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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male.

There are a lot less than there used to be and will probably be even less going forward.

There's differences that show up in the modern age too. Engineering is predominantly male (though not as male as the trades), despite vast effort made to change that. But do men get credit for this? No, we get rhetorically beat up for it.

Yes, there are other sex differences. But upper body strength, and what flows from it like fighting, killing, other feats of physical strength was for a long time the single most important sex difference. It absolutely dwarfs most others, even if you assume all other sex difference are 100% innate. Its shrinkage as a relevant factor in modern society is hugely impactful and probably couldn't be otherwise.

A huge portion of the seething over women having "fake email jobs" and what have you probably comes down to the fact that a huge portion of men also have "fake email jobs" nowadays. You can say "well the majority of cutting edge research in XYZ field is still done by men" or whatever, but that's a tiny proportion of all men so it doesn't really matter for the average person. It used to be the case that a miner or a steelworker or farm laborer could tell himself he was doing a job only a man could do and that was a source of pride and identity for him, though even by the 19th and early 20th century the anxiety about the softening of manhood was already well-advanced, evidenced by all of those intellectuals who argued that regular warfare was necessary to maintain racial/national virility. But nowadays a guy who works as a cashier at wal mart or does some rote office job understands full-well that a woman could do his job just as easily and it probably grates psychologically.

This reminds of the study (don't have the link, sorry, it's quite some time ago) that claimed to show that men resent and feel threatened by female success, and that this is a large part of successful womens' struggle with dating, based on the fact that men are much less attracted to successful women.

The numbers? Seeing a highly prestigious/high earning job such as CEO increases a woman's chance to consider dating that person by something like 50%, whereas men give only a 10% premium. On the other hand, seeing someone with a less prestigious/lower earning job than them reduced the chance to consider dating that person for the majority of women to near zero irrespective of other qualities, while men only gave a 20% penalty or so.

In other words, men just don't consider women's jobs as super-important either way. Only a minority of men resent that "a woman could do this". It's women who look down on male cashiers so much that they'd never consider dating one.

But as usual, everyone tries to find a way to blame men.

Whether women wanna date men who make less money than them is a totally different question from whether the disappearance of traditionally masculine jobs from the economy contributes to a crisis of masculine identity.

  • -10

If your post was entirely about how men just really like building, fighting, hunting, etc. and that modern jobs simply fail to fulfill some primal male urges I'd completely agree! Though I'd add that modern jobs struggle to sufficiently fulfill many primal female urges as well.

But a large chunk of your post was about how men resent certain female jobs and in particular resent doing jobs if - and because - a women can do them. This is a fairly common claim I hear, and it's in my view an inversion of reality ; It's primarily women who resent men doing a job they can do themselves, similar to how the average man does not resent successful women, but successful women resent the average man.

Though I'd add that modern jobs struggle to sufficiently fulfill many primal female urges as well.

I'm not sure this is accurate. Many female jobs: Nursing, Teaching, HR, etc. seem to scratch feminine itches and are either high status or have significant social support for arguing they should be high status.

In contrast the male jobs are very much low status, and status is an important part of scratching the male itch.

I don't think it is, mostly because one of the main reasons why there exists a crisis of masculine identity is because without provider-type jobs, women won't mate with men. It's less about miners and steelworkers vs fake email jobs, and more about provisions and providers vs children and child-rearing. Women have been moving away from producing children and spending time rearing them, and instead have been joining men in producing provisions (money) and spending time acquiring them (jobs). Men cannot and will never be able to make new children. They can raise them, but they are not suited for it, certainly not for the first year, likely more like two or three.

The elephant's tail is completely different from the elephant's nail, so I will grant you that the two questions are, in fact, different. That doesn't address either issue, and deliberately ignores the ways in which they are connected.