Masculinity can be wholesome or toxic.
Femininity can be wholesome or toxic.
Which one is discussed more, by a literal order of magnitude? [1]
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Toxic%20ma...
When it came to handling the things that go bump in the night, a social species with thumbs, a bit of fire and a few sharpened sticks went a hell of a long way.
And after bumping back for long enough, we were the only monsters left standing.
I think that one of the problems with toxic feminity is that it's a quieter and less explosive form of destructive behaviour - but it's very much a real thing.
As a weird little note regarding society's tolerance of the hatred of men, "misandristic" isn't even worth inclusion in the spell checker's dictionary.
What happened was the government has successfully co-opted the social contract between men and women so women now can reap most of its benefits while men carry most of the risks. That doesn't make things all hunky-dory for women, but it certainly doesn't do men a whole lot of good when some of their biggest assets in a relationship are stripped away and redistributed, without accommodating that in some form.
Meanwhile, society has done very little to put men in a positive light or encourage women to accept the 'new man'. If anything, it has done the opposite: women seem to respect men less than before, and men are expected to be more competitive than ever before, even on aspects which are practically immutable. Now society is slowly showing signs of how dysfunctional things become when men aren't incentivized to be men, while women aren't taught to respect the 'new man'. The men quit trying, the boys get stressed out, and the women run around asking the government to fix it somehow. Virtually no one is happy, and Socrates is rolling in his grave.
Not what I said; men are still needed - but it's been a damned long time since we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger.
I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women IIRC, and both sexes could use fire to scare away predators, so men were relevant for breeding nearly exclusively.
Today we have far more risky activities where men dominate, such as high-rise towers construction, firefighting, law enforcement, security, sailing etc etc.
The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required - we're bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive.
Our aim is better, and (best of all) if half of us die it doesn't severely impact intergenerational population levels.
Women may have gone gathering, but men went hunting.
Fire fighting is some scary shit - but our ancestors took on short faced bears with sticks.
I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...
In fact, I'm damned near certain of it.
~Modern humans have been around 30 times longer than that.
I'm not fighting tigers but the women around me sure are happy when I can carry something alone they struggle to do with three of them. There's a significant difference between a direct display and a bunch of commercialized abstractions. All those abstractions make people forget the value others have. We just so happened to push a lot of those abstractions onto men and the value they tend to bring as men.
The most interesting part was not how much women failed to survive, and how successful men were (which makes sense, as men are designed for survival), but the feeling of how much easier in that world is to show the need for masculanity (which is mostly not needed anymore).
Evolution doesn't only "design" a single sex for survival. (With the possible, arguable exception of some insect species.)
Women are structured as a compromise between their own needs and the needs of their children.
If you think for an instant that men and women aren't optimised for very different scenarios, then think harder.
Seriously, you can tell just by looking at us.
Or do you think that child bearing hips and big vulnerable mammaries are useful things to have in situations that call for physical action (other than birthing and feeding infants)?
As I understand it men have greater strength because they are optimized to fight other men for reproductive opportunity. This doesn't increase their opportunities for survival since fighting other men can get you killed. It increases their opportunities to reproduce.
Our advantages in a hostile environmental come from building tools not physical strength. If physical strength was important a male human would not be 5 times weaker than a gorilla.
So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
> So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
False dichotomy. Also, what fraction of explorers do you think were men? Pretty much fucking all of them.
We don't get pregnant, so having children is not a physical inconvenience and (as I mentioned elsewhere) half of us can die without impacting the next generation's population.
If you think that men and women had the same evolutionary imperative to develop the skills required for navigating strange environments then you're not adequately considering the innumerable trade-offs involved.
No, they die far more often. Because they enter unknown risky situations.
Humans explore in search of new lands and resources, and in search of safe paths.
When they take the more vulnerable members of the tribe, they generally have a better idea of where they're going, what the path is, and what risks are involved.
If a path is too dangerous then they don't tend to take pregnant women and small children.
So because it is primarily adult or adolescent males that go on the more risky adventures, they're the ones that have the costly adaptations required to maximise the likelihood of survival.
Have you ever made a tool with your hands? Physical strength--especially grip strength--not just dexterity, is required for tool making. There are no vices or pliers in the Wild.
Men have a huge advantage in grip strength, and hence tool making. This study[1] suggests that elite female athletes in athletic disciplines that require grip strength only rank in the 25th percentile of grip strength when compared to men as a population.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
I suspect any of the western desert women would merrily laugh and wiggle their little finger were they to hear you speak.
If you look at the series, they took 14 random people for each group and gave them 2 days of survival training and basic helper tools.
Just looking at how the men killed the crocodile in a team work with their bare hands first time in their life without any help from experts looked awesome.