Equality within Inequality

 I recently saw on Quora that someone had shared this image (from Twitter, I guess):

 

 

 

 

 

The person sharing this on Quora remarked, "A little too passionate but he has a point."

I responded:

Too passionate? Society literally disposes of low-achieving men--on the battlefield in wartime and through homelessness during peacetime--and you think it's inappropriate for him to have feelings about that? Then you're the problem he's talking about.

For most of human history, we lived like all animals live. We made our homes and gathered food and other resources from our environment. Our only responsibilities were to our loved ones--our children, wives, parents, siblings and their children, maybe others whom we took in out of pity or relied on for mutual care. The only “achievement” was keeping everyone safe and fed.

The greatest advance in this was agriculture. Now instead of endlessly roaming to find food, we could make a cozy home and have the food grow right outside our door and produce a surplus. But that also meant people started getting possessive about land. Eventually, all the land was claimed, so now we had some wealthy people who owned land, and other people who had none. The landless people's only options for survival were to violate the claims of the landowners (stealing, poaching, squatting, war) or to go begging. The landowners exploited the desperation of the beggars and made them work to make the landowners richer.

From that point on, we've had an ethical double-standard. We see the wealthy as being entitled to idleness because they “earned” it somehow, even if that's just by being born or “chosen by God.” Everyone else--at least all the non-landowning men-- are seen as being born into debt, owing the world their best effort. “Pull your weight,” we're told. “Contribute to society.” We're assigned that role, and if we don't fill it, we're literally just garbage to be buried. Even then, the men tasked with burying us resent that we didn't arrange to have it done ourselves.

The reason “hitting the wall"--losing one's youthful, feminine beauty at around the age of 35–40--is such an existential crisis for a woman is because at that point, if she hasn't already claimed a role as a mother or won the attachment of a husband who will always love her and see her as being his to care for, all that's left for her is the life of a man. Up to a point, she could rely on neotony (the resemblance to a child) to cause people to involuntarily feel protective of her. And once she reached a certain age, she was also seen as having utility as a sex partner and a mother. But once she hits the wall and nobody wants to have sex with her anymore, if she hasn't cemented her position as wife or mother, all she has left is business, just like the men.

If, like the men, she spent her youth pursuing achievements at work, then she'll be able to support herself into old age just like a man, but will likely feel an instinctive yearning, a regret for never having had children. If, though, like so many women, she took her privilege for granted and failed to plan ahead--if she just partied and hopped from man to man through her 20's and 30's without ever having children or settling down into a committed relationship--she's going to be unprepared to support herself for the rest of her life.

This is why women used to be treated as property. Girls' parents felt a duty to ensure that their daughters would be provided for even after the parents had died. They'd arrange to marry her off to a man who would take good care of her so she wouldn't be fated to end up as a 60-year-old washer woman someday. It's why ancient Hebrew scriptures command a man to marry his deceased brother's widow and for a rapist to marry his victim. It was all about making sure that women and children were provided for in an age before the welfare state and child support enforcement.

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First- and Second-Wave feminists felt that the height of achievement in the realm of sexual equality was to open all of men's jobs and spaces to women--to enable women to live as men. This is the goal of a spoiled girl who has no idea what it means to be a man, or the goal of a lonely, middle-aged woman who finds herself suddenly having to support herself in a system of restricted options. Now they're pushing affirmative action, trying to propel girls and women into STEM fields that most of them don't even want to work in, just because men still dominate those fields.

This is short-sighted. As the Twitter poster said, it only focuses on the winners among men. Trying to make the male experience the new default for women ignores what awaits men who don't succeed. These feminists see themselves as expanding opportunities for women, when what they're really doing is throwing them out of the frying pan and into the fire.

And really, there's a new milestone down that road that most women aren't interested in reaching--the equality of a woman fulfilling the role of family breadwinner and supporting her stay-at-home husband. Providing men with the privilege that women are tossing away isn't something most feminists show any interest in. It was thought, during feminism's Second Wave, that this would be the natural result--that there would be less class division because there'd be no reason for women to have to "marry up." They could marry purely for love, without regard to a man's level of achievement or wealth. It didn't happen, though. Instead, it appears that hypergamy is hardwired into women's instincts. A high-achieving woman sees her pool of eligible partners as consisting only of men more accomplished than herself. A woman who becomes an acclaimed neurosurgeon will look up the social hierarchy at the chief surgeon or a Surgeon General or some other person who "outranks" her. She won't consider the advances of someone she sees as her inferior. The higher up the ladder she climbs, the more people who get tossed into that bin labeled "inferior."

Rather than trying to hack our way through short-sighted attempts at sexual equality within a system of class inequality, it seems to me that it makes more sense to get to the root of the problem with the goal of getting back to the equality we enjoyed before people started owning land. If we determine that that's a genie that simply cannot be placed back in the bottle, and finite global wealth for which we all must compete is a reality that's here to stay with us forever, then we need to devise a system that eliminates inequalities among men, instead of just ushering women into that same cage match and calling it Utopia.