ACT I
Scene 1
Men and women reproduce differently. So we’ve evolved different instincts for reproducing.
Those affect how we think about a lot of things. Neither way of thinking is inherently better than the other. They each work better than the other for some things, and each work worse than the other for some things.
So for all of us to be able to talk about ideas in broad enough terms that we leave room in the conversation for people with different points of view, we need to find easy ways to visualize how our differences originated.
Scene 2
Among all the species of large mammals, the males compete for mates. Or at least, that’s how it looks to the males.
The females are looking for the best males to mate with. The females of every mammal species are more physically committed than the males to having children, so they have higher standards on who they want to mate with.
How does that work for our species? And what does it tell us?
ACT II
Scene 1
Take a sheet of paper. Write People at the top of it.
Now take a red pen and a blue pen and draw a line of 10 people near the top.
Draw 5 of them red and 5 of them blue. That’s 5 women and 5 men.
Now draw two more lines of people like that below them. You have 3 lines of 10 people each, 5 red and 5 blue.
There are about the same number of men and women in the world. There are slightly more women, but this is close enough for what we’re doing here.
Now you’re going to turn this into a drawing of something else.
After People at the top, write, Who are of Reproductive Age.
In each line, the people are of all different ages.
In each line, there’s one man and one woman who are over 70. They’re too old to have children, so you can cross them out.
Now you have 4 men and 4 women on each line.
One man and one woman on each line are over 45. Those men are still young enough to have children, but the women aren’t. So cross off another woman from each line.
Now you have 3 women and 4 men on each line.
Let’s say that on each line, one man and woman are in their 30s, one is in their 20s, and one is a teenager.
There’s nothing controversial about any of this. Men are fertile much later into their lives than women are. That means there have always been more fertile men in the world than fertile women. We’ve just drawn a diagram of that fact.
Now the question is: How have our reproduction instincts evolved around that?
Scene 2
9 women have 12 men to choose from. That’s good for them. Having children is a lot of work for women, so the more men they have to choose from, the better.
So all these women are going to pick whoever they consider to be the best men to have children with.
But that also means that no matter what these women are looking for in their partners, there are going to be 3 men left over. If each of these women is looking for a husband, that means three single men left over.
Even if three of the women want two husbands each, or if one woman wants four husbands, and all these polyandrous women want to have children with all of their husbands, each of them can only get pregnant by one man at a time. So who are they going to get pregnant by first?
That means there’s always going to be competition among the men, no matter what.
Scene 3
What do the lines represent?
Living conditions. Meaning environments.
Wherever babies are born, they’re about half boys and half girls. But wherever people live, the women get too old to get pregnant long before men get too old to get women pregnant.
Since there are always more fertile men in any environment than fertile women, there are always men who are looking for fertile women. What we call competition among men we could just as easily call upward mobility for women. They mean the same thing.
The top line is Beverly Hills. Or whatever the rich neighborhood is called where you live.
There are three single women there and four single men. So the three women hook up with three of the men, and there’s one man left over.
The next line is the suburbs. There are three single women and four single men there. But there’s also that leftover guy in Beverly Hills.
So two of the single women start hanging out around Beverly Hills, and eventually they meet that guy. He marries one of them, and she moves into Beverly Hills with him.
She did really well. She had high standards, she took advantage of her opportunities, and she met a man with a good income and a good house in a good neighborhood to have children with.
There are still four men in the suburbs, but now there are only two women left. Those two women marry two of the men, and there are two men left over.
But there are still three women down in the hood. Two of them find ways to start hanging around the suburbs. Eventually they meet the two single guys. They get married, and those women move into the suburbs.
Now down in the hood there are four men and only one woman left. And there isn’t another lower level for women to move up from.
This is where competition among men gets really intense.
Scene 4
This has always been a competition among men.
The men in Beverly Hills were competing against each other. Whatever women there wanted, the three of them who had the most of it got the women, and the other guy didn’t.
But he was still competing against the four guys in the suburbs. It wasn’t a very intense competition. In fact, it might’ve been so easy that he never even noticed it was a competition. He already had a much better life than those four guys did. It was only a matter of time before one of those women found him.
The men in the suburbs are competing against each other and competing against the men in the hood the same basic way. Men who have a lot more to offer women than other men do are winning that competition, by definition. It’s almost inevitable that they’re going to find women to marry.
The two remaining women from the suburbs married the two men from the suburbs who had the most of whatever they were looking for, and the other two men still found women to marry.
ACT III
Scene 1
Now what’s going on on the bottom line?
Why are those four men stuck on that line? And why is that woman stuck there?
What are those men doing to try to hook up with that one woman? And how is she going to decide which man is the best?
Whatever is going on there, it’s some drama that doesn’t happen on the top two lines.
Maybe that one woman from the bottom line isn’t as attractive to the men on the middle line as the other two were because she has some chronic health problem.
Or maybe she has three or four children already.
Or maybe the rest of her family is stuck on the bottom line too and they need her help so much that she doesn’t have time to move up.
Or maybe she’s a prostitute, or she’s found some other way to take advantage of four men trying to hook up with her all the time.
Maybe one of the men on the bottom line is trying to move up too. Maybe he’s going to move up. Maybe that’s going to pay off for him in the long run, and he’ll marry a woman up there.
But that’s a long term goal he’s going to have to work hard for. Men in their late teens and early 20s want relationships and sex now, not in 5 or 10 years from now. Whoever invests a lot of time and energy into their long term goals has to sacrifice a lot from their short term goals. Some men might pay that price, but most men don’t.
So maybe instead of four men competing against each other for one woman, it’s only three, and one spending all his time working his way through college in the hopes that he’ll finally have time to date women seriously when he’s 26.
Scene 2
Now that fundamental biological fact that women can only get pregnant by one man at a time shows up in ways no one on the top two lines noticed.
This is where it stops being a dating game and turns into a fight for survival. This is where we can see most easily why competition among men reaches a level that just doesn’t make sense to women. It doesn’t make sense to the men on the top two lines either, because the competition there never gets this intense.
Why is there so much violence in poor neighborhoods? And crime in general? Why does poverty make those things happen?
First we better define what poverty is.
One definition is absolute poverty. If using all the energy you have every day doesn’t get you all the basic things you need to live, that’s the simplest definition of not making a living.
It could mean you can’t find a way to stretch your minimum wage income far enough to pay for housing, food, clothes, utilities, and medical bills all at the same time.
Or it could mean that you live on a farm and grow most of your own food, but now a drought has reduced the productivity of your land to the point that no matter how hard you work all year you can’t bring in enough food to feed yourself and your family anymore.
Another definition is relative poverty. That means you have so much less stuff than the people around you that it creates obstacles to you participating as a normal member of society.
For much of human history, people have lived in tents. If you live in a tent, and so does everyone else in your society, you’re living a normal life. But if you live in a tentin America today, there’s a lot of normal stuff for life in America today that you don’t have.
A tent doesn’t have electrical outlets. A tent doesn’t have indoor plumbing. A tent doesn’t even have a front door you can lock. Or even if it has two zipper handles you can lock together with a little padlock to keep people from being able to zip your door open, you still don’t have a front door, or walls, or a ceiling, that people can’t cut open with a knife.
Scene 3
This is where poverty turns into a pattern of behavior.
If you can’t get all the things you need to live a healthy life, what should you do?
Decide which ones you’re going to sacrifice so you can focus on getting the ones you want the most?
That’s what that hardworking guy is doing when he decides he’s going to give up on trying to date women so he can spend his late teens and first half of his 20s working his way through college.
Do you get really creative in finding ways to cooperate with people so you can help each other get what you need? That can help. But if there are some things you all need that none of you have, no amount of sharing is going to create them.
Or maybe you get a group of people to support each other so one of you can be the first to get something, and that will make it easier for more of you to get it. Maybe that one guy who’s working hard to go to college has a big family supporting him. But if none of them have ever been to college, none of them can give him any first hand advice on it.
Or do you try to get what you need by taking it from other people? That’s what crime is.
But that’s also one of the most primal forms of competition. Men risk their survival and safety to increase their chances of reproduction.
Scene 4
Mathematical relationships are all around us.
We perceive a lot of them subconsciously. We perceive the best decisions we can make to be the ones that we feel give us the best risk to benefit ratios for getting what we want.
If the guys on the top two lines can get everything they want in life fairly easily, but the guys on the bottom line constantly have to think about what they’re going to risk or sacrifice to try to get what they want, the mathematics of good ideas works very differently for them.
If three men are all trying to have sex with one woman, if one of them gets her pregnant, the other two men can’t get her pregnant.
That means the one who got her pregnant is passing his genes on to a child, and the other two aren’t passing their genes on at all.
So if one of the men kills one of the others and puts the other one in the hospital, he’ll be the only man left for the woman to choose from.
That’s a very straightforward solution to the math of reproduction on the bottom level. But it’s also a high crime rate.
Usually it gets more complicated than that. All three of those guys can think of the same thing. And they can all realize the others can think of it too.
If one guy tries to kill another guy, the third guy is probably watching him. When the first guy is busy killing the second guy, that’s the perfect time for the
third guy to sneak up behind the first guy and kill him.
So these three guys don’t compete against each other like a bunch of rabid dogs. They look for opportunities to compete against each other and win.
Scene 5
They’re not competing to eliminate each other. They’re competing to attract that woman and get her pregnant. So they can take big risks to get wealth to attract her.
The normal way to acquire wealth is to work and earn money. But obviously that isn’t working very well for these guys. That’s why they’re down on the bottom line.
So how can they take bigger risks to try to acquire more wealth?
If the legal ways of making money aren’t working for them, taking bigger risks to make more money means crime… again.
They could rob people. Or they could sell drugs.
If you hook up with a woman, stay with her a couple of years, get her pregnant twice, and then get caught and sent to prison for 20 years, your kids are growing up without you, but you did have kids, and you did pass your genes on to them.
ACT IV
Scene 1
Now let’s zoom in on the bottom line and look at something else that happens here.
There’s a lot more than 5 people who live in the hood. So let’s expand on this now.
We’re going to draw four more lines now, and divide people up by age.
The top line is fertile people over 45. There are 3 men up there.
The next line is 35 to 45. That’s 3 women and 3 men.
The next line is 25 to 34. 3 women and 3 men again.
The last line is 15 to 24. 3 women and 3 men again.
We have our 9 women to 12 men ratio again.
The lines represent age now. But think about the connection between age and environment.
Older men tend to have better home environments to offer women, because they’ve had more time to learn job skills and life skills and build social networks and save up money than younger men.
Scene 2
Let’s say that one woman from each line hooks up with a man from outside the hood, so they’re gone. Cross them off.
These 6 women who are staying in the hood still have a way to move up in the world by hooking up with the men who have the most to offer them.
Let’s say that on the top line one of the men is a 65 year old alcoholic, and he just isn’t attractive to women 20 years younger than him.
Let’s say another guy on the top line is 55, and even though he’s single and he still thinks about getting a woman pregnant, he already has 3 kids in their 30s and he’d rather go out with women close to his own ageso they can talk about their favorite musicians and movies and TV shows.
The other guy does want to go out with younger women, and he’s a good match for one of them. So one of the women from the second line moves up.
You know where this is going.
But now that we’re looking more closely at people’s lives, we’re not going to say that all the women move up as far as they can. Some of the guys have things working against them.
There’s the guy who’s working his way through medical school, so he isn’t dating anyone.
Another guy is homeless, so he’s out of the running.
Another guy gets arrested and sent to prison.
Let’s say that we end up with one woman and three men on the bottom line again. But this time they’re grouped by age. 15 to 24.
Scene 3
Since there’s so much crime in their neighborhood, another good idea those men are going to think of is to band together to help keep themselves safe.
There’s three more men and one more woman on the bottom line living over on the next block. And the next block in the other direction. And the other direction. And the other direction.
Now these three guys think of something else. If they band together to compete for this one woman and the one woman on two other bottom lines, then all three men could hook up with a woman. So they form a gang.
But the men on those other bottom lines thought of that too. And they all know that the others thought of it.
Now those three men have to band together just to keep themselves safe from the other men who have banded together.
Now they live in a gang land.
Scene 4
Since so many men are taking big risks for short term goals, they keep finding more ways to try to outmaneuver each other. But it also takes a big psychological toll on them.
Men buy the drugs that other men sell to try to make themselves feel better about how their lives are working out. Some of those men use the drugs to make themselves feel better enough to get back in the competition and keep going. Some men get addicted to drugs, and resort to more crime to get the money to pay for their drugs.
Some women buy drugs to make themselves feel better about all the things that go wrong for them. Some of them use drugs to help themselves keep going. Some of them get addicted and resort to crime to pay for more drugs.
Scene 5
If the three men are competing against each other to get the one woman pregnant, one of these guys could just skip competing to attract her altogether.
He could rape her.
If he gets her pregnant that way, and she has the baby because she couldn’t get an abortion, he passed his genes on to a kid, even though she’ll never want to see him again, and even though he could go to prison.
Even if her boyfriend and her two brothers and her brother in law and ten of their friends show up at that guy’s door later that night and drag him out in the street and kill him, if she still has his baby, he still passed his genes on.
Scene 6
What if one of these men hooks up with the woman and then
never wants to let her leave the house? You might call that abuse.
But if this guy knows what other men will do to try to get her pregnant, this could be his way of trying to protect her. Then again, he might have a different reason.
If he controls the choices she can make in life, he can limit the men she meets, and limit how attractive to them she’ll be.
If he knows that a lot of men will do a lot of things to try to attract her away from him, now he has an opportunity to beat them at that competition by preventing her from meeting them in the first place.
Or when she does leave the house, making her so afraid of what he’ll do to her, or to them, if she talks to them, that she won’t dare to talk to them. And he can do other things to make other men not dare to talk to her. When they go out together he can threaten other men when they look at her.
Scene 7
What’s the currency of a gang land?
Reputation.
If you’re a man and another man bumps into you or steps on your foot by accident, in most of America he’d just apologize and you’d both move on with your lives.
But what if you live in a part of the country where men do those things to other men on purpose frequently? And what if you’ve seen that happening all your life?
Now another man bumping into you isn’t just an isolated incident. It’s the 40th man bumping into you.
Do you want to be the kind of man that other men bump into all the time?
Or do you want to be the kind of man who other men don’t dare to bump into?
If you and two other men are competing for the chance to get one woman pregnant, where the one who does passes his genes on to a kid and the other two don’t pass their genes on at all, everything you can see as a competition is something that other people can see you either win or lose at.
So what should you do if another man bumps into you, even if it was an accident this time?
You could punch him. But he could punch you back. Now you’re in a fight. That can work out in your favor, if you feel like you can beat him.
You could freak out on him so badly that he never dares to come anywhere near you ever again.
If either of those work, all the people who see what you do to that guy
will know you’ll do it to them too, so they won’t dare to bump into you either.
But that other guy can think of all that stuff too. He’s got a reputation to maintain just like you.
If you freak out on him to try to scare him, and he freaks out on you even worse, what should you do then?
You could punch him and get in a fight. But that only works in your favor if you win.
You could stab him with a knife. But he could have a knife too. Again, this only works for you if you win. What if you pull out a knife and he pulls out a gun?
Should you just pull out your gun immediately? That might seem crazy.
But if you and the other man both live in a place where men bump into other men on purpose all the time, to build up their own reputations and diminish the other man’s, by proving they can disrespect him and get away with it, and you’ve both seen all the steps of where this leads, and this is the 50th time another man has bumped into you, you can run through all the possible outcomes in your mind in an instant and realize the only way to guarantee that you can beat him at anything he could possibly do to you would be to pull out your gun right away and shoot him dead on the spot, before he has time to do anything else.
That doesn’t sound like a good choice.
Maybe it doesn’t feel like a choice at all. Maybe it’s just a bunch of feelings of frustration and anger that keep building up until they explode.
Whether you put this together consciously or subconsciously, if the choices you can see are to keep getting disrespected and never have kids with a woman, or kill this guy and have a chance of getting a woman pregnant, only one of those lets you copy your genes into the next generation.
If you’re 17 now and you know from other people this has happened to that if you plead guilty to second degree manslaughter you’ll get 5 years in prison, you’ll be out by the time you’re 22 and be known around your hood as a guy who killed a man for bumping into him. That’s like the gangland equivalent of a Master’s degree.
Or at least, it might seem that way when you’re 17.
ACT V
Scene 1
We started with the biology and math of gender differences, and now we’ve turned the bottom line of the drawing into an outline for a Spike Lee movie. Now let’s zoom out and look at some bigger pictures.
First of all, why are the feelings that systemic poverty lead to so hard to understand? Why are young men from inner cities so quick to fight each other to the death over their reputations?
That usually doesn’t make any sense to the paramedics and nurses and doctors and coroners who work at the hospitals these men end up in. But paramedics and nurses and doctors and coroners all have college educations.
So which neighborhoods do they live in? Not the poorest ones.
And which neighborhoods did they grow up in? Some of them grew up in the poorest neighborhoods, but most of them didn’t.
Scene 2
Now think about how American history turned out. Where have people made big decisions that fit with this drawing?
When Europeans set out to colonize the world, who was always in the first waves? Men. Mostly single men. Many of them poor single men.
Anywhere around the world that European colonists obliterated an indigenous nation, they killed a lot of the indigenous men and eliminated them from competition. Every time a young indigenous woman tried to save herself by marrying a European man, the kids she had with him passed on his genes, not the genes of an indigenous man.
Wherever men have forced poverty on groups of people, they were forcing people onto the bottom line. By forcing some people onto the bottom line, they were guaranteeing that other people wouldn’t be forced onto the bottom line.
The whole idea behind the slave system in the US was that Black people would have the worst living conditions of anyone. And therefore, White people, even the poorest White people, wouldn’t.
Now it’s been another 158 years and counting of White people just feeling that things are supposed to be better for White people than they are for Black people.
When you keep people poor by not offering them good jobs, or any jobs, not letting them go to school, and not letting them rent apartments or buy houses in the neighborhoods they want to live in, you help make the cycles of poverty keep dragging them down, where a lot of people take big risks and make big sacrifices for short term gains.
Scene 3
How many things have men done to control the decisions women make?
Some of those things are easy ways for men to keep from having to compete against women in addition to competing against other men.
A woman can do math or operate heavy equipment just as well as a man, if she knows how to do all the steps involved and does each one of them right. But a woman who drives a dump truck for a living is one more person all the men who drive dump trucks for their livings are going to have to compete against.
Some of those things are ways to limit the choices women can make in life. The more choices women have in life, the harder it is for individual men to look like women’s best choice.
A woman who has the choice to pursue a demanding career might not want to have children at all. Then that’s one less woman for men to compete for.
A woman who makes a good income and works in a traditionally male dominated field, meets a lot of men, and doesn’t need to marry any of them to support herself. To men who have certain views about what women should do in life, that sounds like total chaos.
Scene 4
Now the Supreme Court has overturned women’s right to abortions at the federal level. In 30 states abortions are now mostly illegal.
What we have in those states now, essentially, is an agreement among men that whoever gets a woman pregnant first gets to keep the kid.
Women are no longer allowed to change their minds and decide they want to get pregnant by another man instead, or to do something completely different with their lives.
Scene 5
The primal struggle for reproduction that happens on the bottom line made a lot of people’s feelings and ideas easy to illustrate. But these things don’t just happen there. People on any of the lines can feel any of these things.
Money and the good neighborhoods it pays for aren’t the only things women want. Wherever reproduction aged men outnumber reproduction aged women, there are going to be some men left over. So men always feel this competition.
Think of anywhere a lot of single men congregate. Maybe it’s the computer labs of a university on Saturday nights. Or maybe it’s in certain rooms at a science fiction convention.
If you’re a young woman, you know that a lot of drama is accumulating in places like those. You probably don’t want to go there. Or at least not alone. Or if you do want to go there on your own, you’re going to be prepared for it.
Why are all those men single? And why have they gathered together where they are? That probably gives you some clues.
Good relationships are ones where both people feel good around each other most of the time. If a woman wants to talk about her feelings, and all a man ever wants to talk about is computers and Star Trek and cryptocurrency, she’ll just find some other man to talk to.
If these guys don’t figure out what’s going on, and all they can tell is that they feel like they’re losing at one of the most important competitions of their lives in a big way, they can start taking bigger risks to try to get ahead of other men for the limited opportunities they see to hook up with women. To people who aren’t in that situation they’ll seem to blow things way out of proportion.
Maybe they end up software engineers in their 30s, with good incomes, living in nice houses in upper middle class neighborhoods, but for some reason they’re very resentful of other men and of women. They have the good lifestyles to attract women now, but none of the women who meet them like their personalities. Or maybe they keep a lid on their feelings long enough to get married and have kids but a few years later their marriages fall apart.
Scene 6
Here’s a question.
When was the last time you heard a school shooter’s long time, steady girlfriend speak out and say she can’t understand why he would do such a thing?
Never.
Because school shooters don’t have long time steady girlfriends!
There’s probably a good reason no girls wanted to go out with them.
There are different reasons people resort to mass shootings. But they revolve around a few underlying patterns. Beginning with the fact that mass shooters are virtually always males. Let’s just pick one possibility.
Let’s say a boy started having mental health problems when he was 5. He was fairly normal at first. He made friends in kindergarten.
But over the years he got a little stranger and a little stranger. All his friends drifted away. But they didn’t notice they were doing it, because they were only in sixth or seventh grade by then.
As new people got to know him over the years, they never got very far into knowing him before they felt like they just didn’t click with him and moved on. So no one ever got to know him well enough to realize how much was going wrong for him.
Now he’s 18 or 19 or 20, and he hates his life. He thinks back over his life, trying to figure out where everything went wrong. He thinks of eighth grade as the time when he became an outcast. That was the point where everyone else’s lives seemed to start fitting together, and they made long lasting friendships and started dating each other. That’s not really what went wrong with his life, but it’s the part he noticed.
He’s always been mentally unstable. He probably could’ve been treated for it and lived a somewhat normal life with the right kind of help. But he didn’t get it.
Then something bad happened to him that pushed him over the edge. Maybe he got fired from a job or a woman he was trying to go out turned him down.
If he’s felt that he’s been losing at the competition in the social world since he was in eighth grade, in his mind he’s still trying to compete against eighth graders. So he buys an assault rifle and walks into a middle school.
He kills eighth grade boys as his way of eliminating them from the competition once and for all.
He kills eighth grade girls as a way of getting revenge on them for not going out with him.
He kills eighth grade teachers to get his revenge on them for making eighth grade work the way it did.
Even though he doesn’t intend to leave the school alive, he is finally getting the one thing he felt he needed to make his life go in a direction he wanted it to.
He has a reputation, which will keep anyone in town from forgetting about him from now on.
Scene 7
Finally, why do some rich men rape women? They live up on the Beverly Hills line. They don’t have a problem attracting women.
This diagram is an illustration of why men feel so competitive. Rich men tend to be very, very good at competing. That’s because many of them feel very, very competitive.
Remember, emotions don’t give us factual information. They give us attitudes toward situations.
Regardless of how much money and power a rich man has, and how big of a house in how expensive of a neighborhood, if he still feels very intensely that he needs to keep competing, raping a woman can still feel like one more chance to outcompete all the other men and get her pregnant.
If he knows that his lawyers can make all his legal problems disappear, that’s even more incentive for him. Then he’s just trading money he didn’t need for a powerful feeling he enjoys. And really, that’s what entertainment is.
ACT VI
Scene 1
The term people have been using for this obsession by men with proving they’re the best at everything and controlling women is toxic masculinity.
Recognizing a pattern of behavior that causes serious problems is the first step toward solving it. But it isn’t the last step.
Many people seem to think it is, and just say, “toxic masculinity” as if it explains everything. But then when you ask them what that means, the way they describe it doesn’t relate it to the feelings of the people they’re talking about.
When you talk about people with some kind of catch phrase that you feel describes them, but that those people don’t feel describes them, to them you sound like you’re pretending to be a psychiatrist, diagnosing them with a disease they don’t even believe in.
Scene 2
Toxic masculinity begins with a feeling that men have, and that women don’t have.
For a man or a woman to have a baby, they need to have sex with the other one. But a woman can always find a man to have sex with. A man can’t always find a woman to have sex with.
Usually, women want a lot more from a relationship than having sex with a random man once. That’s not really a good way to have a baby. But it is a choice women have.
If all a woman wants in life is to get pregnant, have a baby, and pass her genes on to another generation, she can always find a man who’s willing to have sex with her. Even if they both have to get blackout drunk to be attracted to each other.
Most women probably don’t think that could be real, or can’t see the point of talking about this, because they can’t imagine ever wanting to do that. But the fact is, women have different feelings than men do about that part of life, becausethat part of life turns out differently for women than it does for men.
Think about it.
Imagine the least attractive woman in the world walking into a bar and shouting, “Hey guys, who wants to get blackout drunk with me and get me pregnant?”
No matter how unattractive that woman was, she could always find a man somewhere who was desperate enough to go along with it.
Imagine the least attractive man in the world trying to do the same thing. “Hey ladies, who wants to get blackout drunk with me and get pregnant?”
The most unattractive woman in the world could still tell that guy, “No, I’d rather get pregnant by any other man in the world but you.”
And she could mean it, because she could always find another man to have sex with. Because there are always more reproductive aged men in the world than reproductive aged women.
Scene 3
What started with women being more physically invested in reproducing than
men are, led to women having more potential reproductive partners to choose from.
That works out well for them. It works out well for the men they hook up with. It works out well for our species as a whole. But it doesn’t work out well for the men they don’t hook up with.
Now men like that set up websites and meet each other. Now they have a term for themselves. Involuntarily Celibate, or incel for short.
A lot of those guys really have a lot to learn about making good impressions on people.
Scene 4
Women have probably taken the struggle against toxic masculinity about as far as they know how.
If you try to change people’s behavior without really understanding how they feel, you can’t tell them how to recognize when their feelings start leading them in the wrong direction, so they can change their mind and start thinking differently.
All you can do this way is to try to get them to memorize what you want them to do. The more people you convince the harder it’s going to get. Some people will be able to think along with you right away, because they get what you’re trying to say. But when you start talking to people who don’t relate to what you’re saying, every 1% of people you try to get to change their minds are going to be harder than the previous 1%.
Scene 5
What we need now is a way to visualize the origins of the problem.
Then we need to get men involved who can see the problem and relate it to their own feelings.
And we need for women who are trying to do something about the problem to be okay with the fact that when men talk to other men about how their feelings lead to toxic masculinity, they’re going to talk about feelings that women don’t have, probably couldn’t even imagine, and can’t relate to personally.
But that’s not hard to grasp.
If you agree that women have feelings about getting pregnant that men don’t have, then it’s easy to understand how men would have feelings about the things we have to do to reproduce that women don’t have.
