Male expendability
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Male expendability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis is the idea that the lives of human males are of less concern to a
The concept comes from the idea that, from a reproductivity standpoint, one male may be able to impregnate or otherwise father offspring with many females. In humans, this would mean that a population with many reproducing women and few reproducing men would be able to grow more easily than a population with many reproducing men and few reproducing women.
Origin
According to Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia Higgins, the concept of male expendability was first described by fellow anthropologist Ernestine Friedl in 1975,[1] though she gave it no particular name. Friedl noted that most hunter-gatherer and horticultural groups that she had studied for her book, Women and Men: An Anthropologist's View, gave the tasks of hunting and warfare to men, employing women very sparingly or not at all. She hypothesized that this could be because hunting and warfare required the men to be away at home for long, unpredictable periods, which was not compatible with the care of young children in which many women were heavily occupied and could be because fewer men would be needed to replenish the population, given that women in horticultural societies were limited to about one child every three years.[2]
Overview
The idea of male expendability in humans stems from the assumption that the biological differences in the roles of the sexes in procreation translate into societal differences in the level of bodily risk considered appropriate for men and women. In human reproduction, it requires far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and semen and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to complete pregnancy and childbirth. Male expendability takes the idea that one or a few men could therefore father children with many women such that a given population could still grow if it had many child-bearing women and only a few men but not the other way around.[3][4] Anthropologist Ernestine Friedl specifically cited the slow average reproductive rates of women in extant hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies of the 1970s (one child in three years) as a reason why this might be important.[2]
Anthropologists note that "most societies in the ethnographic record" allow polygyny, in which a man may have more than one female partner but a woman may not or at least is not encouraged to have more than one male partner. Per the male expendability model, it therefore makes sense for societies to assign the most dangerous jobs to men rather than to women.[5] Anthropologists have used the idea of male expendability to study such subjects as polygyny, matrilineality,[6][7] and division of labor by gender.[5]
Dundes, Streiff, and Streiff link the concept to a male fear of being obsolete in reproduction with inspiration from feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick.[8]
The patriarchal cognitive frame assigns the role of sex object to women and assigns to men the role of violence object, with male expendability being corollary to the sexual objectification of women.[9]: 59 This form of male expendability includes the social expectation that men will step in to defend others from danger, work the most dangerous jobs, and risk death or serious injury by doing so.[10]
Theory and concept
Ivana Milojević argues that while
Anarcho-capitalist economist Walter Block argues in The Case for Discrimination that male expendability is the result of women being the bottleneck of reproductive capacity in a population.[13]
Examples
Norwegian sociologist and scholar of
See also
- Androcide
- Bateman's principle
- Compatibility-with-childcare theory
- Economy-of-effort theory
- Lost boys (Mormon fundamentalism)
- Misandry
- Missing white woman syndrome
- Reverse sexism
- Sexual division of labour
- Strength theory
- Women-are-wonderful effect
References
- PMID 12319976. Retrieved December 2, 2022.
- ^ ISBN 0-03-091529-5.
- ISBN 9781478608103.
...hunting is a more dangerous occupation than gathering and should therefore be allocated to the more expendable sex, seeing as it is far easier to replenish a population with one man and ten women than it is with ten men and one woman.
- S2CID 40340124.
- ^ a b Carol R. Ember; Milagro Escobar; Noah Rossen; Abbe McCarter (November 19, 2019). "Gender – Human Relations Area File". Yale University. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
- S2CID 255247087. Retrieved December 19, 2022.
- PMID 31303164.
- .
- ^ a b Ivana, Milojević (2012). "Why the Creation of a Better World is Premised on Achieving Gender Equity and on Celebrating Multiple Gender Diversities" (PDF). Journal of Futures Studies. 16 (4): 59.
- OCLC 567850747. Archived from the originalon 2019-01-02.
- ISBN 978-0195374100.
- ^ McElroy, Wendy (18 August 2010). "Review: Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister". The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Canada. Retrieved 2022-01-20.
- ISBN 9781933550817.
- S2CID 73119529.