Männerhass
In the past weeks I had several encounters with kind, well-intentioned but strongly ideological people and the recurring theme of menhate (misandry) left me puzzled, so I wanted to express my thoughts.
This post assumes that ones sex/gender has impacts on character traits. To avoid overgeneralization, I restricted myself to areas with strong empirical support. When I talk about men and women, I talk about macroscopic statistical patterns only. When I mention gender I mean sex (biological gender) specifically.
Obviously, there are differences between gender. No, that does not make any gender superior. The same can be said for ethnicities. The awareness of differences should never be used to restrict freedom but to ensure it. Different needs require different forms of support.
Evolution is favoring sustainable, reproductive species. Under resource constraints, diversification and specialization is a natural type of solution. It makes sense that men and women should have different evolutionary priors extending from the body into the mind. Divergent physical constraints and ancestral task specializations favor differentiated skill sets and motivational tendencies. Still, one should not forget that societal pressures can amplify those differences even more. While men show modest advantages in certain abstract or spatial reasoning domains, women tend to be better in verbal comprehension and tasks demanding attention and inhibition control (more here). Also quite a lot of prosocial traits are more prevalent in women, including empathy and altruism (see 1 and 2). Given this evidence it starts to sound reasonable, that men might be responsible for most bad things in the world.
Our current human perspective is unique and artificial in the way that we outsped evolutionary pressures, shaping our environment to noticeable degrees. We built societal nervous systems through memes and culture, global dopaminergic motivational systems through money and the free market.
Many of our biological priors are no longer necessary. I think this is specifically visible in gender roles. Our social structures changed the games we play in life.
For a long time in our past, human roles were specialized around survival-critical tasks (find food, provide childcare, mantaining shelters). These were not cultural whims, they were enforced by ecological constraints. In modern society, specifically the first world, most survival-critical tasks are offloaded to technological and institutional agriculture, energy grids, childcare infrastructure, healthcare, education, automation. Because baseline survival is collectively outsourced, individual roles no longer need to follow rigid specialization.
Today, (most) people get artificial jobs, get kids if they want to and split family roles however preferred, no stay at home mom and man ensuring income is required anymore. The space of possibilities expanded and became more flexible with new societal control structures. Still the biological priors are there. To repeat, they are not easy to distinguish from societal pressures, but it is rational to assume differences, especially given the empirical evidence.
But this leads to interesting dynamics and memes in today’s society. In the current transition to a post-woke era a lot of the ideologies seeping into mainstream get identified as such. One of those which prevails in the mainstream left activist bubble is the belief of men being the root of evil. Needless to say this position exists in many shades of grey. I don’t think it has a lot to do with feminism; it is oppressive and sexist in nature.
Instead of improving gender-equality by supporting gender agnosticism in fields where gender is irrelevant and supporting women in fields where they are oppressed, the menhate culture is concerned with scapegoating men as a whole.
But they are not wrong with the observation that many atrocities in the history of humanity were and are enabled or caused by powerful men.
My hypothesis is that this mainly stems from the biological artifacts of gender differences regarding motivation and skillset. Women score higher on agreeableness, and men on average are more likely to opt into and strive to dominate in competitive settings, making them more likely to rise into positions of power and control.
The more monarchical and hierarchical systems are, the higher the chance of manipulation and misalignment with the greater good (as defined by the masses), risking being perverted to enforce the ruling group’s ideology. And these groups historically were men-dominated. And as evidence shows that is not an accident, as long as we do not correct against the biological priors, the story might continue.
Seeking power is not inherently bad but the more power people have, the more pressures they have to sustain against without being corrupted. In our current systems, such as the free market, companies often pursue profit not by creating genuinely helpful products but by instilling artificial needs through manipulation. Within such environments, climbing the power ladder would select for psychopathic character traits. Similar problems exist in politics.
Secondly, I conjecture that given the here discussed biological priors, the dangerousness of a man is heavily g-loaded, while women, given their prosocial priors, are less prone to evilness with higher intelligence. A valence-free goal such as increasing control, needs to rely on an underlying striving for societal good and given the less prevalent prosocial traits in men, this comes with a higher potential for “evil”. Additionally, empathy makes it harder to win in competitive elbow games which we incentivize in many power structures.
Striving for truth is the the best antidote. Integrity is a virtue. A person who is openly evil but honest is less dangerous than one which masks their evil through exploiting the epistemically incapable and emotionally fallible.
Rationality and epistemic honesty is what we need, not ideologies and memes. Even if some ideologies are aligned with the “greater good” today, they are not self-correcting and therefor inherently dangerous.
People need to discuss anything not just what is politically accepted by today’s hegemony. We need to be able to confront uncomfortable truths without pushback and unpack sugarcoated lies or misrepresentations.
When no prior record suggests otherwise, extending a presumption of good will to every human is a principle anyone (Yes, you!) should adopt today.
I try to have compassion for all kinds, and the older I get, the more different minds I listen too, the more I can understand opposing perspectives. True evil is rarer than public discourse makes it seem. Menhaters are usually not menhaters even if they claim it. They hate a specific stereotype of men or the the wrong-doings of men, but not men per se.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. True evil lies in indifference to the wellbeing of humans. Psychopaths, cheaters exploiting for short-term gains, parasites, manipulators and ideologies are the real threat.
This threat is agnostic to race, gender or any other category. It is solely defined in its interactions with humankind. So to all ideologists, even if your ideology is good-willed, please dig deeper otherwise you run the risk of diverging from good no matter how good your intentions are. In the real world, what finally matters are not our intentions but the actual consequences of our actions. Think for yourself, stay epistemically grounded, be kind to each other, give everyone as much freedom as you can allow for and remember that having no opinion on something is totally fine.