One of the most trenchant breakdowns of men’s position in modern society is psychologist Roy Baumeister’s presentation for the American Psychological Association titled “Is There Anything Good About Men?” . Some of the topics of Baumeister’s speech have been covered here before, but they can bear repeating. He also fuses several of our previously known ideas together to give us a clear picture of the development of culture. (HT: Ferdinand Bardamu).
1. Men are at the top of society, but they’re also at the bottom
The feminist movement sought to usurp modern culture based upon the observation that men occupy the upper echelons of society. The problem with the feminist argument is that, because women were too busy looking upward, they didn’t notice that men occupied the bottom of society as well.
Men operate in the boardroom, courtroom, and legislature; they are also fixtures of the battlefield and prison cell. They sleep in the most plush beds with sheets of a high thread count; they also occupy real estate under the most rickety of bridges using local business’ most recent cardboard throwaways as padding. Men are risked, experimented with (both by nature and by culture), and used for the greater good. They reap large rewards by incurring more risk. Women who complain about the male-dominated social structure fail to understand the concept of trade-offs; the men who now dominate have reached those positions against a backdrop of an unseen number of men who have failed.
2. Men are the extreme sex
Men and women may have average intelligence or behavioral measures across a broad spectrum of ability, but men occupy the extreme tails of those distributions. With regards to IQ, men have the highest incidence of genius, but they also have the highest incidence of mental retardation. The average IQ of men equals that of women because the highs for men are balanced out by the lows.
When businesses make employment decisions, they prefer to choose from the right tail of the employability distribution (this was the point Larry Summers tried to make, for which he was canned). Men tend to be chosen for higher level jobs because they exhibit more extreme intelligence and ability. When a job has a limited number of positions available with no requirement for gender, people with the most intelligence, ambition, creativity, and work ethic will be selected; this is an evolutionary outcome.
Male extremity leaves room for people to fabricate their own stories with regards the “superiority” of either gender. As Baumeister said:
“Men go to extremes more than women. Stereotypes are sustained by confirmation bias. Want to think men are better than women? Then look at the top, the heroes, the inventors, the philanthropists, and so on. Want to think women are better than men? Then look at the bottom, the criminals, the junkies, the losers.
In an important sense, men really are better AND worse than women.”
He makes a powerful point. The purpose of his speech was to investigate the cultural shift that spanned an era where men were thought of as superior (up through the 1960s), on through to a decade where superiority was a toss-up, to the modern age, from 1980 on, where women were thought of as morally superior and “better” than men. If we want to characterize men as “good” or “bad”, there are plenty of extreme examples to validate both sides of the argument.
To explain the social effects of the concept of male extremity, Baumeister points to GPA and minimum wage. Both are affected by arbitrary boundaries. For GPA, grade inflation has made it such that there can be vast differences in the mental ability required to get one “A” over another. Grade inflation has eroded the value of the highest-scoring students – presumably male. Therefore, the very low-scoring students – also presumably male – pull the average male score below that of girls who hover in the middle with their inflated grades.
The same goes for minimum wage. Workers are bounded by a wage floor but not a wage ceiling. Men’s average wage looks higher than it would be if there wasn’t an arbitrary floor. Account for the number of men who don’t work, have shaky job prospects, or end up in prison or dead from pursuing illegal activity as a response to poor job prospects, and the average wage of men and women falls into more equitable territory.
According to Baumeister, these two statistical anomalies arising from male extremity make it seem as if women are adding more inputs into the system while receiving less compensation.
3. Can’t versus Won’t
Baumeister cites research that has shown that women don’t want to engage in certain specialized fields as much as men. To be a top-notch mathematician, one has to not only have the ability to do math, but they must have the desire and devotion to it.
If men are the more extreme gender, in terms of innate ability and innate desire to achieve, it makes sense that men would more likely make it through the rigorous gauntlet that is the process towards Ph.D. math positions. Men’s extreme nature means that more men – although a very small proportion of them – will have the focus and determination to see their math studies through to the highest level.
This disparity is a consequence of our different evolutionary-ingrained natures; men are more extreme in their wants – successful men differentiate themselves and get a leg up by being persistent in their endeavors. In the workplace too, 80% of those who work 50+ hours are men.
Baumeister also makes a particularly interesting argument with regards to men’s creative extremity compared to women. Creativity can be a motivating factor that has little to do with actual ability, and it also offers a differentiation among men that can be a solid strategy towards the goal of reproduction.
Why is it, Baumeister asks, that during the 19th century, a large number of girls played the piano, yet very few women ever composed music? Baumeister shields us from the oft-repeated feminist meme that women weren’t encouraged to create music by showing that, if women were inclined to, they could overcome the perception of discouragement running rampant throughout society. When newly-freed black men – who had little access to musical instruments and had every barrier in the world preventing them from playing or composing – actually did gain access to instruments, they composed jazz music and blues which have come to influence much of modern American music. There is a difference in the innate motivations of men and women.
4. The Most Underappreciated Fact
DNA research has shown that throughout human history, twice as many women as men have reproduced; something along the lines of 40% of men produced offspring while 80% of women did.
The disparity in the odds of reproduction had to have had resounding effects on the characteristics of modern day humans. Modern humans descend from the 40% of men who had to out-compete the other 60% who failed to reproduce as well as the 80% of women who were able to bear children. Baumeister asserts that we are the product of men who took on risk and differentiated themselves from other men and women who played it safe. The long gestation period and rarity of female sex cells makes it such that women are – evolutionarily-speaking – less disposable than men. Populations in which women took on undue risk had lower survival rates. From the standpoint of producing a healthy next generation, women are much more crucial than men.
Since men had a much lower chance of reproducing anyway, they are most naturally geared towards engaging in risky behavior. These risks can take on many forms: financial, physical, explorative.
5. The Different Social Natures of Men and Women
Women are often thought of as the more social gender, and Baumeister admits that women tend to be more amenable than men. But he puts forth the argument that men are just as social – but in different ways than women. Female sociability is more intimate while males’ is more superficial but wide-reaching. Men tend to cast a wide (albeit flimsy) net while women lay down a steel trap.
Baumeister points to several observations of these differences. Men help strangers more than women, but they are also more likely to engage in fights with strangers. Since women care more about intimate relationships, they aggres and help people who are close to them. Since men care about broad social networks with low intimacy, they also aggres and help in those arenas.
Childhood playground observation supports this thesis. Young boys tend to engage with multiple play partners during recess while young girls tend to focus on one other person. Baumeister ties up all of this up as evidence to support what we see in the “real world”: men most often dominate vast, loose, non-intimate social networks like business, politics, sports, and the economy.
6. Egalitarianism = small group; Meritocracy = large group
For small, intimate groups in-depth communication strengthens bonds. In loose organizational networks, withholding some information is part of a strategy for success while tipping your hand to the competition hinders it.
The different natures of men and women were shown by another experiment. Research in the 1970s showed that women tend to allocate resources in an egalitarian fashion; egalitarianism is more amenable to small groups and helps them survive. Men tended to allocate resources based upon merit which is a better way to maximize “profitability” and teamwork in large groups.
This provides further evidence that, because of their greater disposability, men have developed strategies to operate within large social networks.
7. Culture
Baumeister views culture as a biological strategy that has pitted groups of men and women against other groups of men and women. This runs counter to the feminist view of culture that promotes the idea that the culture of patriarchy has developed in order to hold women down.
Culture creates a fusing force called “social gain”. It is a sort of electric bond that utilizes division of labor and cooperation within the given culture to aid in survival. When one culture is pitted against another culture, the culture with the most effective fusing force captures resources, survives, and spreads through either cultural diffusion or heredity to higher numbers of surviving offspring.
Since culture’s benefits are stronger with more people, and since men are more tuned towards engaging with larger groups, men have been the main drivers and benefactors of culture.
8. Men and Culture
Baumeister rejects the claim that men have benefited from patriarchy. He views patriarchy as a conspiracy theory that posits that men have systematically and purposely sought to hold women down.
Baumeister’s argument is that, because men’s networks tend to be shallow and widespread, they benefit from the rise of culture. As culture rises, their sphere of influence becomes more important as well. The distinction is that male-domination of social structure didn’t arise because men sought to hold women down; it was a result of the different natures of male and female physiology and the surviving strategies that were most amenable to propagation of the culture.
9. Three Ways Culture Uses Men
a. Culture uses men to create large social structures
As has been repeated, men are geared towards operating within loosely-knit, superficial social settings. Culture is created out of the evolved inclination of men to compete, innovate, and work their way to the top of society.
Cultures that form using more intensive amounts of competition, innovation, intelligence, and ability will be marginally stronger against competing cultures; the culture that is strongest prevails. Following from this, if we currently reside within a given culture, we have the infrastructure of that culture to thank for our existence. If the culture – the electrically symbiotic system of division of labor and cooperative effort – wasn’t in place, the ability to survive would have been greatly eroded. The culture is what got us here; arbitrarily criticizing the culture is like criticizing your legs because they “helped” you walk in front of a moving car (please note: the culture of which I speak isn’t pop culture; it’s the culture of hard work, duty, meritocracy, and self-sufficiency).
b. Men are Disposable
Physiological differences make each female womb coveted while each male penis is easily replaced. A fully-populated next generation can still be brought forth if half of the men have died off, but this can’t be done if half the women suffer the same fate.
Men expend themselves in any number of ways. They engage in dangerous risks like combat or exploration, but they also spend inordinate amounts of time in other endeavors. Baumeister draws a parallel to the research process whereby 11 men can fail in their theories while the one who succeeds wins the Nobel Prize. There is a lot of risk involved, but the payoff is especially sweet for the one who does succeed.
I mentioned earlier that men are experimented with both culturally and biologically. In light of the recent research that shows that the Y sex chromosome is 30% different from chimpanzees (while the rest of our DNA is only 2% different), it seems that the Y chromosome (men) are the mechanisms of evolution. Experiments and mutations in human beings are carried out on the male sex chromosome. In biological terms, men are used as guinea pigs by the forces of natural selection to tweak and mold human physiology and behavior. Culturally as well, men develop extreme behavior which correlates with greater disposability all in an effort to come up with the strongest strategies towards propagating the culture going forward. While there will be unmitigated failures, the positive extremes add value to the species.
c. Be a Man: create more than you consume
The whole point of male disposability is to benefit future generations. Since male sex gametes are common, we are most inclined to offer the benefit to offspring. Being a man involves risking what you have in order to benefit others. Risking life and limb on a battlefield, capital in a financial endeavor, time and brain power on innovative efforts or political endeavors don’t come with a certain payoff. There are quite a few losers for every winner, but even those losers give something of themselves in order to build the culture. Their failure is a result of a contest with a man who ended up winning. The failure would have been a winner if he had faced an inferior competitor. The fact that the best man won benefits culture, society, and humanity as a whole by putting forth a battle-tested idea or innovation.
In order to incubate competition, the cultural set-up operates on the assumption that there is a limited amount of respect to go around. Not everyone can have respect in this relative hierarchy. Put-downs, hazing, and harassments have all co-evolved with male groups in order to separate the cream from the rest of the crop; culture doesn’t benefit most if people aren’t “harassed” or put in their place. This is a hard pill for women to swallow when they enter a workplace that wasn’t designed to allocate respect to everyone from the jump.
In summary of his speech, Baumeister brings up one more interesting point. He acknowledges that culture uses men and creates an insecurity in men that leads to both grand achievements and dastardly deeds. On balance, the insecurity instilled in men pushes culture forward. It creates the desire in men to be accepted by competing and proving themselves in their cultural networks. This insecurity, stemming from the biological development of male disposability (which developed from the fact that men aren’t as necessary for fully populated future generations) is culture’s engine.
Chuck Ross holds a Master’s degree in Economics and an up-to-date State of Kansas food handlers card. He blogs daily at Gucci Little Piggy.
