Why big strong men fear tiny feminist gains

Despite a few notable setbacks, women today are doing pretty well.

Across a range of measures, our lives beat those of our mothers and grandmothers. For instance, women today live longer, suffer less violence, eat better, travel more, get more education, etc. We have higher labor force participation rates (a mixed blessing, some would say) and median wages (a more straightforwardly good outcome).

Of course, men today are also doing better across the same measures.

But, whereas women in the top and bottom-half of income and education are both doing better, it’s different for men.

So why are we experiencing a feminist backlash?

I think it comes down to three reasons:

1. Everyone cares more about losses than gains

2. Men have lost something they value a lot, but which women don’t care anywhere near as much about

3. Status quo bias

Women today have more status and power. These are relative and zero-sum. So we necessarily gained them from men.

For example, last summer, I wrote about how women have surpassed men on status markers like education and homeownership.

In any zero-sum game, if one party gains, the other party must lose. Same for a hierarchy. If one person “moves up” a rung and no one moves down, it’s not that no one loses anything. The hierarchy just flattens a bit, and everyone below that person loses power and status, except the one who moved up and everyone above them.

This power transfer is an unavoidable result of progress.

For example, banks wouldn’t give a woman a credit card unless she had a male cosigner until the 1970s. Men could control their female family members by granting or withholding credit and loans. If that didn’t work, they’d just throw them into an insane asylum.

In the 1950s, it was perfectly legal, and common, to fire or refuse to hire on the basis of sex.

Labor unions excluded women. Labor and no-fault divorce laws gave men unchecked power over women. Sexual harassment was legal and normal. Same for marital rape.

Women didn’t “progress” toward anything so much as we progressed against the legal, financial, and social sexism that gave men tons of unearned power over us.

Today, women and men compete for power on more playing fields than at any point in modern history. And those playing fields are more level.

And yet, this doesn't explain feminist backlash. Far too little has actually changed to justify this level of collective freak-out.

The field is still far from even. Maleness still confers a tremendous power and status advantage. Men continue to dominate the upper echelons of nearly every important institution in existence.

Being male is power, at least by any cogent, useful, and comprehensive definition of either term.

To help explain things, I want to point to three facts about people:

1. People care much more about losses than gains

2. Men care more about power and status than women

3. People notice changes far more than they notice defaults

That’s why men losing such tiny amounts of power and status can have such an outsized influence on gender relations.

Whoever lost was always going to be more upset about losing than whoever gained was going to be happy about gaining. Women won the exact amount of power men lost. But women are less grateful about our W than men are distraught over their L.

The fact that US culture is particularly hierarchical, unequal, and status-obsessed probably also plays a role. “The larger the hierarchy, the more distressing it may be to see a woman soar,” Dr. Alice Evans wrote in an excellent post about why Sweden is so gender egalitarian.

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On top of that, the average man cares more about what men lost than the average woman cares about what women gained. Feminism is giving women some of the status that men used to have. It’s like a parent taking a toddler’s favorite toy and giving it to their infant sibling. The toddler is going to throw a histrionic fit, and the infant is not going to thank them.

Lastly, the male breadwinner norm makes men care about status losses. The more I read and think about it, the more confident I become that this is the most underrated contributor to feminist backlash.

The male breadwinner norm is so powerful that it’s depressed the overall marriage rate. And who suffers most when marriage rates decline? Men.

Marriage is much better for men than for women. Men need women much more than women need men. When men lose status to women, demand for male breadwinners exceeds supply, leading to an oversupply of single mediocre (and worse, and worst) men.

Lastly, of course, men think everything is so different because they don’t understand what water is and, unlike women, lack any real incentive to take stock of the reality of the sexist status quo.

That men have lost a tiny little bit of the power they never should have had in the first place doesn’t seem like a good reason to roll back no-fault divorce and go full Handmaid’s Tale to me.

But I think it’s useful to be able to separate what is from what should be. People should care equally about gains and losses. Men and women should care equally about power and status. But we don’t. And the fact that we don’t is creating serious, measurable consequences.