The Privileged Sex Quotes

“Thanks largely to the attempts to integrate women into the armed forces of many modern countries, the physical differences between the sexes have been precisely measured.[296] One study found the average U.S. Army female recruit to be 12 centimeters shorter and 14.3 kilograms lighter than her male brethren. Compared to the average male recruit, females had 16.9 fewer kilograms of muscle and 2.6 more kilograms of fat, as well as 55 percent of the upper body strength and 72 percent of the lower body strength. Fat mass is inversely related to aerobic capacity and heat tolerance, hence women are also at a disadvantage when performing activities such as carrying heavy loads, working in the heat and running. Even when the samples were controlled for height, women possessed only 80 percent of the overall strength of men. Only the upper 20 percent of women could do as well physically as the lower 20 percent of men. Had the 100 strongest individuals out of a random group consisting of 100 men and 100 women been selected, 93 would be male and only seven female.[297] Yet another study showed gthat only the upper 5 percent of women are as strong as the median male.[298]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“In all developed countries, without exception, women spend fewer hours working. In the United States, female doctors work fewer hours than their male counterparts; the same is true for female lawyers.[403]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“The male imperative to compete for females often comes at a heavy cost. In some mammals, such as kangaroos, mountain sheep, deer and sea elephants, it leads to fights that can result in life-threatening injuries. At a minimum, the loser can expect a drop in status as well as eviction from the most favorable feeding grounds, leading to a shortened life expectancy. Moreover, sexual selection often operates at cross-purposes with other evolutionary forces.[152] A male who develops disproportionately sized organs, or displays brilliant color, or emits certain sounds, may well lose some of his mobility or become more vulnerable to predators. Trying to attract a female, in other words, may cost him his life.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“Men’s lot in life is endless hard work whose fruits will be consumed largely by others. The more men bring in, the greater the demands. Should men fail, they may lose both what they made and those to whom they gave it. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about Melville’s story is that, at times, Bartleby’s behavior and fate can tempt even the most active and successful man.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“The largest concentrations of women were found in industries with the smallest number of accidents. In such industries, women outnumbered men nearly four to one. Conversely, in the most dangerous places, there were hardly any women at all.[367]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“the most famous handbook on witch-hunting, the Malleus Maleficarum,”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“In the early 1990s, for example, 300 million people lived in countries where men’s life expectancy was higher than that of women. Today, the number is practically zero.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“For example, no sooner did large numbers of women enter the American automobile factories in the late 1960s than they and their representatives demanded that the old system of mandatory overtime be abolished. When that demand was granted and voluntary overtime substituted, they were still not satisfied. They declared that since men were more prepared to do overtime, the right to do so discriminated against women. By 1973, women workers’ contradictory demands had driven the Union of Auto Workers almost to distraction. As part of its attempts to bring the matter to a close and move on with business, the union endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment. That legislation, however, ended up being rejected by most women.[419]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“The usual reason given for women’s shorter hours is the famous double burden. However, upon closer inspection, this well-worn argument falls apart.[408]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“The combination of modern anti-discrimination laws, on the one hand, and women’s reluctance to pull up their sleeves, on the other, can lead to strange results. Thus, whereas 80 percent of all clerks in the United States are women, the one “clerical” job that involves substantial outdoor walking — mail delivery — is done almost entirely by men.[401”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“In 1945, out of 52 million American adult women only 19.5 million held jobs. Among married women, only a quarter did.[364] Though the image of Rosie the Riveter dominated propaganda, its link to reality was tenuous. In metal-working plants of all types, male workers outnumbered female ones more than three to one.[365]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“For example, at Wigan Pier, later to be made famous by George Orwell, women formed just 5.5 percent of the work force. Of them, not a single one worked underground.[355]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“By 1908, future justice Louis Brandeis was able present the United States Supreme Court, in Muller v. Oregon, with more than 100 studies on the need to protect women against overwork. The strategy worked, and state regulation of women’s work was declared to be constitutional. Yet notably, just three years earlier another court had rejected similar regulation of an industry in which men bore among the heaviest burdens, namely baking.[337”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“For most modern Western men, abandoning their families will result in increasing their dispensable income by as much as three quarters.[167] In the whole of nature, there is no arrangement that is more demanding and more altruistic.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“In fact, it is not impossible that one day the sperm-less fertilization of eggs — based on triggering the genetic code present in any cell of the body — will become a reality.[131]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“In reality, all that is needed are a syringe and a few cubic centimeters of semen. Should current experiments with fertilizing eggs with DNA taken from other eggs be extended from mice to humans, soon we will not even need that. The fact that the necessary techniques were invented by men merely adds offense to injury. It is as if each time men try to help women along, men only make themselves more superfluous.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“Since society permits girls to follow straight in their mothers’ footsteps, psychologically speaking becoming female also means taking the path of least resistance. Like girls, boys are born to women and spend the first years of childhood under their care. Unlike girls, boys must at some point renounce their mothers, start identifying with their fathers and grow into men. This may be because the father threatens them with castration, as Freud thought. Or it may be because the mother is seen as big and threatening.[121] Or, as some feminists have claimed, it may be because boys, forced to witness the sufferings their fathers inflict on their mothers, will do whatever it takes not to share them.[122] One way or another, men labor under an Oedipus complex. On pain of remaining forever in a state of childhood, they must resolve it; doing so may be the hardest thing they are called on to do in their lives.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“in all species for which information is available, once the sex of the fetus is determined, more males than females are aborted.[120]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“Whenever fewer women than men study a subject, then this fact is immediately seen as a problem. However, when fewer men take up a subject than women, as is the situation in fields such as foreign languages, most of the liberal arts, and some of the social sciences, nobody seems to care.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“From 1939 to 1944 the proportion of students who were female went up seven-fold, reaching 49.3 percent of the total student body.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“Like most people at the time, Hitler believed that women who did not have children would eventually become mentally ill.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“The fact that the Nazis constructed “polarized identities for males and females” and did not accept the feminist dogma about men and women being similar in every respect was said to be one of their worst misdeeds.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“Keith Thomas’ Magic and the Decline of Religion (1971).”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex