Debunking the myth of biological male disposability

Lindy Beige and many others assert that because men occupied dangerous, life expectancy-reducing work positions throughout human history, this must come from the fact a man can impregnate ten women (after the loss of the other 9 men) and save the demographics of a human tribe until the next generation while a woman cannot simultaneously reproduce with ten men (after the loss of the other 9 women.) Therefore sperm must be cheaper than ovulas, because the loss of a man can be made up for more easily than the loss of a woman.

Such trad-con argument is erroneous and harmful. It's based on the fallacy that a man can provide for 10 women and their dozens of children alone, or that those women can fully provide for themselves, which is not the case in the state of nature. It was in fact hard enough for a man to provide for a single family. One could even go further and remark that a tribe made of 1 woman for every 2 men, with each woman making twice the usual number of children (say, 8 instead of 4), would be far richer and productive than the same group made of as many women as men, as a woman in on average far less productive than a man in such early society fully dependent on heavy manual labor. Reasonable female disposability (half of the female population wiped out) is supposed to be evolutionarily advantageous, while a society gains nothing from the loss of a man. Let's see if there are real examples of such economically-induced female disposability, shall we?

There is a book called Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians from anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who went to live a few years with one of the last completely savage, polyandric and cannibalistic tribe in the 50's. That tribe counted more men than women, and it lived in great material scarcity in the Amazonian jungle. When a young man was killed in a hunting accident, which happened frequently, the tribe surrounded and sacrificed a little girl of its own, and ate her. In that tribe's religion, it was said that the ghost of said little girl was to accompany the ghost of the young man who wasn't supposed to die that early to the other world, to prevent his ghost to haunt the rest of the tribe and to cast bad luck on it. But the prosaic reason for such tradition to exist was most likely that it was too economically heavy for the tribe to support the life of more women than men. In such tribe that lived nearly in the state of nature, males didn't appear to be the disposable sex, but rather the opposite.

Now, with the absurdity of such biologically reductionist arguments having been made clear, it's important to remind everyone that the sexual division of labor in traditional societies is made according to the degree to which productivity in a particular labor is dependent on the physical strength of the worker, and not directly to the degree of how dangerous said labor is, as the average male lumberjack working with a simple axe can produce on average 2, 3 or even 4 times more cubic meters of wood a day than the average female lumberjack. While male weaver is on average not significantly more productive than a female weaver. As such, logging was made a male trade while weaving was made a female trade in most or all human societies. The fact logging is a more dangerous and arduous work than weaving has nothing to do with the traditional assignement of either work to either gender. Male disposability in the context of work is a byproduct of the traditional division of manual labor that primarily aims for the most productive setup in the context of great material scarcity. And this is of course without denying the privilege women benefited from in such state of affairs. The rest of male disposability (general indifference toward male suffering compared to female suffering) is simply due to men's reluctance to have empathy for one another and to form a collective to fight for their rights and interests.