Is There Anything Good about Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men

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Is There Anything Good about Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men

4.06 of 5 stars 4.06 · rating details · 49 ratings · 12 reviews

Have men really been engaged in a centuries-old conspiracy to exploit and oppress women? Have the essential differences between men and women really been erased? Have men now become unnecessary? Are they good for anything at all?
In Is There Anything Good About Men?, Roy Baumeister offers provocative answers to these and many other questions about the current state of manh...more

Hardcover, 306 pages

Published August 12th 2010 by Oxford University Press

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May 01, 2012 Greg Linster rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: all-time-favorites

The title of Florida State psychologist Roy Baumeister’s book speaks to how silly much of the rhetoric surrounding the gender debate has become. Dare I suggest that both sexes are good? We don’t need our men to be more like women, nor our women to be more like men. Both sexes need each other for who they are. Someone had to write this book and I’m glad that Baumeister had the audacity (and tenure) needed to do so. To put it simply, this is hands-down the best book on gender differences I’ve ever...more

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Dec 18, 2011 Zahwil rated it 4 of 5 stars

Baumeister gives a standard economic argument to explain differences in outcomes (e.g. career success, incomes) between men and women. He attributes these differences, not to oppression as feminists would have us believe, but to differing levels of motivation. Women, says Baumeister, are better at close, intimate relationships while men are better at developing broad networks of shallow relationships. Men, for evolutionary reasons, strive to achieve greatness. In our evolutionary pasts, only tho...more Baumeister gives a standard economic argument to explain differences in outcomes (e.g. career success, incomes) between men and women. He attributes these differences, not to oppression as feminists would have us believe, but to differing levels of motivation. Women, says Baumeister, are better at close, intimate relationships while men are better at developing broad networks of shallow relationships. Men, for evolutionary reasons, strive to achieve greatness. In our evolutionary pasts, only those men who climbed to the top were able to have sex and reproduce. As a result, the men who are around today are the descendants of the few chosen men who had in them a strong sexual drive and were able to oust many other men in a competition in which women were the prize.

Baumesiter argues that culture exploits men. One of the ways he says it does is by marriage, which he sees as a way of transferring wealth earned by men to women and children. Baumeister says he is a romantic, but it's clear from his writing that he is anything but. He suggests that love is a myth propagated by culture to get men to make a life-long commitment, financial and sexual, to a single woman. Men get the raw end of the bargain over time, as their wives gain weight and lose their sexual appeal, while the men become richer and more powerful.

Baumeister argues that culture curbs men's sexual desires by encouraging them to commit to a single woman. He suggests that half of all men will cheat on their wives at some point, and that men who have the choice choose to have sex with multiple partners. He points to superstars like professional athletes or famous actors or politicians, whose sex lives are frequently the subject of scandal. He also refers to a campus experiment where three quarters of attractive men agreed to have sex in a heart beat with an anonymous woman. When the experiment was reversed, with men approaching attractive women, there were no takers.

Culture, says Baumeister, dangles an elusive carrot of abundant, willing sexual partners, to harness men's talents in the creation of wealth for society. It is elusive both because men's sexual fantasies are somewhat beyond reality and because few men reach greatness, while those who do have paid a high price along the way in terms of self-sacrifice. Male ego and overconfidence ensure that all men give it their best shot, which acts as a sorting mechanism to reveal the few men who are really capable of greatness. It is these men whose contributions move society forward.

Throughout the book, Baumeister attacks the widespread view that men and women are the same in every relevant respect and the corollary that there must be systemic oppression of women in our society. This belief rests on two fallacies. First, although men and women have the same average ability, the distribution for men has fatter tails - more dispersion of ability at either end of the spectrum. When making the case for women's oppression, people tend to focus at the top of the distribution, where they find predominantly men among the ranks of top CEO's and politicians. what they fail to notice is that men also dominate the bottom positions in society: the prisons, death row, the homeless, the mentally disabled.

As Baummmeister puts it, men are nature's way of rolling the dice. If nature lucks out by stumbling upon a winning genetic variation, the man who has it has lots of sex with many women, thereby propagating the trait rapidly. On the flip side, when a trait has a bad outcome, the man fails to reproduce, and the trait meets a quick end. Women, in contrast, are able to mother only a limited number of babies during their lifetime, so nature has endowed them with greater moderation and risk-aversion. Their abilities are more tightly clustered in the middle of the distribution.

The second fallacy to which people fall victim is to overlook differences in motivation. Men are far more ambitious than women within the male domain of broad, shallow relationships which characterize most large organizations. To support his case, Baumeister points to surveys of the female graduates of IVY leagues universities, which find that significant fractions of these top-performing women are unemployed several years after graduation. Since they graduated from the top universities in the world, these women clearly face an abundance of career choices and are sought-after by the most prestigious employers. The decision many women make to stay home with their children instead of pursuing the top-tier career available to them reveals their lower level of motivation to take on this kind of work.

Some but not all of the book resonates with my own experiences. When I look at my own life in my early 20's, I see how central to my life were my sexual desires and how preoccupied I was with trying to satisfy them. Looked at through Baumeister's lens, I see the twin forces of nature and culture having done a number on me. Nature endowed me with plenty of restless sexual energy and drive to climb to the top. Culture then stepped in with the institution of marriage. Once I got married and had children, the restless energy was replaced with an intense career orientation knowing that my family now depends on my financial support. I think marriage, viewed from a broad cultural perspective, is a great tool to get men to hanker down on their careers and create wealth for society. Without marriage, men would wander the land restlessly with their minds never far from their next sexual conquest. To tame the "beast", men need a contract which entitles them to sex with a single woman and forbids them, through social norms, from looking beyond. This takes men's energy and attention away from trying to have sex with many women and channels it into more productive means.

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Jun 28, 2011 Stacy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

The first half of this book was fascinating. Overall, the book was well written, well organized, and well thought out. I applaud the author for being willing to speak candidly about an opinion that is not considered politically correct. And, at first I thought that his opinions were right on the mark.

Then I kept reading and I became more and more conflicted. As I read I was first impressed, then incredulous, and occasionally downright insulted. I think the author honestly attempted to remain unb...more

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Nov 08, 2012 Marshall rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: feminism, non-fiction

It's sad that our culture has become so anti-male that we seriously ask a question like, Is there anything good about men? This book is about what purpose men have served in our culture, and the ways our culture exploits men. As an answer to all of the various feminist complaints, it is insufficient. What it does is builds a case for a perspective rarely seen in gender discussions: evolutionary psychology. It spends a lot of time discussing the way humans have evolved culture to band together fo...more It's sad that our culture has become so anti-male that we seriously ask a question like, Is there anything good about men? This book is about what purpose men have served in our culture, and the ways our culture exploits men. As an answer to all of the various feminist complaints, it is insufficient. What it does is builds a case for a perspective rarely seen in gender discussions: evolutionary psychology. It spends a lot of time discussing the way humans have evolved culture to band together for a common purpose, which both shaped and was shaped by gender differences, namely men's greater upper-body strength and women's pregnancies. Each had their roles to play in culture-building: men, through leadership and strength, and women through nurturance and child-raising.

This is not a conservative argument for traditional gender roles. It's merely an overview of our current understanding of human biology. Traditional gender roles stem from an outdated misunderstanding about gender differences: that men and women are inherently better or worse at some things than the other. Modern biology shows that these differences are in fact so slight as to be insignificant, though they do exist. This book argues that the real difference is in the psychologies each gender has evolved, which shaped their respective preferences. Females tend to prefer one-on-one relationships, whereas males tend toward larger groups.

The implications of these gender differences are quite far-reaching, and can help explain many cultural differences that feminists have insisted we should attribute to a patriarchal conspiracy to oppress women. There's little evidence of such a conspiracy, and yet the differences remain. This book offers an elegant explanation for these differences, and has more evidence to support it.

Obviously, this contradicts the feminist party line, as well as the common understanding in our culture. Feminism officially denies evolutionary psychology. In fact, they feel threatened by it. They believe humans are malleable blank slates which patriarchal culture shapes to its own ends. It makes intuitive sense, but it is rather simplistic, and it flies in the face of a burgeoning field of science. It will be forced to reconcile itself with an increasing plethora of evidence.

The reason modern (specifically, third-wave) feminists are so threatened by this perspective is that it undermines their entire platform. Just as evolution took away the need for God as an explanation for the existence of life, it also takes away the need for Patriarchy as an explanation for the gender differences in our culture. And to do that would be to absolve men of many (most?) of the crimes they're collectively accused of. It will be interesting to see how this struggle plays out in Women's Studies and in politics in the decades to come. This book gives a good preview.

But it goes beyond that and shows many ways that men are treated as expendible, beasts of burden in our culture. It shows the huge role men's unique characteristics have created many things we enjoy and take for granted--breakthroughs in medicine and technologies that make our lives easier and more pleasant. Many of these specifically benefit women. But men's ways also created a lot of problems, so these benefits were certainly trade-offs. In this way it sounds very much like Warren Farrell's books, but without the resentment that seems rife in Farrell's books, and also more cohesive than Farrell's arguments.

This book tries very hard to make a balanced argument, and constantly points out that neither gender is inherently better than the other. Nevertheless, he does come off as slightly sexist at times, and there were a few indications that his male perspective has biased his arguments, what feminists call "male privilege." Many feminists are hyper-sensitive to these issues, sometimes to the point of hostility. For this reason, I would never recommend this book to a feminist. Instead, I would point them toward Ceasefire Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality and Who Stole Feminism.(less)

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Dec 25, 2011 Thu rated it 3 of 5 stars

I like it that Baumeister attributes the gender divide to [i]motivational[/i] differences rather than biological/ability differences. He really makes a strong case that it is culture (created by men) that shape men's roles as expendable members of society. The question of whether men only compete with themselves or they conspire to play down women according to some 'imaginary feminist' is extremely interesting. The book, however, gets too long and repetitive after the first half. The author wast...more

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Jan 17, 2013 Celeste rated it 3 of 5 stars

Has some interesting ideas, but fails to back them up with any substantial evidence. It would have helped if citations were inserted in their appropriate places in the text rather than lumped together in the back, too. Baumeister says outright that it's meant to be read more like an essay, but this is rather bad considering that the book often becomes offensive with its assumptions.

Overall, though, the idea of the sexes being "different but complimentary (in general)" is good. It's nice to not s...more

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Aug 09, 2012 David Rutter added it

There is no way to present the ideas in this book without looking sexist. People have lost careers saying these things. They are extremely unpopular. Does that make them untrue? Some of the things written here do appear to be false, but this is not a work of science. It's an essay. I do wish this were written more like a literature review and less like a pop-sociology book, but it certainly did not leave me wanting for things to think about. Things that I could be shunned for pondering aloud...

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Mar 19, 2011 Katherine rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book definitely makes you think about the reasons for inequalities between men and women as well as how men are used by our culture. Baumeister does a great job of presenting alternative explanations for issues like the pay difference between men and women. However, I feel like parts of the book could have been presented in much more sensitive ways. As a woman, I felt defensive in parts of the book and I think a lot people will be turned off by the way the information was presented.

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Feb 20, 2011 Olga rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: psychology, non-fiction

I didn't read the book, but i found an essay written by the author on is book and i was impressed. If you don't have the time to read all the 320 pages, just read the essay following the link http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister...

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Sep 05, 2010 Nathan rated it 5 of 5 stars

So good I wrote something on the back jacket.

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May 27, 2012 Stuart rated it 4 of 5 stars

The author offers an interesting perspective on gender roles and the evolving american culture. His sociological background is nice though he can be a bit too objective at times. The nature of the topic makes it difficult to have no bias one way or the other.

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Jun 27, 2012 Caitlin rated it 2 of 5 stars

read solely for the title

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About Roy F. Baumeister

Dr. Roy F. Baumeister is Social Psychology Area Director and Francis Eppes Eminent Scholar at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He is a social psychologist who is known for his work on the self, social rejection, belongingness, sexuality, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, and aggression. And enduring theme of his work is "why people do stupid things."...more

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