Could there be an argument made that the current push by the mainstream to sort of dissuade men from aggression and dominance and impulsivity is more unfair genetically?
Oh, that's interesting.
If men are, on average, less domesticated and appropriate for a gentle modern world and our behavior needs to be curtailed more than women's does, is that unfair?
Gosh, is unfair the word that I would use to that.
So to abstract- Well, we're being asked to modify our behavior in a manner that women aren't, simply because of what modern society- Well, I mean, this has been Richard Reeve's argument.
I don't know if you're familiar.
He wrote- It's been said in that show.
Oh, really?
So you know, like if we're not going to change schools, then we should redshirt all the boys and give them an extra year as the only because?
Because asking a five-year-old boy to do developmentally, the exact same thing as a five-year-old girl isn't unfair in his, in his comparison.
You've spent a lot of time talking about dominance and aggression.
I want to.
I want to go up a level to think if I can articulate this in terms of sort of like more general principles, and then go back to your, your specific question.
So in questions like this, when we think about fair or unfair, just or unjust, I'm still very heavily influenced by Rawls, political philosopher, John Rawls, and his thought experiment, which is if you didn't know what hand you were gonna be dealt in the natural lottery and in the social lottery.
What rules would you want for society?
And that's an interesting question to think like, if I didn't know whether or not I was gonna be a man or a woman, would I set school up the way that school is set up now? and i can't i i actually wish that i could like inhabit the mind of a man for a day just to see like is it really different is it very similar i'd be fascinated with that i can't do that but i have a son i have a child and so i can get to given what i know about sex differences in brain development in rates of adhd and rates of conduct disorder How would I design an educational system such that my sons and my daughters would have an equal opportunity to thrive in them?
And it sure as heck wouldn't be what we do now.
I mean, my son's in middle school, and I think it's culturally insane what we do.
Like there is no culture on earth before industrial capitalism.
That was like Do you know what we should do with our 12 and 13 year old pubertal boys?
We should put them inside all day, ask them to sit still with each other and no older boys and no younger kids and no responsibilities.
And we should put a 25 year old woman in charge of them.
And we should get them to learn stuff that they won't be able to remember a decade later.
Whereas he does these once a month.
Go play in the woods for the whole day and there's no screens and there's a bunch of young men and it's like we're gonna build a fire and we're gonna carve things out of wood and we're gonna catch turtles and we're gonna fish and we're going to hide in the brushes.
And while we're there, we're going to talk about math and we're going to talk about the stars, and you can read stuff to prepare for your earth native day.
Well, okay.
Maybe I put it in a different way to unfair.
Yeah.
Should the additional level of discipline that males, specifically men, are required.
Oh, should we have lower standards for this?
No, no, the opposite.
The opposite.
The emotional containment that men are forced to do in order to adhere to a much more domesticated modern world takes more effort than it does for women.
It just straight up takes more effort because we are being asked to be further away from our set point, right.
Our predisposition pushes us in a direction that modern society has said that we're not allowed to go in on average, more so for women.
There will be more people who find it harder to do that in a way that are that is considered that a man.
Yes.
There has been what you could say a feminization of society, at least in as much as traits that were more typically on the feminine side of the conscientiousness uh orderliness, et cetera, et cetera uh, lower risk-taking, lower aggression, lower dominance.
Those things are being selected for.
That means that men need to pay an additional price.
It's more effortful for men to behave.
And given that, is that something that should be recognized?
Is that a kind of price?
We often talk about the double shift that women do, where women have worked during the day and then they come back home.
But nobody ever talks about the additional emotional containment that men have to do, especially given their nature.
I mean, so I Gosh.
I've never thought about this before, so everything I'm about to say is I don't have high confidence that I'm right in anything I'm about to say.
That's just as a preface.
I should do that before every episode.
I mean part of what's difficult for me to think through.
That is that the distributions differ but they're highly overlapping.
Like, most men are in the...
Range of normal women and most women are in the range of normal men.
When it comes to conscientiousness or agreeableness or risk-taking, like the, the sex difference or the gender difference, depending on how you conceptualize it in these traits is going to be the most evident at the extremes.
So, you know, we're, we, and we do see.
But this works all the way, right?
Like if you start to squeeze the bracket and squeeze the window of what is acceptable.
Once you get like outside of the tails, men are within the female range and women are in the male range.
On average, you're going to have, it's going to be a, it's going to be.
I mean, the distributions are very overlapping.
When you run it across multiple different traits though, when you're talking aggression and externalizing behavior and impulsivity and risk-taking and dominance, like when you roll all of those together and this isn't just a Someone isn't just aggressive.
They're aggressive and risk-taking.
They're all of these things together.
And when you start to lollapalooza this, there's almost no woman would be as risk-taking aggressive, dominant person.
As the outlying, as the outlying.
No, even if you were to, because on average you have like these massive overlapping distributions, right?
Yeah.
But as soon as you go, it's this trait and this trait and this trait and this trait.
But I don't think that's true because all those things are all correlated with each other.
So I think even if you- Surely it would start to push those hills out further.
I mean, we could run a simulation to do this.
But I think if you were envisioning, let's say, just three traits, some sort of three-dimensional terrain surface, I think the things that you're talking about are correlated enough, such that men and women are more similar than is commonly assumed.
So I do think that we definitely clearly see sex differences at the extremes, at the outlying one.
But in terms of like is your ordinary experience.
But that's that different than a woman in the 60th percentile?
A question would be, we can only see the behavior of people who manifest it.
And to say, well, this is where the tails are.
How many men should be out on the tails, but are wrangling?
They're white knuckling their way through life.
They're white knuckling their way through domestication.
And they're thinking, look, modern society says I can't behave in that way.
I'd really better not.
That's a price that men have to pay that women don't.
I mean, I think there's a price to the, I think I'm being hung up on the price to pay.
Like I think that there's a denial of a denial, a denial of their nature, a type of containment.
All I'm all I'm saying is, in in a modern world that basically seems to continue to say, unless you're addicted to drugs, in jail or homeless, you are still from a kind of privileged background and there is ways that you as a man aren't even seeing some of the additional costs that women pay, the double shift, the domestic stuff and, i think, some interesting data around that um, but i think that that is a the unseen cost, right like that would be the unseen cost of being a woman, of being a mother, of the things that you need to get over.
I'm just seeing if there's any leeway for sort of guys to have their own equivalent, their own equivalent like source of grievance or like sense of things that are unfair.
I mean, whether or not they should, they clearly do like, again, I'm not a man.
I'm not going to speak for men, obviously.
You know the men that I interact with are my husband and honestly, the modal man that I interact with these days is a is an 18 year old college student who's in my class and you know who are really just trying to figure out like, what is this life thing about?
Like what is this adult thing about?
You know, there's whether or not people should feel like society is unfair for um society stacked against them.
I don't think any data point even if I had them that I could come up with to be like you shouldn't feel like life is unfair, because here's why.
I think that data is really bad at counteracting these kinds of like vibes, of feeling like the headwinds of culture are against you.
And everything that I read and all the data I've seen is that men, and young men in particular, feel like they really struggle to articulate what is my role in society.
Am I valued in society?
There used to be a lane for me, and now I don't know what that lane is anymore.
You could think about like no, you shouldn't feel that way because like, the distributions are overlapping.
Or like yes, you should feel this way because.
But like, neither one of those really get at the question about like well, what do you do about it?
Like, well also like this is your personal experience, but.
I mean, I find the gap between young men and young women in terms of their perception of society, of politics, of hope for the future, of whether or not they trust each other, to be really sad and alarming.
And I think anytime you start seeing society in terms of like a zero sum game, like if women are gaining, I'm losing.
Cause I'm being asked to do something that's more against my nature.
Or if men's problems are given any airtime, that is unfair because actually, like women, are so disempowered.
Yes.
Like this um, I mean, I think it goes back to what I was talking about earlier with like the Norwegian crime, which was that, like when we began, from the perspective of each one of us has value as a human, and we are all in the same boat now, like we're all in this society together.
So how are we going to make it work for everyone?
That feels like a much more productive way forward than trying to adjudicate like which Should people think it's unfair or not.
If they do, you're going to have to start with that as a starting point.
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