(Note: I also published this to Substack. I worry it will take over my life.)
"When the big ones are gone, the big ones remain." My friend Gerry used to say this a lot, speaking not only of work problems, but family and political problems. The meaning is that when one problem is solved, another rises to take its place, seeming just as large. It is like those old cafeteria stacks of plates in a cylinder with springs. When you took off the top plate, the next one rose to its exact level. There was an illusion of endless plates, though at the very end there was a different look and feel that the last one was coming.
A lot of women, especially young women are angry at everyone right now, and everyone is angry right back. The women feel uniquely put-upon and disadvantaged, while the rest of us look on in astonishment. Sexual assault diminishes every year. Discrimination against women now exists mostly in subtle ways, while their societal advantages are quite public. If the attitudes of men in the dating market and into the realm of marriage are bad, were they not much worse thirty years ago, sixty years ago, ninety years ago? Have you never talked to your grandmother about her life, and her own mother's life? Have you never read a biography of a woman before Oprah?
Tangent: I mean a real biography, not one of those Facebook blurbs about Felicia Elderflower, who wanted to go to medical school after saving thousands of soldiers in the Civil War, but her father forbade her, threatening to kill her cat. But she and Mr Whiskers set out for the West and worked a silver mine, where she developed new techniques that were stolen and she was never given credit for. She made her fortune and founded the Nevada Medical College for Women, which has produced four Nobel Laureates. Her brothers eventually had to kiss her feet when she went back East.
Yes, yes, I am being snide and unfair. I am one of the astonished ones.
But because of that, I thought it better to look at all this mechanistically. Let's say that women have a pre-installed level of suspicion about men and the world in general. This fear was developed in worlds in which however dangerous your own village-boys and even husbands were to you, the men from the next tribe over would abduct you, kill your children and sell you. That was not an irrational fear, and a patriarchy run by brothers was at least a step away from servitude or death. Even as things improved throughout the Middle Ages, when women slowly acquired the right to inherit property, or inherit guild status when widowed, or veto marriages for themselves and their daughters, privileges that look meager now were hard-won and deeply treasured then. By current standards it may all have been embarrassingly bad, but in Asia, Oceania, the New World, and Africa it was far worse. And still is. There are still slave markets in Libya.
The big ones are gone, so now there are new Big Ones. A hundred years ago, women depended on men for a lot more than just status and social expectations. In an agricultural and industrial world, they were much more reliable sources of long-term resources, especially with an eye to your parents dying before you. Death and disability came more frequently, but playing the percentages, a girl could look around town and see that the future was bleak as a single woman alone. It was better in the cities, where there were teaching and millworking and secretarial jobs, but the cities also carried a much higher risk of sexual assault, especially by the men from other groups. Survival was in question, and two together had a better chance than one alone. Humorously, Garrison Keillor reversed this when talking about hard times among the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers in Lake Wobegon: "Some of those guys are even considering getting married. Marriage: the last refuge for a guy who can't make it on his own." This is also true.
All that is much better. Women have better jobs, public order protects them more, domestic abuse is no longer a forbidden subject. But the level of fear remains, so it moved down to the next plate in the stack, and then the next one. Men still have the desire to protect, but that is less necessary. There are still some groups of men that are dangerous, but women are no longer afraid to go out most places. However, because of 24/7 news covering wider areas, rare dangerous events look more common, feeding the need to keep danger alertness at the same level. The existence of some safe places highlights that some places are not. And...they are not safe because of men.
A common complaint from the angriest women on reels is that men haven't fixed other men. The idea that good men have always been needed to protect you from bad men is no longer accounted or credited. Men are now seen as contributors to dangers even if they are protectors. Yet in a pre-installed level of evolutionary fear sense, this isn't crazy. It's just moving on to solve the next level of problem.
Consider the true crime narratives, the Karen Reads and Lyndsey Clancys, that obviously guilty pretty white women can't be the guilty ones. Something about it just doesn't feel right to other women. They feel sure that something must be wrong in this situation. It must be the husband or the ex-boyfriend, somehow. Incredibly unlikely scenarios are believed, with rumors of suppressed information. Handsome single men get the same treatment. I give you Luigi Mangione, or the Tsarnaev Boston Marathon bombing brothers. Well sure they are guilty, but...they just haven't beeen understood properly. Black women don't get these fan clubs, they get the bog-standard, who-cares wheels of justice with appointed lawyers in small courtrooms.
The dating/marriage narratives and true crime narratives are tied together by evolutionary inheritance. We are still in danger. But who does the danger come from? Who is next in line? There is also heightened suspicion of what we would call male-coded spaces. When the danger was the males on the other side of town, the arrival of the police was a cause for relief. But now they are the ones who are suppressing the evidence against the guilty men, and if that man has some police connection, that just proves it.
I have mostly left out men's genetic programming and how it plays out in changing society. Society is always changing and the male and female programs are built to be somewhat adaptable. There is a different set of discussions about where all this leaves men, especially young men. I don't think I've covered that much in the last couple of years. I should have another go at it in light of this new information. But part of it is in the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche research of Why Men Take More Risks.
