www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
Note, I will be out of the country July 3-31 except for the night of July 17-18. Youre probably thinking that a talk called Is there anything good about men will be a short talk! Recent writings have not had much good to say about men. Titles like Men Are Not Cost Effective speak for themselves. and although she never gave an explicit answer, anyone reading the book knows her answer was no. Brizendines book The Female Brain introduces itself by saying, Men, get ready to experience brain envy. Imagine a book advertising itself by saying that women will soon be envying the superior male brain! Eaglys research has compiled mountains of data on the stereotypes people have about men and women, which the researchers summarized as The WAW effect. Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. My purpose in this talk is not to try to balance this out by praising men, though along the way I will have various positive things to say about both genders. The question of whether theres anything good about men is only my point of departure. The tentative title of the book Im writing is How culture exploits men, but even that for me is the lead-in to grand questions about how culture shapes action. In that context, whats good about men means what men are good for, from the perspective of the system. Hence this is not about the battle of the sexes, and in fact I think one unfortunate legacy of feminism has been the idea that men and women are basically enemies. I shall suggest, instead, that most often men and women have been partners, supporting each other rather than exploiting or manipulating each other. Nor is this about trying to argue that men should be regarded as victims. And Im certainly not denying that culture has exploited women. But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think its more accurate to understand culture (eg, a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause. Also I think its best to avoid value judgments as much as possible. They have made discussion of gender politics very difficult and sensitive, thereby warping the play of ideas. I have no conclusions to present about whats good or bad or how the world should change. In fact my own theory is built around tradeoffs, so that whenever there is something good it is tied to something else that is bad, and they balance out. Men on Top When I say I am researching how culture exploits men, the first reaction is usually How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything? This is a fair objection and needs to be taken seriously. This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth these are mostly men. Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. 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. Whos in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Even in todays American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks arent equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women. One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins. An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins, half of those coins should go to women. But remember, while the men you see are getting gold coins, there are other men you dont see, who are still bleeding to death on the battlefield from spear wounds. 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 dont give them the big rewards. Im not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures arent moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups. Stereotypes at Harvard I said that today most people hold more favorable stereotypes of women than men. Up until about the 1960s, psychology (like society) tended to see men as the norm and women as the slightly inferior version. During the 1970s, there was a brief period of saying there were no real differences, just stereotypes. Only since about 1980 has the dominant view been that women are better and men are the inferior version. The surprising thing to me is that it took little more than a decade to go from one view to its opposite, that is, from thinking men are better than women to thinking women are better than men. Im sure youre expecting me to talk about Larry Summers at some point, so lets get it over with! As summarized in The Economist, Mr Summers infuriated the feminist establishment by wondering out loud whether the prejudice alone could explain the shortage of women at the top of science. After initially saying, its possible that maybe there arent as many women physics professors at Harvard because there arent as many women as men with that high innate ability, just one possible explanation among others, he had to apologize, retract, promise huge sums of money, and not long afterward he resigned. Nobody accused him of actually discriminating against women. His misdeed was to think thoughts that are not allowed to be thought, namely that there might be more men with high ability. The only permissible explanation for the lack of top women scientists is patriarchy that men are conspiring to keep women down. Actually, there is some evidence that men on average are a little better at math, but lets assume Summers was talking about general intelligence. People can point to plenty of data that the average IQ of adult men is about the same as the average for women. He said there were more men at the top levels of ability. That could still be true despite the average being the same if there are also more men at the bottom of the distribution, more really stupid men than women. During the controversy about his remarks, I didnt see anybody raise this question, but the data are there, indeed abundant, and they are indisputable. Indeed, the pattern with mental retardation is the same as with genius, namely that as you go from mild to medium to extreme, the preponderance of males gets bigger. All those retarded boys are not the handiwork of patriarchy. Men are not conspiring together to make each others sons mentally retarded. Almost certainly, it is something biological and genetic. And my guess is that the greater proportion of men at both extremes of the IQ distribution is part of the same pattern. Its true not just with IQ but also with other things, even height: The male distribution of height is flatter, with more really tall and really short men. Again, there is a reason for this, to which I shall return. For now, the point is that it explains how we can have opposite stereotypes. Then look at the top, the heroes, the inventors, the philanthropists, and so on. Then look at the bottom, the criminals, the junkies, the losers. In an important sense, men really are better AND worse than women. A pattern of more men at both extremes can create all sorts of misleading conclusions and other statistical mischief. To illustrate, lets assume that men...
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