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> We haven't removed the need. Not what I said; men are still needed - but it's been a damned long time since we spent our nights waiting around the fire in ca

• ernst_klim 3y ago
  > we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women IIRC, and both sexes could use fire to scare away predators, so men were relevant for breeding nearly exclusively. Today we have far more risky activities where men dominate, such as high-rise towers construction, firefighting, law enforcement, security, sailing etc etc.
  • yarg 3y ago
    You think that we took equal roles in dealing with threats!? The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required - we're bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive. Our aim is better, and (best of all) if half of us die it doesn't severely impact intergenerational population levels. Women may have gone gathering, but men went hunting. Fire fighting is some scary shit - but our ancestors took on short faced bears with sticks.
    • ernst_klim 3y ago
      > The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...
      • yarg 3y ago
        And I think that you're severely underestimating the impact of infrequent existential threats, and how that interplays with slight improvements to fitness compounded over hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, I'm damned near certain of it.
        • hef19898 3y ago
          The most existential threat in pre-industrial times was a bad harvest. It meant starvation. That men used their de-facto monopoly on violence to start dominating their communities is a different story.
          • yarg 3y ago
            So agriculture? 10,000 years ago. ~Modern humans have been around 30 times longer than that.
• BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  It boils down to the same thing. Demand for things men are primarily doing / willing to do / capable of doing hasn't significantly decreased. It has merely been commercialized and subsidized in a way that it isn't at all obvious the need for men is still very much there. Hence, the lack of a need for men, whatever form you imply, is not the cause. I'm not fighting tigers but the women around me sure are happy when I can carry something alone they struggle to do with three of them. There's a significant difference between a direct display and a bunch of commercialized abstractions. All those abstractions make people forget the value others have. We just so happened to push a lot of those abstractions onto men and the value they tend to bring as men.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    It is almost as if general kindness, helping someone carry something for example, is well received. Who'd have thought...