Self-sacrifice as a man...

fengpi · 2019-05-29T05:31:48+00:00

I think it's an obligation which is, oftentimes, imposed upon me. And, unsurprisingly, I resent the kinds of situations where there's a heavy box to be lifted and the ladies turn to me and say "Well...?" as if I'm supposed to tip my hat and hop right to it. It's not biological in origin, it gets beaten into boys' skulls as they grow up.

There might've been a point in time where a fellow would get a certain appreciation for doing that kind of thing-- the appreciation made it tolerable-- but a lot of the ladies of today decided that offering appreciation was weak and stupid and it was better to sneer and jeer at the evil moronic oppressor instead. "Okay, lift your own damn box then" is the only reasonable reply.

grasshopa · 2019-05-29T05:52:42+00:00

I have a healthy sense of self preservation, so don't look for me to be throwing myself in front of any bullets anytime soon. Didn't used to be that way, but I guess as I've gotten older and more aware of the bullshit of societal expectations it kinda flipped a switch in me.

Folks certainly expect me to step up in those kinds of situations, and I don't know why it's always me they look towards. Just recently, on a train ( bart ) and some dude is talking to his shoe and acting jumpy, folks are looking at me, not him. As if I'm going to throw myself on some transient with needles in his pocket should he go nuclear.

Fuck that noise. I'll watch from a safe distance, thank you very much.

iainmf · 2019-05-29T08:28:14+00:00

Do you feel like it's a social expectation you have to fulfill or a biological predisposition?

I think men have an instinct to protect and care for women. This is reinforced by socialisation "never hit a girl".

If you no longer feel duty-bound to offer protection, what caused that shift for you?

I think there has been a breakdown of the social contract for men. It goes back to 'A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". It created a division between the sexes. Recently I was on Twitter discussing how we need women to help raise awareness for men's issues and a couple of women replied with "men need to do their own work". So these women feel no obligation to help men. Not only that but there is a whole lot of rhetoric demonising men.

On the other hand, there is still plenty of social pressure for men to help women. Men need to 'lean in', 'listen and believe', 'use their privilege to help women' etc etc. That seems completely unbalanced to me.

I'm not sure why men would put themselves in harm's way when they are treated like crap and there is no reciprocation.

problem_redditor · 2019-05-29T06:41:38+00:00

I wasn’t sure whether anyone was able to see this comment (I couldn't see it in the thread), so I reposted it. Sorry if you receive this twice.

Do you feel like it's a social expectation you have to fulfill or a biological predisposition?

I would say it's both, people are much more willing to sacrifice men (and put a heavier expectation on men to self-sacrifice) and men are also themselves far more willing to be self-sacrificial especially for the benefit of women and children.

Studies have shown that people, both women and men, are far more willing to sacrifice men for the good of others than women.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/men-more-likely-to-be-sacrificed-for-the-benefit-of-others-than/

"In one experiment a group of subjects was given £20 and told that any money they held at the end of the experiment would be multiplied up to 10 times."

In the course of the experiment the subjects interacted with other individuals. They were told that if they decided to keep the money, these individuals would be subjected to mild electric shocks, but if they gave up the money, no shocks would be administrated.

Women were less likely than men to be subjected to shocks, suggesting an aversion to harming females - even when this came at the subjects’ own financial expense. While both female and male subjects were less likely to shock women than men, women in particular were less willing to shock other women.

Subjects were also asked questions such as: “On a sinking ship, whom should you save first? Men, women, or no order”; and “According to social norms, how morally acceptable is it to harm men/women for money?”

Overall, the answers of both female and male respondents suggested that social norms account for greater harming behavior toward a male than a female target.

“There is indeed a gender bias in these matters: society perceives harming women as more morally unacceptable,” explains co-author Dean Mobbs, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University.

As to why this is?

It stems a lot from biology. Humans spent the vast majority of history living in small and undeveloped tribes and, particularly in that environment, women are far more biologically valuable than men being the ones who can give birth, who can produce milk, etc. And as humans evolved, our hips progressively became smaller and our heads became bigger which meant pregnancy and childbirth was a harder, more laborious, and more dangerous task which put women more or less out of commission for 9 months. And to add to that children became more incapable and more dependent on their parents for longer.

If you take an extreme scenario of a society with one man and many women, one man could impregnate all of these women and produce at least a few offspring which would carry on to the next generation. If you have the opposite scenario with only one woman and many men, that would be a far more precarious situation to be in simply because one woman can only give birth to one child at a time, and she could potentially die during childbirth, or have miscarriages, etc. And even if she successfully gave birth she would have to take time to recover after childbirth, which meant that she would be not be able to deliver another child very soon after.

And the less children you have, the more the future of the tribe is at stake. Nature back then was harsh and killed off a lot of children at an early age through disease, malnourishment, etc.

So women were the more important gender due to their reproductive capability, which meant that people were instinctually more concerned with women's safety and well-being. If the woman sustained too much damage she could die or become infertile. If she stayed out of dangerous places, avoided dangerous tasks, etc. that risk would be significantly minimised. The women who stayed safe and didnt hurt their reproductive ability were able to have children.

This meant that human women became more risk-averse, and were more dependent on the men of the society to take on the bulk of the high-risk, high-reward "providing and protecting" activities. So we've been putting men between the dangers of the world and women and children. In every society men generally took on the more dangerous and labour intensive tasks in order to protect women from harm. We lived in tribes that often warred with each other, and had men kill other men (and die at the hands of other men) for the protection of women and children. Because societies that place men in the role of "protector" and place women in the role of "protected" are better able to sustain themselves over the long run.

Because of this we have all evolved to be more tolerant of male pain, male suffering, male harm and male death than female. The empathy gap is a phenomenon that's hardwired into our brains, with plenty of supporting physiological evidence to back it up, and social experiments and other types of research consistently confirm that we simply just feel more compassion for women. And we feel much more comfortable with sacrificing men for the protection of women.

Lol this turned out long and a bit rambly and only addressed one of your questions, but yeah.

xNOM · 2019-05-29T08:41:29+00:00

Taking responsibility and suppressing emotion to deal with the physical world is the essence of masculinity.

Avoiding responsibility and wallowing in emotion and the social world is the essence of femininity.

The hard-wired personality differences between men and women that have been observed cross-culturally, reflect this.

A more interesting question to me is how women feel about getting in the lifeboat first, hiding behind their husbands during a mass shooting, sitting at home while soldiers die in the trenches, refusing to take outdoor or high risk jobs, working less and using far more government benefits and medical care than you pay for, and sitting in internet-connected power-appliance-driven homes and offices while men do the actual physical suffering and building/maintenance of infrastructure to guarantee your comfort.

Why is there no sense of shame? Do y'all rationalize it that you're just weaker and cowards so you don't have to do that shit? It's just not your job? That would make sense to me but then why is there no corresponding sense of gratitude anymore? What do you do for men these days besides spread your legs? Or bear children (never if you don't feel like it, of course) that you can take from men on a whim 75% of the time while continuing to draw subsidies from ex-husbands and male taxpayers. Do you not think it's odd that you now have almost 100% of the power when it comes to children but men still do all that shit for you?

fgrsentinel · 2019-05-29T13:08:21+00:00

The thing to remember is that, in modern culture, self-sacrifice on the part of men is less a virtue like it was in the past and more a societal (and even governmental) obligation that a man can't refuse without being condemned. At the same time, the #MeToo movement makes it increasingly dangerous for a man to offer help to any strange woman as the case in Australia shows since a woman could pass off any significant lateness as "oh, I was sexually assaulted/raped" and then blame it on the man that helped her, if they don't just do it for attention.

As someone who reads a lot of Daoist/Taoist philosophy, I can tell you that this is most certainly not how it's supposed to be and I'm sure I speak for a lot of men when I say self-sacrifice isn't worth it for us anymore. There used to be a time when helping someone or protecting those in need because it was the right thing to do and we had the option to stay out of it was there for us, but now, like you asked, it's very much a duty for us that even if we follow through our lives can be ruined. The sad, twisted truth is, it's better for us to be an asshole and reduce our chances of being slandered than it is to help others like people used to. We're already seeing the death of the "Good Samaritan" as it is. Human compassion and decency have been on their deathbeds for years as well. If nothing changes, we'll likely be left with a culture that values the self over anything else.

StanUlam · 2019-05-29T14:05:21+00:00

No. Look after yourself first. I would call the police if I saw someone getting attacked, but would not intervene.

RockmanXX · 2019-05-29T15:45:48+00:00

I'm pretty sure Chivalry is dead and has been dead for quite a while. Feminists killed it.

Lion_amongst_gods · 2019-05-29T15:47:21+00:00

Do you feel like it's a social expectation you have to fulfill or a biological predisposition?

They're not totally mutually exclusive.

If you no longer feel duty-bound to offer protection, what caused that shift for you?

Ingratitude and potential lawsuits.

What are some areas in life where you feel men are given an unfair advantage in making sacrifices?

The entire legal system uses traditional gender roles, but accommodates modern-day conditions only for women. (at least in my country).

AnonymousBoi6996 · 2019-05-30T03:10:03+00:00

I remember a case where a women took a man to court for touching her without consent when she was unconscious.

Now that might seem bad but the "touching" was the man dragging the woman out of the water after she drowned and was unconscious and then doing cpr

BramblEdge · 2019-05-30T11:04:28+00:00

It is imposed on men. When boys are about to turn 18, most countries let them know they are required to do military service. That you are supposed to put your life at risk to save others, especially women, is ubiquitous in media, upbringing, education and politics. The message is clear growing up as a boy: You do not matter, your labour and utility matter. Your life is worth less than women's.

I think this male disposability is the greatest hurdle to men achieving equal rights to women. If people don't care whether men live or die, why would they care about men being raped, being abused or assaulted, being forced into parenthood, forced into relationships, having their children stolen from them, denied custody and visitation, robbed of their income, incarcerated for not being able to afford support payments, genitally mutilated, ending up homeless due to support payments, languishing in horrible, unsafe working conditions doing damaging and arduous work, etc.

Title	Self-sacrifice as a man...
Author	Nienna92
Upvotes	11
Comments	34
Date	May 29, 2019 5:07 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/buakde/selfsacrifice_as_a_man/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/self-sacrifice-as-a-man.1206578 https://theredarchive.com/post/1206578

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