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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Post subject: Incels and male expendability |  |
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I thought this was a fascinating and eye-opening article:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/the-new-superfluous-men/
| Quote: | The consensus narrative seems to be that traditional patriarchy had for ages ensured men’s access to sex, until feminism came along and gave women a choice in the matter—the only disagreements being over whether this is a positive development and whether the men “left behind” are to be pitied and accommodated or mocked and restrained. A closer look at history, however, suggests that the real question is not why incels exist, but why there aren’t more of them.
The key to this problem lies in a shocking and underappreciated fact first highlighted by social psychologist Roy Baumeister and biologist Jason Wilder: the ancestors of the current human population are overwhelmingly female. This strikes many as counterintuitive. After all, it takes two to tango, and under normal circumstances the number of men and women born to each generation has generally remained equal. But there is a deeper underlying imbalance at play, rooted in the fact that, given the opportunity, a single man is capable of fathering many times more children than a single woman can birth in a lifetime. What should we make of this simple disparity? Various conservatives, traditionalists, and other opponents of feminism have taken it as proof that there are “biological imperatives” for traditional gender behaviors, often via some armchair evolutionary psychology that “programs” men to maximize the spread of their seed and women to seek stability and security for their offspring. But this is no more accurate than the liberal cliché that everything humans do is socially constructed (which begs the question of what motivates such construction). Human beings are neither blank slates nor slaves to biology—rather, biology acts as a set of constraints on the social models we develop. And what those constraints mean is that when it comes to long-term group survival, men are more easily replaceable than women. A society in which most women were killed or otherwise excluded from reproduction would struggle to maintain its population, as the remaining women would only be able to bear so many more children to compensate. Yet a society that lost most of its men could repopulate the next generation with just a handful of fathers. The rest are, reproductively speaking, expendable.
Just how expendable men are has varied with time. When the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe forty-five thousand years ago as relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherers, about three women reproduced for every man. But with the advent of agriculture, this changed drastically. The need to secure territory and a complex division of labor created highly stratified societies in which a relatively small number of men could monopolize the land, resources, and power needed to support and maintain families. By about 6000 BC, the ratio of females reproducing versus males had risen to a staggering seventeen to one, and in the Middle Ages a single leader like Genghis Khan or Augustus the Strong could father hundreds of children. Indeed, polygamy has long been the norm in many societies around the world, and even where it has been banned by law, the tendency of high-status men to cycle through successive younger wives and mistresses has long meant that it continued in practice. Recent centuries have seen a more reasonable reproductive ratio of four to one, but no matter how you slice it, the fact remains that of all the men who have ever lived, the majority of them have left no trace in the human gene pool.
Of course, all these men who weren’t reproducing did not just disappear into the ether. They cleared forests and dug ditches, plowed fields and laid bricks, their bones mixed into the mortar of civilization’s monuments. The more fortunate were sequestered into the clergy or sent away to distant posts and expeditions. Ships and caravans full of convicts, orphans, and younger sons with no chance of inheritance regularly embarked in search of new lands and wealth—many never to return. And most importantly, nearly every generation in history sent its young men to kill each other by the thousands in order to defend its frontiers—or expand them. These high-risk, high-mortality ventures, when successful, served to increase a society’s power and resources, securing an advantage for its ruling class over their neighbors and rivals. But even those ending in failure served a no less important purpose precisely by providing an outlet for excess men. An overabundance of unattached young men, or “bare branches” as they’re known in China, has long been recognized as a threat to stability. As Chatham House notes, “men who are disenfranchised from the established social order because they lack the necessary skills, education, or socioeconomic standing to compete in the marriage market are more likely to engage in risky and criminal behaviour to obtain the resources denied to them.” And when such men begin to congregate in large groups, organized crime, religious sectarianism, and civil unrest are usually not far behind. |
Would be interested to hear others’ thoughts on this – do you feel this analysis checks out?
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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Duh.
It is simple and obvious, and every thinking human over the age of 15 already knows it.
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I read the quote, didn't make it far in the article, i don't see what's surprising?
There's always been blokes who couldn't get a root or a wife, for a variety of reasons, just as there's always been spinsters for the same variety. The only thing new is that because of the Internet these Incels are able to form groups online and sook to each other.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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Lol! Love the way you put it Stui!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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