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Notes -
Women's lives do matter more.
I'm as anti-feminist as anyone, but the central lie that feminism has spread is that men and women are groups in conflict with each other. That's not reality - overwhelmingly, women and men are in cooperation with each other. That dynamic is at the heart of what family is.
Feminism also tries to tell us that the differences between men and women are minimal and mostly social. That's another lie, the differences are profound and biologically inescapable. And one of those profound differences is that men are vastly more replaceable. If you lose half of your young men, that sucks, but in 20 years you will have another generation of young men larger than the one that you lost. If you lose half of your young women, that is a demographic catastrophe that you many never fully recover from.
And beyond that, on the individual level women are better suited to the task of raising children - ideally you have both parents around, but if you have to lose one, it's better to lose the father. Meanwhile men are better suited to the task of courage and self sacrifice. If you force a married couple to decide on one of them dying, most of them will agree that it's the man who goes.
It is a good and noble thing that the men on the Titanic gave up their places on the lifeboats for the women and children. It is a good and noble thing that men go to war to protect their wives and sisters and daughters. It is a good and noble thing that men do the dangerous and difficult jobs that risk life and limb. This is our role, and this is why it is shameful for a man to be afraid of death and amusing for a woman to be afraid of a mouse.
I would much rather myself be attacked at night than it happen to my wife or my daughters. Any man of decency would say the same.
It is absolutely wild that the male group that says the above is seen as a blood enemy by feminists, whereas the group of males that is bought in to "men and women are 100% equal from the celluar level on up" are treated as either useful idiots by feminists or with outright suspicion (i.e. "nice guys").
I also like your remark about forcing a married couple to choose who dies. Every parent is (sometimes a little too) eager to state how they'd "die for [my] kids." The real truth of the matter is that, for societal stability and growth, there isn't choice in the matter. The father should die (in this hypothetical scenario) because it's incredibly important that the wife not die and continue to raise children - and potentially have more.
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However, your position of being the one who takes the risks means you deserve additional authority to make up for that. Higher risks, higher rewards; that's just basic fairness.
The ultimate problem with feminism, and why it is destructive, is that it denies that premise; instead preferring to take "women's lives matter more" as a license for selfishness. Its fundamental contradiction is that women's lives only have value because men believe they do; treat them unfairly enough and the men will no longer do those dangerous jobs like "go to war and protect our society from an enemy that, should they win, will make life much worse for those women". (Conveniently for feminists, that enemy is nowhere to be seen, and the other dangerous/difficult/necessary jobs not being performed tend to be invisible until they aren't.)
Nah, the ultimate problem with feminism and why it is destructive is because independent, financially secure women in the labor force simply don't breed enough, and whatever political power they accrue is bent towards giving them more independence and financial security, furthering the problem.
Existence is on the line, not some vague idea of basic fairness. Fairness has never really existed since the dawn of time. Higher risks have only equaled higher rewards when the risks are considered necessary for things to continue to function (and are therefore priced in).
Women's lives do matter more, on a long enough timescale, due to the utility function of childbirth. It's got nothing to do with what men believe. Believing they're potatoes or exotic birds won't make you pregnant. If we science our way around it at sufficiently distributed scale then women's lives won't matter more. Until that day, however...
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Not really how the trade works.
Men give the physical self-sacrifice and commercial value, women give the ability to bear children in the first place plus additional care work. Depending on how good either of them are at these things, and how much demand there is for them, the balance of value may favor either party. The willingness to risk life and limb isn't worth a terrible lot in a safe, peaceful first-world country (or one that actively penalizes men who take physical action), noble as it still is when it comes to it. And a deadbeat man who doesn't work won't earn much respect either. Similarly, a woman's biological abilities aren't worth a damn when she doesn't put them use, say through contraception, and her care work needs to actually happpen for it to be counted in her favor.
I think it's entirely fair to look at each case individually to determine whether the man or the woman is more worthy of authority and/or better-suited to exercise it. In most cases it may well be the man, especially in this postmodern age in which most women seem to have been eaten by social media and social contagion.
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