This morning I missed Kirk. I slept in. When I am on call it is for 24 hours: after a very quiet day (spent mainly finding things on the wayback machine) I was called into the emergency department, and got home at 3 am. I woke up almost 7 hours later. It is the nature of work: it happens at times when you would rather it did not
Now there is an economic and sociology theory paper that reduces us all to Homo Econonomicus. It uses game theory, with intercourse as the prize and men adapting to meet these goals. The paper is worth reading, but here is one of the better bits.
It falls to men to create society (because women almost never create large organizations or cultural systems). It seems foolish and self-defeating for men then to meekly surrender advantageous treatment in all these institutions to women. Moreover, despite many individual exceptions, in general and on average men work harder at their jobs in these institutions than women, thereby enabling men to rise to the top ranks. As a result, women continue to earn less money and have lower status than men, which paradoxically is interpreted to mean that women’s preferential treatment should be continued and possibly increased (see review of much evidence in Baumeister 2010). Modern society is not far from embracing explicit policies of “equal pay for less work,” as one of us recently proposed. Regardless of that prospect, it appears that preferential treatment of women throughout the workforce is likely to be fairly permanent. Because of women’s lesser motivation and ambition, they will likely never equal men in achievement, and their lesser attainment is politically taken as evidence of the need to continue and possibly increase preferential treatment for them.
But this pattern of male behavior makes more sense if we keep in mind that getting sex is a high priority for men, especially young men. Being at a permanent disadvantage in employment and promotion prospects, as a result of affirmative action policies favoring women, is certainly a cost to young men, but perhaps not a highly salient one. What is salient is that sex is quite readily available. As Regnerus reports, even a man with dismal career prospects (e.g., having dropped out of high school) can find a nice assortment of young women to share his bed.
Remember, too, that the ostensible career motivation of many men was infused partly by the desire for sex. That is, one main purpose of work was to make oneself attractive to women as a potential sex partner, including as a husband as long as marriage was the main route to sex. Nowadays young men can skip the wearying detour of getting education and career prospects to qualify for sex. Nor does he have to get married and accept all those costs, including promising to share his lifetime earnings and forego other women forever. Female sex partners are available without all that.
This was not always so. In ancient Israel, the power was with the landlord and the patriarch who ran households with servants and hired hands. The power a woman had come from being in that household. The Iron laws of Malthus were in effect: if there was no food, people starved.
The Mosiac law included the Levirate laws. These were aimed to stop landlords accumulating large tracts of land, but instead land remaining in the family. In short, if a brother died, his brother had to marry his wife and raise their children: the first offspring would take the name of his brother and preserve his inheritance. This also meant that the daughters in law within a family or clan remained in the clan: you better select them well because they would be with you for a long time.
And this, quite cold blooded and economic analysis is the background to Ruth.
1In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons. 2The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. 3But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, 5both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.
6Then she started to return with her daughters-in-law from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the LORD had considered his people and given them food. 7So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. 8But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back each of you to your mother’s house. May the LORD deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. 9The LORD grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud. 10They said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” 11But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? 12Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, 13would you then wait until they were grown? Would you then refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the LORD has turned against me.” 14Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.
15So she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” 16But Ruth said, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17Where you die, I will die-there will I be buried. May the LORD do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” 18When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.
Ruth should be honoured, for she chose Isreal, she chose the people of faith. Without any security. There was no way that Naomi was going to have more children. The line would die out, and without a kinsman who would fulfil the role of the Levirite they would be widows, marginalized, and probably starving.
There would be some security in her father’s home. She would be a maiden aunt, faithless but fed. The author of Ruth does not present some form of feminist uptopia, or the period of Judges as a golden age. It was risky. Life was ephemeral. Most women knew this: men died in battle and in accidents (being a farmer has always been risky: they still get injured and die, even in these days of mechanized farming). Women died in childbirth, and children died of infection.
And that biology has not changed. As Baumaster and Volk note:
With regard to work, the societal changes are producing less contribution by men and more by women. These might offset, with few or no costs to society. Still, replacing male with female workers may bring some changes, insofar as the two genders approach work differently. Compared to men, women have higher rates of absenteeism, seek social rewards more than financial ones, are less ambitious, work fewer hours overall, are more prone to take extended career interruptions, and identify less with the organizations they work for. They are more risk averse, resulting in fewer entrepreneurs and inventions. (Baumeister 2010, noted an appalling gender imbalance in new patents; nobody is seriously suggesting that the U.S. Patent office systematically discriminates against women, but women simply do not apply for patents in anything close to the rate that men do.) Women are less interested in science and technology fields. They create less wealth (for themselves and others).
Now, I work in a female dominated area. Most of the trainees I work with are women. And most of them have men they love, want to be a mother, and will spend a fair amount of time working part-time in their career. I see this as sensible. I am also aware that they will be less likely to be leaders within the professional college or academe: I know women who have been leaders in both and they generally have a man (and mother) at home keeping the kids happy — or are childless.
I’m also aware that most of the breakthroughs in my field require a fair amount of work. One or two of my colleagues are world-class (I’m good, but not that good) and I know they work 70 -80 hours a week. I cannot do that as a solo Dad. Biology is what it is.
What should men do? The laws are currently against them. We may not have the Levirate law in place, but child support laws are, and they are vicious. The predominant discourse neither considers economics, nor empirical data, nor the word. It lives in its own lie. As the good captain says
Why does it take society 4 decades to point out facts and truth, or better yet, why is society so afraid of facts and truth? And why do such purveyors of truth get socially ostracized for pointing out the truth? Consequences or not, I’m pointing out the emperor has no clothes because I am sick and tired of tip-toeing around eggshells that communists and tyrants have laid around my feet. Life’s too damn short and too damn valuable.
The answer is that the generation before me (I was in nappies and primary school in the 1960s and 1970s when the feminist revolution occured) made a bargain, have enforced it, and do not want those who followed — who have to live with the consequences — renegotiate this. Despite the consequences. Despite the damage.
Our role not is simply to say No. The Boomers wrote a destructive script that is taking them to perdition. We need not follow.
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