Baumeister - Is there anything good about men?: how cultures flourish by exploiting men

Is There Anything Good About Men?

On second thought you bunt, Ill gather.

HOW CULTURES FLOURISH
BY EXPLOITING MEN

Roy F. Baumeister

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baumeister, Roy F.
Is there anything good about men?: how cultures flourish by exploiting men / by Roy F. Baumeister.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-537410-0 (hardcover)
1. Men. 2. Men in popular culture. 3. Equality. I. Title.
HQ1090.B38 2010
305.3109dc22

2010018772

ISBN-13: 978-0-19-537410-0

ISBN-10: 0-19-537410-0

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

Dedicated, with deepest appreciation,
To the women who have loved me

I have worked on this book for years. During that time I have spoken about it with many people. I cannot begin to thank them all. Many of them have helped, although, to be honest, quite a few advised me not to write this book. They thought that saying anything favorable about men is taboo and could seriously damage my career. I hope they are wrong.

Three sources of encouragement are therefore particularly welcome and deserve special thanks. The first is my longtime friend and colleague Professor Kathleen Vohs. She supported the project, gave ample constructive criticism of the various ideas, and made many useful suggestions. She also read the entire manuscript and offered detailed and very helpful feedback.

Next, I also wish to mention my editor at Oxford, Lori Handelman. Shes been delightful to work with and has provided crucial editorial guidance at several key steps along the way.

Last, I wish to thank the many men and women who have written to me during this project to express their support and encouragement. Early writings and talks on this topic generated some publicity for it, and many people read those preliminary works and wrote to me about how much better they felt about malefemale relations and manhood after reading my thoughts. I have written many books and articles and given many talks, but none of them generated anywhere near the popular response as this work did. The warm messages from total strangers helped me keep going during the more difficult stages of getting this book done.

Two important sources of support also deserve special thanks. My wife Dianne did much toward maintaining a home and life in which this sort of intellectual work could thrive. She also read the entire book and talked about ideas with me, helping to steer me through some of the more difficult and sensitive issues. The other is my employer, Florida State University, which also has helped considerably by creating an environment conducive to this sort of prolonged exercise of reading, thinking, and writing.

I wish also to thank others who read the manuscript and offered valuable comments, especially Tyler Stillman and C. Nathan DeWall.

Is There Anything Good About Men?

IS THERE ANYTHING GOOD ABOUT MEN? The question is provocative today, because hardly anyone dares to suggest that men are superior to women in any respect. Political correctness permits us to say that women are better than men at one thing or another. But its mostly taboo even to suggest men are better at anything more important than opening jars and killing bugs.

In this book, I develop a somewhat radical theory about men and women. It holds that differences are rooted mainly in tradeoffs. If one gender is better at something, the superior ability will probably be linked to being worse at something else. Otherwise, it would be reasonable to expect that nature would have made both genders equally good at most things.

That is not the main point, however. I intend to go far beyond the questions of who is better at what. We want to know not just what men are good atbut also what men are good for.

One of the most important traits that make us human is our ability to create and sustain giant social systems that can evolve and adapt and compete against each other. These systems are called cultures. I shall suggest that cultures routinely exploit men in certain ways, which is to say cultures find men more useful than women for certain tasks. We shall ask what those tasks are and why cultures pick men for those.

The reasons that it has recently become taboo to say positive things about men are rooted in the womens movement and its wide-ranging influence. That, in turn, is grounded in the way men and women relate to each other in our society and culture. Men and women occupy different positions in society, and always have. If anything, the separate worlds that men and women have long occupied have become merged to a degree that would have astonished many of our ancestors. But all is not yet quite equal, to the dismay of many. Why not?

One might instead ask, who cares? But people do care. In particular, men have long held higher positions in society than women have. Most rulers throughout history have been men. Even today, most countries are governed by groups consisting mostly of men. Elsewhere in society, men rule also: in corporate boardrooms, on town councils; even within families, men seem to have more authority. The Global World Forum recently rated most nations on various dimensions of equality, and it found not a single country in which women generally enjoy superior status over men. Nor did the Forum find full equality was reached in any. Thus, men have higher status than women in every country in the world today.

To simplify broadly, two main explanations have been put forward for why men have dominated culture and ruled the world. The first was accepted nearly everywhere until the twentieth century: that men were naturally superior to women. The forces that created human beings, whether they involved a divine power or the natural processes of evolution (or some combination), made men to be better and created women to help and serve men.