This kinda overlaps with what’s been said already, but men seem to be better at near-autistic dedication to a task. Often to our own detriment, whether it be health or social standing or otherwise. Sometimes this means building a giant train set in the basement. Other times it means winning a Nobel prize because you worked 120 hours a week and destroyed your marriage while discovering some new law of nature.
Individually, this kind of behavior is almost certainly a net loss, but we wouldn’t have the same progress in the hard sciences without it. The small handful that actually contribute in a positive way more than make up for the rest.
(Obviously, there are exceptions. Marie Curie comes to mind in particular.)
Although I wasn’t here “looking for a hug” - (I’ve learned that this is NOT the place to go for free hugs, but rather free factual slaps in the face) - though I was maybe in search for some “positive vibes”… which I believe I’ve succeeded in getting.
I told people that it’s ok to list things where it’s “easier to be a man”, but I’m more interested in the things along the lines of what you’ve listed. I’m really happy with the other 50% of posts. EVEN THOUGH most of the “strengths” that men generally possess are not things I particularly shine in;
I do give a fuck. More than I should.
I’m short.
I’m not particularly strong physically.
I’m dyslexic, which I’m told more women suffer from than men.
I’m scared/ not a risk taker.
I’m not competitive. (I’m not into sports, and even though I LOVE video games, I hate playing competitively.)
I don’t drive on the highway because of my spatial reasoning isn’t as keen as I would like it to be, and don’t feel safe merging at such high speeds.
I don’t know why, but I’m secure with this for the most part. I would admit if I wasn’t.
I just wanted to hear some good things about being a male in general. I don’t know why, but it comforts me knowing that there are things men are generally better at, even if I don’t possess most of them.
Honestly, it’s too early in the morning to try and figure out exactly why. I will think about it and get back to you.
This is why I buy my jeans, and shorts in the men’s department, and take up the cuffs (on the jeans). When I was thinner (before I had a baby), I could wear a boys size 16, and the pockets were a joy. I hate carrying a purse, although I own three of them. I have a small one for when I go out wearing skirts with skimpy pockets, a big one for when I fly, because women are allowed to have a purse, so it functions as an extra carry-on, and the one the Army issued me.
I hated maternity clothes with the fire of a thousand suns, because they had the pockets of typical women’s clothing. My mother found a pair of shorts some place with great pockets, and I wore them almost every single day the summer I was pregnant.
There’s still the fact that we have to disrobe, or use an implement for aiming. I know a woman truck driver who swears by the implement though.
They go back and forth with who is the favorite parent. When my son first showed a preference (around 10 months), it was for me, probably because I was the one nursing him, and that lasted until he learned he was a boy, like his daddy, and was potty training, and then he began an intense bonding and identification with daddy, that lasted until he started first grade, then he got very affectionate with me. I don’t think he was homesick at school, and he was doing well, but I think he was trying to make up for the mommy time he used to get with his half-days, with ramping up the intensity of his relationship with me. He’ll probably go through another “boy” stage soon, because in the third grade, kids get separated by gender for summer sports and other activities by most of the different organizations that offer them (and since our son is really big for his age, and if he weren’t kinda klutzy, would be placed a year up for sports-- we had a conversation with a director that consisted of “He’s pretty big; maybe we should put him with kids his own size”; “Just watch him for a minute”; “Oh, nevermind”-- we’ll keep him in the gender-segregated groups).
Or it could be random. Those are just rationalizations my husband and I guessed at.
Dyslexia is actually much more common among men (as are a lot of cognitive disabilities), so I guess that’s one point for Team Dude in the “who’s got it rough” sweepstakes.
One thing I note about your list: it’s all about who you are. I would suggest that, for good or ill, men are measured and assessed primarily not by what they are, but what they do. This is how they are assessed by other men, other women, and by themselves. What’s illustrated by the stats on homelessness, incarceration, suicide and all the other really bad life outcomes is that while women probably have to work harder/be luckier to have a super-awesome success story, they also don’t have to work as hard to avoid a really shitty life.
Despite the wishes of some feminists, saying “well, if my career doesn’t work out, I’ll just be a househusband center my life around my family” is not really an option: most men wouldn’t truly be happy with that, and most wives wouldn’t either. Failure in life for women is more likely to involve marrying a guy who wasn’t everything you hoped he would be and living a life of disappointment; failure for men is being crushed under chariot wheels at 19, committing suicide at 43, or digging in coal mines six days a week for 40 years and hearing people tell you how easy your life was.
Women desire to be loved, men desire to be respected; the former is usually given for intrinsic qualities, but the latter must be earned. A satisfying life is usually something you have to work for, not something you just get handed to you or luck into; that’s true for everyone, but especially true for men.
A big one: Men aren’t usually judged by other men in the same way that women are often judged by other women.
That being said, women have no one to blame but each other for the women-judging-women thing.
I think this is something that is not mentioned enough. Men have historically enjoyed the bulk of the rewards because we have also endured the bulk of the risks. It was traditionally the men who went off to hunt, fight in wars, start businesses and form careers.
Certainly women didn’t have the “opportunity” to do these things until relatively recently. But it always seems glossed over that if women want to enjoy being a CEO, war hero or whatever, they also have to assume the risk of getting fired for not making their numbers or having their head blown off. Not to mention, sometimes people fail at shit not because they are a man or a woman, but just because it worked out that way.
The greatest advantage to being a man is that we get to be dads. Moms are supposed be loving and understanding while we get to play ‘pull my finger’ with our kids, and teach them what a ‘Hertz Donut’ is. Kids look up to us like gods. Not the malevolent OT type of god that a strict mother can be, but the loving fun type god that kids adore. We get to say the things that moms disapprove of. We get to teach the kids how to fight, how to joke, how to eat over the sink so we don’t have to clean up. There’s no way motherhood ever gets to be as rewarding as this.
My bias is to take an evolutionary standpoint (and it is just that, a bias) but you may have a point here. I remember a friend of mine some time back quoting a study tha purported to show that how sexually ‘adventurous’ a woman was (i.e. how much she was likely to be interested in casual sex, premarital sex, extramarital sex, number of partners etc.) was highly correlated with the vagina-clitoris distance (which in turn relates to how easy it is for the woman to orgasm). I’m trying to see if I can find the study right now.
In other words, the easier it is for a woman to orgasm, the more her sexual tastes are going to resemble ‘male’ sexual behavior.
You mean, how easy it is for her to come to orgasm from penile penetration. I know plenty of women who can orgasm very easily when masturbating, but don’t, or very rarely, reach orgasm from penile penetration.
[QUOTE=furt]
The most successful people in the world – the kings and the millionaires – have almost always been men … but so have the biggest failures, the untold millions of poor bastards who were stampeded while on a buffalo hunt or killed in some war the asshole king started or stuck working in the millionaire’s coal mine until they coughed up a lung.
[/QUOTE]
(that’s my snip of furt’s quote, not msmith’s - intending no misrepresentation of what msmith was responding to)
I don’t know how often it’s mentioned,and it is a point worth listening to, but it’s also kinda horseshit in the same way that the stuff furt called horseshit is horseshit. It’s not just made up, but it’s selling a particular viewpoint.
It’s not more objectively true to say that men endure the bulk of ‘the risks’ than it is to say that being competitive is a bad thing, for instance. Both are basically political arguments, not factual claims. Because, it’s like, risk of what, and a bad thing in terms of what? I doubt the OP wanted a debate about the relative trials and tribulations of the most abject women in history vs. the most abject men (and like I said, I agree this is stuff he needs to hear anyway), so I won’t engage in one, but it’s worth saying: men have not historically enjoyed the biggest rewards because they’ve taken the biggest risks. They’ve taken the most of a number of particular kinds of risks, and they’ve enjoyed the bulk of particular kinds of rewards, but it’s not like these are just a bunch of individual choices, and the one causes the other. Both of those facts are manifestations of a whole shitload of other forces at work.
Because listen, I’m pretty confident I can suggest some certain kinds of failures and certain kinds of risks that I bet you guys would choose the bottom of a chariot wheel over. You’re just calling the chariot wheel and the coal mine the biggest kind of failure because they’re the “manliest” kind of failure, and they’re spectacular. Someone coming at this from the other direction would call some similarly spectacular “feminine” misadventure the most abject kind of failure. I also think that it’s dangerous to assert that for a man, life is about what you do, while at the same time suggesting that what defines women is a desire to be loved. That’s objectification in the actual concrete and straightforward sense. That’s a suggestion that women should be treated like objects because they actually are, by their nature, objects.
Anyway. I think it’s a terrible thing to be insecure about being who you are because being who you are is associated with certain benefits. I think the OP’s solution - to hate every impulse he has toward what he identifies as masculinity - is equally terrible. But I don’t think the best solution is to focus on the unique hardship we experience as men; it’s just substituting one kind of shortsightedness for another.
In the end, like furt said, the thing to do is to work, all the time, toward the version of yourself as an individual that you think you should be. Some of those things are masculine, like they have on TV. That’s totally fine. You can be a person who recognizes that a certain privilege attaches to the kind of person you are, and still not be defined by that. You didn’t steal your masculinity. It has its advantages, and it has its drawbacks, and they’re all yours.
Not to derail the thread, but since human reproduction involves penetration of the vagina, why isn’t the clitoris (or some similar bundle of nerve endings) biologically located in the middle or rear of the vagina? Wouldn’t that make more biological sense? Although childbirth might be even more painful that way.
Oh well, thread derailed.
Because the clitoris is the penis-- or the other way around, actually, since female is the default developmental strategy. Men and women have gonads formed from the same embryonic tissue. For women to have a bundle of nerves inside the vagina, there’d have to be a structure in the undifferentiated embryo, and it would need a purpose, which is to say, a purpose other than guaranteeing women orgasms from penile penetration. Women do pretty well, sex-wise, as it is, and the way women achieve orgasm probably promotes pair bonding, and makes women more selective in choosing a mate, both of which are good for the ultimate survival or her infants, which, given that a woman can have one a year, at most, and not do much else but care for it during the first year (and personally, I don’t get women who pop out baby after baby-- I was so exhausted when my son was an infant, I could not have cared for him if I’d been pregnant again, and women who care for an infant and toddler at the same time are made of iron, as far as I’m concerned-- thank gawd I didn’t get my period for the first year I was nursing).
I’m trying to think what it would feel like to have a yeast infection if I had my clitoris inside my vagina, and my eyes are watering at the thought.
Correct. It’s not like the guys getting lashed while building the pyramids had all tried and failed to be Pharoahand this was the consequence. But the implication of those who point to thing like “90% of CEOs are men” is that all men, by virtue of being men, are enjoying some kind of penis dividend where they are all, from birth, advantaged toward CEO-hood. They do not acknowledge what should be the logical corollary, which is that men are also apparently disadvantaged to being homeless, in jail, dying young, or suffering grevious bodily injury.
The implication of the “male privilege” narrative, for many men like the OP, is the sense that whatever they’ve accomplished in life, well, “it was easy for you, 'cause you’re a guy.” And the truth is it’s every bit as true to say “hey, you managed to make it to adulthood, finish college, get married, father a couple of kids, and be a productive member of society … that was all harder for you, 'cause you’re a guy.”
Ever wonder why middle-aged white men – the ones who are supposed have it so easy – are the highest-risk group for suicide? Ever wonder why most people don’t know that fact?
Why all this is true, is, as you say, due to a whole shitload of other forces. But it is true, and worth pointing out.
Historically speaking, men are at much, much greater risk of early death, violent death, slavery, suicide, most any horrible fate you can name except rape (and even there, the balance of the odds is closer than you might think). That’s not to say that being a woman was easy or fun; dying in childbirth kind of sucks, as does rape. But for every young girl stolen as a war bride by the conquering barbarian, there was a father, a brother, and an uncle killed defending her. Seems kind of crazy to look at that and say “the women all had it the roughest.”
I always find it very telling when I hear someone saying that an idea is “dangerous” instead of just saying it’s “untrue.”
There’s pretty much a mountain of evidence showing that men and women, in general, have different emotional desires/needs. “Love” and “Respect” are blunt instruments for summarizing the differences, but they do an adequate enough job.
Agree. And this also goes for women (minorities, disabled people, etc) prone to dwell on their own disadvantages. Focusing on the upsides or downsides of group membership and statistical probabilities is only gonna do so much in improving anyone’s personal outlook.
