The masculinity paradox

The BBQ Pit
141

It is in large part a matter of differing reproductive strategy.

Women are born with an average of about 400 ova. That, therefore, is a hard upper limit on how many offspring they can produce, and circumstances of pregnancy and breastfeeding and maternal mortality reduce that limit very much. The most children ever produced by one woman is 69, some Russian woman with a lot of multiple births and a good deal of luck and hardihood. The average healthy young male, given the opportunity, could impregnate that many women in a year or less. The key phrase being “given the opportunity”.

Given the much more limited capacity of women vs. men, women, and their social group in general, have to be a lot more choosy about who gets access to the limited reproductive capacity of women. They cannot afford to waste pregnancies, so to speak. Therefore, animals in general, not just humans, allocate reproductive access to “successful” males, both by defining “success” as “winning in ritualized combat with other males and thereby demonstrating that they are stronger” and by allocating resources to successful risk-taking.

Thus the tendency is going to be to push males to take risks. They go to war, they hunt, they push the boundaries of safety. Many or most of them may fail. Men die in war, they die in hunting, they do stupid things and get killed showing off. In the indifferent logic of natural selection, that doesn’t matter. The ones who don’t die, who gain resources thru risk-taking, can impregnate as many women on their own as necessary. And therefore risk-taking is going to be selected for, in large part because men are descended from the successful (and lucky) risk-takers.

And thus we get the risk-taking part of “toxic masculinity”. Men take all kinds of risks, both adaptive and even non-adaptive, because they are much more expendable than women. The ones who say “hold my beer and watch this” and then don’t get killed gain status and therefore reproductive access. The football player gets the cheerleader. The hunter who kills the bison gets the wives. The entrepreneur gets the dates.

Can we socialize against this? Sure, we can try, and maybe even be successful to some extent. But only to some extent - because the risk-taking strategy and being a dominant male works.

So what about the incel and the Nice Guy and those who don’t succeed either by risk-taking successfully, nor by “getting to know women as individuals”? Is he a failure?

Evolution asks exactly one question. “Did you produce more viable offspring than everything else in your environment?”

If the answer is Yes, then you are not a failure. If the answer is No, then you are a failed experiment. You can contribute to your culture, certainly, and to the extent that culture evolves and survives, you have contributed in that way. But in terms of biological evolution, the only thing that matters is reproducing your genes.

Regards,
Shodan

142

Justso stories are fun.

143

Thanks. Reading it now.

144

I think you’re describing it the wrong way around. The cheerleader chooses the football player. Women choose the hunter who kills the bison. Women choose to go on dates with the entrepreneur.

145

It’s always cool when people who rail against the breakdown of the nuclear family and who fuss about deadbeat dads and how that creates poverty turn around and talk about how women only have sex with successful dudes like that’s some biological reality.

Of course it’s not. The entrepreneur gets the dates, but so does the drummer. The hunter has the wives, but so does the grifter. The football player dates the cheerleader, and the goth dude dates the goth chick.

Instead of being all We Hunted Mammoths about it, how about a more general idea?

  1. Folks want to date/have sex with/marry people they think are interesting, physically attractive, competent, or offer something material they want (a skill, wealth, a connection, etc.)
  2. Folks tend to date within social groups.

This way you don’t need to posit some previously-undiscovered gene of attraction to football players.

146

Sure, and the more control women have over who they reproduce with, the more they get to choose. In traditional societies, that control is more in the hands of the high-status males in the situation, which leads to things like bride prices and dowries and even the traditional parts of fairy tales where the king promises his daughter to whoever slays the dragon. But that is society reinforcing a reproductive strategy that maximizes reproductive success, by managing the limited reproductive capacity of women compared to men.

And it persists to this day. When my daughter was six, she came home from school to tell me that she was now engaged to Caleb, a boy in her class. (Caleb was apparently quite the star at flag football during recess.) To which I asked the traditional question - “How is he going to support you? Does he have a job?”

To which she replied with perfect logic, “Don’t be silly, daddy - he’s only six”. When I asked where they were going to live, I was informed that they would live with us, because we had a better TV. For a six year old, she was doing a reasonable job of managing - access to a high-status male, as well as access to resources.

It didn’t last - he moved to Duluth.

Regards,
Shodan

147

This is a really fascinating line of discussion. I don’t dismiss evolution or biological drives…but we are thinking monkeys. A woman might choose the “high status male,” but we have the ability as a species to change what that means. To no longer be at the mercy of Saint Darwin. To choose to define value in a partner any way we wish, as individuals and as societies.

We’re having some successes in that regard.
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148

Note the alpha male myth is BS, and the author (Dr. David Mech) of the retracted study had tried to clarify this for years

I get that the unrequited love switcheroo trope is popular in movies and insecure men also like to use the Alpha male claim because of their own self doubt but it just isn’t true.

Even if it was true, men being selective would show value, so only the “betas” would take what ever they could get.

The reality in humans is that living the single life wasn’t really even possible until very recent history and it required an entire family to survive.

Sure woman may want successful attractive leaders, but guess what…those are rare resources too. Don’t confuse the need to demonstrate being a worthy partner with a desire for the best.

The whole claim is really a type of benevolent sexism that dehumanizes women and the far more complex reasons and even chemistry that results in interest. The fact that Trump had to sexually assault and import a woman from across the globe to be “successful” in his mind demonstrates that this alpha male theory is BS.

Harvey Weinstein didn’t get in trouble for consensual sex!

149

To expand on Dominance here.

  • Bad behavior is typically due to a drive to attain higher rank.

  • Dominance is not a personality trait and changes.

  • For animals where rank is maintained through ritualistic aggressive acts, being on the top is stressful and typically short lived and they almost exclusively breed in herds.

  • Most hierarchies are established through parent-child relationships or influence and not aggression like in the Alpha model. In fission–fusion societies, like chimpanzee, the main parent group leader has to spend much more time forming coalitions and protecting subordinates. Bonobos can be lead by a coalitions of females they use sex and grooming to reduce stress.

Even in the case of chimpanzees which do use yelling and sometimes violence to resolve stress are typically based on families and social and mating groups do not always overlap. They also mate promiscuously.

One just has to look at the inheritance laws of last century to show that the “disposable sex” idea isn’t fully true. But it is also sexist against men who while they lack a womb or mammary glands have no problem raising children.

The benevolent sexist belief that makes women out as weak and fragile is why men went to war in recent western history, they were dehumanized by being put on a pedestal. Women in warfare differed from culture to culture which directly demonstrates it is not a biological trait. The fact that men are often portrayed as too incompetent to be a parent is similar and in conflict with the Alpha male myth.

150

Missed the edit window.

  • Most hierarchies

should be

  • Most social mammal hierarchies
151

Sure, we can do that to some extent. But, as mentioned, only to some extent. The underlying biological components are there.

It is rather similar to the idea of a “gay gene”. Nobody AFAIK suggests that same-sex orientation is wholly and solely a function of genetics - a lot of homozygous twins are both homosexual, but not all. Very strong social pressure in most cultures over time has been to suppress the expression of the gay gene, but that didn’t mean that nobody was ever homosexual, or never had homosexual contacts on the side. I know about Greeks and pederasty - but ancient Greeks could be as gay as green on Thursday and still be expected to marry and have children. There is only so much that social pressure can do - it can inhibit overt expression of an urge, but not suppress it altogether, much of the time.

Likewise with men. Men are more aggressive than women about 60% of the time. That is, if you pick one man and one woman at random from a population, the chances that the man is more aggressive overall than the woman are about 60% - significant, if not overwhelming. But it is distributed along a bell curve, and becomes more extreme as you move to either end. A highly aggressive person at the extreme end of the curve is 90+% more likely to be a man than a woman. That’s why so many men are in prison. Sure, there are women who are in prison for violent crimes. But there are ten times as many men (and many of the women are there for violence against children - most child abuse is committed by women). Men tend to be risk-takers - women tend, on average, to respond differently to negative stimuli as compared to men. Is that a good or a bad thing? Not altogether relevant - it’s a thing, even if it’s bad, and will manifest itself even if we try to socialize against it.

It is extremely difficult to socialize away the extremes, because they are, well, extreme. We can do a lot, perhaps, to change the definition of “high-status” so that women will be attracted to “woke” men or bookish nerds or whatever. But we are working against tens of thousands of years of evolution, so it will be an uphill battle, and probably never entirely successful.

Regards,
Shodan

152

While there are biological differences, can you provide a cite that shows that it is caused by XY or XX chromosomes?

The statement that “men’s and women’s brains respond differently” is vastly different than a claim “men’s and women’s brains respond differently because they are men and women’”

You are also talking a study that was directed at detecting differences in current state without making any claim about biological cause. There will be small differences even if just due to hormonal but the only way this cite matches with your overarching theme is if one makes conclusions it didn’t make.

Note that this later study may show that the fact that women have to be more fearful in general may lead to this difference being due to culture and not biology as you claim as novel images didn’t show a sex difference.

No one is arguing that testosterone doesn’t increase aggression, but your claim that:

Doesn’t even relate to the negative effects of conforming to male social stereotypes but doesn’t establish your claim that this is a purely biological trait.

It seems like you are connecting a bunch of random and often not fully accepted gender differences and claiming that they are a function of Gender.

Yes testosterone and male risk taking may increase crime rates as an example, but there is also compelling evidence that social norms, social support, or gender inequality play a big role in the differences. As a male myself I am not willing to accept your claim that I am more likely a criminal because I have a penis.

There is lots of evidence to the contrary that a lot of the aggression is explained by belief and not biology.

Outside of violence it seems that acts aggression in intimate relationships tend to be similar for men and women but that escalation to violence is more typically male.

Please come back if I am somehow missing this research but search engines only produce pop-sci links that try and tie this to evolutionary genetic differences and the studies aren’t even making that claim when checked.

153

I’m still reading it. Interestingly, it appears that one of the authors referenced, Bohan, works at the university here.

154

Whoah there. That’s completely wrong. Women don’t traditionally go to war because they are needed for bearing the next generation of (male) soldiers. A society that sends its women to war is very quickly a dead society.

155

Oh really,

Explain the lower rates of marriage and fertility in western countries after losing a significant portion of the male population, or the typical high abortion rates? Can you show me any time when polygamy was leveraged to take advantage of this breeding stock or state sponsorship for unwed mothers for this “population”

While you may claim that they were intended to be broodmares, can you provide any evidence outside of your opinion to demonstrate this was true?

Or am I suppose to accept that the use of an interjection is your evidence.

156

Recently the population has been large enough for this to not be an issue.

Sure, look at the Rape of the Sabine Women.

Post WW1 there were large numbers of single women here in the UK, thanks to the losses in WW1. 700,000 men were killed, remember, and many more seriously wounded. And the most eligible men - those from the upper classes - were hit disproportionately hard (17% of officers were killed vs 12% of ordinary soldiers). And then there was the flu epidemic afterwards, which killed even more. Many women just stayed single, but a fair few were mistresses - discreetly, of course.

It is self-evident that a society without women will die out. We can’t all be Romans and kidnap and rape Sabine women.

157

Less self-evident that a society with 3 or so percent fewer women would die out, since presumably one could allow women to volunteer rather than be drafted. And probably less than that: few people of either gender want to go to war. So assume only 1% women casualties: that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the vagaries of social norms and customs. And presumably that 1% represent volunteers at least as capable as the average draftee man, even given socially-, and to a lesser extent in modern warfare, biologically-imposed differences since they would be more zealous.

158

As I fell like this is degrading to where “but there are differences” or “because there are differences we are stuck” discussion here is a good page that covers the complexities.

The problem I am talking about isn’t that we are different, but the fact that we are using that to make sure both sides suffer.

The typical argument is that liberals are trying pushing the pussification, and while I will not use that term personally the point I am making is that no, we are where we are, because we are afraid and weaker than we should be.
*(People never use an insult with something that that they don’t think is insulting.)
*
This link will cover a lot of topics, but the paradox I was mentioning is that when you remove the cultural power structure that produces effects like ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘rape culture’ the biological differences are actually more free to be expressed.

Resorting to categorizing women as broodmares or holding them up as sub-human sex objects is not productive. Just as it isn’t productive to have a system where men are embarrassed to go to the doctor for a problem.

As an example Men in the military and suicide due to PTSD is a culture issue. The culture doesn’t need to change so that men are emasculated, the culture could just switch to one that conveys that help-seeking is the smart and prudent thing to do.

159

In other words you can’t find anything, but women have been warriors in the past when there were smaller populations.

This only demonstrates that women were valued property. What is the point?

And you suffered the strife related to those single women, decline of the socially allowed jobs etc…and mistresses are why the abortion rate often went up in that case, which goes against that claim.

WTF, seriously, you are going to escalate to this type of hyperbole? Where did I say we should send women in and have genocide? I am talking about equal opportunity not oppression like you are advocating for.

I am worried that you think that mass abduction of women for men who can’t find a partner is even an option. Fuck you for suggesting I would even ever consider trafficking in human beings.

FWIW, in the UK and France where there were big but not critical levels of losses, women married down and younger and that happened for a few generations. In Russia who had far more losses it was not as nice.

160

But Russia certainly learned its cultural lesson. Their population dwindled so badly that the Germans massively outnumbered them in World War 2, and they certainly didn’t make the mistake of exposing their valuable breeding stock to violence again, and letting some of them perform combat missions was right out! Oh wait, neither of those are true? nevermind.