Is There Anything Good About Men?

As to your point, while I would not assume people are strictly rational it’s important to understand the transition points where rational behavior becomes destructive for society. Not because everyone acts in a strictly rational fashion but rather because there is a tendency for the average individual to do so. for example corruption often links to both the benefit and the risk of being corrupt and enforcement is far more important than what's in the books. IMO, the most important insight is given a large population there are usually several productive approaches that tend to balance over time.

PS: If you think about it Sociology and Psychology are considered separate disciplines for obvious reasons. But economics is plenty complex to avoid being merged with Sociology because how you exit a burning building is only peripherally related to which brand of soda you buy.

Why would you say this essay "paints us as slaves to our genes?" I didn't read it that way at all. In fact there's so much content there to discuss that I think it's really unfair to make such an unrelated generalization about the whole thing.

There is much discussion about evolutionary traits, for sure, but just because it's there as an explanation doesn't mean it's "painting us as slaves" any more than is really the case. To some extent, you must admit that people are slaves to their biological disposition. We can't, for example, stop and start our own heart at will. Admitting that for the purposes of discussion is not "painting us as slaves."

I don't think it's that surprising that so many women are opposed to the idea that we're essentially designed to live out our whole lives hidden in the private sphere. Especially when you consider the 1950s, when (white, middle-to-upper class) women were "free" to do just that. They were miserable. I know I would have been miserable too. There's a reason the Feminine Mystique exists, and the 50s housewife who drowns herself in a bottle of booze is a cliche. For most people, that's just not enough to make a fulfilling life by itself. Even women today who are SAHMs have other things going on than taking care of their household, husband, and kids. He implies that it's somehow detrimental to our survival if women like me are free to create lives that don't make us deeply unhappy. If this arrangement had been as cooperative and nice as the author claims, how does feminism fit in? If we were happy inside the home, why did women look up and think, "I want to be a CEO" in the first place? Why did they not all look up and say, "I'm glad I don't have to do that, it looks stressful"? Given that it was their job to take care of the CEOs and other assorted businessmen after they came home stressed from work, it's not as though they didn't realize the drawbacks. Vacuuming is just not meaningful work.

Guys, if you lived in a time where your choices were to latch onto a woman for financial support or pick a low-paying unskilled job, because everyone believed you were genetically incapable of doing anything better, would that be OK with you? Or would you find it personally offensive? What if they said you were incapable of making art, and labelled any creative work made by men as not art in order to reinforce that? (In the case of women, that's tapestries, embroideries, and pottery, for a start.) What if our default model of "real" sex was stuff women liked more than men (random, probably inaccurate example: doll up for us, dance for us, an hour of groping, grinding, and oral, PIV at the end optional), and "all men were frigid" because for some reason they found it less interesting than women? Come on. Women are people, like you; empathy applies. The old ways were awful.