Is There Anything Good About Men?

First, let me just say this paragraph alone made the article worth the read...

Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.

With that said I don’t agree with the premise of this article.

The problem I have with classic feminism AND the people making counter arguments (like this article) is it’s all inherently irrational. In the end the rational thing to do in society is to match each job with the person who has the most compatible skill set. Whether that person is man, woman, monkey, or whatever doesn’t really matter.

Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you’re trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It’s dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts.

In the end the most disturbing thing about this article, imho, is the fact that someone felt the need to right it in the first place. I mean, if there really is someone out there who thinks either sex is expendable is there really any point in trying to convince them otherwise?

Despite the linkbait-ish title, this is actually a very thorough and well written article.

"For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."

>"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it’s a hard sell."

This is a great article but the premise of that argument doesn't make sense to me - even if he admits its a hard sell.

I'm all for equality but paying someone more for doing less work to bring fairness seems illogical. If someone is genetically less motivated to be a workaholic then how does taking money from the person who does work an extra 10hrs a week, so the the other person can be paid more, make the world a fairer place?

When I was 15 I accepted the fact that I'm wasn't born tall enough to play basketball professionally so I focused my efforts on something that I was capable of being great at.

This is a very well written article. However, I must admit I don't really understand the wide interest the (western) world seems to have in the men vs women viewpoints.

Perhaps (and I'm just guessing here), it is because the culture in the west has changed so fast that men and women are struggling to find new "places" in society. I don't know - it's just a guess.

I'm going to pick on one point to discuss - the WAW effect (Women are Wonderful).

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

leading to:

>perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.

Sounds reasonable until you see he has skipped over the middle:

>It was not always thus. Up until about the 1960s, psychology (like society) tended to see men as the norm and women as the slightly inferior version. During the 1970s, there was a brief period of saying there were no real differences, just stereotypes. Only since about 1980 has the dominant view been that women are better and men are the inferior version.

It seems strange to draw such broad conclusions that completely ignore the past in favour of present circumstance. Plus I can tell you, in India the bias is more towards liking men than women.

In any case, I wish I understood the fascination the west has with men vs women debates. The fact that men and women are different is obvious as is the fact that they tend to complement each other. The fact that men and women are similar is also obvious as is the fact that they tend to compete with each other.

So what??!

When Lawrence Summers resigned I was highly disappointed about the entire incident, as it seems no one can question, with good intentions, generally accepted facts about gender equality in the interest of the truth, rather than what might be the socially acceptable answer. I was glad to find an article that posits some alternative hypotheses and simply acknowledges that the answers are not so simple as they might seem, and that discusses the issue from a neutral, non-activist viewpoint. I read Pinker's article in The New Republic, but this one talks about the issue more than about the discussion itself.

One thing I kept expecting the talk to mention as I was reading was the importance of outliers. While I agree that comparisons of fundamental ability between the sexes, as opposed to factors such as motivation, is probably flawed, I think it might make the argument more immune to activist criticism to point out that there are always outliers in either group. Just because men may be, on average, more inclined to build large businesses, for example, does not mean that each man is more inclined to build large businesses than every woman — the curves overlap. Of course, the different shape of the distributions are important, as Baumeister pointed out (the male curves tend to be bimodal in certain cases whereas the female ones might be more normal). But there are always outliers, and so there will probably always be certain woman who are better at any given thing than most men; even though there may be more men than woman who are 'really good'. The entire talk discusses generalities and statistical tendencies, I know, but might easily be confused by less sophisticated readers as talking about individuals, which seems to be the common criticism of such talk.

This paragraph struck me:

"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it's a hard sell." (emphasis mine)

It takes a special kind of commitment to the truth to write an extended, compelling piece that ruthlessly undermines any rational basis for a position you support.

I think this is especially interesting in light of the fact that I and most people frequenting this website are interested in startups. This seems to be the essential male proclivity for seeking greatness at work. I wonder if that is why there seem to be fewer female founders (AFAIK).

However, the worst thing to take away from this article would be that you can predict how an individual will react given their gender. That is definitely not true. Although, if you look at a group of people, you can probably predict some of the distribution.

This was an interesting article, and a very important counter-point to the notion that any difference between men and women is evidence of discrimination or at least socialization.

That said, I think the article is a little extreme. I suspect that the genetic benefits of "playing it safe" for men and "risk taking" for women were greater throughout our evolutionary history than the author suggests.

For starters, a brief glance out into the world suggests that women do take risks and seek power - sometimes through a man, but often independently. They may not build boats and sail to far away lands, but they sure will follow the yellow brick road to hollywood on a pipe dream of becoming a high status movie star or singer.

The author used the example of Genghis Kahn as an example of why men would benefit from high status in a way women wouldn't - GK fathered hundreds (thousands?) of children, whereas a woman wouldn't be able to exploit this power in the same way. This isn't necessarily the case. Sure, a woman can't have hundreds of thousands of kids, but her sons may be able to. In fact, the biggest fights among Bonobo apes are between Females, usually over their son's status in the mating hierarchy.

For men - I've read (and sorry, no cite here) that many hunting gathering societies are quite egalitarian, mainly because the leverage that great wealth and concentration of power aren't present. While good hunters do more mating than poor ones, the opportunity and benefit to shooting the moon with extreme risk taking may not be nearly as prevalent in our evolutionary history as the author suggests. Again, a brief glance out into the world suggests that the norm among males is to exhibit some risk taking and status seeking behavior - and perhaps a bit more so than women - but ultimately, I suggest that for at least some of our evolutionary history, many males had the opportunity of, well, behaving more like females, but acting fairly monogamous and playing it safe.

Still a good article, I just think it overstates the case considerably.

I had a discussion about this with a friend recently. She linked me to this:

http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/math_performanc...

Of particular note: "The present study also indicated that the variance ratio for boys and girls is inverted for Asian American students -- the girls have higher variance. Thus, higher variance in boys is not always a robust finding."

I can't speak to the significance of this, it being way out of my knowledge, but if true it certainly suggests something strange is going on.

This is a very interesting and well thought essay. Especially the stats and facts behind some of the positions he is taking are very interesting. With regards to creativity, I would tend to think that: if we look at nature, there seem to be two inherent trends emerge from time immemorial: 1) nature is interested mainly in prorogation of species(thru reproduction) and 2) at the subject level creativity seems to be one of the big driving factors. Meaning, if we look at every species, it is hardwired to reproduce, and lot of physical and non-physical characteristics/actions are specifically put in place by nature, so that species propagates(including humans). Second, behind lot of our endeavors, creativity is the underlying force. And so, for example art, music, scientific discovery (and even sports or programming), the underlying desire is to create(something). I tend to think, even behind the desire to be powerful (for example CEOs/other powerful positions etc, in present times is nothing but desire to create(or failure there of fulfilling this desire and thus reflecting in powergrab). And so in case of women, this particular desire(to create something) is inherently fulfilled(or fulfillable) by giving birth and creating a human being. And of lot their energies over centuries has gone towards this (and then tending and caring for their created product). Whereas men has no such outlet, so they need to express it somehow - hence this is also one reason why see men all over the place at top in lot of fields.

So, I read this article early today. Then later, I was just googling interesting things, and thus surfing ensued...

I landed here (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090119104804AA...), and noticing the nature of the comments/avatars. Do you think it would be possible to find "reliable"-confirmation that "even on the internet", 'female personalities', in situations where one would expect 'care ethics' to be emergent on the social graph (perhaps health care industry), could one find numerical-"confirmation" of the one-to-one vs one-to-many interactions hypothesized in the article?

...or is that just a cyclical thought... a bias?

Great stuff.

I found a bit disconcerting the constant use of words like "fairness" and "morality". I tend to see them as "quick and dirty" models useful for everyday behavior. But in a scientific work, which is supposed to study the real thing, I find them not so fitting.

One important factor is that naturally a lot of women die in childbirth, So a successful man in the past would often go through multiple wives.

As Artie Johnson might have said, verrrry interestink, (long drag on cigarette, turn back to camera) but risky.

Bjork went through this stage where she used to say, "Boys are only good for sex and beats."

Brilliant!

This also was utterly fascinating: "The first big, basic difference has to do with what I consider to be the most underappreciated fact about gender. Consider this question: What percent of our ancestors were women?

It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes, every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children.

Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men."

I had no idea... they must have tested mitochondrial dna or something?

I didn't exactly remember the quote, but there are another 'biological' prove of this concept - in case 'one man, hundred women' there are guaranteed survival for entire specie, while 'hundred men, one woman' is a lose case.

In simple words, men are consumables, and this fact is known for ages. Especially in poor countries.

Interesting stuff. However it would be better if he had not talked about groups or cultures competing, which is ultimately incidental, and talked instead of genes and memes competing. Evolution could give a damn about the group. It cares only about genes. Similarly, cultural (memetic) evolution could give a damn about the culture (or society or whatever). It only is concerned with the meme.

Basically his thesis is that women are good at close-knit relationships, and me are good at broader networked relationships. So roughly, though women are protected and valued in society because of reproduction, men are valued in society for the culture they create with their penchant for wide social networking. Fair enough perhaps but this misses the point.

I think rather than say woman have a usefulness to the group for the creation of offspring, both in terms of having in offspring and having a higher chance of reproducing, and men have a usefulness to the group because of their cultural contributions, I think we need to look at usefulness with respect to what. The "what" is the gene and the meme.

Woman are good for the gene. If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article). So if I want to become part of evolution's junk DNA (and 95% of our DNA is junk, true "selfish genes"), then I have a better chance hanging out in the junk DNA of a female than a male. Women are good for me as a selfish gene. Women are useful to the selfish gene. Men? Well, hell, we can always invent pathogenesis in a pinch as a certain kind of shark in a zoo has done. Men are a nice to have to broaden the genome which enhances fitness, but we can ultimately do without them if we need to ("we" referring to the genes).

On the other hand, if I am a selfish meme, if the author is right about men preferring wider social networks (like politics or religion) than I have a better shot infecting the brain of a man than a woman. Why? Because the dude I infect will know more dudes, and can pass me along to them before he gets eaten by a saber tooth cat.

So do the author's conclusions make sense? I think so. But he needs to understand what "usefulness" means. Usefulness with respect to WHOM.

If I am a selfish gene, women are more useful to me.

If I am a selfish meme, men are more useful to me.

However I would say though it is hard to put numbers on this, that the higher advantage chicks give the selfish gene versus dudes is greater than the higher advantage endowed by dudes to the memes versus the chicks. This is a guess, but it is my gut feeling. I think that tho genes find chicks more important and memes find dudes more important, a gene can live without the dudes more facily than a meme can live without the chicks. Since whereas women might not network quite with the same alacrity as men, still they network. Anyway. So I like this article. But better clarity could be had in my opinion by looking at the men vs. women thing from the perspective of genes and memes, which again, is all biological and cultural evolution respectively care about.

So yes, if you are a meme, you like men. But you kind of can go both ways. If you are a gene, you really prefer women, and are less inclined to go both ways. :-)

No. Next article!

"If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners?"

A somewhat disturbing equation. A political prisoner is precisely the (potentially extra-) societal actor that is relegated to the "bottom" by the state through punitive measures.

In any event, what's good about men is that we cut code; no 'Y', no 'hacker' ...