Culture Exploits Men

Culture exploits men.  How could that possibly be?

Roy Baumeister was  invited to address to the American Psychological Association.  His speech  Is There Anything Good About Men? is the best writing and thinking I've seen in years on the difference between the sexes.

A lot of excerpts.

“How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?” ...The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men

Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards.

He sees the same pattern in genius and in mental retardation, more men at either end of the spectrum. 

Men go to extremes more than women.

He says that the differences between the genders, even in the field of creativity are more about motivation than ability.  What do they want to do and why?  How many women do you find doing improvisational jazz?

He first looks at the biological motivation.

Did you know that the human population is descended from twice as many women as men? I didn't .    Baumeister says, "This is the most unappreciated fact about gender."

throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
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For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. ..We’re descended from women who played it safe.....For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. ... We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).
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In terms of the biological competition to produce offspring, then, men outnumbered women both among the losers and among the biggest winners.
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Tradeoffs again: perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.

Then the  social motivation.

Bausmeister says there are two different ways of being social.  Women excel at close, intimate relationships while men excel at larger networks of shallower relationships and the network they have made.  So in the larger social sphere and with strangers, men help more than women. 

The conclusion is that men and women are both social but in different ways. Women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships. Men specialize in the larger group. If you make a list of activities that are done in large groups, you are likely to have a list of things that men do and enjoy more than women: team sports, politics, large corporations, economic networks, and so forth.

He goes to say that personality differences in communication,  the notion of fairness, the "communal-exchange" difference and the competition-collaborative difference  follow from this basic difference in the kind of social relationship that interests men and women.

The male pattern is suited for the large groups, the female pattern is best suited to intimate pairs

Finally culture.

Culture, he says, is a new and improved way of being social, a larger system, even a biological strategy with men and women working together, but against other groups of men and women.  Culture mainly arose in the types of social relationships favored by men.

The women’s sphere consisted of women and therefore was organized on the basis of the kind of close, intimate, supportive one-on-one relationships that women favor. These are vital, satisfying relationships that contribute vitally to health and survival. Meanwhile the men favored the larger networks of shallower relationships. These are less satisfying and nurturing and so forth, but they do form a more fertile basis for the emergence of culture.

So how does culture use men, what are men good for?  Three things.

1. Culture relies on men to create large social structures.
2. Culture uses men for the high-risk, high-payoff undertakings where a significant portion will suffer bad outcomes, waste their time, maybe even get killed.

most cultures have promoted population growth. And that depends on women. To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job...men create the kind of social networks where individuals are replaceable and expendable. Women favor the kind of relationships in which each person is precious and cannot truly be replaced.

3, Culture requires that manhood be earned.  A man must prove himself, earn respect, and produce more than he consumes, to  support himself and others

While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks of shallow relationships, less necessary for survival but eventually enabling culture to flourish. The gradual creation of wealth, knowledge, and power in the men’s sphere was the source of gender inequality.