Men Create, Women Destroy.

Wherever you are right now, take a look around.

Unless you're out on the Alaskan tundra, or literally inside of a fucking vagina, there is a 99.9% chance that you are surrounded on all sides by products of the invention and ingenuity of men. I'm in my office, surrounded by drywall and wooden studs, built, laid and painted by men. I'm wearing a stainless steel Lacoste wrist watch, the precursors for which were engineered and manufactured by men. In front of me is a 10-foot stained wooden door; it is doubtful that any woman would have been able to lift and hang it. I'm typing this on a laptop, designed by a tech billionaire from Austin, TX, which runs an operating system designed by the 2nd-richest geek of them all. Now that geek's mom pulled some strings way back in the day to get him a meeting with IBM, which certainly helped; however, that O.S., like every other product of male workmanship and initiative, was destined to live and die by its own merits.

In a weird, poetic kind of way, our existences as men mirror the things we create and how they benefit society. Like them, if we succeed and add value, we are venerated and uplifted; if we fail and are a net drain, we are ignored and discarded like trash. This inherent condition of masculinity is not some grave injustice to bitch and moan about cathartically, nor is it some sort of dogmatic precept to be out worshiped out of masochism or misplaced nostalgic blood lust. It is simply the way things are, and nothing can change it.

As a man, it is your job, not just to understand and accept this condition, but to internalize it and make friends with it. Beyond a certain age, whatever the traditional coming-of-age point is in the society you inhabit, it is gravely important to understand that social acceptance, friendship, companionship, material reward, and sex are all increasingly, and never decreasingly, contingent upon your observable success. In any society, anywhere on earth, a man is only ever worth what he can bring to the table. Women, children, and household pets can expect to be loved, cherished, and protected for their innate, subjective qualities: their appearance, the character they project, and who they "truly are on the inside". Any man who expects reciprocal treatment in this regard is a fool and destined for disappointment.

Men

For millions of years, we lived in tiny nomadic, groups, generally isolated and rarely in contact with those outside our tribe. For that entire time period, our only jobs as men were to track down big, dangerous animals, kill them for food to share with the women and children, and murder the fucking shit out of anyone who represented a threat to that process. That's it. Times were dangerous, and resources (including pussy) were scarce; far too scarce to waste on men who didn't contribute to procuring them. Because we were so worried about fighting and dying over food and territory, no one ever had time to do anything else useful or productive, and we as humans stayed in the same violent, chaotic, shitty existence for countless millenia.

Then one day, something amazing happened.

Some weird, undoubtedly feeble and socially awkward dweeb, who never got any sex from the women in the tribe, and whom all of the guides, hunters, and warriors all made fun of and beat up for digging around in the dirt all day, discovered that, if you dug around in the dirt in certain specific ways, in a specific order, at the right time of year, and then waited a while, FOOD WOULD GROW OUT OF THE GODDAMN GROUND. Suddenly, men didn't necessarily have to run, jump, wrestle, chuck spears, or risk violent and painful death every day to have value in society. Hell, even the men who were good at those things didn't have to spend as much time doing them; they were free to spend some of their time growing their own food. Or learning to make things out of wood and metal to trade for food. Or developing a system of markings to communicate and keep track of whose food belongs to whom. Or developing, with those markings, a code of ethics more balanced and nuanced than "Rule #1: Kill and get food, or we all die". Or packing up a bunch of food and exploring new places they'd never been before.

We'll never know his name or if he even had a name, but the awkward, ectomorphic dweeb who made that discovery, obsessively scratching and digging around in the dirt, searching, for years on end, for an answer to a question he didn't know existed, was the most important human being to ever live, and the second-place finisher isn't even fucking close. This man broke convention by creating value, rather than seeking it out, and by doing so, allowed men all across human existence to devote their lives to doing the same. It was men who secured the territory, men who mastered and scaled this process through toil and determination, men who tilled the fields, and men who built civilizations upon the bounty which those fields wrought. To view human history any other way is an exercise in delusion.

Ever since then, creation has been the metric by which men are judged. Our ability to generate tangible outcomes, which are greater than the sum of their constituent parts, dictates our value to anyone and everyone around us, not least of all ourselves.

Women

One point I have tried to internalize both in my writing and my everyday interactions is that male and female existences are diametric opposites. Men are born with nothing, and our experiences, conflicts, trials, and failures forge and harden us into a state of stoicism and agency. A life full of hard-won victories and character-building defeats makes a boy into a man; it takes something valueless and breathes life into it. These tests allow us to grow and develop into the kind of man who can create value, not just for himself, but for those he cares about, and even humanity at large. But once again, it is important not fall victim to the trap of programmed, societally-informed false equivalency, and remember:

None of this applies to women.

It's not that women inherently lack the ability to create; quite the contrary, they have it in spades. Pregnancy, gestation, childbirth, and maternal nurturing coalesce to form the biological and ground-floor emotional foundation upon which a healthy, stable human psyche is built. But they do not develop these creative abilities out of choice or necessity; they are born with them.

For those first several million years of human existence, the goals of men were diverse and varied. Constantly evolving environmental conditions forced them to adapt readily to whatever behavior proved most viable, whether that be killing mammoths, fighting wars, growing food, creating tools, writing down important things, or searching for new and better lands. The goals of women, on the other hand, remained absolutely constant: sex, security and provisioning, and childbirth/nurturing, each of the highest attainable quality. The important distinction to make here is that whereas men are compelled, both internally and externally, to achieve their goals through ability and merit, women are compelled to achieve their respective goals primarily through men.

In those first thousand millenia or so, while men were out hunting, or fighting, or building, or farming, or exploring, women were, by enormous majority, at home. Nesting. Foraging. Pregnant. Giving birth. Staying safe. When danger in the environment was clear and present, men were out facing it, and women stayed at home away from it. This was never because of oppression or patriarchy or any of that happy bullshit, but because that's how everyone fucking wanted it. As a result, women never faced life-or-death necessity for things like fast-paced problem solving, risk-assessment, or stoicism. Throughout our species' long and turbulent history, women never went out and got what they wanted; they had men to do it for them. It is deeply ingrained in women to seek out a man-as-proxy when a problem needs fixing, rather than attempt to fix it herself.

Buns in the Oven

Imagine for a moment that you're baker. You make cakes. You have total control over all of the ingredients, the entire process from front to back, and your business does well enough that you can afford to hire employees to assist and maintain the consistency of your bakery's operations. Now imagine that one day you have to bake a cake so goddamn important that your entire business and reputation will be irrevocably destroyed if it's no good. You still have control over your facilities and the baking process, but you have no help from your employees and have to bake the cake entirely by yourself. Furthermore, a new and untested supplier now controls a single essential ingredient in the baking process, but faces no personal or professional repercussions if the cake turns out to be sub-standard. You know this new supplier, have met them, and even like them on a personal level, but you don't really have complete information as to the quality and consistency of their product. Remember, your whole fucking career depends upon how delicious this cake is, and this person stands to lose absolutely nothing.

Concerned yet? Now, let's add in the condition that you have no idea what you're doing and have never baked a cake in your life. And that if you were to ever express even the slightest sense of regret for this cake turning out shitty and ruining your career, you would be branded a heartless monster.

What would you do in this situation? What would any sensible person do in this situation? You would put the motherfucking screws to the supplier of that secret ingredient. You would question, test, and attempt to undermine that son-of-a-bitch harder than anyone had ever had before.

And most importantly:

If that person faltered under the pressure, you would drop them like a rock, and you wouldn't give a single fuck how they felt about it. If they're not the right guy for the job, they need to get the fuck out of your bakery ASAP. Because if the shit hits the fan, they stand to lose nothing, while you stand to lose everything.

If the value they offer you can be easily destroyed or undermined, better for you to destroy it yourself than for it to fail on its own, and you to be stuck with the consequences.

Boilerplate 8th Grade Conclusion Header

It's a complex and long-winded explanation, but the idea really is that simple.

Men are born with nothing; we're hormonal, adolescent trash piles with cystic acne and involuntary erections in history class. We mold ourselves into useful beings, and use the skills we acquire to create every ounce of substance that both we and others perceive in us. Experience hardens us; it makes us into the men that we hope the world outside us will value.

Women are born with everything; they exist, by default, in a position of absolute choice and abundance. The extent to which this inborn value can be improved upon is limited, and it will decline however quickly her behavior dictates and beyond the purview of her control at whatever rate nature sees fit. When you're handed everything you need and more at a fever pitch, your goal is no longer to acquire more value; it is merely to destroy that which is valueless and cumbersome to you.

Men create; women destroy.

(Note: Yes, I understand that one man didn't pioneer primitive agriculture single-handedly. The individual man is a metaphor for that phase of human history; it makes the passage more relatable and, in my opinion, a better read.)