Male expendability

Male expendability, male disposability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis is the idea that male lives are of less concern to a population than female lives. From a reproductivity standpoint, in most vertebrate species, one male can impregnate many females, but females are more limited in how many offspring they can produce. Male expendability is based on the belief that a human population with many reproducing females and few males could grow more easily than a population with many males and few reproducing females.

According to Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia Higgins, the concept of male expendability was first written down by fellow anthropologist Ernestine Friedl in 1975, calling it the "relative expendability argument." Anthropologists have used the idea of male expendability to study such subjects as polygyny, matrilineality, and division of labor.

Men's rights advocates have used male expendability to explain why, in their view, society is unfair to men. For example, Warren Farrell, a founding figure of the men's rights movement, has defined male expendability as society's willingness to sacrifice the health, wellbeing, and lives of males to serve its interests and keep itself safe from outside predation and attack. In this model of male expendability, the patriarchal cognitive frame assigns the role of sex object to women and assigns to men the role of violence object, with male expendability being corollary to the sexual objectification of women. 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.

Overview

The idea of male expendability in humans stems from beliefs and assumptions about biological differences between the sexes. In human reproduction, it takes far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and complete the sex act than it does for a woman to complete pregnancy and childbirth. The male body can produce many millions of sperm over a lifetime, which could hypothetically allow one man to impregnate many women. This model maintains that a population could still grow if it had many child-bearing women and only a few men, but not the other way around. English literature expert and historian Walter Ong says males are often the ones assigned to deal with many types of lethal risk situations in human society.

Some versions of male expendability also rely on the assumption that men are generally stronger and able to run faster and throw farther than women. This form of the male expendability model maintains that these physical differences along with reproductive differences have permeated most human societies such that the males are expected to protect the females. According to Warren Farrell, a leader of the men's rights movement, male disposability has also been romanticised as chivalry, which he says is term which promotes male "servitude and disposability" by rewarding males who engage in public acts of heroism with statues and glory as a form of social bribe. Farrell says that this expectation causes society to train young boys and men with a 'hero' mindset, ultimately priming them to register for the draft or armed service, volunteer as fire fighters, and to perform nearly all of the most dangerous and hazardous jobs. As an example, Farrell cites the military conscription of young men during conflicts to fight and possibly be injured or die.

Examples

In humans

Anthropologists note that "most societies in the ethnographic record" allow polygyny, in which a man may have more than one wife but a woman many not have more than one husband. Per the male expendability model, it makes sense for such societies to place men in the most dangerous jobs, such as fighting and mining.

The concept of "Women and children first", otherwise known as the 'Birkenhead Drill', is a code of conduct that originated during the 19th century Victorian era, where men are sent to slow down the sinking of a ship while women and children escape. In the 19th and 20th centuries, "women and children first" was seen as a chivalric ideal. However, the concept has no basis in maritime law.

One 2016 experiment suggested that people are more likely to agree to sacrificing a man or a person of unspecified gender than a woman in the interest of saving the lives of others or pursuing the interests of human society.

Norwegian sociologist Øystein Gullvåg Holter argues that the male-led Russian government's belief in male expendability contributed to their delay in seeking international help during the ''Kursk'' submarine disaster, in which an all-male crew of 118 personnel was lost. He states, "If 118 women had been killed, alarm bells regarding discrimination against women would probably have gone off around the world." He states that able-bodied males were viewed as a more legitimate target during wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor, Rwanda, and Chechnya.

On farms

With regards to livestock, the majority of male animals are typically culled. Annually, around 7 billion male chicks are killed shortly after hatching, since the industry mainly requires healthy females for egg laying. In the USA, this is typically done by grinding them down to slurry in a machine called a macerator. Male calves are also killed in great numbers. In the UK alone, in 2018, around 95,000 male calves were killed due to the cost of raising them.

In other species

Among insects, male dung beetles act as foragers, who leave the burrow to search for food. This leads to males facing the risk of being eaten by predators, while female dung beetles remain safe beneath ground in their burrows. Male disposability can be far more direct; such as in praying mantis, where females eat the males as part of the act of mating. Male deaths have been argued to be being less dangerous for the overall survivability of the species than female deaths, since one male can impregnate many females, but females are limited in how fast they can reproduce.

Theory and concept

Ivana Milojević argues that while patriarchy assigns the role of sex object to women, it assigns to men the role of violence object, with male expendability being corollary to the sexual objectification of women. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that it is common for cultures to thrive by exploiting males; sometimes with fatal results. This includes men making up the large majority of occupations such as construction workers, truck drivers, police, fire fighters, and armed service members.

Manosphere critics of feminism have argued that 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". Anarcho-capitalist economist Walter Block argues in ''The Case for Discrimination'' that male expendability is the result of women being the bottleneck of reproductive capacity in a population, a theme that was also presented in Warren Farrell's '' The Myth of Male Power''.

See also

* Androcide
* Gendercide
* Misandry
* Missing white woman syndrome
* Reverse sexism
* Superfluous man
* Violence against men
* Women-are-wonderful effect

References

External links

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* {{cite book , first=Roy , last=Baumeister , title=Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men , year=2010 , publisher=Oxford University Press , isbn=978-0-19-537410-0, author-link=Roy Baumeister

Gender-related violence
Gender equality
Men's health
Men's rights
Violence against men
Misandry