"Equal and Opposite" was the title of a YouTube video that jumped out to me.

I thought I'd share my comment/view on that title, which is below:

Equal and opposite? Only within the context of traditional gender roles.

Why?

Consider the following distinction:

Value Equality vs. Legal Equality

  1. By nature, men and women each evolved to have a separate and exclusive source of value.
    1. For women, the ability to bear children. (Arguably the most important value to a species).
    2. For men, simply being the "stronger" gender. (From this fact alone, men's source of value was primary resource privisioning.)
  2. Each source of value actually created the closest thing you can get to a "balance of reproductive value" between the genders.
  3. Traditionalism encapsulated this natural distinction -- through cultural enforcement. Quite simply, men were the primary provisioners, in correspondence to their natural source of value of being stronger and able to do just that. In essence, we had a system of rough "value equality" whereas we now have a system of "legal equality". Legal equality on paper translates to high value inequality in practice. They are not compatible. Why is this so?
  4. Because male investment and provisioning will inherently become far less valuable to women if they now share what used to be men's balancing source of value.
  5. What we have today is the equivalent, in hunter-gatherer tribes, of making women child bearers \and* making women just as strong as men.* The balance of value between men and women is lost entirely.

A system built (and now in fact dependent) on the prosperity created from a system based on value equality, in my opinion will collapse under a system based on legal equality -- due to the high value inequality that a legal equality based system results in.

Thoughts?

One takeaway from this is that:

To the extent groups/cultures move away from a value-equality based system (i.e., traditional gender roles), those groups will be displaced by those that do favor a value-equality based system.

Why? Because value equality results in the closest thing we can get to equality in practice -- where the average member of each gender is roughly equally valuable/desirable to the average member of the other gender.