the-real-seebs:

spaceshipoftheseus:

the-real-seebs:

spaceshipoftheseus:

the-real-seebs:

lierdumoa:

dirtydarwin:

thentheysaidburnher:

All men benefit from women’s reinforced fear of being hurt for saying no.

read it again and again

Understand that this applies even to non-sexual situations. Women are more likely to be asked for favors from coworkers. Regular “can you file this for me” / “can you cover my shift” / “can you finish up this paperwork” workplace favors. Men are less likely to return those favors. Women are more likely to be seen as “difficult to work with” if they refuse to do favors when requested. Being viewed as ungenerous has negative social and professional consequences.

So yes, even gay men benefit. All men benefit from women’s reinforced fear of being hurt, not just physically, but also socially and professionally, for saying no to anything at all.

But unless that’s actually the most efficient use of people’s time, everyone also suffers from it.

I’d guess that, on the whole, the net impact is negative even for the people who “benefit” from it. Yeah, they’re getting a larger share of the pie, but it’s a much smaller pie.

Not necessarily. Everyone’s total effort/efficiency does not all go into the same pie. Sticking with the ‘workplace favors’ example, it could easily be the woman’s family/leisure that suffers from her spending extra spoons at work, rather than the total productivity of that company. If the male and female co-workers don’t interact socially outside work, he loses nothing, because the ‘company success’ pie is the same, and the ‘woman’s home life happiness’ is the one shrinking, while ‘man’s home life and happiness’ is either the same or larger. Which might be to the detriment of other men who are in the women’s life outside work, but her co-worker still benefits.

I’m not talking company-scale, I’m talking species-scale.

The problem here isn’t just “who gets the time”. It’s that inefficient resource allocation is another way of saying “resources wasted”. And the cumulative effect of wasting so much of so many people’s time and effort is enormous.

Like, if we’d stopped doing that in the 1800s, I suspect cancer would be long past-tense by now.

So, he still loses a lot. Because it’s not just that one woman that’s being inefficient; we’re making bad choices about the productivity of at least half of our species.

I…kind of suspected you meant it that way. But the men from the 1800s are dead now whether we today have a cure for cancer or not. I guess my point is that high-cost short-term gains have a bigger impact on their individual lives – certainly a bigger observable impact – and the original post is taking about small scale individual actions. Both perspectives are worth thinking about, but I think the short term, where the effects haven’t propagated yet around the whole society through averages and back to the original guy, is what the post is actually trying to make people aware of. And I suspect that most of men who actually care about long-term future wellbeing of society also care about profiting from the women they know everyday, which is a much easier thing to see/verify. It’s also much easier to feel like they can individually make a change that matters in their own workplace than ‘the general culture and industry of the next generation or two.’ I feel like smaller-scale and personal concerns are more likely to prompt change that a much wider view, even if the wider view involves their self-interest. Then again, I’m not sure I have a single cisdude following me, so maybe it doesn’t matter what I say at all.

Prisoner’s Dilemma strikes again: You’re personally better off if you betray everyone else, probably, but we’re all better off if no one does.