Any individual man is disposable.
More broadly, any individual person is disposable. Even a George Washington or a Nikola Tesla could die in infancy and the species would muddle along. But as a group, men are more disposable than women.
Everyone knows this. All but the most broken societies are organized around it. “Women and children first” in a catastrophe, men are conscripted and sent off to die in wars, the jobs with the highest death rate are overwhelmingly filled by men.
It makes perfect sense, of course. The most primal instincts are to stay alive and to reproduce. A mammalian species which loses most of its females before they reproduce will probably go extinct. A mammalian species which loses most of its males before they reproduce might not even notice. See, for instance, the deer population in the United States. A sizable fraction of the bucks might be killed in any year, between hunters and other predators and car accidents and Winter, but the population comes right back up.
That’s for most species, either loners or those in which the males and females are equally able to obtain food.
Humans are different.
Humans obtain resources by specialization to a degree unknown in any other species. Humans choose to work in a specialized field according to their own opportunities and abilities and preferences.
And there’s the rub. Most of the jobs which keep modern society functioning are held by men: keeping the electricity and the water flowing, constructing buildings and roads, growing the crops. Any individual man might be replaceable but losing even 20% of men would cause systems to fail. The species might not be doomed but society as we know it would be.
Women are still essential, of course, because they are needed to produce the next generation. Any one woman can make only so many babies, so we need them all in order to keep the species going. Each individual woman is valuable and important regardless of her material or economic contribution.
… Or is she?
In modern, industrialized society, a large and increasing fraction of women have no children. The fraction of women who never have children went up from about 1/20 a couple of generations ago to 1/4 or even almost 1/3 today.
In almost all cases this is because they choose not to. In the past, most childless women were infertile or suffered repeated miscarriages. Today, fertility problems are much reduced and miscarriages, while individually tragic, are less common and are less likely to result in ongoing problems. That leaves choice. Some women never wanted children at all. Some put it off until they were emotionally or financially ready but by the time they’re ready they are unable to bear children. Some “can’t find the right man”. Some do indeed have fertility problems but they were caused by hormonal birth control or years-long use of IUDs or STDs left untreated too long.
We see the effects in birth rates and in demographic distributions. The United States, Canada, most of Europe, Japan, mainland China, and South Korea all have birthrates below replacement level. Their populations are either decreasing or are being sustained only by immigration. This has serious implications on societies and economies. Without a steadily-increasing population, most consumer economies will be shaken or or destroyed. Without a supply of younger workers, who will produce the goods and perform the services that an ever-aging population will need?
Demographic collapse signals societal collapse.
Demographic collapse is the result of women’s choices.
Demographic collapse can be halted only by women choosing to have more babies.
Women’s value as women was always based on their ability to have babies.
Women who choose not to have babies should lose that intrinsic value. No more “women and children first”. Now it’s “women /with/ children first”. No women-only college scholarships. No welfare for childless women. No hiring preferences for childless women. Draft childless women for war and send them to the front lines.
A woman who does not have children should be valued only for the value she brings. That is, what she does that others value enough to pay for. Just as men are.
Doctors (almost half female in the US) and nurses (overwhelmingly female in the US) are important but most people can go quite a while without needing to see them. Linesmen (overwhelmingly male) are unappreciated because if they do their job right no one notices (and because they don’t need college degrees) but if they disappeared, chunks of the nation would notice after every storm and the electrical grid would fall apart within a year or two. Garbage collectors (overwhelmingly male) are looked down on for their dirty, smelly job (and no college requirement) but if they all disappeared, people would for sure notice within a week. Sewer workers, doubly so. Modern city life would become impossible very shortly.
The loss of workers in jobs typically held by independent women would have, shall we say, somewhat less dire effects. If every social worker in the nation disappeared overnight, how long would it be before anyone noticed? If every HR department in every corporation was depopulated? If every not-for-profit little art gallery had to close?
If the ability to birth the next generation will not be used, if one is a net consumer of resources and wealth, who really is disposable?
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Bravo! Someone else gets it!
I put up two essays last night but only one is showing for me. Nothing obviously wrong appears in the post’s settings.
Here’s the link to the other: https://coldfury.com/2024/10/02/choices-and-consequences/
As for the unaccustomed productivity, I’ve been very busy lately, with no time to write and barely even any to read. Yesterday, though, I was shuttling someone around to different appointments and had almost two hours’ waiting time in which I had a laptop but no connectivity. Hence, words on the page.
Both show up this morning…
Makes sense to me.
This is, over time, a self correcting phenomenon.
Natural selection, evolution, always wins.
I believe men and women to be equally disposable. You don’t get one without the other. The ratio of men to women could be much different than the current 1:1*. One man can father multiple children with multiple women. Could because there is a role of provider and protector that keep the women and children alive, and that has evolved in the human species to be a near 1:1 male/female ratio.
*close enough
Look–back in my late twenties I spent a lot of time thinking “if only I had a man in my life, boyfriend/husband whatever–then he could do (insert thing typically done by males) and I wouldn’t be stuck.”
Spent a while being held hostage by my expectations of what a man could or should do, then decided this–every time I found myself thinking that, I was going to learn to do that thing. Twenty years later I reckon I’m a motorcycle short of being the man I want to marry.
I married a dude in the army in my early twenties, lost my first baby and had a little girl who I then proceeded to raise without any assistance from her Dad, who ended up morphing into a drug-addled deadbeat.
Would I have liked to have had more kids? Yup.
Did I ever find someone who would have made a good Dad, was interested in being a Dad, was single? Nope.
Do I prefer doing the sorts of activities typically considered feminine? Yup.
But I can do most of the activities typically considered masculine, too, and if the men around me are more trouble than they are help, I’ll do just that.
Just because women aren’t linemen doesn’t mean they couldn’t rise to the occasion should they need to. I’ve yet to meet a man who can cook a meal while balancing a baby on his hip while simultaneously making sure the older kids don’t burn the house down. They’re just not wired for it.
My point is this–if a man wants a woman to go in for the more traditionally woman things – – and that includes having kids–he needs to demonstrate he’ll pick up the slack without holding her hostage.
If he’s struggling to find/do that, he needs to work on being a better man.
I know I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but fwiw.
While sympathetic to what you write – “Just because women aren’t linemen doesn’t mean they couldn’t rise to the occasion should they need to.” – most women actually cannot do on an every day basis the things that men do that work in the trades. Sure, there is the unusual woman that can, but most can’t because of a combination of physical skill/size and the mentality of being a man.
There is a reason why the skill sets of men and women evolved differently, and complimentary. The reason is success, which is all evolution cares about.
A lot of women can’t, mostly because they lack the ingenuity to come up with alternatives and work arounds for the lack of physical strength–but they can be taught. When I used to work on my car I got really good at using a breaker bar against a spare car jack on a ratcheting wrench to loosen bolts I couldn’t get loose by my own strength alone. Division of labor to keep a household running is a thing, as noted before (and again) I prefer more feminine pursuits but I’d still be living in a trailer park and walking to work at a gas station if I had refused to learn to do things more typically associated with men.
If a man wants to be needed, he needs to be reliable enough she allows herself to need him, y’know?
Most men* are “reliable enough”. I’d say they match the reliability of women across the board. Not more, not less. There are good and bad in both groups and there are the lucky and unlucky ones. I’m a lucky one, but I’ve known some men and women who were unlucky.
*American men anyway. Long on the American part.
Yeah. I was living in Denver Metro, by and large the single men seem to fall into what I’d call the “Bro-Dude” catagory.
(This article is, on my opinion, spot on though if you don’t read it I don’t really blame you–(https://www.westword.com/news/denver-named-worst-city-for-dating-2017-9737648)
Since moving to NM I’m seeing there’s a lot more men willing to put in some effort, but I’m fairly happy in spite of my singledom at this point.
Like I’m not gonna say never, but if I stay single the rest of my life I’m OK with that too. Lotta women think you have to either be a shrill harpy or a doormat, and the truth is you gotta be somewhere in between.
In general, I respect and approve of learning as many skills as possible. Very seldom will that serve you ill.
“Very seldom”, not “never”. Your motivation was to make it so you “don’t need no man”. I imagine this comes through clearly when you and a prospective mate are getting to know one another. Many men need to feel needed. This is true at the instinctual, evolutionary psychology, level. It’s doubly true in today’s Western society, in which women can walk away from a marriage and get full legal, financial, and social support. If the woman doesn’t need the man for anything, just wants him around while it’s convenient, he’d be foolish to enter into that relationship. Many men realize this, as shown by the plummeting marriage rate.
“I’m … the man I want to marry.” is another red flag. There’d be one too many penises if you got into a relationship with a man.
Many women claim that women could do all of the trades jobs if necessary. This is an assertion with effectively no evidence behind it. Setting aside the repulsion that most women feel over “dirty” jobs, few women have the physical strength to perform the jobs effectively. Take a look at the productivity of the Rosie the Riveters during WWII and you’ll see that women were doing only the lighter jobs; the heavy work was done by men, who even at peak female employment still outnumbered women on the assembly lines. (It’ll take some digging to find this. Almost all discussion of women in the workforce back then is unqualified cheering.)
And finally, “he needs to work on being a better man” is tedious in its predictability and lack of self awareness. It’s been said before and it’ll be said again: very few Western women are worth the effort for him to “be a better man”.
Equally predictably–
Y’alall
A. Skipped my stated preferences were for more feminine activities and
B. Don’t seem to understand the difference between “being held hostage ” and “don’t want a man.”
In the words of Lauren Bacall “A woman isn’t complete without a man. But where do you find a man – a real man – these days?”
In the context you seem to get “blow up doll and live-in maid” confused with “partner.”
By dismissing any woman who won’t consign herself to such as being a western woman not worth the effort–Every man I’ve seen go overseas to find a woman did so not because he thought she was the kind of woman worth putting the effort in for, but because she was someone with whom he could substitute a green card for putting in the effort.
Good heavens Stevo, You even read Tough Chicks up there?