Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister

Author:Roy F. Baumeister [Baumeister, Roy F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195374100
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Status Quo Bias

Once society evolved with men in a position superior to women, individual women who protested may have found themselves punished and their options blocked. Men made universities, and women did not, and so when the first women wanted to attend the men’s universities, the men there said no.

People often try to preserve the status quo, especially when it is reasonably good for them and they see no need for change. When some women wanted change, some men resisted. This is not surprising. To the women, this would seem to be oppression. To the men it probably did not seem like oppression.

So let me return to the original question about oppression. Yes, there probably was some oppression, and almost certainly far less than we have been told. The idea of oppression cannot be evaluated without an open-minded, disciplined evaluation of evidence, which is what good science requires. I doubt it will get that any time soon, because it is a highly emotional and politicized concept, and because insisting on oppression is politically useful to some who seek to advance their own interests by asserting that it can be found everywhere.

Most important, though, if there was oppression, it was secondary. The real cause of women’s inferior status in all societies in world history was not the oppressive conspiracies by evil men. The real cause was that the types of social groups created by men and not women gave rise to wealth, knowledge, and power. Groups of men competing against other groups of men pushed cultural progress forward. The men who lost these competitions suffered, but the ones who did well in them reaped benefits. Women did not compete in these ways. They did not suffer all the bad consequences (though the women married to the male losers certainly suffered some, justasthewomenwhomarriedthemalewinnersbenefitedsome). Crucially, women did not create the rising tides of wealth, knowledge, and power that were found in the men’s sphere.

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