[mythrwy]

This may be an unpopular opinion but the real issue (biologically) is that we don't need all the men. We only need a tiny percentage of men.

So how societies sometimes dealt with this excess of men was to send a good number of them off to war. Also occupations used to be much more hazardous so many more die working.

The days of bundling laggers up in a red coat and sending them off with a musket to make the queens empire a bit larger appear to be coming to a close. But in my opinion, we still haven't addressed the underlying problem evolution has left us with. I don't have a good answer either.

[HeroOfAges]

While I would agree that this is an unpopular opinion, it's one I've come to terms with myself as I've grown older. There's a book I read that's popular in men's rights advocate circles called "The Myth of Male Power" that explores the idea of males being the "disposable" sex. Unfortunately, we live in a time where you're branded a misogynist for even mentioning the possibility that men face some serious disadvantages in modern American society.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Anyone with an ounce of empathy can see how men and women face unique challenges in society. The discussion to be avoided is "who has it worse". The more effective discussion is to see the problems for what they are, and come up with solutions.

[bluntfang]

>we live in a time where you're branded a misogynist for even mentioning the possibility that men face some serious disadvantages in modern American society.

no we don't

[scarmig]

Feel free to restate it as "you're branded a misogynist for not conceding from the get go that women experience an order of magnitude more suffering than men and need more rectification of gender injustice than men do."

[munificent]

> we don't need all the men. We only need a tiny percentage of men.

Relevant: A single male galapagos turtle sired 800 offspring, single-handedly (well, I guess it wasn't his hand) saving his species from extinction.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/world/americas/diego-tort...

> Also occupations used to be much more hazardous so many more die working.

Right. Females are precious (in the eyes of genetics) because they are wombs for the next generation. Because maturation takes time, total reproduction throughput is mostly limited by number of females.

This raises the natural question then, why don't most species simply produce way more females than males? Some do, but most don't and the reason is fascinating [0]. There's almost an iterated prisoner's dilemma thing going on where producing fewer of one sex opens up potential genetic exploitation by producing more of the rare sex and over time, that leads to a stable roughly 1:1 equilibrium.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle

So, species tend to produce lots of males but don't really need them. What to do? It seems like the evolutionary answer is to treat them as expendable wildcards. Make them bigger, stronger, more aggressive, and more willing to take risks. Some of them will stumble on to new discoveries that benefit the herd, or die protecting the tribe. Many will simply die from misfortune, but no matter, they weren't needed anyway. There's plenty of sperm to go around.

Through most of human history, this kinda sorta worked out OK because there were enough competing warlike tribes, deadly predators, unexplored territories, and risky occupations to soak up all of these genetically extraneous dudes. But we keep making the world safer and safer and now we are finding out that our culture no longer effectively knows what to do.

It seems like, for many men, the answer is to escape into a simulated world that gives them the challenge, risk, and potential (virtual) reward that they crave. Notice how almost all of the widely played videogames by young men are violent and war-like, or at least sports, itself a ritualized simulation of combat.

And, from that light, the incredible backlash of Gamergate where some men attacked women for daring to criticize or even participate in their videogame world makes a little more sense. They felt they had no place left on Earth where they could be a man and not feel like a failure.

> The days of bundling laggers up in a red coat and sending them off with a musket to make the queens empire a bit larger appear to be coming to a close.

Actually, it was just last year that the US ended the longest continuous war it has been in for its entire history. I've noticed that almost every US President seems to become more hawkish once elected. When I feel like putting on my tin-foil hat, I sometimes imagine the newly elected candidate getting a briefing from security officials. "We've run the simulations over and over, and if we don't have some kind of military conflict to act as a pressure release valve for this surplus of angry, disillusioned men, the end result will be revolution in the US."

I don't really believe that, of course, but sometimes...

[allovernow]

>But we keep making the world safer and safer and now we are finding out that our culture no longer effectively knows what to do.

I can't say I agree with everything in your post, but this assertion is reasonable. I'd say civilization has already discovered a partial solution to this problem: monogamy where men satisfy their evolutionary urges for usefulness through breadwinning. It isn't perfect for everyone but it's probably the most optimal overall solution, especially when you consider that once basic needs are met, the average person is content to live the life prescribed to them by society. What I'm saying is that maybe we don't need to indoctrinate our youth with the notion that historic gender roles are totally evil and oppressive - we're seeing a lot of the fallout from that practice in contemporary Western society.

No, not every woman wants to be constrained to a life of housework and childrearing, and not every man has the ambition to make a name for himself; but on average humans have innate desires/drives which have specialized, over tens of thousands of generations such that average life satisfaction is strongly predicated upon traditional gender roles.

[munificent]

> I'd say civilization has already discovered a partial solution to this problem: monogamy where men satisfy their evolutionary urges for usefulness through breadwinning.

Yes, I agree. Strangely enough, I think outlawing polygamy is probably one of the most profoundly powerful cultural technologies humans have ever invented.

So putting this back together with the article, the author is showing how unskilled men are dropping out of the social contract. Because, for them, the opportunities for breadwinning are harder to find.

[jotakami]

My own anecdotal experience says that not all the dropouts are, by typical definitions, unskilled. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and I believe it is closely connected to psychological factors such as susceptibility to anxiety and depression.

[paradox242]

This is the take the feels closest to the mark to me.

[invalidOrTaken]

>We only need a tiny percentage of men.

The question isn't how many we need, because need is relative. The question is how many we can employ profitably, and how profitably. (Hedonic adaptation will make us "need" them soon enough).

How many we can use profitably, and how profitably, is not fixed.

[outime]

> This may be an unpopular opinion but the real issue (biologically) is that we don't need all the men. We only need a tiny percentage of men.

Biologically a baby may be male or female at similar probability. I think your argument is flawed, as it implies that the only goal of males is to impregnate as many females as possible and nothing else.

[lovich]

That is the "goal" of dna as far as a non thinking entity can have a goal. It's deeper even then males and females. Dna that reproduces more frequently and consistently ends up dominating it's environment. How the dna accomplishes that is what changes, whether it's by reproducing in higher quantities, or making adaptations to have the organic payload carrying the dna get more opportunities to reproduce, or some other solution