For some men, there *are* no long term benefits. They will lose status and access to choice, sometimes quite a lot of both, and will not begin to regain it due to a more egalitarian social structure. *In general*, an egalitarian social construction materially disadvantages men over a patriarchal system; that's what "loss of privilege" means.
That doesn't mean an egalitarian social structure is a bad thing -- I am very strongly of the opinion that it's a good thing -- but you can't just assert that men also benefit without showing how that works. (and it's tough to do, because a real loss of privilege is precisely that.) Even if there is an obvious potential benefit, the rules have changed, and the current generation of men are poorly suited to the new selective landscape, and undergo a high cost to switch landscapes. The next generation might benefit, but even that's unclear; not being responsible for everything is only a benefit if the other option includes significant exercise of choice, and the general cultural tendency has been to try to degender service-instead-of-person rather than to make women really people in a lot of social areas.
Even for very high status women, shifting to women-are-people is a net material gain. (Just having standing to enter into contracts on your own behalf would do that.)
So it's not a symmetric situation; treating it as a symmetric situation has odd failure modes. (Such as associating women-are-people with upper class attitudes; that doesn't really change the upper class power structure, and it makes women-are-people a thing folks-like-us don't do.)
Sexes are *defined* by differing reproductive strategies. (few expensive gametes, many cheap gametes.) We haven't collectively figured out what the social organization looks like where this is not a source of contention. (We might not be able to; that's a tough problem.)
Female choice systems in primates -- they exist in many primate species and have been studied -- generally disadvantage the bottom 90% of males, because it's easier for the females of those species to share the top 10% of males than accept an inferior male and that certainly ups female reproductive fitness. That won't map, cannot map, directly on to people, in large part because we've significantly substituted social fitness for reproductive fitness. But something like it maps; if the cost of being picky enough about reproductive partners is low enough, the result is a lot of relatively disadvantaged men compared to the way things used to be. There are ways to make that stable, but a combination of strict female choice and men-are-responsible-for-everything (which are the two dominant ideas in Anglo culture right now) is horribly unstable. So it's not enough to talk about egalitarian social change as an obvious general benefit, because it isn't.
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Date: 2010-04-11 03:25 pm (UTC)That doesn't mean an egalitarian social structure is a bad thing -- I am very strongly of the opinion that it's a good thing -- but you can't just assert that men also benefit without showing how that works. (and it's tough to do, because a real loss of privilege is precisely that.) Even if there is an obvious potential benefit, the rules have changed, and the current generation of men are poorly suited to the new selective landscape, and undergo a high cost to switch landscapes. The next generation might benefit, but even that's unclear; not being responsible for everything is only a benefit if the other option includes significant exercise of choice, and the general cultural tendency has been to try to degender service-instead-of-person rather than to make women really people in a lot of social areas.
Even for very high status women, shifting to women-are-people is a net material gain. (Just having standing to enter into contracts on your own behalf would do that.)
So it's not a symmetric situation; treating it as a symmetric situation has odd failure modes. (Such as associating women-are-people with upper class attitudes; that doesn't really change the upper class power structure, and it makes women-are-people a thing folks-like-us don't do.)
Sexes are *defined* by differing reproductive strategies. (few expensive gametes, many cheap gametes.) We haven't collectively figured out what the social organization looks like where this is not a source of contention. (We might not be able to; that's a tough problem.)
Female choice systems in primates -- they exist in many primate species and have been studied -- generally disadvantage the bottom 90% of males, because it's easier for the females of those species to share the top 10% of males than accept an inferior male and that certainly ups female reproductive fitness. That won't map, cannot map, directly on to people, in large part because we've significantly substituted social fitness for reproductive fitness. But something like it maps; if the cost of being picky enough about reproductive partners is low enough, the result is a lot of relatively disadvantaged men compared to the way things used to be. There are ways to make that stable, but a combination of strict female choice and men-are-responsible-for-everything (which are the two dominant ideas in Anglo culture right now) is horribly unstable. So it's not enough to talk about egalitarian social change as an obvious general benefit, because it isn't.