This article was nominated for deletion on 18 January 2022. The result of the discussion was no consensus. |
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The
contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to gender-related disputes or controversies or people associated with them, which has been
designated as a contentious topic. Editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process may be blocked or restricted by an administrator. Editors are advised to familiarise themselves with the contentious topics procedures before editing this page. |
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2019 and 12 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Eveningblack.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 00:27, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
A comment at WP Sociology raised the issue of whether "Male expendability" is sufficiently notable to have an article at Wikipedia. Let's have the discussion here.
I believe it is notable, based on numerous references at Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL, especially in books. Where I agree with the OP, is that none of them have an explicit definition. Per GNG: If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article,[emphasis in original] and there's nothing further down that page that implies that locating a definition in a source is a requirement for notability. Neither does MOS:LEADSENTENCE require it, and bullet 3 implies that it isn't required. Finally, template {{ Missing lead}} is available to tag the article, if needed. So, I believe that this topic is notable. Mathglot ( talk) 12:09, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
Go to Misandry and look in the right margin at the nav boxes (1) Series on Masculism and (2) Series on Discrimination and you'll see what I'm talking about regarding redundancy. Atsme 📞 📧 16:05, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
Hope I'm formatting ok here. I think this school of thought (male disposability) is deserving enough of a page. It's discussed and cited frequently enough to be considered a mainstream debate. An article on a theory or concept doesn't have to be endorsing that theory, just explaining what the theory is. I think the page is sourced well enough to have a valid case.
References
Hello, I corrected the spelling of Benatar's name in your last paragraph. Overall, great work! Yourmomcantswim ( talk) 00:11, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
I added a bit about Second Sexism. :) -- Eveningblack ( talk) 00:14, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Antovigo, your additions are a bunch of WP:Synthesis. Read WP:Synthesis for what I mean. What academic sources do you have that are specifically on the topic of male expendability, as opposed to you cobbling together sources and deciding that they are about the topic?
I am likely to revert your additions. For now, I've added a Template:Original research tag to the article. Flyer22 Frozen ( talk) 01:56, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
In fact, there is no "likely." I will eventually revert all of that. Flyer22 Frozen ( talk) 01:59, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
Hi Flyer22 Frozen! I am well aware of SYNTH. I am also aware of Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not. You asked: What academic sources do you have that are specifically on the topic of male expendability, as opposed to you cobbling together sources and deciding that they are about the topic?
Let's go through it together. From Wikipedia:Notability: Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. Thus I'm going to consider that sources need not to be "specifically on the topic of male expendability", and that sources that are generally about "what populations are more expendable than others" or "in what cases is it acceptable to sacrifice someone" are acceptable. For example, a study that literally asks participants if a man or a woman should be sacrificed in a car crash is de facto about male expendability, even if the main title doesn't say "male expendability". The fact that the same study also contains data on age and social class is irrelevant.
Please note that I agree with you for some parts of the article. The first sentences about empathic response are not explicitly related to male expendability. They provide basic insight into the origin of the gender bias, but it's not explicitly linked to discrimination, so you are right that they should be removed.
But then, in ref 4: Hence, we could infer that whereas for most women (and also most men), an offspring seems “more irreplaceable” than a mate, for a significant number of men (and only a few women), just the opposite would be the case. In ref 5: A culturally pervasive social norm is the chivalrous idea that women should be protected from harm. This is exemplified by “women and children first”—a historical maritime code of conduct stating that when there is a life-threatening situation, those who are more vulnerable should be saved first (Kipling, 1907).
In ref 6: Because the parental investment of women (e.g., pregnancy, childbirth, and child care) is largely greater than that of men (Trivers 1972), their death would result in a larger fitness cost (Sear and Mace 2008)., Would you rather cause the death of three women (saving one man), or cause the death of one man (saving three women)? The sexual selection account assumes that men are more prepared than women to eliminate sexual rivals by the infliction of physical harm, especially in situations such as that described in the dilemma, which pose no physical risk to themselves.
In ref 7: Never in the history of humanity have we allowed a machine to autonomously decide who should live and who should die, in a fraction of a second, without real-time supervision. We are going to cross that bridge any time now, and it will not happen in a distant theatre of military operations; it will happen in that most mundane aspect of our lives, everyday transportation.,As a response to these challenges, we designed the Moral Machine, a multilingual online ‘serious game’ for collecting large-scale data on how citizens would want autonomous vehicles to solve moral dilemmas in the context of unavoidable accidents.
In ref 8: A contradictory perspective suggests that crime and, in particular, violence against females is viewed as more harmful than crimes against male victims (Baumer et al., 2000; Kleck, 1981). This may be mitigated or aggravated by decision makers' perceptions of the victim’s familial role and responsibilities (see Daly, 1989, 1994).,There is considerable historical evidence of a heightened concern with the victimization of white females in the United States. The cultural and symbolic power of white females as a protected class has resulted in numerous social changes and legal responses when that group has been perceived as threatened.,Furthermore, research on victims has noted that the perceived status of the victim affects decision making through the attribution of blame, the perceived threat to the community that a particular crime represents, and the practical concerns of those decision makers (e.g. Baumer, et al., 2000; Farrell and Swigert, 1986; LaFree, 1989; Stanko, 1981-82).,More severe sentences for crimes with female victims have also been explained in terms of the perceived "innocence" of females and the "undeserving" nature of their victimizations (Myers, 1979; Williams, 1976), the perceived "defenselessness" of females (Gross & Mauro, 1989), and the perception that females are less likely to contribute to their own victimization (Farrell & Swigert, 1986).,crimes against black victims may be considered unworthy of the most severe criminal justice response (see Friedman, 1993). an so on.
In ref 9: The optimal punishment model suggests that victims characteristics will not matter when the victim is determined as random,Some of our results can be understood as the outcome of a greater desire of society to protect particular types of people. For these last references, I agree that talking about "value" for society is a bit vague and more specific wording could be used.
In ref 11 (a secondary source): One also assumes that if women were eleven times as likely to die on the job, the “gender gap in workplace deaths” would be the topic of policy discussion, legislative initiatives, and, no doubt, numerous law-school symposia. Yet one seldom hears about a “gender gap in occupational deaths,” despite the fact that eleven men die on the job for every woman who dies.,Instead, it is to show that there is a broad range of gaps that favor females, but the single-minded focus on “female disadvantage” obscures a more complicated reality. This review actually cites Warren Farrell's Why men are the disposable sex" as well as Benatar.
Ref 12 states that occupational gaps favoring women are less deserving of attention and social actions. Ref 13 states The emergence of the ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret gender inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind., a losing male, more than a losing female, [...] has not exerted sufficient effort, and thus may find it fair that less resources are allocated to assist them.. For this last two references, you could technically argue that allocating less resources to assist "men falling behind" is not "disposability" per se. Thus, it can be construed as SYNTH, you win. Feel free to erase these sources about the men's issue that men's issues are erased.
Last thing, I'm going to quote Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not: If you want to revert something on the grounds that it's SYNTH, you should be able to explain what new thesis is being introduced and why it's not verified by the sources.
It appears you cannot just "revert all of that". Instead, you are expected to go through each statement made on the page and explain what new thesis is being introduced. You can then remove the specific statements for which you could demonstrate SYNTH.
Antovigo ( talk) 16:56, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
I am an external contributor, I never knew about this term before and I am not an activist. But the text was "sounding weird", we can hear an unsavory tone, and the writing is just poor in general. I hence checked the sources, and it appears the editors who wrote the sections summarizing Benatar's thesis and its criticisms were quite not as neutral and factual as it could have been.
For example, this is what is currently written [1] (emphasis mine):
> Benatar posits that society leaves men behind in discussions about discrimination, focuses entirely on women's struggles while ignoring the fact that men are the main victims of discrimination.
This sounded surprising. So I checked the sources, and here is what a review by The Kelvingrove Review writes, literally in the 2nd paragraph [2]:
> Benatar acknowledges that the sexism against women and girls (which he calls first sexism) is still a more severe problem in most parts of the world. However, he argues that, contrary to popular belief, men and boys can also be subject to discrimination.
So it appears there is just plain misinformation mixed in this page. I won't list everything here, I will try to rework a bit, but I'm not a specialist, so I'd suggest that anyone interested and knowledgeable in this subject to rework the entire page from the grounds up by referring to the sources (instead of personal interpretations of the sources). 213.211.155.159 ( talk) 00:07, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
@ User:Alssa1 You didn't give a reason why you reverted my edit. If it's because the lost boys aren't explicitly referred to in this article or male expendability in their article, then fair enough. But it is related, as they were seen as disposable by the FLDS leadership due to the desired sex ratio. Also, on this article it says "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." which is pretty much what happened with the FLDS. 24.44.73.34 ( talk) 22:10, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
I think this article is not related with discrimination at all. It should be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.212.196.193 ( talk) 23:08, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
I added the bias tag because I believe must of the content of this article, most clearly the beginning of the Overview section, should not be given in Wikipedia's voice as if the specifics of the male expendability idea were set, confirmed and accepted. Is it believed that it is more acceptable to kill a man than a woman, overall? The idea that one man can impregnate many women seems true intuitively but history shows that emperors with large harems don't have as many more children than monogomous men as we might think.(Source: Testosterone Rex) I think "Social scientists who ascribe to this idea believe that society [does this] and [does that]" would work better. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 23:32, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
I found the discussion at NPOVN enlightening. Two of the ideas in the article that are giving me pause are "most vertebrates could restore their populations if the males but not the females were killed off," which you claim is an accepted and mainstream biological fact. I disagree. (1. Most species don't have things that kill off adult males but not also adult females in similar numbers. 2. Historically, human women in Western society who can't find husbands are not encouraged to have children with shared men.) Another idea in this article is "and what happens with moose and frogs and elephant seals necessarily carries into human society's attitudes." I found one source that can refute that:
I think this is enough to justify either stronger sourcing for the implied claim that the statements about biology made in this article are mainstream enough for Wikipedia's voice or switching to "Proponents of male expendability theory believe..." However, I can find more such sources if you feel it is necessary. Perhaps some on wild animals instead of lab animals. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 00:47, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
synonyms or mention the same idea in general terms, then find it in the source and quote it. Otherwise, they (and the text cited to them) needs to go. EDIT: I pulled the parts I felt were synth away from the "arguments" they were being used to support, which reduces the problem but illustrates the fundamental issue here - they are less synth-y now, but their basic inclusion is still a problem for the reason I outlined. Editors cannot include random bits of biology or facts about gender demographics to try and illustrate a point about male expendability themselves; we need to use sources actually making those arguments, which, as far as I can tell, these ones do not. -- Aquillion ( talk) 07:44, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
This Wikipedia article was written starting halfway into the topic, looking only at the recent trend by men's rights activists who have been using the arguments of feminism against feminism. MRAs have written about how men are unfairly treated by expected societal gender roles in the same fashion as feminists saying women are mistreated. (See Angela McRobbie's The Aftermath of Feminism, Molly Dragiewicz's Equality with a Vengeance, Ana Jordan's The New Politics of Fatherhood, etc.)
The first half of the topic was ignored completely: how and why the males of many species are considered the expendable sex. How deeply ingrained this pattern is in human society. All the scholarship from anthropologists and biologists who were studying long-term patterns in humans and various other species. Nothing about this aspect was covered here until March–April 2022 when one paragraph was introduced referring to human reproduction and its ramifications in gender roles. [8] Just one paragraph! It should have been a major section, fully fleshed out with historical examples, setting the stage for the next section.
This article was started by a sockpuppet who was interested in neo-Nazi alt-right topics, men's rights, reactionary social movements, etc. Subsequent contributors retained his focus on MRA complaints, not seeing that the topic was historically enormous, far beyond any recent concerns by MRAs.
Let's continue to develop text and find sources for the pre-MRA concepts that this topic calls for. We should set a context for the MRA material. Binksternet ( talk) 05:33, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
It seems like a completely random assortment of factoids and articles someone came across somewhere, with little academic coverage. The first paragraph is devoted entirely to a single quote from the National Coalition for Men (the article otherwise doesn't mention mail expendability at all), which seems WP:UNDUE. The second paragraph is reasonably sourced but, again, feels drastically undue as a full third of the "in humans" section given the relative narrowness of the study. And the final one cites a single opinion piece to make the connection between "women and children first" and the topic of this article, then cites a bunch of others sources that don't mention this article's topic at all - it's very WP:SYNTHy. -- Aquillion ( talk) 06:55, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
This removal is completely inappropriate. As a founding figure of the male rights movement and a lifelong activist, Warren Farrell is an extremely WP:BIASED source; per BIASED, we are required to make that bias clear every time we cite him. It is not enough to just give his name; we must mention his connection to the men's rights movement. Sometimes biases are complex or unclear, but this is not one of these cases - he is clearly an activist and cannot be cited without making that fact clear. The only alternative to attribution is to remove all citations to him entirely and discuss him only via secondary sources (but those are also going to describe him primarily as a men's rights activist, since that is what he is notable for, so we would likely still have to state that fact.) -- Aquillion ( talk) 08:02, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
I managed to get Professor Daniels' book out of the library and I started it today. I'll be updating this section. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 17:26, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
Should the article state the biological beliefs underlying male expendability in Wikipedia's voice or attribute them? Editors disagree about whether these beliefs are mainstream among scientists or not. 02:22, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Please see this edit for the two main versions of the text that we have been using. Here is an example:
In human reproduction, the required participation of the male is brief, but the pregnant female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. Also, the male body produces many millions of sperm over a lifetime, allowing one man to impregnate many women. By contrast, the female body can produce far fewer children. Finally, men are generally stronger, can run faster and throw farther than women. These biological conditions have permeated human society such that...
The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology: In this model, human reproduction is understood to require only brief participation from the male parent, but the pregnant female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. Male expendability assumes that the many millions of sperm that male bodies can produce over a lifetime would allow one man to impregnate many women while the female body can produce far fewer children. Finally, men are understood to be generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. According to male expendability theory, these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...
The main problem with this article is that it presents it like this a mainstream concept in evolutionary biology, when none of the sourcing is from evolutionary biologists, with most of the sourcing to men's rights activists and religious scholars. Hemiauchenia ( talk) 17:16, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
The idea of male expendability in humans stems from biological differences) does not seem to come from her text and instead seems to be synthesis by an editor - she does not state that these differences led men to be viewed as expendable. -- Aquillion ( talk) 10:46, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
What does the academic literature in relevant scientific fields like evolutionary anthropology say? If this hasn't been searched then I don't see how we can really know which way to go. Basics of human reproduction are BLUESKY, but drawing any conclusion from that regarding this hypothesis isn't. Male provisioning and overall social systems are an evolved part of many species, so it may not be as cut and dried as it seems at first. People far more qualified than us have likely written on the matter. If neither version is sourced then neither should be in place. If only one is but the source speaks in a way that indicates there is debate on the matter, it should be attributed. But ideally more sources would be checked to determine weight. Crossroads -talk- 19:57, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
The attribution issue affects much of the article, but let's brainstorm replacements for the example texts down here...
The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology and human reproduction. Because it takes far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to go through pregnancy and childbirth, male expendability theory concludes that, should large numbers of men die or be removed from the society, only a few remaining men would be needed to father the next generation. Male expendability also assumes that men are generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. According to male expendability theory, these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...
Improvements?
Darkfrog24 ( talk) 00:12, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology and human reproduction. It takes far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to go through pregnancy and childbirth. From this, proponents of male expendability conclude that the required participation of the male is brief while the female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. They also believe that because the male body produces many millions of sperm over a lifetime, one man could impregnate many women. From this, they conclude that only a few men are needed to father the next generation, and large numbers of men are therefore expendable. Male expendability also assumes that men are generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. Proponents claim that these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...
I think the Ember source/Yale source should go front and center in the lede.
Out of all the sources given for this article, it's the only one I've seen to clearly state what male expendability is. It also does so well. It also calls male expendability by that name. No inferences or synthesis on our part is needed. It's got a publisher people have heard of. I think putting it in the fore makes this article much stronger and much less likely to be deleted.
Unlike other sources, this one specifically states that yes it is talking about human populations and not making assumptions about "most vertebrates."
Unlike other sources, it's not paywalled, availble with full text, and completely searchable via the CTRL-F function. Readers skeptical of other sources can get a good look at this one with no weeks-long wait at the library. This article has been subject to so much questioning that it absolutely needs at least one source that's just there for people to see.
It does not support the biological claims made in the overview section, at least not directly, so it doesn't belong there. We could quibble about this one, I guess. In short, the authors describe the male expendability model but they don't say that they think it or the biological ideas underlying it are correct. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 21:40, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
Allow me to set your minds at ease about such phrases as "male expendability maintains that." It's perfectly normal English to say "this idea/philosophy says" even though of course ideas don't have mouths or lungs.
Here are some on-Wiki examples:
And that's just the letter C!
If you would fee more confident with something other than examples, let me know, and I'll see if it's practical for me to find it.
The outcome of the recent RfC was that the biological ideas that male expendability uses as a foundation must be attributed as beliefs and assumptions and not given in Wikipedia's own voice as if they were generally accepted as true. "Male expendability maintains that..." is one way we can do this but who says it's the only one? If you can think of some way to say "Male expendability relies on the idea that men are physically stronger and better at running and throwing than women. That is why it maintains that society is the way it is about men" without saying "men are physically stronger and better at running and throwing than women" in Wikipedia's voice, go on and give it a go.
The issue is that the article isn't saying "Men in the Olympics are stronger and faster than women in the Olympics." That's provable. We can just look at Olympic records and see that yup, the most highly trained well-fed men tend to better marathon times than the most highly trained well-fed women. But the article is saying "Men as a class are much stronger and faster than women as a class and that has been the case across human cultures, across continents, across thousands of years so much so that it still affects our industrial Western society today," and no one has ever proven that. It's plausible, not verifiable. But I had one grad school professor flat-out scoff at the idea. He said (paraphrased) "When people are stressed and underfed, the difference in strength is negigible. Women worked in mines alongside men. Women defended forts alongside men." More likely, a difference in upper body strength might have made more or less difference in society depending on what was going on. I can't think of even one female English warbow archer, but the medieval Japanese style of archery lent itself very well to women. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 01:20, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
@ Binksternet: what's it going to take for you to acknowledge the results of the RfC that we not list beliefs/conclusions/assumptions about biology in Wikipedia's voice? This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know what would make you feel reasonably okay even if you don't agree. If something goes wrong later because of it, it will be very very on record as not your fault.
To put my own cards on the table, I'm thinking of an assumption or conclusion as anything not accepted by biologists in general as established fact. "It takes longer for a woman to complete pregnancy than it does for a man to complete the sex act"? Established fact; we could look up any number of sources if we needed to. The "Therefore one man can [no 'hypothetically'] impregnate many women" is a conclusion/assumption, and one I've seen questioned and contradicted in at least one RS. "Many many human cultures have practiced polygyny"? Verifiable fact (okay, technically what counts as "many" is an opinion but you get my drift) (since it's about anthropology, it's cool that the source is written by anthropologists). The implied therefore-human-society-does-this and this-is-because-human-biological-reproduction-is-like-that are conclusions/assumptions.
Not all assumptions/conclusions have RS that say they're questionable or not true, but any statement that does have RS that say it's questionable/not true should be treated like an assumption/conclusion. Sound reasonable to you? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 18:08, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
@ AndersThorseth: I observe that you did supply a source for the additions you made today. However, I'm concerned that this may have made the synthesis issue in this article worse. I do think the study you posted does show that male nonhuman animals from species with harem social arrangements engage in high-risk behavior, but I'm not sure it isn't WP:OR to place it here. Is there any source from an anthropologist or biologist saying "and that's part of male expendability"? Otherwise, we're the ones drawing that conclusion ourselves. My feelings on the content supported by the 2014 study showing that more human women than human men have reproduced are similar but less pronounced. I'd like to see a source saying "And we the experts conclude that this concerns male expendability." It would make an excellent addition to Polygyny, though. EDIT: And I've added it over there. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 16:47, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
AndersThorseth's contributions have inspired me. How do we all feel about going through this article and removing any content not supported by a source that mentions/describes the term "male expendability," no matter how long it's been in here? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 13:48, 4 March 2023 (UTC) EDIT: So that meant removing the entire livestock/animal husbandry section. How are we feeling about this? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 13:58, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
This would imply three implications that need to be shown .... In the literature maybe other words than expendable are used like “surplus, redundancy, extra, superfluous, excess etc.” it does not change the meaning of the mindset/theoretical underpinning behind.
I do not have my hands on a paper copy of Walter Ong's 1981 book Fighting for Life. I used the handy link provided and the included search tool to look for "expend" and "cull." I got no results. Does the term "male expendability" or a description of the concept appear anywhere in this book? If it doesn't, then maybe it's not a good source for this article. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 14:02, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
And it's talking about animals in general, not exactly human social dynamics. There's more discussion of humans a bit later in the book, which I skimmed over but may still be useful. ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 14:37, 5 March 2023 (UTC)Agonistic behavior can be interspecific (between individuals of different species) or intraspecific (between individuals of the same species). In both cases male and female behavior commonly differ. Among many vertebrate species, the male or males in a close-knit group are typically the most active in warding off predators (Edward O. Wilson, 1975:46, 121-22). They are larger and often equipped with special weapons, such as tusks, and thus more effective. But their strength is a by-product of their uselessness. Evolutionary selection makes it advantageous that males rather than females develop the size, strength, and aggressiveness that successful fighting demands. One reason is that fighters are the individuals most likely to be killed, and a species can more easily survive the loss of males than the loss of females. A colony of one surviving male and twenty females can in most species reproduce itself with a proficiency that cannot be matched by a colony of one surviving female and twenty males. Paradoxically, males, at least in many instances, have become big and strong in —for there are also other evolutionary pressures—so as to serve as the chief extraspecific defense fighters, because for the other individuals and for the species itself they do not count so much as the so-called “weaker” sex does. Even when males are not larger and stronger than females, they are often the ones assigned to lethal risk situations. Male dung beetles of the family Scarabaeidae regularly do the work at the surface of dung piles and outside of their burrows and thus are eaten in fantastic numbers by predators while the females work safely within the burrow under cover (Heinrich and Bartholomew, 1979:148, 151).
Can you quote the part of the source that verifies this? ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 17:28, 5 March 2023 (UTC)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.
The Bailey source covers the history of the Birkenhead drill well, but it does not mention male expendability. The Delap source is paywalled. The abstract doesn't mention male expendability, but the body might. Does anyone here have access, through a university or library account, perhaps? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 00:23, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
@ Timothytyy: The sentence: "Manosphere critics of feminism have argued that poor and working class men "are cannon fodder abroad and..." is a mischaracterization of the content of the source. The quote is clearly written in the voice of the author and should be attributed to him and not to anyone else. Note that the author a few sentences later twists and (still in the narrator voice) turns these very arguments around and against the people he is portraying, so please reconsider you reversal of my edit. But as the whole GQ article looks more like hit piece than any kind of journalism it is not clear that it should be as source in the theory section at all. AndersThorseth ( talk) 14:15, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
Understood, thanks for explaining! Timothytyy ( talk) 10:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Due to the problem of finding sources for a(n apparently) contentious subject with a vague definition here is a suggestion for more precise definition and to my mind better definition. I realize it is more academic in the wording, but I believe it encapsulates the subject much better:
Male expendability, male disposability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis is the hypothesis that due to the contingent aspects of the male role in reproduction, then consequently male lives are generally of less concern to a population than female lives. The hypothesis considers the disproportionate amount of effort and participation required by each of the sexes for procreation to be the basis of a system of values, whereby females generally are to be protected by the group and males are often left to fend for themselves or sacrificed for the good of the over all population. In humans, this would mean...
What do you guys think about it? AndersThorseth ( talk) 14:47, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
I found a source. It looks like notes from a university lecture. They look like they're meant to go with a spoken lecture. They contain a summary of male expendability under the name "expendability theory" and many of the other subjects we cover in this article: [15] I don't know if we can use this in the article, but it could be good for our own references and perspective. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 12:46, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Society’s population is limited by the number of reproductive-aged women, not the number of reproductively-aged men. This is because women usually have only one child at a time, but men can impregnate more than one woman. Indeed, most societies in the ethnographic record allow or prefer polygyny as a form of marriage. Therefore, if there are dangerous activities to be undertaken, “expendability” theory suggests it is more adaptive for men, rather than women, to perform them.
Here is an older source discussing the expendable male, the text viewable in Google search snippets:
An enterprising soul could hunt down a hard copy and obtain a fuller understanding of the author's thesis. Binksternet ( talk) 05:53, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
As we are discussing an idea or hypothesis that could potentially be culturally very pervasive and therefore also turn up in popular culture. Here are some potential topics:
AndersThorseth ( talk) 08:09, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Another user recently added "short description: Hypothesis in anthropology" to one of the sister articles. I realized that with all the improvements we've made to this article over the past few months, the current version and its sources support "male expendability is a hypothesis in anthropology" far more strongly than "Societal biases which make violence against males acceptable." In fact, the article in its current form doesn't talk about violence against men the way that term is generally understood. The old one did because it mentioned the targeting of boys in genocides, but we removed that text. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 13:22, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
My library was able to find this book for me and I'm almost all the way through it. I see that Friedl does describe male expendability on page 59, but she does not call it by any name:
"War: Men are the principal fighters and defenders in horticultural societies as in all others; it is mostly the energy of the male members of the society which is expended in the preparation for war and in actual fighting; it is the men who account for the majority of deaths in warfare. That this is so can probably be accounted for by many of the factors by which we explained the male monopoly of hunting: the need for unpredictable absences from the homestead which is incompatible with the nurture and transportation of children, and so forth. But there may be an additional adaptive factor at work here, related to the maintenance of the population. The number of children that a woman can bear is severely limited, particularly where the average spacing is frequently one child in every three years. Under these circumstances a woman can scarecely have more than a dozen children between menarche and menopause. One man, on the contrary, is capable during his sexual maturity of impregnating an extremely large number of women. Therefore, for the maintenance of a population, men's lives are decidedly more expendable than women's. [New paragraph] These factors have not, however, prevented some horticultural societies from using women in warfare to a limited extent..." She continues by giving examples of women in warfare.
So far, this is the only time that male expendability appears in this book in any way. I'm nine pages from the end. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 18:22, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
I think we've solved many of the sourcing and bias problems in this article over the past few months, but the organization could be neater. The "overview" and "theory and concept" sections seem pretty arbitrary to me. I plan on experimenting in the next few days. Any ideas? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 14:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
I found a place to download the study on the Birkenhead Drill in full text. It's on Researchgate. So far, the word "expendability" does not appear in it, but I'll read the rest to see if male expendability is described using other terms. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 00:51, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
Per this exchange, I think the manosphere souces, such as Farrell, are reliable for what the people in the manosphere believe but not for facts to be given in Wikipedia's voice. We discussed this in an RPG a while back, but that was specifically about biological concepts, not about less concrete ideas. Thoughts? Or do any of the anthropology sources say "well being and health"? I'm reading the "Myth of Male Power" interview source, and Farrel doesn't strike me as generally reliable. He takes the legend of the Spartan agogae at face value. He offers scenarios with no proof. He says polygyny exists "so that a woman will not be stuck with a poor man," and this is not how the anthropologists describe it. He thinks nurses have "desirable hours." He says that the most dangerous jobs tend to be male dominated while making no mention of women working to break into those jobs. I think that if any idea or phrase is mentioned only in Farrell, we should list it as his opinion and not state it in Wikipedia's voice. We currently do this in the Overview section. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 12:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm reading the GQ source, and its tone isn't literal. The article is cited to support the text "poor and working class men are cannon fodder abroad and expendable labor at home, trapped beneath a glass floor in jobs nobody really wants—farm workers, roofers, garbage men—and injured at far higher rates than women." Here are Jeff Sharlet's exact words:
"They have evidence. Men, particularly poor and working-class men, are cannon fodder abroad and expendable labor at home, trapped beneath a glass floor in jobs nobody really wantsfarm workers, roofers, garbagemenand injured at far higher rates than women."(3)
This is an example of how the author writes:
It looks like the author isn't saying "She shouldn't put her hand on a man's knee unless she wants sex"; he's saying "Sage thinks she shouldn't put her hands on a man's knee unless she wants sex." There are several cases of this elsewhere in the article: Then there's footnote (3), which reads like this:
"(3) Of course, these are largely economic conditions, but conference speaker Helen Smith, Ph.D., in her book _Men on Strike_a door prize throughout the weekenddescribes the problem as "female privilege": schools drugging the boyishness out of boys and workplaces promoting underqualified women, leaving men dumb, doped, and too broke to afford what one of Smith’s sourcesechoing Elliot Rodgerdescribes as "an expensive bitch." To men "on strike," those who refuse to marry or to work to avoid alimony"going Galt," in the movement’s Ayn Randian parlancewomen are the economic condition, singular."
So I'd say Jeff Sharlet isn't saying "Men are cannon fodder ... higher rates than women." He's saying "The [not really evidence] evidence that they have indicates that men are cannon fodder...; I believe these are actually economic conditions." I think this source is a holdover from the article's previous version, in which authors like C. Daniels were cited for things they didn't mention at all. However, it is real journalism and does comment on the manosphere. Maybe we could use it for something else. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 02:18, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
My library was able to get a copy. Let's see what Farrell said in here... Darkfrog24 ( talk) 17:47, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
The first thing I notice is that it was published in 1993, so that's just as genetic analysis was coming out, before we learned a lot of what we currently know about the genetic and biological elements of gender and gender identity. It's not a contemporary work; it's a contemporary of Reviving Ophelia. It didn't come out during the Me Too movement; it came out when sexual harassment was just starting to be a concept in the American workplace.
I'm going to do here what I did with Daniels and Freidl, go through the book page by page to confirm that it actually supports the text it's cited to support, that the author actually says what he's purported to have said. But I already find that it's giving me a sense of just how reliable the work is as a source.
Warren Farrell does not mention male expendability anywhere in Myth of Male Power. He describes many ways in which he feels society treats men as disposable but he never claims this is because men are or believed to be less necessary for population maintenance and replacement after impregnation. Instead, Warren places profound importance on the roles and rights of fathers long after their children are born and believes that society does so as well, at least as far as their financial role ("man as wallet"). It looks like his idea of male disposability and the theory of male expendability used by anthropologists are two different things with similar names. Here's what I think we should do:
I'm a human being and subject to error, and I won't take it personally if anyone checks my work: [20]. We include Friedl here even though she only discusses male expendability on one page. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 18:49, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
Why is there no mention of the feminist kickback again this seeing it portrays them as baby makers and nothing more? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C7:6388:4F01:F584:8674:49B1:226F ( talk) 19:44, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
This article was nominated for deletion on 18 January 2022. The result of the discussion was no consensus. |
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The
contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to gender-related disputes or controversies or people associated with them, which has been
designated as a contentious topic. Editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process may be blocked or restricted by an administrator. Editors are advised to familiarise themselves with the contentious topics procedures before editing this page. |
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2019 and 12 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Eveningblack.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 00:27, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
A comment at WP Sociology raised the issue of whether "Male expendability" is sufficiently notable to have an article at Wikipedia. Let's have the discussion here.
I believe it is notable, based on numerous references at Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL, especially in books. Where I agree with the OP, is that none of them have an explicit definition. Per GNG: If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article,[emphasis in original] and there's nothing further down that page that implies that locating a definition in a source is a requirement for notability. Neither does MOS:LEADSENTENCE require it, and bullet 3 implies that it isn't required. Finally, template {{ Missing lead}} is available to tag the article, if needed. So, I believe that this topic is notable. Mathglot ( talk) 12:09, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
Go to Misandry and look in the right margin at the nav boxes (1) Series on Masculism and (2) Series on Discrimination and you'll see what I'm talking about regarding redundancy. Atsme 📞 📧 16:05, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
Hope I'm formatting ok here. I think this school of thought (male disposability) is deserving enough of a page. It's discussed and cited frequently enough to be considered a mainstream debate. An article on a theory or concept doesn't have to be endorsing that theory, just explaining what the theory is. I think the page is sourced well enough to have a valid case.
References
Hello, I corrected the spelling of Benatar's name in your last paragraph. Overall, great work! Yourmomcantswim ( talk) 00:11, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
I added a bit about Second Sexism. :) -- Eveningblack ( talk) 00:14, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Antovigo, your additions are a bunch of WP:Synthesis. Read WP:Synthesis for what I mean. What academic sources do you have that are specifically on the topic of male expendability, as opposed to you cobbling together sources and deciding that they are about the topic?
I am likely to revert your additions. For now, I've added a Template:Original research tag to the article. Flyer22 Frozen ( talk) 01:56, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
In fact, there is no "likely." I will eventually revert all of that. Flyer22 Frozen ( talk) 01:59, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
Hi Flyer22 Frozen! I am well aware of SYNTH. I am also aware of Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not. You asked: What academic sources do you have that are specifically on the topic of male expendability, as opposed to you cobbling together sources and deciding that they are about the topic?
Let's go through it together. From Wikipedia:Notability: Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. Thus I'm going to consider that sources need not to be "specifically on the topic of male expendability", and that sources that are generally about "what populations are more expendable than others" or "in what cases is it acceptable to sacrifice someone" are acceptable. For example, a study that literally asks participants if a man or a woman should be sacrificed in a car crash is de facto about male expendability, even if the main title doesn't say "male expendability". The fact that the same study also contains data on age and social class is irrelevant.
Please note that I agree with you for some parts of the article. The first sentences about empathic response are not explicitly related to male expendability. They provide basic insight into the origin of the gender bias, but it's not explicitly linked to discrimination, so you are right that they should be removed.
But then, in ref 4: Hence, we could infer that whereas for most women (and also most men), an offspring seems “more irreplaceable” than a mate, for a significant number of men (and only a few women), just the opposite would be the case. In ref 5: A culturally pervasive social norm is the chivalrous idea that women should be protected from harm. This is exemplified by “women and children first”—a historical maritime code of conduct stating that when there is a life-threatening situation, those who are more vulnerable should be saved first (Kipling, 1907).
In ref 6: Because the parental investment of women (e.g., pregnancy, childbirth, and child care) is largely greater than that of men (Trivers 1972), their death would result in a larger fitness cost (Sear and Mace 2008)., Would you rather cause the death of three women (saving one man), or cause the death of one man (saving three women)? The sexual selection account assumes that men are more prepared than women to eliminate sexual rivals by the infliction of physical harm, especially in situations such as that described in the dilemma, which pose no physical risk to themselves.
In ref 7: Never in the history of humanity have we allowed a machine to autonomously decide who should live and who should die, in a fraction of a second, without real-time supervision. We are going to cross that bridge any time now, and it will not happen in a distant theatre of military operations; it will happen in that most mundane aspect of our lives, everyday transportation.,As a response to these challenges, we designed the Moral Machine, a multilingual online ‘serious game’ for collecting large-scale data on how citizens would want autonomous vehicles to solve moral dilemmas in the context of unavoidable accidents.
In ref 8: A contradictory perspective suggests that crime and, in particular, violence against females is viewed as more harmful than crimes against male victims (Baumer et al., 2000; Kleck, 1981). This may be mitigated or aggravated by decision makers' perceptions of the victim’s familial role and responsibilities (see Daly, 1989, 1994).,There is considerable historical evidence of a heightened concern with the victimization of white females in the United States. The cultural and symbolic power of white females as a protected class has resulted in numerous social changes and legal responses when that group has been perceived as threatened.,Furthermore, research on victims has noted that the perceived status of the victim affects decision making through the attribution of blame, the perceived threat to the community that a particular crime represents, and the practical concerns of those decision makers (e.g. Baumer, et al., 2000; Farrell and Swigert, 1986; LaFree, 1989; Stanko, 1981-82).,More severe sentences for crimes with female victims have also been explained in terms of the perceived "innocence" of females and the "undeserving" nature of their victimizations (Myers, 1979; Williams, 1976), the perceived "defenselessness" of females (Gross & Mauro, 1989), and the perception that females are less likely to contribute to their own victimization (Farrell & Swigert, 1986).,crimes against black victims may be considered unworthy of the most severe criminal justice response (see Friedman, 1993). an so on.
In ref 9: The optimal punishment model suggests that victims characteristics will not matter when the victim is determined as random,Some of our results can be understood as the outcome of a greater desire of society to protect particular types of people. For these last references, I agree that talking about "value" for society is a bit vague and more specific wording could be used.
In ref 11 (a secondary source): One also assumes that if women were eleven times as likely to die on the job, the “gender gap in workplace deaths” would be the topic of policy discussion, legislative initiatives, and, no doubt, numerous law-school symposia. Yet one seldom hears about a “gender gap in occupational deaths,” despite the fact that eleven men die on the job for every woman who dies.,Instead, it is to show that there is a broad range of gaps that favor females, but the single-minded focus on “female disadvantage” obscures a more complicated reality. This review actually cites Warren Farrell's Why men are the disposable sex" as well as Benatar.
Ref 12 states that occupational gaps favoring women are less deserving of attention and social actions. Ref 13 states The emergence of the ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret gender inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind., a losing male, more than a losing female, [...] has not exerted sufficient effort, and thus may find it fair that less resources are allocated to assist them.. For this last two references, you could technically argue that allocating less resources to assist "men falling behind" is not "disposability" per se. Thus, it can be construed as SYNTH, you win. Feel free to erase these sources about the men's issue that men's issues are erased.
Last thing, I'm going to quote Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not: If you want to revert something on the grounds that it's SYNTH, you should be able to explain what new thesis is being introduced and why it's not verified by the sources.
It appears you cannot just "revert all of that". Instead, you are expected to go through each statement made on the page and explain what new thesis is being introduced. You can then remove the specific statements for which you could demonstrate SYNTH.
Antovigo ( talk) 16:56, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
I am an external contributor, I never knew about this term before and I am not an activist. But the text was "sounding weird", we can hear an unsavory tone, and the writing is just poor in general. I hence checked the sources, and it appears the editors who wrote the sections summarizing Benatar's thesis and its criticisms were quite not as neutral and factual as it could have been.
For example, this is what is currently written [1] (emphasis mine):
> Benatar posits that society leaves men behind in discussions about discrimination, focuses entirely on women's struggles while ignoring the fact that men are the main victims of discrimination.
This sounded surprising. So I checked the sources, and here is what a review by The Kelvingrove Review writes, literally in the 2nd paragraph [2]:
> Benatar acknowledges that the sexism against women and girls (which he calls first sexism) is still a more severe problem in most parts of the world. However, he argues that, contrary to popular belief, men and boys can also be subject to discrimination.
So it appears there is just plain misinformation mixed in this page. I won't list everything here, I will try to rework a bit, but I'm not a specialist, so I'd suggest that anyone interested and knowledgeable in this subject to rework the entire page from the grounds up by referring to the sources (instead of personal interpretations of the sources). 213.211.155.159 ( talk) 00:07, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
@ User:Alssa1 You didn't give a reason why you reverted my edit. If it's because the lost boys aren't explicitly referred to in this article or male expendability in their article, then fair enough. But it is related, as they were seen as disposable by the FLDS leadership due to the desired sex ratio. Also, on this article it says "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." which is pretty much what happened with the FLDS. 24.44.73.34 ( talk) 22:10, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
I think this article is not related with discrimination at all. It should be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.212.196.193 ( talk) 23:08, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
I added the bias tag because I believe must of the content of this article, most clearly the beginning of the Overview section, should not be given in Wikipedia's voice as if the specifics of the male expendability idea were set, confirmed and accepted. Is it believed that it is more acceptable to kill a man than a woman, overall? The idea that one man can impregnate many women seems true intuitively but history shows that emperors with large harems don't have as many more children than monogomous men as we might think.(Source: Testosterone Rex) I think "Social scientists who ascribe to this idea believe that society [does this] and [does that]" would work better. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 23:32, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
I found the discussion at NPOVN enlightening. Two of the ideas in the article that are giving me pause are "most vertebrates could restore their populations if the males but not the females were killed off," which you claim is an accepted and mainstream biological fact. I disagree. (1. Most species don't have things that kill off adult males but not also adult females in similar numbers. 2. Historically, human women in Western society who can't find husbands are not encouraged to have children with shared men.) Another idea in this article is "and what happens with moose and frogs and elephant seals necessarily carries into human society's attitudes." I found one source that can refute that:
I think this is enough to justify either stronger sourcing for the implied claim that the statements about biology made in this article are mainstream enough for Wikipedia's voice or switching to "Proponents of male expendability theory believe..." However, I can find more such sources if you feel it is necessary. Perhaps some on wild animals instead of lab animals. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 00:47, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
synonyms or mention the same idea in general terms, then find it in the source and quote it. Otherwise, they (and the text cited to them) needs to go. EDIT: I pulled the parts I felt were synth away from the "arguments" they were being used to support, which reduces the problem but illustrates the fundamental issue here - they are less synth-y now, but their basic inclusion is still a problem for the reason I outlined. Editors cannot include random bits of biology or facts about gender demographics to try and illustrate a point about male expendability themselves; we need to use sources actually making those arguments, which, as far as I can tell, these ones do not. -- Aquillion ( talk) 07:44, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
This Wikipedia article was written starting halfway into the topic, looking only at the recent trend by men's rights activists who have been using the arguments of feminism against feminism. MRAs have written about how men are unfairly treated by expected societal gender roles in the same fashion as feminists saying women are mistreated. (See Angela McRobbie's The Aftermath of Feminism, Molly Dragiewicz's Equality with a Vengeance, Ana Jordan's The New Politics of Fatherhood, etc.)
The first half of the topic was ignored completely: how and why the males of many species are considered the expendable sex. How deeply ingrained this pattern is in human society. All the scholarship from anthropologists and biologists who were studying long-term patterns in humans and various other species. Nothing about this aspect was covered here until March–April 2022 when one paragraph was introduced referring to human reproduction and its ramifications in gender roles. [8] Just one paragraph! It should have been a major section, fully fleshed out with historical examples, setting the stage for the next section.
This article was started by a sockpuppet who was interested in neo-Nazi alt-right topics, men's rights, reactionary social movements, etc. Subsequent contributors retained his focus on MRA complaints, not seeing that the topic was historically enormous, far beyond any recent concerns by MRAs.
Let's continue to develop text and find sources for the pre-MRA concepts that this topic calls for. We should set a context for the MRA material. Binksternet ( talk) 05:33, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
It seems like a completely random assortment of factoids and articles someone came across somewhere, with little academic coverage. The first paragraph is devoted entirely to a single quote from the National Coalition for Men (the article otherwise doesn't mention mail expendability at all), which seems WP:UNDUE. The second paragraph is reasonably sourced but, again, feels drastically undue as a full third of the "in humans" section given the relative narrowness of the study. And the final one cites a single opinion piece to make the connection between "women and children first" and the topic of this article, then cites a bunch of others sources that don't mention this article's topic at all - it's very WP:SYNTHy. -- Aquillion ( talk) 06:55, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
This removal is completely inappropriate. As a founding figure of the male rights movement and a lifelong activist, Warren Farrell is an extremely WP:BIASED source; per BIASED, we are required to make that bias clear every time we cite him. It is not enough to just give his name; we must mention his connection to the men's rights movement. Sometimes biases are complex or unclear, but this is not one of these cases - he is clearly an activist and cannot be cited without making that fact clear. The only alternative to attribution is to remove all citations to him entirely and discuss him only via secondary sources (but those are also going to describe him primarily as a men's rights activist, since that is what he is notable for, so we would likely still have to state that fact.) -- Aquillion ( talk) 08:02, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
I managed to get Professor Daniels' book out of the library and I started it today. I'll be updating this section. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 17:26, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
Should the article state the biological beliefs underlying male expendability in Wikipedia's voice or attribute them? Editors disagree about whether these beliefs are mainstream among scientists or not. 02:22, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Please see this edit for the two main versions of the text that we have been using. Here is an example:
In human reproduction, the required participation of the male is brief, but the pregnant female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. Also, the male body produces many millions of sperm over a lifetime, allowing one man to impregnate many women. By contrast, the female body can produce far fewer children. Finally, men are generally stronger, can run faster and throw farther than women. These biological conditions have permeated human society such that...
The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology: In this model, human reproduction is understood to require only brief participation from the male parent, but the pregnant female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. Male expendability assumes that the many millions of sperm that male bodies can produce over a lifetime would allow one man to impregnate many women while the female body can produce far fewer children. Finally, men are understood to be generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. According to male expendability theory, these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...
The main problem with this article is that it presents it like this a mainstream concept in evolutionary biology, when none of the sourcing is from evolutionary biologists, with most of the sourcing to men's rights activists and religious scholars. Hemiauchenia ( talk) 17:16, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
The idea of male expendability in humans stems from biological differences) does not seem to come from her text and instead seems to be synthesis by an editor - she does not state that these differences led men to be viewed as expendable. -- Aquillion ( talk) 10:46, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
What does the academic literature in relevant scientific fields like evolutionary anthropology say? If this hasn't been searched then I don't see how we can really know which way to go. Basics of human reproduction are BLUESKY, but drawing any conclusion from that regarding this hypothesis isn't. Male provisioning and overall social systems are an evolved part of many species, so it may not be as cut and dried as it seems at first. People far more qualified than us have likely written on the matter. If neither version is sourced then neither should be in place. If only one is but the source speaks in a way that indicates there is debate on the matter, it should be attributed. But ideally more sources would be checked to determine weight. Crossroads -talk- 19:57, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
The attribution issue affects much of the article, but let's brainstorm replacements for the example texts down here...
The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology and human reproduction. Because it takes far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to go through pregnancy and childbirth, male expendability theory concludes that, should large numbers of men die or be removed from the society, only a few remaining men would be needed to father the next generation. Male expendability also assumes that men are generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. According to male expendability theory, these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...
Improvements?
Darkfrog24 ( talk) 00:12, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology and human reproduction. It takes far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to go through pregnancy and childbirth. From this, proponents of male expendability conclude that the required participation of the male is brief while the female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. They also believe that because the male body produces many millions of sperm over a lifetime, one man could impregnate many women. From this, they conclude that only a few men are needed to father the next generation, and large numbers of men are therefore expendable. Male expendability also assumes that men are generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. Proponents claim that these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...
I think the Ember source/Yale source should go front and center in the lede.
Out of all the sources given for this article, it's the only one I've seen to clearly state what male expendability is. It also does so well. It also calls male expendability by that name. No inferences or synthesis on our part is needed. It's got a publisher people have heard of. I think putting it in the fore makes this article much stronger and much less likely to be deleted.
Unlike other sources, this one specifically states that yes it is talking about human populations and not making assumptions about "most vertebrates."
Unlike other sources, it's not paywalled, availble with full text, and completely searchable via the CTRL-F function. Readers skeptical of other sources can get a good look at this one with no weeks-long wait at the library. This article has been subject to so much questioning that it absolutely needs at least one source that's just there for people to see.
It does not support the biological claims made in the overview section, at least not directly, so it doesn't belong there. We could quibble about this one, I guess. In short, the authors describe the male expendability model but they don't say that they think it or the biological ideas underlying it are correct. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 21:40, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
Allow me to set your minds at ease about such phrases as "male expendability maintains that." It's perfectly normal English to say "this idea/philosophy says" even though of course ideas don't have mouths or lungs.
Here are some on-Wiki examples:
And that's just the letter C!
If you would fee more confident with something other than examples, let me know, and I'll see if it's practical for me to find it.
The outcome of the recent RfC was that the biological ideas that male expendability uses as a foundation must be attributed as beliefs and assumptions and not given in Wikipedia's own voice as if they were generally accepted as true. "Male expendability maintains that..." is one way we can do this but who says it's the only one? If you can think of some way to say "Male expendability relies on the idea that men are physically stronger and better at running and throwing than women. That is why it maintains that society is the way it is about men" without saying "men are physically stronger and better at running and throwing than women" in Wikipedia's voice, go on and give it a go.
The issue is that the article isn't saying "Men in the Olympics are stronger and faster than women in the Olympics." That's provable. We can just look at Olympic records and see that yup, the most highly trained well-fed men tend to better marathon times than the most highly trained well-fed women. But the article is saying "Men as a class are much stronger and faster than women as a class and that has been the case across human cultures, across continents, across thousands of years so much so that it still affects our industrial Western society today," and no one has ever proven that. It's plausible, not verifiable. But I had one grad school professor flat-out scoff at the idea. He said (paraphrased) "When people are stressed and underfed, the difference in strength is negigible. Women worked in mines alongside men. Women defended forts alongside men." More likely, a difference in upper body strength might have made more or less difference in society depending on what was going on. I can't think of even one female English warbow archer, but the medieval Japanese style of archery lent itself very well to women. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 01:20, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
@ Binksternet: what's it going to take for you to acknowledge the results of the RfC that we not list beliefs/conclusions/assumptions about biology in Wikipedia's voice? This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know what would make you feel reasonably okay even if you don't agree. If something goes wrong later because of it, it will be very very on record as not your fault.
To put my own cards on the table, I'm thinking of an assumption or conclusion as anything not accepted by biologists in general as established fact. "It takes longer for a woman to complete pregnancy than it does for a man to complete the sex act"? Established fact; we could look up any number of sources if we needed to. The "Therefore one man can [no 'hypothetically'] impregnate many women" is a conclusion/assumption, and one I've seen questioned and contradicted in at least one RS. "Many many human cultures have practiced polygyny"? Verifiable fact (okay, technically what counts as "many" is an opinion but you get my drift) (since it's about anthropology, it's cool that the source is written by anthropologists). The implied therefore-human-society-does-this and this-is-because-human-biological-reproduction-is-like-that are conclusions/assumptions.
Not all assumptions/conclusions have RS that say they're questionable or not true, but any statement that does have RS that say it's questionable/not true should be treated like an assumption/conclusion. Sound reasonable to you? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 18:08, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
@ AndersThorseth: I observe that you did supply a source for the additions you made today. However, I'm concerned that this may have made the synthesis issue in this article worse. I do think the study you posted does show that male nonhuman animals from species with harem social arrangements engage in high-risk behavior, but I'm not sure it isn't WP:OR to place it here. Is there any source from an anthropologist or biologist saying "and that's part of male expendability"? Otherwise, we're the ones drawing that conclusion ourselves. My feelings on the content supported by the 2014 study showing that more human women than human men have reproduced are similar but less pronounced. I'd like to see a source saying "And we the experts conclude that this concerns male expendability." It would make an excellent addition to Polygyny, though. EDIT: And I've added it over there. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 16:47, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
AndersThorseth's contributions have inspired me. How do we all feel about going through this article and removing any content not supported by a source that mentions/describes the term "male expendability," no matter how long it's been in here? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 13:48, 4 March 2023 (UTC) EDIT: So that meant removing the entire livestock/animal husbandry section. How are we feeling about this? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 13:58, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
This would imply three implications that need to be shown .... In the literature maybe other words than expendable are used like “surplus, redundancy, extra, superfluous, excess etc.” it does not change the meaning of the mindset/theoretical underpinning behind.
I do not have my hands on a paper copy of Walter Ong's 1981 book Fighting for Life. I used the handy link provided and the included search tool to look for "expend" and "cull." I got no results. Does the term "male expendability" or a description of the concept appear anywhere in this book? If it doesn't, then maybe it's not a good source for this article. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 14:02, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
And it's talking about animals in general, not exactly human social dynamics. There's more discussion of humans a bit later in the book, which I skimmed over but may still be useful. ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 14:37, 5 March 2023 (UTC)Agonistic behavior can be interspecific (between individuals of different species) or intraspecific (between individuals of the same species). In both cases male and female behavior commonly differ. Among many vertebrate species, the male or males in a close-knit group are typically the most active in warding off predators (Edward O. Wilson, 1975:46, 121-22). They are larger and often equipped with special weapons, such as tusks, and thus more effective. But their strength is a by-product of their uselessness. Evolutionary selection makes it advantageous that males rather than females develop the size, strength, and aggressiveness that successful fighting demands. One reason is that fighters are the individuals most likely to be killed, and a species can more easily survive the loss of males than the loss of females. A colony of one surviving male and twenty females can in most species reproduce itself with a proficiency that cannot be matched by a colony of one surviving female and twenty males. Paradoxically, males, at least in many instances, have become big and strong in —for there are also other evolutionary pressures—so as to serve as the chief extraspecific defense fighters, because for the other individuals and for the species itself they do not count so much as the so-called “weaker” sex does. Even when males are not larger and stronger than females, they are often the ones assigned to lethal risk situations. Male dung beetles of the family Scarabaeidae regularly do the work at the surface of dung piles and outside of their burrows and thus are eaten in fantastic numbers by predators while the females work safely within the burrow under cover (Heinrich and Bartholomew, 1979:148, 151).
Can you quote the part of the source that verifies this? ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 17:28, 5 March 2023 (UTC)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.
The Bailey source covers the history of the Birkenhead drill well, but it does not mention male expendability. The Delap source is paywalled. The abstract doesn't mention male expendability, but the body might. Does anyone here have access, through a university or library account, perhaps? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 00:23, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
@ Timothytyy: The sentence: "Manosphere critics of feminism have argued that poor and working class men "are cannon fodder abroad and..." is a mischaracterization of the content of the source. The quote is clearly written in the voice of the author and should be attributed to him and not to anyone else. Note that the author a few sentences later twists and (still in the narrator voice) turns these very arguments around and against the people he is portraying, so please reconsider you reversal of my edit. But as the whole GQ article looks more like hit piece than any kind of journalism it is not clear that it should be as source in the theory section at all. AndersThorseth ( talk) 14:15, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
Understood, thanks for explaining! Timothytyy ( talk) 10:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Due to the problem of finding sources for a(n apparently) contentious subject with a vague definition here is a suggestion for more precise definition and to my mind better definition. I realize it is more academic in the wording, but I believe it encapsulates the subject much better:
Male expendability, male disposability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis is the hypothesis that due to the contingent aspects of the male role in reproduction, then consequently male lives are generally of less concern to a population than female lives. The hypothesis considers the disproportionate amount of effort and participation required by each of the sexes for procreation to be the basis of a system of values, whereby females generally are to be protected by the group and males are often left to fend for themselves or sacrificed for the good of the over all population. In humans, this would mean...
What do you guys think about it? AndersThorseth ( talk) 14:47, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
I found a source. It looks like notes from a university lecture. They look like they're meant to go with a spoken lecture. They contain a summary of male expendability under the name "expendability theory" and many of the other subjects we cover in this article: [15] I don't know if we can use this in the article, but it could be good for our own references and perspective. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 12:46, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Society’s population is limited by the number of reproductive-aged women, not the number of reproductively-aged men. This is because women usually have only one child at a time, but men can impregnate more than one woman. Indeed, most societies in the ethnographic record allow or prefer polygyny as a form of marriage. Therefore, if there are dangerous activities to be undertaken, “expendability” theory suggests it is more adaptive for men, rather than women, to perform them.
Here is an older source discussing the expendable male, the text viewable in Google search snippets:
An enterprising soul could hunt down a hard copy and obtain a fuller understanding of the author's thesis. Binksternet ( talk) 05:53, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
As we are discussing an idea or hypothesis that could potentially be culturally very pervasive and therefore also turn up in popular culture. Here are some potential topics:
AndersThorseth ( talk) 08:09, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Another user recently added "short description: Hypothesis in anthropology" to one of the sister articles. I realized that with all the improvements we've made to this article over the past few months, the current version and its sources support "male expendability is a hypothesis in anthropology" far more strongly than "Societal biases which make violence against males acceptable." In fact, the article in its current form doesn't talk about violence against men the way that term is generally understood. The old one did because it mentioned the targeting of boys in genocides, but we removed that text. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 13:22, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
My library was able to find this book for me and I'm almost all the way through it. I see that Friedl does describe male expendability on page 59, but she does not call it by any name:
"War: Men are the principal fighters and defenders in horticultural societies as in all others; it is mostly the energy of the male members of the society which is expended in the preparation for war and in actual fighting; it is the men who account for the majority of deaths in warfare. That this is so can probably be accounted for by many of the factors by which we explained the male monopoly of hunting: the need for unpredictable absences from the homestead which is incompatible with the nurture and transportation of children, and so forth. But there may be an additional adaptive factor at work here, related to the maintenance of the population. The number of children that a woman can bear is severely limited, particularly where the average spacing is frequently one child in every three years. Under these circumstances a woman can scarecely have more than a dozen children between menarche and menopause. One man, on the contrary, is capable during his sexual maturity of impregnating an extremely large number of women. Therefore, for the maintenance of a population, men's lives are decidedly more expendable than women's. [New paragraph] These factors have not, however, prevented some horticultural societies from using women in warfare to a limited extent..." She continues by giving examples of women in warfare.
So far, this is the only time that male expendability appears in this book in any way. I'm nine pages from the end. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 18:22, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
I think we've solved many of the sourcing and bias problems in this article over the past few months, but the organization could be neater. The "overview" and "theory and concept" sections seem pretty arbitrary to me. I plan on experimenting in the next few days. Any ideas? Darkfrog24 ( talk) 14:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
I found a place to download the study on the Birkenhead Drill in full text. It's on Researchgate. So far, the word "expendability" does not appear in it, but I'll read the rest to see if male expendability is described using other terms. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 00:51, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
Per this exchange, I think the manosphere souces, such as Farrell, are reliable for what the people in the manosphere believe but not for facts to be given in Wikipedia's voice. We discussed this in an RPG a while back, but that was specifically about biological concepts, not about less concrete ideas. Thoughts? Or do any of the anthropology sources say "well being and health"? I'm reading the "Myth of Male Power" interview source, and Farrel doesn't strike me as generally reliable. He takes the legend of the Spartan agogae at face value. He offers scenarios with no proof. He says polygyny exists "so that a woman will not be stuck with a poor man," and this is not how the anthropologists describe it. He thinks nurses have "desirable hours." He says that the most dangerous jobs tend to be male dominated while making no mention of women working to break into those jobs. I think that if any idea or phrase is mentioned only in Farrell, we should list it as his opinion and not state it in Wikipedia's voice. We currently do this in the Overview section. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 12:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm reading the GQ source, and its tone isn't literal. The article is cited to support the text "poor and working class men are cannon fodder abroad and expendable labor at home, trapped beneath a glass floor in jobs nobody really wants—farm workers, roofers, garbage men—and injured at far higher rates than women." Here are Jeff Sharlet's exact words:
"They have evidence. Men, particularly poor and working-class men, are cannon fodder abroad and expendable labor at home, trapped beneath a glass floor in jobs nobody really wantsfarm workers, roofers, garbagemenand injured at far higher rates than women."(3)
This is an example of how the author writes:
It looks like the author isn't saying "She shouldn't put her hand on a man's knee unless she wants sex"; he's saying "Sage thinks she shouldn't put her hands on a man's knee unless she wants sex." There are several cases of this elsewhere in the article: Then there's footnote (3), which reads like this:
"(3) Of course, these are largely economic conditions, but conference speaker Helen Smith, Ph.D., in her book _Men on Strike_a door prize throughout the weekenddescribes the problem as "female privilege": schools drugging the boyishness out of boys and workplaces promoting underqualified women, leaving men dumb, doped, and too broke to afford what one of Smith’s sourcesechoing Elliot Rodgerdescribes as "an expensive bitch." To men "on strike," those who refuse to marry or to work to avoid alimony"going Galt," in the movement’s Ayn Randian parlancewomen are the economic condition, singular."
So I'd say Jeff Sharlet isn't saying "Men are cannon fodder ... higher rates than women." He's saying "The [not really evidence] evidence that they have indicates that men are cannon fodder...; I believe these are actually economic conditions." I think this source is a holdover from the article's previous version, in which authors like C. Daniels were cited for things they didn't mention at all. However, it is real journalism and does comment on the manosphere. Maybe we could use it for something else. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 02:18, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
My library was able to get a copy. Let's see what Farrell said in here... Darkfrog24 ( talk) 17:47, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
The first thing I notice is that it was published in 1993, so that's just as genetic analysis was coming out, before we learned a lot of what we currently know about the genetic and biological elements of gender and gender identity. It's not a contemporary work; it's a contemporary of Reviving Ophelia. It didn't come out during the Me Too movement; it came out when sexual harassment was just starting to be a concept in the American workplace.
I'm going to do here what I did with Daniels and Freidl, go through the book page by page to confirm that it actually supports the text it's cited to support, that the author actually says what he's purported to have said. But I already find that it's giving me a sense of just how reliable the work is as a source.
Warren Farrell does not mention male expendability anywhere in Myth of Male Power. He describes many ways in which he feels society treats men as disposable but he never claims this is because men are or believed to be less necessary for population maintenance and replacement after impregnation. Instead, Warren places profound importance on the roles and rights of fathers long after their children are born and believes that society does so as well, at least as far as their financial role ("man as wallet"). It looks like his idea of male disposability and the theory of male expendability used by anthropologists are two different things with similar names. Here's what I think we should do:
I'm a human being and subject to error, and I won't take it personally if anyone checks my work: [20]. We include Friedl here even though she only discusses male expendability on one page. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 18:49, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
Why is there no mention of the feminist kickback again this seeing it portrays them as baby makers and nothing more? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C7:6388:4F01:F584:8674:49B1:226F ( talk) 19:44, 11 March 2024 (UTC)