We all know that women’s appearance is a way bigger deal than men’s in our society.

But I had to ask myself — why?

In most every land-dwelling vertebrate, the males are arrayed in splendor, their flashiness being key to attaining mates. To paint broadly: because babymaking is relatively cheap for males (the biocost of a few drops of sperm), their goal would be to get more mates. By contrast, females who pay dearly to make a baby, would have the goal of getting better mates.

Therefore, the males have to be arrayed in splendor to convince females that they’re the best. Females, by comparison, dress for utility (i.e. full camo), to give them the best bio-savings to pay the immense cost of reproduction:

The shiny one is the dude-bird, demo-ing his genetic superiority. The camo one is the lady-bird, hunkering down for efficiency and utility.

I had to ask myself, how did we humans get it switched?

I don’t have any solid conclusions. I do, however, have 3 loosely held guesses:

GUESS 1: Humans are particularly skilled at extraction.

When humans get in positions of power, they’re extra good at getting what they want from whatever — or whoever — they have power over.

Just look at nature. When we establish our power over nature, boy do we establish it, and we extract, pollute, whatever-the-heck-we-want. Our intelligence drastically elevates our extraction capabilities.

In most species, the males, no matter how much physical power they attain, cannot ask their females to put on make-up or dress more sexily.

GUESS 2: Monogamy means males too must select for quality instead of quantity.

To the degree that society, for whatever set of reasons, manages to enforce some modicum of monogamy, it becomes diminishingly viable for males to increase their progeny by increasing numbers of mates, so instead, males (like females) must now optimize their progeny by trying to pair with a female of the highest possible quality. That means ladyfolk would now have equal motivation to look biologically awesome as males. And then Guess 1 or Guess 3 takes it from there to create the women-body-idolatry we see today.

Undermining Guess 2: Cardinals are monogamous.

GUESS 3: Males get and use stuff to get mates. Females weren’t able to.

Males, due to physical advantages, have historically used possessions to display bio-virtue, which can make sense in societies where possessions lends greater advantage than physique, and females, excluded by society or physiology from various workplaces and the acquisition of stuff, stick with visual appeal as a strategy to display bio-virtue.

Any or all of these 3 factors could be at play.

I will say this: factors 1 and 3 are naughty, naughty factors. I do not like them. I do not want them to have sway. Especially #1. And factor 2 is semi-disproved by… cardinals. So there’s almost surely some funnybusiness at play here.

In other words, I don’t see a real sensible, healthy reason why we should be way more focused on female appearance than on males. And I’m rather uncomfortable with said level of focus.

And I say this as someone who IS way more focused on female appearance. Who sees it as normal for “men to be visual” and “women not to care as much how men look”. Someone who IS visual… but why?

What are your ‘causal’ thoughts? (or casual, you know, it’s whatev.)

I refrained from calling these guesses “hypotheses” because I don’t really intend to test them thoroughly. Just throwing them out there, wanting to hear your thoughts.

A friend shared this video of a men’s rights activist who particularly dislikes feminism, and asked for my thoughts:

Here’s what I got:

VIDEO SUMMARY:

He’s challenging a single claim: “women are worse off”.

He does so by highlighting ways that men suffer in which women do not, and challenging the notion that those ways are less signficant.

He’s also doing so by questioning the overall-happiness-value of the privileges that men in places of particularly high power enjoy.

In fact, at base, he’s quite nearly arguing something that feminist Jackson Katz (I think) and our dear Martin Lang argue: patriarchy hurts men.

IDEA BREAKDOWN:

Let’s say for the moment that there’s 2 potential viewpoints that could be included in what we call feminism:
1. Women suffer more than men suffer.
2. Patriarchy hurts people more than it helps them.

He’s naming and declaring false and hateful the first viewpoint.
He’s not naming or addressing the second viewpoint.

MY ANSWERS TO EACH OF 2 THE QUESTIONS:

1. Do women suffer more than men? Quite Probably. (…but it’s a very subjective and not totally helpful question/viewpoint.)
2. Do patriarchy hurt people more than it helps them? Very Probably. (…and it’s a very testable, actionable, and helpful question/viewpoint.)

My purpose in this post is not to talk about my own bolded answers to those questions. My purpose is:
A) to evaluate the questions themselves, as I’ve begun in the parenthesis above, and
B) to evaluate the video-guy’s approach to these questions.

WHY THE SECOND QUESTION IS MORE HELPFUL:
I.E. WHY THE GUY IN THIS VIDEO IS SLIGHTLY RIGHT BUT MOSTLY OFF-TRACK:

Trying to figure out whether viewpoint 1 is accurate A) is apples-to-oranges and B) creates division between men and women.

• Viewpoint/Question 1 divides: The implicit goal of question 1 is to give people the right amount of feeling bad for and/or anger toward themselves and/or others.
• Viewpoint/Question 2 unites: The implicit goal of question 2 is to make people less hurt and more helped.

• Question 1 is apples to oranges; which is worse, dying in war, or losing someone in war? Which is worse, prison, or sexual assault?
• Question 2 is more sensible; I don’t like going to war, and you don’t like when I die in war. I don’t like prison, and you don’t like being sexually assaulted. Let’s figure out whether diminishing patriarchy, or more broadly, what kinds of changes, can cause those things to happen less.
• Question 2 is still tough; it’s hard to figure out what a world without patriarchy would look like, and whether it would be better or worse for everyone.
• But Question 2 is still a more viable question, in that it can actually be tested somewhat: “what happens to societies, or in my relationships, when I work to free men and women from roles and expectations? Do the men and women involved appreciate the effects of that change in their lives?” Men and women can each experience their own before-and-after, and decide which is better, whereas it is impossible to experience the conditions of the other sex to decide who has it worse currently.

• I agree with the original video guy inasmuch as he’s urging feminists to move away from making strong claims regarding Question #1.
• I disagree with him utterly, for the above-mentioned reason, when he himself makes a strong claim regarding Question #2, namely; that women do not have it worse than men. He condemns feminists for their assumption that they’re treating all the suffering-variables correctly, and yet he makes the same assumption of himself.

In other words, the problem with the statement that “women have it worse” is not that it’s false, but rather that it’s not falsifiable, and yet he claims to falsify it.

As a sidenote, I also notice that he Freudian-slips into poopfacehood, in that although he disclaims that he’s only addressing a certain viewpoint which is only a slice of feminism, he repeatedly returns to his phrase “feminism is hate”.

SHORT MORALISTIC CONCLUSION:

In my marriage, whenever Rebekah and I spend time arguing over who was hurt worse in some relational mishap we had, the discussion is bitter and divisive, and yields little fruit.

When the discussion is about how the systems and patterns of our marriage hurt or help us, the discussion is loving, uniting, and fruitful.

Video-face-guy is probably close to right in urging feminists to stop emphasizing how women “have it worse”, but is utterly off base when he asserts that they don’t.

Let’s all lovingly inspect how the patterns of this world, particularly but not exclusively the gendered structures in our society, hurt people or help people, and act accordingly.

The end.

Someone posed the question of what the difference is between “need” and “desire”. Here’s my answer, adapted for the blog:

Every “need” bears an implicit “in order to”. That “in order to” can be weighty or trivial, but it’s ALWAYS there.

I “need” food “in order to” live.

I *desire* to eat a pizza. I *need* to heat up the oven *in order to* cook the pizza in a reasonable and efficient way.

When we say “need” without an explicit “in order to”, there’s always an implicit one, and it’s usually more of the weighty variety:

I “need” food. (“in order to” survive, which I’ve determined to be what I should do in this context.)

Usually when we just say “I need X”, we mean “I need X in order to achieve the ends I have determined to be sufficiently important to merit/warrant my acquisition of X.”

So when we use “need” by itself without specifying the “in order to”, what we’re really saying is “should”, because we’re implicitly referring to an underlying value/importance framework.

In that way “need” and “should obtain” are quite convergent. Whereas “need” and “desire” are quite divergent. Desire requires no explicit or implicit “in order to”, and so neither does it bear any explicit or implicit reference to supporting moral frameworks. “I want pizza” neither has nor needs a morally defensible “in order to”.

The difference between “desire” and “need” is that “I desire” is an impossible-to-refute assertion about my own feelings, whereas “I need” is a fully refutable claim that X is a prerequisite to Y, usually also implying that the Y is important enough to warrant (morally or in accordance to whatever other system is relevant to the discussion) the acquisition (or execution) of X.

That’s the difference.

UPSHOT:

When you say “I need X”, if it’s a significant situation, remember to ask yourself what your underlying “in order to Y” is, and try to be fair in your evaluation of whether it REALLY merits X, (in light of everybody mattering).

OTHER UPSHOT:

Sometime, you may “need” to do something that causes or risks an outcome as significant as you dying, “in order to” attain something sufficiently worthwhile.

In other words, in order to more accurately represent truth/reality, we need to stop saying “I need X” where our implicit “in-order-to” is “to keep me safe, secure, comfortable, and not dead”, and thinking that’s solidly and permanently sufficient.

Whether X is the avoidance of a mission/advocacy/service role that could kill me, or if it’s the utilization of insane costs to keep myself alive, it’s easy to see where the approach that says “I need X, period” is potentially very erroneous/dangerous/bad.

In other other words, we don’t actually unilaterally need to live in order to attain or serve what’s most important, most worthwhile.

I think that Christian readers in particular should especially agree with me on this point, because at the core of Christianity is the notion that Somebody decided that the “in order to” of redeeming our lives and creation was literally worth dying for.

No one shows greater love than when he lays down his life for his friends.

John 15:13