Why Men Are at the Top of Society (and the bottom) - Roy Baumeister - #1075

You say that cultures flourish by exploiting men. What's that mean? Well, um there are multiples a multiple aspects to it, but uh uh first of all, men are more expendable uh than women, uh, probably for basic biological reasons. If a a small group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full size. loses half its women, it'll be a long time to uh to recover.

So it takes it risks men, uh, puts men to work, um, to to produce things, and most of uh um, you know, the structures of society are really created by men. Um, I was talking to Carol Hooven at Harvard and she said, uh, th there was a feminist who had an epiphany one point. She was looking out the window and said, the whole world was built by men. Uh, as you look at the buildings and the roads and the cars and the uh all those things and uh and that's that's just the physical world, the institutions too, the uh the banks and the uh the schools and the uh armies and the governments and the marketplaces.

Um I mean, women do plenty of wonderful things and they're important partners in the flourishing of our species, uh, but uh creating large social systems, that seems always to be the men's job. Um and so uh cultures compete against other cultures, which is mostly groups of men competing against other groups of men. Now women have joined the groups in many places, but it's still the institutional structures are created created by men. Why is it the case that men have been overrepresented as the builders, in that case, both cognitively, uh systemically, physically?

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