Male expendability

Male expendability, male disposability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis is the idea that male lives are of less concern to a population than female lives. Male expendability is based on the belief that, from a reproductivity standpoint, one male can mate with many females, but females are more limited in how many offspring they can produce. In this way, a human population with many reproducing females and few males could grow more easily than a population with many males and few reproducing females. Anthropologists have used the concept of male expendibility in their research since the 1970s, and men's rights advocates have adopted the concept to explain and defend their own views of society.

Part of a series on
Masculism
Movements
Topics and issues
Topics
Issues
By country
Men's rights
Fathers' rights
Lists and categories
See also

Overview

The idea of male expendability in humans stems from beliefs and assumptions about biological differences between the sexes. In human reproduction, the male body can produce many millions of sperm over a lifetime, and it requires far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to complete pregnancy and childbirth. Male expendability takes the idea that one or a few men could therefore father children with many women, and a given population could still grow if it had many child-bearing women and only a few men but not the other way around.[1][2]

Anthropologists have used the idea of male expendability to study such subjects as polygyny, matrilineality,[3][4] and division of labor.[5]

Men's rights advocates have used male expendability to explain how, in their view, society can be unfair and harmful towards men. For example, Warren Farrell, a founding figure of the men's rights movement,[6][7][8] has defined male expendability as society's willingness to sacrifice the health, wellbeing, and lives of males to serve its interests and keep itself safe from outside predation and attack.[9] In this model of male expendability, the patriarchal cognitive frame assigns the role of sex object to women and assigns to men the role of violence object, with male expendability being corollary to the sexual objectification of women.[10]: 59  This form of male expendability includes the social expectation that men will step in to defend others from danger, work the most dangerous jobs, and risk death or serious injury by doing so.[11]

Some versions of male expendability also rely on the assumption that men are generally stronger and able to run faster and throw farther than women. This form of the male expendability model maintains that these physical differences along with reproductive differences have permeated most human societies such that the males are expected to protect the females. According to Farrell, male disposability has also been romanticised as chivalry, which he says is term which promotes male "servitude and disposability" by rewarding males who engage in public acts of heroism with statues and glory as a form of social bribe. Farrell says that this expectation causes society to train young boys and men with a 'hero' mindset, ultimately priming them to register for the draft or armed service, volunteer as fire fighters, and to perform nearly all of the most dangerous and hazardous jobs.[9][12] As an example, Farrell cites the military conscription of young men during conflicts to fight and possibly be injured or die.[9][12]

Theory and concept

According to Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia Higgins, the concept of male expendability was first written down by fellow anthropologist Ernestine Friedl in 1975, calling it the "relative expendability argument."[13]

Ivana Milojević argues that while patriarchy assigns the role of sex object to women, it assigns to men the role of violence object, with male expendability being corollary to the sexual objectification of women.[14] Social psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that it is common for cultures to thrive by exploiting males; this includes the most dangerous jobs being male dominated and job related deaths being higher in those occupations. This includes men making up the large majority of occupations such as construction workers, truck drivers, police, fire fighters, and armed service members.[15][16]

Manosphere critics of feminism have argued that poor and working class men "are cannon fodder abroad and expendable labor at home, trapped beneath a glass floor in jobs nobody really wants—farm workers, roofers, garbage men—and injured at far higher rates than women".[17] Anarcho-capitalist economist Walter Block argues in The Case for Discrimination that male expendability is the result of women being the bottleneck of reproductive capacity in a population,[18] a theme that was also presented in Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power.

Examples

In humans

Anthropologists note that "most societies in the ethnographic record" allow polygyny, in which a man may have more than one female partner but a woman many not have more than one male partner. Per the male expendability model, it therefore makes sense for societies to assign the most dangerous jobs to men rather than to women.[5]

The concept of "Women and children first", otherwise known as the 'Birkenhead Drill', is a code of conduct that originated during the 19th century Victorian era, where men are sent to slow down the sinking of a ship while women and children escape. In the 19th and 20th centuries, "women and children first" was seen as a chivalric ideal.[19] However, the concept has no basis in maritime law.[20]

One 2016 experiment suggested that people are more likely to agree to sacrificing a man or a person of unspecified gender than a woman in the interest of saving the lives of others or pursuing the interests of human society.[21]

Norwegian sociologist Øystein Gullvåg Holter argues that the male-led Russian government's belief in male expendability contributed to their delay in seeking international help during the Kursk submarine disaster, in which an all-male crew of 118 personnel was lost. He states, "If 118 women had been killed, alarm bells regarding discrimination against women would probably have gone off around the world." He states that able-bodied males were viewed as a more legitimate target during wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor, Rwanda, and Chechnya.[22]

On farms

With regards to livestock, the majority of male animals are typically culled.[11] Annually, around 7 billion male chicks are killed shortly after hatching, since the industry mainly requires healthy females for egg laying.[23] In the USA, this is typically done by grinding them down to slurry in a machine called a macerator.[24] Male calves are also killed in great numbers.[25] In the UK alone, in 2018, around 95,000 male calves were killed due to the cost of raising them.[26]

In other species

Among insects, male dung beetles act as foragers, who leave the burrow to search for food. This leads to males facing the risk of being eaten by predators, while female dung beetles remain safe beneath ground in their burrows. Male disposability can be far more direct; such as in praying mantis, where females eat the males as part of the act of mating. Male deaths have been argued to be being less dangerous for the overall survivability of the species than female deaths, since one male can impregnate many females, but females are limited in how fast they can reproduce.[11]

See also

References
  1. Boulanger, Clare L. (2012). Biocultural Evolution: The Anthropology of Human Prehistory. Waveland Press. p. 224. ISBN 9781478608103. ...hunting is a more dangerous occupation than gathering and should therefore be allocated to the more expendable sex, seeing as it is far easier to replenish a population with one man and ten women than it is with ten men and one woman.
  2. Etkin, William (Summer 1979). "The Expendable Male Animal, with a Sociobiological Interpretation". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. Johns Hopkins University Press. 22 (4): 559–564. doi:10.1353/pbm.1979.0026. PMID 492923.
  3. Jose C. Yong; Norman P. Li (December 19, 2022). "Elucidating evolutionary principles with the traditional Mosuo: Adaptive benefits and origins of matriliny and "walking marriages"". Culture and Evolution (Full text). 19 (1): 22–40. doi:10.1556/2055.2022.00017. S2CID 255247087. Retrieved December 19, 2022.
  4. Mattison, S.; Quinlan, R. J.; Hare, D. (July 15, 2019). "The expendable male hypothesis". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Full text). 374 (1780): 20180080. doi:10.1098/rstb.2018.0080. PMC 6664138. PMID 31303164.
  5. Carol R. Ember; Milagro Escobar; Noah Rossen; Abbe McCarter (November 19, 2019). "Gender - Human Relations Area File". Yale University. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  6. Ribeiro, Manoel Horta; Blackburn, Jeremy; Bradlyn, Barry; Cristofaro, Emiliano De; Stringhini, Gianluca; Long, Summer; Greenberg, Stephanie; Zannettou, Savvas (22 May 2021). "The Evolution of the Manosphere across the Web". Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 15: 196–207. doi:10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18053. ISSN 2334-0770.
  7. Kyparissiadis, George; Skoulas, Emmanuel (2021). ""Manosphere and Manconomy: Divergent Masculinities in the Digital Space."". Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media. 5: 199–217.
  8. "Chapter 1: The Politics of Men's Pain". Men's Ways of Being. 20 February 2018. pp. 11–40. doi:10.4324/9780429493461. ISBN 9780429493461.
  9. Farrell, Warren (2001). The myth of male power: why men are the disposable sex. Lane Cove, NSW: Finch Publishing. ISBN 1-876451-30-0. OCLC 155053789.
  10. Ivana, Milojević (2012). "Why the Creation of a Better World is Premised on Achieving Gender Equity and on Celebrating Multiple Gender Diversities" (PDF). Journal of Futures Studies. 16 (4): 59.
  11. Ong, Walter J. (1981). Fighting for life: contest, sexuality, and consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-6629-8. OCLC 567850747. Archived from the original on 1981.
  12. Farrell, Warren (2012). "The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex". New Male Studies. Australian Institute of Male Health and Studies. 1 (2): 4–33.
  13. Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia Higgins (1988). "Anthropological studies of women's status revisited: 1977-1987". Annual Review of Anthropology. 17: 473. doi:10.1146/ANNUREV.AN.17.100188.002333. JSTOR 2155921. PMID 12319976. Retrieved December 2, 2022.
  14. Milojević, Ivana (June 2012). "Why the Creation of a Better World is Premised on Achieving Gender Equity and on Celebrating Multiple Gender Diversities". Journal of Futures Studies. 16 (4): 51–66.
  15. Baumeister, Roy (2010). Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195374100.
  16. McElroy, Wendy (18 August 2010). "Review: Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister". The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Canada. Retrieved 2022-01-20.
  17. Sharlet, Jeff (February 3, 2014). "What Kind of Man Joins the Men's Rights Movement?". GQ. Retrieved 2017-08-03.
  18. Block, Walter E. (2010). The Case for Discrimination. Ludwig von Mises Institute. pp. 32–33. ISBN 9781933550817.
  19. Delap, Lucy (1 January 2006). "'Thus Does Man Prove His Fitness to Be the Master of Things': Shipwrecks, Chivalry and Masculinities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain". Cultural and Social History. 3 (1): 45–74. doi:10.1191/1478003805cs044oa. S2CID 153392118.
  20. Bailey, Sue. (November 5, 2017). Women and children first: How an elusive maritime custom evolved - and waned. National Post. Retrieved December 1, 2022.
  21. Devitt, James (2016). "Chivalry is Not Dead When it Comes to Morality" (Press release). New York University News. Retrieved 2022-01-26.
  22. Holter, Øystein Gullvåg (March 2002). "A theory of gendercide". Journal of Genocide Research. 4 (1): 11–38. doi:10.1080/14623520120113883. S2CID 73119529.
  23. Krautwald-Junghanns, M-E; Cramer, K; Fischer, B; Förster, A; Galli, R; Kremer, F; Mapesa, E U; Meissner, S; Preisinger, R; Preusse, G; Schnabel, C (2018-03-01). "Current approaches to avoid the culling of day-old male chicks in the layer industry, with special reference to spectroscopic methods". Poultry Science. 97 (3): 749–757. doi:10.3382/ps/pex389. ISSN 0032-5791. PMID 29294120. S2CID 3485512.
  24. Magazine, Smithsonian; Blakemore, Erin. "Egg Producers Pledge More Humane Fate for Male Chicks". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2022-01-20.
  25. "The end of dairy's 'dirty secret'? Farms have a year to stop killing male calves". the Guardian. 2020-12-10. Retrieved 2022-01-20.
  26. "Dairy's 'dirty secret': it's still cheaper to kill male calves than to rear them". the Guardian. 2018-03-26. Retrieved 2022-01-20.
  • Farrell, Warren (1993). The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-79349-4.
  • Baumeister, Roy (2010). Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-537410-0.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.