as they are. For instance, we should eliminate discrimination against women and other genders and put values like excellence, honesty, and honor at the forefront of cultural orientation. These things to me seems obvious. Ultimately, I think you want to keep what is beneficial to human well-being and discard what is not this to me is just common sense. However, I don't know what those things are and what else should change and how these changes should be enacted is a question I feel is too complex and outside the scope of my knowledge and wisdom to actually answer. I think having people discuss what should and shouldn't change would be beneficial. For instance, I don't think one should try or attempt to abolish gender even if we become open to the realities of masculine and feminine energies in the human psyche, because of the need to diversify labor forces and the correlation of certain capacities and attributes across sex and gender as well as the need to respect basic human instincts.
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I agree in so far that identity isn't completely determined by the individual and is mostly determined by the individual's relation to a group or society; I'm not a scientist, mathematician, or philosopher because I say I am and I also think it ridiculous for someone to declare themselves a genius like Kanye West or Andrew Tate, but I generally think they're idiots though talented, clever, successful, and creative people. At some point I will come to a conclusion on gender, but I'm not there yet. To me it's easier to determine what makes someone a professional this or civic servant than it is to determine gender especially for ambiguous cases of people, though I think most people's genders match their biological sexes like myself.
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I think feminism is the modern articulation of primordial matriarchal cult practices that were virtually eradicated with rise patriarchies which is why it's not rational nor knows how to limit itself, because it functionally is a religion, and religions usually are only kept in check by philosophy, they don't limit themselves. Where people think of feminist writers as standard philosophers, they are to me philosophers like Kierkegaard or Augustine which is why though I read feminist philosophers; I'm not a feminist, because this an ideological commitment motivated by Kantian ethics and women's desire for power which I'm not saying either are wrong, just that I want to think less about moral implications of things and more about the distribution of power and how power should be distributed, because war, contest, and happenstance established most power relations across human history where now people believe we can think about these things and I'm not confident that we can or that people are thinking when they're advocating social revolutions. As society changes power relations will change and I don't think people are cognizant of how much technology and social media is influencing the dynamics of power relations in the world just look at Twitter and YouTube, but feminism is never going to limit itself because it's just another expression of the will to power which will only be thwarted or halted by a greater or equal expression of the will to power. I'm conservative in the sense that I don't trust the intellect to get these things right as much as I trust a contest of wills to produce the greatest expression of willing and hopefully that's an improvement that people can live with, because science can't tell us how things should be just what's most likely the case, how things work, and what is most likely to happen.
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When the only winning move is to not play then one really can't blame men for dropping out of the game that is more or less rigged against them one way or another. Part of the problem is current society and the social contracts that everyone has to fallow in some form or another. For men one of the issues is the lack of support while being straddled with only blame and responsibility, for women there is sympathy and support something that very few men get to experience as men are left with an ever present and highly toxic bootstrap reality. So yes men are dropping out as there is very little incentive to participate at least socially in this regard leaving many marooned to lives of soul crushing loneliness while cashing whatever goals they've set for themselves like martial gains or self improvement etc.
Modern ideology isn't there for equality at all but rater to destroy be it any form of traditional society even if it means destroying gender so that whatever the new society ends up being as the social engineers plan out it will be on the blood and bones of those they've destroyed for sake of ideology. So basically they'll make it to where no one will want to be a gender or at the least to not be male as modern ideology has painted the male as being bad and in general for future generations gender will be seen as being toxic and complicated to where androgyny will be preferred or that the male gender will gradually cease to exist at least socially.
Though, I seek autonomy because it's necessary to be truly original in thinking which is a worthy aim if you're pursuing creative excellence.
Yes! The early Christian communities set out to do just that - but it didn't stay that way.
Oh yes! But like @slant says, they are more a media hustle than things we come across in real life.
Is it though? I think this issue is far more complex than it seems on face value. The domestic jobs have always been undertaken by men in male only societies - and done well. In my day, the British Antarctic bases were all male, and domestic work was a very high priority because our survival depended on it. The military were the same in days gone by. This is a matter of attitude rather than hard-wiring.
There is no randomness about this, I think. When we lived in small isolated groups of hunter-gatherers, women were more important than men in Darwinian selection terms. The men could be sacrificed in a way that women could not be. That's because the number of children in a group depended on the number of women far more than the number of men. So evolution selected us to protect women and sacrifice men in the face of threat. Because many of the threats were violent ones, men evolved to tackle violence, and this led us to become violent, aggressive and dominant in behaviour. It's vestiges of this that remain in our genes. Simply intellectualising about it won't change things because it's hard-wired - only further evolution will eradicate it, and that will take quite a few generations.
We can see this played out in the current war in Europe. It's only men that were forbidden to flee Ukraine, not women, and only men that are being conscripted by Russia. Women are not expected to fight in wars, even today, in many parts of the world. True equality would not accept this, though as technology makes physical strength irrelevant in war, and as we have so many people that we can sacrifice both men and women in warfare, things are changing in the most progressive modern societies.
Personally, I don't identify with my biology and I think it's rather primitive to do so. We are human beings first and that is far and away the most significant thing to say about ourselves. Gender is just an attribute, and completely secondary in my eyes. That doesn't mean it's insignificant, but some of the stuff I see written about it sounds like we are talking about two (or more) different creatures. That's rubbish! The sooner we see each other as fellow humans of equal and amazing status, regardless of gender, the better.
I would hope that men would not allow themselves to be destroyed, but I understand this growing concern that we are being made to feel unnecessary, be it sexually economically or otherwise. There seems to be an almost sociopathic lack of empathy surrounding the issue of male insecurity, which makes it difficult to speak up without the fear you'll invite abuse.
What I do not understand is why women would expect men to be in alliance with something that devalues them. If we are not necessary, then our support must not be necessary either.
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Men should not allow themselves to be destroyed, but, in the future, we should not allow our existence to be defined by being needed by others but learn to need ourselves to make our existence its own necessity or to see what in our existence commands its own necessity; its own thou shalt, a scared yes. I want to establish a new philosophy as inspired by Maslow, Jung, and Nietzche where we men can delight in struggling with our insecurities to become something more optimistic and exuberant. This is an opportunity for much creativity and self-overcoming, finding a new abundance of will for we have something new to endure as an existential stress that can help create a new existential strength. How much more can man express when he has freedom to do what he values rather than what necessity society and woman makes out of him. Invite the abuse because the right amount will just make you resilient and cunning. We who chose to over-come the classical masculine norms of being needed, to become the type that values and honors what they find in themselves to become self-organizing a new horizon with new seas to explore are before us such that we can lead men into an entirely new pattern of existence that no longer gives to the world out of necessity, but self-willingness, becoming something no longer needed, but something willing. No longer needed is the cultivation of obedience, the western soul conditioned under a history of discipline can unleash its instincts and break away from being what we men don't like, what we do not find noble, agreeable, or inspiring. Where one door closes another opens. Let us embrace the end of modern man and become a bridge towards a higher man.
A perspective I've been playing around with.
Some of the most toxic garbage originated in the academia, so this doesn't inspire confidence. The last thing I want to do is put my future in the hands of intellectual elites whose only achievement is that they are educated, especially given the extremely politicized academic environment.
Every system generates inequality because it has to be built inside an existence that is inherently oppressive. Maybe you're not as attractive as you want, maybe you were born into poverty, maybe you have a congenital disease, maybe your child has a congenital disease, maybe your husband turns out to be a raging alcoholic...there's no end to factors that make our lives more difficult than they potentially could be. You can't even list all of the ways you are disadvantaged compared to someone else, who is also disadvantaged in other ways. The only way to effectively deal with all of that is to first accept it, and then bear it by becoming more resilient and better in face of it. That's how we even got as far as we did. We can suppress beauty standards and legislate that discriminating based on looks in dating is now bigotry and hate speech. Great, now we can discriminate against people who have preferences. That's the exact problem; everyone who has a solid stance on something is a bigot. The net gain of equality is zero. What every religion has figured out is that the only way out of the cycle is to start with yourself, and you know damn well that there's always something in the back of your mind nagging you that you could have tried harder, which is like the guidance of the divine good.
Trying to equalize outcome is institutionalizing envy. It's guided by rotten principles and feelings from the conceptual phase. Maybe some people shouldn't be richer than others because that puts them in a privileged position where they can leverage wealth to get special favors. But in order to generate any wealth, someone has to be richer than others for at least some time before the whole economy can benefit. It's the reason why at least some of us have the chance to climb out of poor material circumstances.
The question of good isn't a tangent, it's what underpins every social issue. I propose that it's impossible to systematically erase inequality, and you claim that technology will provide a path. But this is the same argument that scientific positivists make: that eventually, science will explain everything due to its progressive nature. However, this is self-contradictory.
[Y]ou cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)
- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)
It doesn't matter if the world is dynamic; every effort has to stop somewhere. To progress anywhere, you first have to have a firm grasp on where you are progressing to. My standards are clear. But my sense of what equality activists are proposing is extremely vague, like hoping that somewhere along the way, we will find utopia if only we abandon what we have now. There is nothing rational about that in face of the immensely complex network that is society. If you can't put down very specific parameters on what such desired equality would look like and what are the means to obtain it, you are just breaking things down out of resentment for existence itself. This is always a ticket to making things infinitely worse for everyone. I know you said you are not setting down a specific perspective, but you also seem to be biased toward the revolutionary approach.
Notice that theft is illegal because it harms the community. In other words, the purpose of theft is wrong, as its legality would quickly lead to chaos. In the same way, destruction of gender roles is false in its purpose because at least part of them are derived biologically. If men were not supposed to do heavy labor, fight, or be leaders, we would not have the organs that are specifically designed to create an abundance of testosterone (though testosterone levels have been diminishing due to industrialization and xenoestrogen exposure, so that might have something to do with it).
We don't need to do everything in the same way it used to be, but there are certain aspects of the masculine and feminine spirit that won't go away. We have data to corroborate this. Men are more disagreeable and less neurotic on average, which correlates with my original statement about orientation of attention toward objects, and women are the opposite. These things matter in the pattern of social dynamics. There is immense popularity of channels that try to advise responsibility, sacrifice, physical strength, and other traditionally masculine virtues to disaffected men. Most men are fulfilled by these things but are not guided toward them by our profligate culture. We obviously shouldn't legislate these roles because there are genuine outliers whose purpose is enhanced by giving space to the opposite temperament, even historically, like Joan of Arc. But the fact remains that these people are a small minority and do not represent some fundamental cataclysm in the purpose of gender.
No, but I also do not think about identity in that way. You are always going to be something else than your biology to someone else anyway: lover, parent, friend, etc. But self-determined identity is hollow because it depends on isolated internal feelings that are often at odds and filtered by culture rather than the consequences and potential of your choices and actions in the social sphere, which are necessary to integrate your identity with purpose. Biology is part of that, and I think trans people are fully aware of this too, even if unconsciously, as they never simply act out their desired role but also resort to physical alterations. Alas, it's never the same.
Being social creatures, that seems highly, highly unlikely. Besides, we find that kind of thing shallow. When tragedy occurs, we cry out to love, friendship, truth, and beauty. These aren't created values. Nietzsche's insights were brilliant, but his conclusions were a despondent escape from his sad social life. I don't think he understood the heart of Christianity at all, as it asks for far more self-overcoming than anything you could ask of yourself with all your desires that seek comfort and ease.
The paradox is posed clearly:
He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. - Matthew 10:39