Summary: A highly-exasperated reflection on the embarrassing, sometimes embarrassingly ernest, anti-feminist belief that if the playing field is leveled men can can’t compete with women.

Echidne of the Snakes passes along the innermost core reason why real men don’t feel threatened by feminism.

Salon has a fairly good article about this all:

I have to wonder: Are we so ill-equipped for any competition that we have to point our fingers at those advancing and say they’re the reason we fell behind? Is our only answer to lay blame at someone else’s feet and try to turn back the clock? What, exactly, are we trying to recapture?

My guess would be that those people are trying to recapture patriarchy.

Read the quote in context here.

This by way of answering a pathetic question by a clinical assistant professor of education and human sexuality at Widener University named Justin Sitron

“Many are left asking, ‘What is a man, if the woman can do all the same things that a man can do?’”

Is he for real?

Actually I’m going to give Sitron’s academic and professional competence the benefit of the doubt and assume that a bit like Echidne he too is passing along without approval a question he instead hears perhaps too often.

The answer, of course, is…

Aww, geez do I have to even say it?

Dude, you could grow a fucking pair of balls!

Oh, you can also be a biological father. Oh, and grow ear hair.

Just like all the other men on the planet can. At least in principle.

Which raises the really, really obvious question that ought to come up whether women have parity with men or not: “What is a man if every other fucking man on the planet can also do what men can do? Possibly better than you?” And yet, even in Rudyard Kipling’s guilt-wracked ruminations in Gunga Din, you don’t see men in existential despair over competition within the class of men. Individual concern here and there, sure! But I think guys don’t bring that up because… well… because it sounds stupid.

Also whiny and useless.

Anyway, I think it’s really, really, really important to keep Sitron’s question in mind anytime someone tries to claim “privilege” and “entitlement” originate in superiority, confidence, or legitimate power. It doesn’t. It arises in the quailings of little boys.

One way or another, though, if the answer to “what does it mean to be a man” has to include “making sure I don’t have to compete with other people who are no less, but also no more, capable than I am” then no self-respecting man should have anything to do with it!

Sweet mother of pearl, and these are the people who claim feminists hate men!?!?

Lindsay Beyerstein of Big Think says

In his latest op/ed Nick Kristof is lamenting the fact that girls are outperforming boys at school. Kristoff is as ardent a defender of women’s rights as anyone in the established media, so he gets a proverbial clitoral ‘hood pass. Yet Kristof seems oblivious to the fact that many self-appointed advocates for boys in the school system are trying to address educational disparities by further institutionalizing male privilege. Instead of demanding more resources to help boys succeed within the system, they want to overhaul the system to cater to male developmental quirks. Boys are just that special.

Read the quote in context here.

Kristof handles the most conventional “yes but” explanations, for instance the “yes but” that performance by local-minority children drags down national averages (the declines are mapped across most demographics), but buys into the possibly-correct notion that increased and earlier academic focus plus disciplinary screw-downs tend to disproportionately alienate boys. So that’s all ok.

And while he points at residual privilege as an even more-likely source for boy’s underperformance he earns more gender-neutrality points, at least from me, in his concluding paragraph (emphasis mine)

At a time when men are still hugely overrepresented in Congress, on executive boards, and in the corridors of power, does it matter that boys are struggling in schools? Of course it does: our future depends on making the best use of human capital we can, whether it belongs to girls or boys.

He said it here.

It’s true! Making the best use of human capital really is the clearest path towards a brighter future! And so I’m strongly inclined to split the difference between Kristof and Bayerstein. As long as boys and their parents could count on a vast series of structural institutions they could also count on being able to lump along on privilege plus Harry Potter / Ron Weasley style luck, pluck, and “girls suck.” Meanwhile over the last 40 years girls, and their parents, have been rather critically aware that if they were going to get anywhere they were going to have to work their asses off Hermione Granger style. Parents have been taking their daughters to work since the 1980s… a period roughly coinciding with strong movement in the workforce away from the kinds of jobs sons were previously brought lump-along style into.

In other words while for the last couple of generations social intertia has continued raising boys in the traditions of casual, lump-along privilege society has also tended to be expressly intentional a.k.a. affirmative about raising girls.

It’s for this reason that I’m more sanguine about us becoming more intentionally affirmative about how we raise boys — the old techniques of greasing the skids so they can coast (into Congress, CEO offices, or other corridors of power) isn’t just unfair, and isn’t just increasingly ineffective (while Harry and Ron could skate without exerting themselves in the the pseudo-1940 or 1950s universe Rowling created for them, Hermione would become CEO and/or Prime Minister and… would be unlikely to hire either of the boys into positions of responsibility) it’s also gets back to the waste of human capital Kristof mentions. Given affirmative, intentional, non-negligent educations boys can grow up to be as productive as girls. It might not happen overnight (old traditions seem to die very hard) but if we choose to put as much effort into boys as the old status quo forced us to put into girls it might take less than 40 years for boys to catch up.

Via Tyler Cowen an academic analysis of 1.4 million chess-tournament game records (pdf) by Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark shows that not only do men players tend to be less risk-averse than women but (emphasis mine)

A novel finding is that males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.

They said it here. (pdf) If you don’t like PDFs you can read the abstract at Marginal Revolution

There are surely dozens of conclusions to be drawn from that single sentence, and drawn with far more nuance and conviction upon reading the entire paper (which is blissfully available and free of charge.) But the most important conclusion I’d like to point out is that whatever origin you care to pick for it (patriarchy, sociobiology, misogyny, history, stereotypical chess-nerd unfamiliarity with the opposite sex or conversely more experience playing female opponents, some other reasons, and/or all of the above) gendered male aggression towards women diminishes male performance!

Specifically….

Interestingly, the estimate in column (5) shows that in cases where men are on objective grounds weaker players than their female opponents, their propensity to opt for an aggressive opening strategy seems to become even greater.18

This as opposed to men who are weaker players’ tendency to choose more risk-averse strategies when facing stronger players who are men. And lest this gender bias all seem 100% one-sided it’s important to note that weaker women players are also more likely to select aggressive strategies against women vs. men who are stronger players than they are.

Our results point at significant differences in risk taking across gender. Most notably, both men and women seem to change strategy when they face a female opponent.

The bottom line for me though is that no, really, “males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.”

Why do male chess players choose to refrain from playing a solid game and opt for more aggressive strategies when they play against female opponents? Could it be rational to pursue a more aggressive strategy? In an attempt to find an answer, we investigate whether men have a greater winning probability when they use such a strategy in games where they face a female opponent. For a strategy to be seen as rational, we simply require that it should result in a higher probability of winning a game. For analytical clarity, it is desirable to use an unambiguous outcome measure, so here we only consider wins and losses, not draws. The results of estimations are shown in Table 7 where the outcome of the game (a win is coded as 1, a loss as 0) has been regressed on choosing a solid strategy, holding constant for other aspects, similar to the earlier regressions. We find that when a man plays against a woman, a solid strategy has a 1.5 percentage point higher probability of winning compared to not using such strategy. Our interpretation of these results is that, on average, it does appear irrational for males to opt for less solid strategies when they face a female opponent.

Recall that for economists “irrational” is equivalent to the slacker insult “loser.”

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Quick question: what do you think these economists propose for a possible mechanism. Would it be a “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology” hypothesis about some kind of zany male instinct to send pawn- or horsie-shaped white sperm proxies squirting across the board towards their female adversaries?

Well… no. In a footnote the authors specifically note that competitive behavior has more of a power component than a biological/sexual one.

On the importance of the position of women in society for competitive behavior see Gneezy et al (2009). In a field study of the Khasi tribe in India and the Maasai tribe in Tanzania, they found that in a society organized along matrilineal lines, like the Khasi tribe, women chose competitive schemes more often than the men in their tribe.

Demonstrating that indeed they are behavioral economists rather than sociobiologists they suggest if there’s any biological basis it’s the universal, non-gendered, and almost certainly evolved tendency for our human brains to save “bandwidth” by resorting to stereotyping, perhaps especially under pressure.

We are not in a position to provide a conclusive explanation for the latter result; however, some theories on stereotyping within the social psychological literature fit in nicely with our results. According to these studies “judgment can become more stereotypic under cognitive load,” (Macrae and Bodenhausen 2000, p. 105). Under the assumption that the “cognitive load” becomes greater when playing against a stronger player, gender stereotyping could be used as a “cognitive shortcut,” i.e. used as a means of processing information in a heuristic mode. As Hilton and von Hippel (1996) report, stereotyping can manifest itself through the selective judgment of evidence, for example regarding another person’s intelligence. Thus, stereotyping seems to be a plausible explanation for our findings, especially as we find the elevated aggressiveness against women not to be rewarding, i.e. irrational in economic terms.

The very good news? Biology we can’t do much about, at least in less than evolutionary time-scales. Stereotypes though? Yeah, well they’re tough too. We’ll never be rid of them (I mean, seriously, would you want to spend time consciously deciding whether each individual piece of red flat octagonal metal near a road meant “stop” this time too?) But we can change them. Not overnight, maybe, but unlike genetics we can change them in decades or even years, not generations.

All the better news if you’re a man too, right? Because the study suggests that right now if you’re a man your stereotypes and assumptions about women don’t just make you behave more aggressively (and thus less, um, endearingly) but also less competitively successful!

In other words you know all that anti-feminist claptrap about how “men are losing out to women?” Well yeah, turns out that’s true. The trick, though, is that if you’re losing it’s because you’ve fallen for other anti-feminist claptrap. How’s that been working for you?

Quick follow up on that post about Jonah Goldberg, who wishes (coughthirdworldcough) women could have a little more power so they could “civilize” their men.

Goldberg actually has it exactly backwards. It’s not that women civilize men, it’s that oppressing women uncivilizes us.

When men have the idea that we automatically have dominion over half of humanity an obvious question becomes “why not have dominion over the rest?” And when men believe we can automatically ignore the agency of half of humanity, rob them of their power, and use them as objects of our own convenience or gratification it’s a quick leap to “why not make similar use of all of humanity?”

Where Goldberg goes wrong is he thinks that just giving women enough power to better withhold sex creates civilization. Instead it’s that taking away any power from women as a class makes us all uncivilized.

And once you get that it’s easy to see how, in this case, his plea to give women a little bit of power so that they can trade sex instead of just having it taken from them, is completely anti-feminist. And uncivilized.