LIFE IS UNFAIR IN GENDERED WAYS

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D.   10-25

The female of the human species has a harder and more difficult life than the male, for a number of reasons.  Nature and evolution have no interest, of course, in what is fair from our human perspective, so any useful response to this essay will have to be on the basis of men recognizing this inequality, understanding the issues women face, and being willing to turn this recognition into useful behavior change.  (The assignment of greater burdens to females is justified, in many societies, through seeing it as the will of a deity.)

(1) Since males are on average physically stronger than females and more likely to engage in physical violence when frustrated than females, women are subject throughout their lives to fear of male violence (and potential sexual assault), at least in public.  They must “manage” males in order to survive and avoid injury, usually by pleasing males to keep them happy and carefully using approval/disapproval (and permission for sex) to signal how they want males to behave.  (In past centuries, higher class women exploited physical illness and the supposed physical “inferiority” of females to avoid harm and make the most of their “inferior” status.)

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(2) Since men are so highly arousable sexually and therefore look at women practically all the time for their own arousal, women must carefully adapt their dress and behavior at all times in public to signal their degree of availability for contact.  This attention inevitably leaves most women to some degree feeling objectified/commodified.  Women are of course ambivalent about this attention, since it both poses a threat and provides an opening to one of the primary factors (sex) that allow humans to establish more or less permanent mate relationships, something that is more important for women than for men because of our long childrearing process.   Since men are the source of the fear of violence and the fear of unwanted sexual attention, men are largely clueless about what this does to women.

(3) Females are judged and rewarded more for their physical appearance than for any other quality, starting in early childhood.  Males initially become interested in particular females largely on the basis of appearance, so it is little wonder that females work hard to be beautiful and attractive.  This selection by beauty disadvantages women who are less attractive, and this is especially ”unfair” since beauty has nothing to do with the qualities and skills that are important for deepening and maintaining mate relationships and for successfully raising children.  Part of the paradox here is that men looking at women for their appearance and women trying to be attractive are both just doing what seems perfectly natural, even though the result seems very unfair to less naturally attractive women.  (Ironically, if women banded together and jointly restricted beautification beyond neatness and soap and water, just as many women would still be selected by males as mates.  It is ignorance and fear-based competition (wanting to be the prettiest and not wanting to be left behind) on the part of young and relatively naïve girls that maintain the competition.)

(4) If they are to have offspring, women must incubate the foetus for roughly nine months and then “deliver” the child in what is often a quite inconvenient and painful process—probably more so in recent centuries since evolution has led to larger and larger heads of babies.  Then, women traditionally must carry primary responsibility for nurturing and socializing the children for at least eleven or twelve years.  In recent centuries, when there was advantage to producing enough children to help with survival issues such as getting food, caring for the parents in old age, and producing a proper heir (male), many women were involved in these reproductive processes for much of their lives, although our greater wealth in recent times and the development of birth control chemicals have reduced the need for multiple pregnancies enough to enable many women to seriously attempt to both raise children and carry on a proper career.

Because of the long and complex childrearing process for humans, women have ended up needing men (for protection of the family and providing for the family) more than men need women (for sex, mothering, and homemaking), thus calling on all of women’s greater social skills to preserve the family relationship. To accomplish this, women use their greater social sensitivity and empathy, as well as their greater patience and psychological connection with the children.  These capacities seem to have been accentuated more in females than in males through evolution.  (On their side, men have greater or lesser strength and agility as a result of their genes, but they have to use what they have both to “bring home the bacon” and to fight against other men who want to invade the home and take or kill the women and/or children.  Having greater or lesser strength and agility due to genetics is just as unfair to men as innate appearance is to women.)

(5) Since males are more driven to have sex then females (because more attempts to impregnate more women has proven to increase men’s evolutionary success), women are more often than males in the position of engaging in sex when they don’t have much desire for it.  This can be a source of conflict in a male-female relationship and a source of injury to females, although evolution has helped somewhat by giving females the ability to be physically aroused even while emotionally uninterested.

(6) It appears that the tissues involved in gestation and suckling are more prone to cancers than the corresponding tissues in males, thus making females more vulnerable to that source of illness and death.

(7) The above inequities and burdens have meant that women feel less in control of their bodies and their lives than men and have led to women being more often anxious and/or depressed than men and to women’s emotions being more labile.  In more instances than not, they must simply slog onward with their tasks, but it is understandable that they would take their pleasures where they are available.  The greater investment of women in maximizing appearance is completely justified by their need to be noticed, picked, and rewarded by men who are so visually oriented, and it also provides a source of self-care gratifications for women as well as some possible aesthetic pleasure.  (Women are also influenced by men’s appearance, but men in our society don’t pay much attention to their appearance, since to do so would commit the sin of engaging in “female” activities.)

This is not to argue that the female role in our society is total drudgery with no reward.  Women’s greater capacity to love deeply and their greater bond with children can bring very significant emotional rewards, and there is some value in the traditional respect for women, but overall, women have a harder life.

Men have serious challenges, too, in modern society, especially those men who have relied on brawn rather than brains to prosper, as jobs for brawn have greatly diminished in number in the last twenty years.  Due to greater and greater specialization and more need for managers and paper-pushers rather than makers and creators, men in “brains jobs” must deal with lack of meaning, too, unless they were lucky enough or smart enough to get into work that expresses and furthers their values.  Also, partly due to the need for job mobility, the old pattern of belongingness through contact with acquaintances in bars and lounges is disappearing, leaving many men without a support system.  (There are still places to drink, but the crowd is not consistent and is more oriented toward making contact with the other sex.)  Men have lost their assumed position as automatic “head of household,” due to the move of women toward treater equality and must now re-establish their value in other ways, as an equal to their partners and taking on emotionally closer activity with the children, for which they usually have been poorly prepared.

Males have a serious responsibility for food and shelter for the family.  In hunter-gatherer times, this was a source of anxiety for males, but this has changed in industrial society more to boredom and meaninglessness in repetitive, uninteresting, and essentially meaningless “jobs.”  In modern times, males have more opportunity and encouragement to participate more equally in the childrearing (and to tolerate their mates contributing to meeting the financial needs of the family), but males that want females to do mothering kinds of things for them are never going to be equal partners.

Females have received help with the above problems from advances in medical science, the development of birth control agents and abortifacients, the greater understanding of women’s existential position by psychology and psychiatry, the greater acceptability in some societies of women both rearing children and having careers outside the home, and the fact that modern societies favor women’s natural superiority intellectually and their social skills (over male physical strength).  An even greater help would be greater understanding of their existential situation by men.

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