Is there anything good about men? Gender differences explained

This article kind of sucks.

> Gender inequality seems to have increased with early civilization, including agriculture. Why? The feminist explanation has been that the men banded together to create patriarchy. This is essentially a conspiracy theory, and there is little or no evidence that it is true. Some argue that the men erased it from the history books in order to safeguard their newly won power. Still, the lack of evidence should be worrisome, especially since this same kind of conspiracy would have had to happen over and over, in group after group, all over the world.

> Let me offer a different explanation. It’s not that the men pushed the women down. Rather, it’s just that the women’s sphere remained about where it was, while the men’s sphere, with its big and shallow social networks, slowly benefited from the progress of culture. By accumulating knowledge and improving the gains from division of labor, the men’s sphere gradually made progress.

Or maybe it's the more obvious answer that women were almost always stuck with the more mundane chores of child-rearing, cooking, and cleaning, and men were the ones doing just about everything else? I mean it's true that it wasn't really a conspiracy, it's entirely predictable that men would end up in that position, since they don't give birth or breastfeed, and they're physically stronger.

But at the same time, it wasn't that women just didn't choose to improve the things they worked on, it's that the things that fell to them lent themselves to relatively little social power or advancement. You can't gain more political power (individually, anyway) if you're just staying at home taking care of the kids, instead of, say, going on a military expedition.

> Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men. I certainly do.

Well yeah, in the current cultural climate (at least in the US), saying that women are better in X way than men is acceptable, but doing the reverse usually means you're sexist. Similarly, saying you like men more than women in the same way the author just said he likes women more than mean would mean that you're a misogynist.

There are relatively sensible reasons for why this is so, but still, on the surface it's kind of silly.

Dear MRAs, please try to lift the entire debate to a 20th century understanding, you are making me look bad.

To give a short primer,

Patriarchy: A social structure, which in modern discourse is largely influenced by work of Zetkin and Luxenburg around the WWI and leans on an analogy to Marxist classes. As such, it is notably not a conspiracy theory. The claim that there is no conspiracy is as uncontroversial as it is a straw man.

Gender: Social roles usually assumed to be correlated with biological sex. Note, if you want to claim gender does not exist, then you have to explain why Black Widow does wear high heels in the latest Marvel movie, while Iron Man does not. (Notably in the article the author confuses gender and sex, they are not synonym. One is about biology, one is about society.)

Toxic masculinity: To give an example, more men die in battle because the role of a warrior is clearly gendered as male. (That is, it is more acceptable for a man to become a soldier than for a women.) So there are aspects of expectations of man that are not helping. Another example is, more men die in car accidents because a man is expected to drive more aggressively than a woman. I have yet to see an interesting argument about toxic masculinity, that was not more eloquently argued by feminists in the 70ies. So stop whining about an unfortunate word choice. (See what I did there?)

Utter garbage that deserves filing in the rubbish bin.

Particularly annoyed at the sweeping statement that people like women more than men. Don't speak for me! And don't make sweeping statements without at least a survey to back up the statement.

Gagging