When I was in junior high, a recurring argument between some of my friends, all boys, with another batch of my friends, all girls, vexed me. The two groups took sides over this:
Which is better: horses or motorbikes?
Even at age twelve I realized this for the pointless, indeed, stupid argument that it was. The two differently favored instruments of locomotion were too different to be directly compared in an across-the-board manner. One gets more love from horses, but one may in good conscience stress one’s motorbike to the limit, on a regular basis.
It was about this time that my respect for the general run of my peers almost vanished entirely. It only began to reappear as we became adults, as they swapped idiotic debates with important ones.
Or so I thought.
The other day a friend placed a trollworthy image on his Facebook page:
I interpreted this as a half-comic question, and many of the answers forthcoming followed in this manner, only half-serious. But one stood out, showing that the trolling had indeed hooked a big fish:
It is proven [that] women don’t have [as] many affairs as men. Women have a higher pain tolerance than men. Women take better care of themselves than men. Women are more compassionate and empathic than men. Women are the caregivers of men. Women are the peacemakers in the family. Women are the keepers of the family history. If it were not for women men would not have life. Women have to remember everything for everybody in the family. If a couple is divorced or the wife dies she will go on, but a man will be looking for someone else to take care of him very quickly. Women put up with an enormous amount of disrespect, and unappreciation that men don’t have to. The list goes on, but hell ya [sic] women are better.
I replied, and in the ensuing comments section interchange I learned that this woman (she had a feminine photo and everything) was indeed quite earnest.
So I now can take it as a fine example of narrow, bigoted opinion. And here quickly react to each of its points:
It is proven [that] women don’t have [as] many affairs as men.
Well, I can see why someone might believe that. I sort of assume that, too. It makes evolutionary sense: plentiful semen versus scarce eggs leads to two quite distinct survival strategies.
But it turns out that studies are all over the map on this issue, and the full truth may be somewhat ambiguous. If we take seriously the reportage of The Daily Mail (and I am by no means convinced we should be), we get conflicting stories.
In “Think men are the unfaithful sex? A study shows WOMEN are the biggest cheats – they’re just better at lying about it,” by Maureen Rice (September 7, 2009), we learn a few things that complicate previous and competing surveys and studies:
According to Dr David Holmes, a psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, women are having more affairs than ever – recent studies say the figure is around 20 per cent for men and a bit over 15 per cent for women — but they behave very differently from men when they cheat.
‘The biggest difference is that women are much better at keeping their affairs secret,’ he says. ‘If you look at the studies into paternity, even conservative figures show that between eight and 15 per cent of children haven’t been fathered by the man who thinks he’s the biological parent.’
That’s a lot of women keeping a lot of secrets.
It appears that men and women prevaricate differently:
When studies about sexual partners or fidelity use a mixture of face-to-face interviews and anonymous computer questionnaires, men will give the same answers to both, but women will report much higher numbers when the answers are anonymous.
And, because of the aforementioned sexually dimorphic sexual strategies, men and women have different levels and manners of lying about cheating:
British men consistently claim to have had more partners than women – the current average is 13, while women claim to have had only nine.
Plainly, someone is lying here. While men might exaggerate their sexual conquests, the bigger liars are women.
In other words, for reasons of caution and pride, women will tend to understate their numbers of affairs, while men tend to overstate them!
Oddly, though, this article does not attempt to do the math. If men really do have more affairs than men, where are those women coming from? (I am assuming that the difference is not made up of rough trade.) Either fewer women have more partners, or some unmarried women are more than willing to play the “home-wrecker” than are men.
But The Daily Mail is not done on its stellar reporting. A few years later we find this: “Men ‘more likely to have affairs than women because they experience stronger sexual impulses’, by an unnamed journalist, which cites a study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin:
Scientists said although men have the same ability to resist temptation as women, this is overriden more often because men have stronger desires.
I am dubious about all these studies. They all betray some fundamental problems of data integrity. So I turn back to that matter of ratios. If it is true that men’s horndoggishness leads more of them to cheat, then the fewer number of women who cheat must cheat with a wider number of men — it is the horndogs versus the whores.
Who comes out looking better here?
Besides, we do know that, in America today, women divorce their husbands in far greater numbers than husbands divorce their wives. And yet, by evolutionary strategy we would think that marriage is set to aid women to secure resources for their children. The truth is just the opposite. What has changed? Modernity, particularly the policies of the modern State. So, the real takeaway may be this:
More women than men have been enticed into de facto marriage to the State.
Government programs have created, for modern women, a new kind of demimonde.
So, definitely not “proven.”
Women take better care of themselves than men.
This I wonder about. If true, I bet this is partially a result of a Bell Curve distribution, the kind that leads to men demonstrating a flatter distribution curve: more male geniuses and dunces. So, more male self-care fanatics than women, but more male self-abusers than women.
Also, we know that life expectancies of men and women used to be, a century ago, nearly at par. With the growth of the modern State and its compensatory feminist policies, women’s life expectancies increased more than men’s did. This may not be a factor of self-care, however, but, instead, of other-care, particularly in the differently allocated resources devoted to repair. For example, much more money (pubic and private) is spent researching breast cancer than in fighting prostate cancer — far more. Also, death in childbirth was the traditional burden of women, putting them at high risk. That has largely been taken care of by modern medicine. Meanwhile, the risks that men take are far more deadly than those taken by women. And this is not attributable to recreational mountain climbing and cliff diving. Men take up occupations that are far more dangerous than women take up: workplace deaths are far higher for men than women. And, for no great mysterious reason, feminists complain about a paucity of women in high-paying desk jobs and in-front-of-the-camera jobs, but never muster much ire about the low numbers of women loggers, ocean fish-boat workers, and other non-glamourous but quite dangerous occupations.
Also: men kill themselves in far greater number than do women. Part of this is the result of the higher rates of failure of female suicides. Lesson: men are more competent than women — they succeed at grim tasks. And part of this is that men have to live with women, and have their honor defined in terms of success with women. Lesson: women are a problem for men, perhaps more than men prove to be a problem for women. At least at the life-and-death level of analysis. At the annoyance level? I suspect this is a wash.
Women have a higher pain tolerance than men.
Let us accept this as given, just as I accept reports that redheads have lower pain thresholds than non-gingers. So, please also accept as given another stat: women are more fearful of violence than men, despite the demonstrable fact that men are far more likely to suffer violence than women are. Women may endure pain better (they are biologically programmed to bear children, after all), but when it comes to judgment of danger, when the prospect of pain is at play, women are far less prone to take risks. Men are courageous; women . . . well, let us just say they are “differently emboldened.”
Women are more compassionate and empathic than men.
Studies by Simon Baron Cohen more than suggest that this is true. That is, more women than men show high empathic responses. But those same studies also show that more men than women exhibit high system-building intelligence. So, a certain type of emotional intelligence is favored by females in the population, while a major factor in IQ can be found higher in men than in women.
We are back to horses versus motorbikes, here. The girls love their horses; the boys are fascinated by their machines. Different but at about parity, if you ask me.
Women are the caregivers of men.
Once again, I will stipulate this as true without investigation. Will my feminist interlocutor stipulate that men provide more resources to women than women do to men? Another rough parity here. Maybe. Though the amount of resources thrown at women by men suggests no parity at all. And do not doubt that this is true: once you figure in tax payment and consumption, men are far more likely to be net taxpayers and women net tax consumers. The welfare state has weighted the whole game of life towards, not away from, women.
Women are the peacemakers in the family. Women are the keepers of the family history. Women have to remember everything for everybody in the family.
Oh, yawn. This is just too boring for words. Though I would be remiss were I to forget to mention that there is nearly as much spousal abuse by women directed against men as vice versa, men against women. So this “peacemaker” line is mighty hard to swallow. And as for family history: yawn. Amongst my Finnish-American folk, interest and maintenance of family records and genealogies strikes me as about equally weighted.
Oh, and about those memory services, that is part of what the housewife job description entails, and what the sexual division of labor amounts to. Got more empathy? Then you get more empathy-dependent tasks. That is why there are more stay-at-home mothers than stay-at-home fathers. But men are more thing oriented. Why do you think husbands tend to be the lawn care and car repair and carpenters of the household? We all go with our strengths.
Comparative advantage: look it up.
If it were not for women men would not have life.
And now we arrive in Stupid Town. If it were not for men, women would not have life. We are a sexually dimorphic species. Does my interlocutor even understand how sex works?
The biology is quite clear, no matter how much “gender theory” makes it all seem very queer.
If a couple is divorced or the wife dies she will go on, but a man will be looking for someone else to take care of him very quickly.
I am going to pass on the illogic of the first clause, instead do the right thing and concentrate on the intended meaning. So, why are men more likely to seek to remarry than women? (If that is indeed the case, and not just a memory glitch or availability bias mis-judgment.) Might not this disparity be a result of the fact that it is easier for a woman to get on welfare than a man to get government assistance cleaning house?
But I wonder if my interlocutor is aware of MGTOW.
Women put up with an enormous amount of disrespect, and unappreciation that men don’t have to.
And men get a lot of disrespect that women do not have to. And a huge lack of freakin’ appreciation. How, otherwise, to explain male homelessness as so much a bigger problem than female homelessness? Why are their so many shelters for abused wives but so few for abused husbands, despite the near-even ratio of actual abuse? (Yes, women can and do violently abuse men — as well as make false rape claims, stick men with child support for the children of other men, and much more.) Why the assumption that in rape cases the man is said to be guilty (I just heard a woman on TV, in a discussion of rape, say “women have a right to be believed”) even if the only “evidence” usually provided is nothing more than an accusation — do we think women lie less than men do?
The whole set-up of modern society is the result of men bending over backwards for women, formally and informally, through government and personal effort, both.
Truth is, men are expendable. Women, less so. Think: “women and children first!” And yes, it comes back to biology, survival of the fittest . . . societies. It is about the nature of investment in children, and that old bedrock difference: many spermatozoa, much semen . . . versus scarce eggs.
So, have we learned anything, here?
Feminism has encouraged women to show and feel solidarity for other members of their sex. Men do not have anything like that. Men are, on the whole, more individualistic. They do not even tend to carry on gripes of this nature, as exhibited by the witless paragraph of the woman I quoted.
I present her prejudiced, thoughtless case as yet another attempt to advance Women’s Honor — and I offer it as Exhibit A in the defense of men against the calumny of feminists.
But, really, I do not want to defend men. I am not very sympathetic to the general run of male kind. But my natural liking for female kind is wearing awfully thin, with each repeated exposure to feminist bullshit.
I mean: cow shit.
twv
Wirkman Comment 