The Lucky Sex

I have heard from the feminists that men are the “privileged” sex in our society, clearly much better off than women. It often sounds as if women should regret having the bad fortune to have been born female in this patriarchal hell-hole.

This leads me to the question, which is independently interesting: Which is the more fortunate sex, male or female? If you’re a disembodied soul in heaven, and God asks you whether you would like to be incarnated as a male human or a female, which should you choose? (Someone in a recent podcast asked me this — https://youtu.be/7tE2wG0nYLE.) For simplicity, assume that you’re going to be incarnated in a society like the contemporary U.S.

Aside: Obviously, women were much worse off in history than they are today, and they are much worse off in most of the Middle East and Africa than they are here.

In case that happens to you after you die, I’m here to help you answer that question.

A. The Case for Male Privilege

1. Pregnancy

Females have one major biological disadvantage: pregnancy. If you want to reproduce, you have to carry a baby inside you for 9 months. Then you have to push it out through a hole that is one quarter the size of that baby’s head. Historically, you would have a fair chance of dying from this, though in the U.S. today the risks are much lower. If you don’t want to reproduce, you still have to worry about accidentally getting pregnant. So all this is a major advantage for the males.

I’m not sure that this counts as male “privilege” since it is pure biology, not something controlled by society. The following considerations, however, are at least partly social.

2. High Status

Suppose that you really hope to attain a very high status position in society. Then you should ask God to make you male. Here are the percentages of males in some high-status occupations:

• U.S. President: 100% (over history)

• U.S. Senator: 74%

• Governor: 76%

• Law firm partner: 73%

• Fortune 500 CEO: 90%

3. Money

In the U.S. today, women earn about 85 cents for every dollar that men earn. So if you are set on being wealthy, you should again ask God to make you male.

4. Sexual Violence

If you’re female, you’ll have about a ten times higher chance of being raped. (Males comprise ~9% of rape victims.)

Exception: If you’re in prison, you’re much more likely to be raped if male (because you’re in a men’s prison). Prison rape isn’t included in the standard FBI rape statistics, but it appears so common that it might actually equalize the overall rape rate between the sexes. People like to laugh about this.

You’re also much more likely to be sexually assaulted or harassed. I suspect that some women (roughly, the ones who are most attractive but least assertive) experience constant proto-harassment.

5. General Treatment

The previous three items are the main examples given by feminists arguing that males are the privileged sex. However, there is also a long series of miscellaneous claims about how women are less respected in our society, e.g., that people don’t listen to them, don’t notice them, etc. This site gives 160 examples of male privilege.

Some of the items strike me as false or even the opposite of the truth, based on my experience living in this society — e.g., the claim that women are expected to step out of the way for men. Many strike me as trivial and just looking for something to complain about, like the fact that humanity is sometimes called “mankind” but not “womankind”. Others cite alleged empirical evidence that I don’t have time to check (again, there are 160 items!).

I did check one of them because it was so surprising. Item 9 says that when a group contains 17% women, men perceive it as 50/50. It looks like the source of this is a remark by actress Geena Davis in an interview:

… in different segments of society, 17 percent of cardiac surgeons are women; 17 percent of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn't that strange that that's also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we're actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you're an adult, you don't notice?

This was based on a study that found that in crowd scenes in Hollywood movies, ~17% of the extras are female. What about Davis’ other statistics? Currently, women comprise about 35% of cardiac surgeons, and 43% of tenure-track professors (including 50% of assistant profs, 45% of associate profs, and 33% of full profs).

Needless to say, none of this supports the original claim. My general experience with woke claims is similar. Every time I look one of them up, it turns out to be blatantly deceptive.

6. Domestic Abuse

If you’re female, you’re also more likely to suffer intimate partner violence, according to item 41 of the list of 160.

Except that’s not what the actual statistics say. Surprising as it might seem, domestic abuse by women and men is about equally common, although men are more likely to cause injuries due to greater strength. This is little known, though, because almost everyone who cares about domestic abuse mainly cares about abuse by men against women. Men who are attacked by women are rarely taken seriously.

B. For Female Privilege

1. Low Status

Remember how all the highest-status positions in society are male-dominated? Well, the low-status positions are also male-dominated. Feminists never notice that, because they don’t care about low-status males. Low-status males are invisible, both to women and to high-status men.

The Jobs Rated Almanac lists 250 jobs, ranked from best to worst. 20 of the 21 worst jobs are overwhelmingly male-dominated. E.g., the most dangerous legal job, lumberjack, is about 95% staffed by men. Almost all the jobs where you are likely to die are male-dominated. That’s why men suffer ~90% of workplace fatalities.

Btw, there are a lot more people in low-status jobs than high-status jobs, so this seems far more relevant to an overall judgment of which sex is better off.