Male expendability

The idea of male expendability in humans stems from the assumption that the biological differences in the roles of the sexes in procreation translate into societal differences in the level of bodily risk considered appropriate for men and women. In human reproduction, it requires far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and semen and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to complete pregnancy and childbirth. Male expendability takes the idea that one or a few men could therefore father children with many women such that a given population could still grow if it had many child-bearing women and only a few men but not the other way around.[1][2] Ernestine Friedl specifically cited the slow average reproductive rates of women in then-extant hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies (one child in three years) as a reason why this might be important.[3] Anthropologists have used the idea of male expendability to study such subjects as polygyny, matrilineality,[4][5] and division of labor by gender.[6]

Men's rights advocates have used male expendability to explain how, in their view, society can be unfair and harmful towards men. For example, Warren Farrell, a founding figure of the men's rights movement,[7][8][9] has defined male expendability as society's willingness to sacrifice the health, wellbeing, and lives of males to serve its interests and keep itself safe from outside predation and attack.[10] In this model of male expendability, the patriarchal cognitive frame assigns the role of sex object to women and assigns to men the role of violence object, with male expendability being corollary to the sexual objectification of women.[11]^: 59 This form of male expendability includes the social expectation that men will step in to defend others from danger, work the most dangerous jobs, and risk death or serious injury by doing so.[12] According to Farrell, male disposability has also been romanticised as chivalry, which he says promotes male "servitude and disposability" by rewarding males who engage in public acts of heroism with statues and glory as a form of social bribe. Farrell says that this expectation causes society to train young boys and men with a 'hero' mindset, ultimately priming them to register for the draft or armed service, volunteer as firefighters, and to perform nearly all of the most dangerous and hazardous jobs.[10][13] As an example, Farrell cites the military conscription of young men during conflicts to fight and possibly be injured or die.[10][13]

According to Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia Higgins, the concept of male expendability was first described by fellow anthropologist Ernestine Friedl in 1975,[14] though she gave it no particular name. Friedl noted that most hunter-gatherer and horticultural groups that she had studied gave the tasks of hunting and warfare to men, employing women very sparingly or not at all. She hypothesized that this could be because hunting and warfare required the men to be away at home for long, unpredictable periods, which was not compatible with the care of young children in which many women were heavily occupied and could be because fewer men would be needed to replenish the population, given that women in horticultural societies were limited to about one child every three years.[3] Anthropologists note that "most societies in the ethnographic record" allow polygyny, in which a man may have more than one female partner but a woman may not or at least is not encouraged to have more than one male partner. Per the male expendability model, it therefore makes sense for societies to assign the most dangerous jobs to men rather than to women.[6]

Ivana Milojević argues that while patriarchy assigns the role of sex object to women, it assigns to men the role of violence object, with male expendability being corollary to the sexual objectification of women.[15] Social psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that it is common for cultures to thrive by exploiting males; this includes the most dangerous jobs being male dominated and job related deaths being higher in those occupations. This includes men making up the large majority of occupations such as construction workers, truck drivers, police, fire fighters, and armed service members.[16][17]

In an article on men of the Manosphere, religion writer Jeff Sharlet notes: "poor and working class men are cannon fodder abroad and expendable labor at home, trapped beneath a glass floor in jobs nobody really wants—farm workers, roofers, garbage men—and injured at far higher rates than women ..."[18] Anarcho-capitalist economist Walter Block argues in The Case for Discrimination that male expendability is the result of women being the bottleneck of reproductive capacity in a population,[19] a theme that was also presented in Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power.

Norwegian sociologist and scholar of men's studies Øystein Gullvåg Holter argues that the male-led Russian government's belief in male expendability contributed to their delay in seeking international help during the Kursk submarine disaster, in which an all-male crew of 118 personnel was lost. He states, "If 118 women had been killed, alarm bells regarding discrimination against women would probably have gone off around the world." He states that able-bodied males were viewed as a more legitimate target during wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor, Rwanda, and Chechnya.[20]

• Sexual division of labour
• Androcide
• Bateman's principle
• Economy-of-effort theory
• Strength theory
• Compatibility-with-childcare theory
• Misandry
• Lost boys (Mormon fundamentalism)
• Missing white woman syndrome
• Reverse sexism