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If you want to get rid of something and have it stay gone, it helps to have some idea of how it came about in the first place. In that spirit, here’s some thoughts about male privilege and why it used to be socially stable. (Rambly, not necessarily the best organized. Light on citations, but I can add ‘em later if people want.)
Back in the 1980s, a fellow named Gilmore undertook a worldwide cross-cultural survey of what it meant to “be a man”. Its book form is Manhood in the Making. I’m still working on getting a copy to dig into its details*, but a section which was quoted elsewhere has stuck with me. Though by far most of the cultures surveyed had permutations of masculinity which resemble those Westerners are familiar with, those whose people had the safest conditions—absence of warfare and little in the way of vital-but-dangerous jobs—encourage their menfolk to be the quieter, less assertive side of the gender N-ary. (At the same time, maternal mortality rates in those places were and still are nontrivial.) It makes me suspect that the mechanism at work is status accruing to whichever sex is in shorter supply.
If so, then once a culture of masculine aggression is established, it can be self-sustaining by way of warfare. While there have long been cultures where it’s normative for women to fight in wars, unless the archaeological record has been updated dramatically since my last anthropology class, we don’t know of any that field(ed) a military solely comprised of women. (That’d be one hell of a headline for me to miss. If I did, please share.)
The story of women’s lib in the U.S. is in many ways one about our foremothers taking advantage of labor shortages when they happened (see Collins, America’s Women) and then hanging onto those gains with everything they had. That’s most notably WWI & II. But the war with the most U.S. military casualties was the one where both sides were comprised of American citizens. The number of soldiers killed in the U.S. Civil War was 2.1% of the entire 1860 census. The scarcity value of the surviving males beat out women’s increased independence for a while longer. On the other hand, in the “wild” West, the extreme shortage of women in frontier towns meant that a (white) married woman had higher status than an unmarried man. (Collins, still. No data on whether the same held true among Black folks in single-race settings.)
Today, though? Today we live in the safest period in human history, not just for warfare but also for crime and accidents. The base rate of 1.05 AMAB newborns to AFAB ones, which used to even out by age 20 or so, is persisting later and later in life**. Right now, the U.S. population younger than 45 has more surviving men than women in every birth-year (Census Bureau population pyramid).
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Potential alternatives / additive factors:
* In some circumstances, status & privileges may have been conferred on men-in-particular as advance payment for the expectation that they’d die in battle rather than live to old age. The archaeological record suggests that until at least the era of settled agriculture, around half of male deaths were at the hands of another human. Need to compare against maternal mortality data. Also consider Sparta: relatively high status for women compared to surrounding city-states due to running the city during wartime, but men over age 65 were either voted into the ruling council (rare) or expected to off themselves.
* Flattery can feed on itself in nasty ways.
* I really want to see his treatment of fa’afine and other 3rd+ genders which could be occupied by AMAB people.
** Possible contributing factor to the existence of incels.
Back in the 1980s, a fellow named Gilmore undertook a worldwide cross-cultural survey of what it meant to “be a man”. Its book form is Manhood in the Making. I’m still working on getting a copy to dig into its details*, but a section which was quoted elsewhere has stuck with me. Though by far most of the cultures surveyed had permutations of masculinity which resemble those Westerners are familiar with, those whose people had the safest conditions—absence of warfare and little in the way of vital-but-dangerous jobs—encourage their menfolk to be the quieter, less assertive side of the gender N-ary. (At the same time, maternal mortality rates in those places were and still are nontrivial.) It makes me suspect that the mechanism at work is status accruing to whichever sex is in shorter supply.
If so, then once a culture of masculine aggression is established, it can be self-sustaining by way of warfare. While there have long been cultures where it’s normative for women to fight in wars, unless the archaeological record has been updated dramatically since my last anthropology class, we don’t know of any that field(ed) a military solely comprised of women. (That’d be one hell of a headline for me to miss. If I did, please share.)
The story of women’s lib in the U.S. is in many ways one about our foremothers taking advantage of labor shortages when they happened (see Collins, America’s Women) and then hanging onto those gains with everything they had. That’s most notably WWI & II. But the war with the most U.S. military casualties was the one where both sides were comprised of American citizens. The number of soldiers killed in the U.S. Civil War was 2.1% of the entire 1860 census. The scarcity value of the surviving males beat out women’s increased independence for a while longer. On the other hand, in the “wild” West, the extreme shortage of women in frontier towns meant that a (white) married woman had higher status than an unmarried man. (Collins, still. No data on whether the same held true among Black folks in single-race settings.)
Today, though? Today we live in the safest period in human history, not just for warfare but also for crime and accidents. The base rate of 1.05 AMAB newborns to AFAB ones, which used to even out by age 20 or so, is persisting later and later in life**. Right now, the U.S. population younger than 45 has more surviving men than women in every birth-year (Census Bureau population pyramid).
—————————
Potential alternatives / additive factors:
* In some circumstances, status & privileges may have been conferred on men-in-particular as advance payment for the expectation that they’d die in battle rather than live to old age. The archaeological record suggests that until at least the era of settled agriculture, around half of male deaths were at the hands of another human. Need to compare against maternal mortality data. Also consider Sparta: relatively high status for women compared to surrounding city-states due to running the city during wartime, but men over age 65 were either voted into the ruling council (rare) or expected to off themselves.
* Flattery can feed on itself in nasty ways.
* I really want to see his treatment of fa’afine and other 3rd+ genders which could be occupied by AMAB people.
** Possible contributing factor to the existence of incels.
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I would be tempted to divide a given population into at least 3 groups before looking at how the fluctuations in numbers work: those who can bear children (mostly women, though not exclusively), those who can impregnate, and those who can do neither. The first group and the third group have some fluidity between them; the second group is the majority of adult men, though obviously not all of them. But the relative scarcity of that first group means we don't need a tiny increase in the number of AMAB relative to the number of AFAB for there to be stiff competition among adult men for access to reproduction. It's already there. That doesn't mean changes along the lines of half a percent or whatever won't have any impact, it just means the group "can bear children" is almost always the minority, until you get into truly horrific rates of male mortality before reproduction.
As an aside: Men are, IIRC, more susceptible to death from both 'flu and sars2 (covid) than women are, on a per infection basis; I don't know if there is much difference in other communicable diseases, but I think this might even out the balance a bit this century.