Is there anything good about men?
Have men really been engaged in a centuries-old conspiracy to exploit and oppress women? Have the essential differences between men and women really been erased? Have men now become unnecessary? Are they good for anything at all?In Is There Anything Good About Men?, Roy Baumeister offers provocative answers to these and many other questions about the current state of manhood in America. Baumeister argues that relations between men and women are now and have always been more cooperative than antagonistic, that men and women are different in basic ways, and that successful cultures capitalize on these differences to outperform rival cultures. Amongst our ancestors---as with many other species--only the alpha males were able to reproduce, leading them to take more risks and to exhibit more aggressive and protective behaviors than women, whose evolutionary strategies required a different set of behaviors. Whereas women favor and excel at one-to-one intimate relationships, men compete with one another and build larger organizations and social networks from which culture grows. But cultures in turn exploit men by insisting that their role is to achieve and produce, to provide for others, and if necessary to sacrifice themselves. Baumeister shows that while men have greatly benefited from the culture they have created, they have also suffered because of it.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
23mentions
20people
2010–2022years
61% recommend39% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Required reading for discussing any of this is "Is there anything good about men"?
According to this, there's a preference (genetic and societal) to condition men to take risks, and that risk skews the distribution outward, with more failures and successes.
One of the main punchlines is that comparing means is useless. Men just have way more outliers in both directions, and grades (maximum-capped) will tend to be lower on average, while income (no maximum cap) will tend to be higher on average.
- "Is there anything good about men?"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8765372-is-there-anythin...
Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YHdl4FXYpU
Lecture text: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Is-There-Any...
Therein you'll find this argument applied to humans, as well. It's fairly informative and rigorous (mostly). Good read, even if you disagree with the whole premise.
> "I’m certainly not denying that culture has exploited women. But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause."
- This is not just your pet theory, it's a very real theory. See "Is there anything good about Men" by Baumeister.
Also, as mentioned in a sibling comment, it used to be that you could find a single authoritative hosting of this lecture/essay, but now it's been ... adopted by the internet. I'd recommend googling and checking sources.
- The best explanation I've come across so far is Roy Baumeister's Is There Anything Good About Men? [0], which explains gender determinisms by regarding the evolutionary history of our species. The article was already posted several times on HN [1].
[0]: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
[1]: http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/prefix/0/Is%20There%2...
- Exactly. What's going on is that the feminists of MVC are looking at the extremes: extreme abuse, or extreme success. What they don't care about is that this is an industry where 40 hour work weeks are a luxury, and the average neckbeard sysadmin is despised by HR even as he fixes their boxes for the n'th time.
As a general rule of thumb: if women have it bad, men have it worse. But since the bottom half of men are invisible, everyone focuses on the 'poor' victimized women instead.
Roy Baumeister's "Is There Anything Good About Men?" explains this well, but they'd never read it because it's "MRA".
- This is really really really hard to believe, unless man and woman play the same role in the process of evolution. Think in this way: if evolution made man and woman physically different, how come it made man and woman mentally same?
Read: Who is Against Evolution?
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2008/08/who-is-against-ev...
Read: Is There Anything Good About Men?
Related
Man, economy, and state
8 recommend · 14
Seeking Wisdom
30 recommend · 45
A Guide to the Good Life
135 recommend · 197
Man's Search for Meaning
250 recommend · 394
Good and real
8 recommend · 15
A few good men from Univac
3 recommend · 7
Ordinary Men
recommend · 39
