Talk:Male expendability/Archive 1

Archive 1

Sources and notability

A comment at WP Sociology raised the issue of whether "Male expendability" is sufficiently notable to have an article at Wikipedia. Let's have the discussion here.

I understand that we should always assume good faith, but it should be noted that there is a long history of subjects like this being swept under the rug as "not important" whenever they are brought up in the public square because they go against the common "Patriarchy Theory" narrative. On that basis alone, I think declaring it "not notable" would be premature, as in effect Wikipedia would be bowing to political pressure from a specific interest group even if the original raising of the issue was done in good faith.JackFloridian (talk) 11:40, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

I believe it is notable, based on numerous references at Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL, especially in books. Where I agree with the OP, is that none of them have an explicit definition. Per GNG: If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article,^{[emphasis in original]} and there's nothing further down that page that implies that locating a definition in a source is a requirement for notability. Neither does MOS:LEADSENTENCE require it, and bullet 3 implies that it isn't required. Finally, template {{Missing lead}} is available to tag the article, if needed. So, I believe that this topic is notable. Mathglot (talk) 12:09, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

While your argument is convincing, I could make a similar argument for "male disposability" but when you read the sources, they don't clearly define either one. See Misandry#Male disposability. I'm of the mind that we should #redirect or merge to that section. ^{Atsme📞📧} 12:38, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

The "male disposability" material does seem to be about the same concept. But you could take that material and merge it here. Bondegezou (talk) 17:11, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

The customary procedure is to spin-off from the main article because there is no more room to expand. We don't necessarily create stand alone articles unless there is good cause, and I'm not seeing it here. ^{Atsme📞📧} 23:25, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Here's some room to expand, from a few sources on the topic:

1. ~ and roots of polygamy
2. ~ starts in the womb
3. masculinity as a moral code assoc. w ~
4. ~ biologically rooted
5. evolutionary and biol roots of ~
6. sense of ~ from slaughter in WWI
7. burakumin background as origin of ~
8. Wheeler's response to ~
9. (relevant snippet p.333 missing)
10. one- gender "marriages" increase with ~
11. in Japanese fiction
12. boxing, bruising, and ~
13. ~ and populist political protest
14. ~ and human warriors
15. feminist guerillas celebrating ~

Plenty to feast on, there. Mathglot (talk) 07:37, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Go to Misandry and look in the right margin at the nav boxes (1) Series on Masculism and (2) Series on Discrimination and you'll see what I'm talking about regarding redundancy. ^{Atsme📞📧} 16:05, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Hope I'm formatting ok here. I think this school of thought (male disposability) is deserving enough of a page. It's discussed and cited frequently enough to be considered a mainstream debate. An article on a theory or concept doesn't have to be endorsing that theory, just explaining what the theory is. I think the page is sourced well enough to have a valid case.

References

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2019 and 12 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Eveningblack.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:27, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

New section

I added a bit about Second Sexism. :) --Eveningblack (talk) 00:14, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

WP:Synthesis

Antovigo, your additions are a bunch of WP:Synthesis. Read WP:Synthesis for what I mean. What academic sources do you have that are specifically on the topic of male expendability, as opposed to you cobbling together sources and deciding that they are about the topic?

I am likely to revert your additions. For now, I've added a Template:Original research tag to the article. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:56, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

In fact, there is no "likely." I will eventually revert all of that. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:59, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi Flyer22 Frozen! I am well aware of SYNTH. I am also aware of Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not. You asked: What academic sources do you have that are specifically on the topic of male expendability, as opposed to you cobbling together sources and deciding that they are about the topic?

Let's go through it together. From Wikipedia:Notability: Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. Thus I'm going to consider that sources need not to be "specifically on the topic of male expendability", and that sources that are generally about "what populations are more expendable than others" or "in what cases is it acceptable to sacrifice someone" are acceptable. For example, a study that literally asks participants if a man or a woman should be sacrificed in a car crash is de facto about male expendability, even if the main title doesn't say "male expendability". The fact that the same study also contains data on age and social class is irrelevant.

Please note that I agree with you for some parts of the article. The first sentences about empathic response are not explicitly related to male expendability. They provide basic insight into the origin of the gender bias, but it's not explicitly linked to discrimination, so you are right that they should be removed.

But then, in ref 4: Hence, we could infer that whereas for most women (and also most men), an offspring seems “more irreplaceable” than a mate, for a significant number of men (and only a few women), just the opposite would be the case. In ref 5: A culturally pervasive social norm is the chivalrous idea that women should be protected from harm. This is exemplified by “women and children first”—a historical maritime code of conduct stating that when there is a life-threatening situation, those who are more vulnerable should be saved first (Kipling, 1907).

In ref 6: Because the parental investment of women (e.g., pregnancy, childbirth, and child care) is largely greater than that of men (Trivers 1972), their death would result in a larger fitness cost (Sear and Mace 2008)., Would you rather cause the death of three women (saving one man), or cause the death of one man (saving three women)? The sexual selection account assumes that men are more prepared than women to eliminate sexual rivals by the infliction of physical harm, especially in situations such as that described in the dilemma, which pose no physical risk to themselves.

In ref 7: Never in the history of humanity have we allowed a machine to autonomously decide who should live and who should die, in a fraction of a second, without real-time supervision. We are going to cross that bridge any time now, and it will not happen in a distant theatre of military operations; it will happen in that most mundane aspect of our lives, everyday transportation.,As a response to these challenges, we designed the Moral Machine, a multilingual online ‘serious game’ for collecting large-scale data on how citizens would want autonomous vehicles to solve moral dilemmas in the context of unavoidable accidents.

In ref 8: A contradictory perspective suggests that crime and, in particular, violence against females is viewed as more harmful than crimes against male victims (Baumer et al., 2000; Kleck, 1981). This may be mitigated or aggravated by decision makers' perceptions of the victim’s familial role and responsibilities (see Daly, 1989, 1994).,There is considerable historical evidence of a heightened concern with the victimization of white females in the United States. The cultural and symbolic power of white females as a protected class has resulted in numerous social changes and legal responses when that group has been perceived as threatened.,Furthermore, research on victims has noted that the perceived status of the victim affects decision making through the attribution of blame, the perceived threat to the community that a particular crime represents, and the practical concerns of those decision makers (e.g. Baumer, et al., 2000; Farrell and Swigert, 1986; LaFree, 1989; Stanko, 1981-82).,More severe sentences for crimes with female victims have also been explained in terms of the perceived "innocence" of females and the "undeserving" nature of their victimizations (Myers, 1979; Williams, 1976), the perceived "defenselessness" of females (Gross & Mauro, 1989), and the perception that females are less likely to contribute to their own victimization (Farrell & Swigert, 1986).,crimes against black victims may be considered unworthy of the most severe criminal justice response (see Friedman, 1993). an so on.

In ref 9: The optimal punishment model suggests that victims characteristics will not matter when the victim is determined as random,Some of our results can be understood as the outcome of a greater desire of society to protect particular types of people. For these last references, I agree that talking about "value" for society is a bit vague and more specific wording could be used.

In ref 11 (a secondary source): One also assumes that if women were eleven times as likely to die on the job, the “gender gap in workplace deaths” would be the topic of policy discussion, legislative initiatives, and, no doubt, numerous law-school symposia. Yet one seldom hears about a “gender gap in occupational deaths,” despite the fact that eleven men die on the job for every woman who dies.,Instead, it is to show that there is a broad range of gaps that favor females, but the single-minded focus on “female disadvantage” obscures a more complicated reality. This review actually cites Warren Farrell's Why men are the disposable sex" as well as Benatar.

Ref 12 states that occupational gaps favoring women are less deserving of attention and social actions. Ref 13 states The emergence of the ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret gender inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind., a losing male, more than a losing female, [...] has not exerted sufficient effort, and thus may find it fair that less resources are allocated to assist them.. For this last two references, you could technically argue that allocating less resources to assist "men falling behind" is not "disposability" per se. Thus, it can be construed as SYNTH, you win. Feel free to erase these sources about the men's issue that men's issues are erased.

Last thing, I'm going to quote Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not: If you want to revert something on the grounds that it's SYNTH, you should be able to explain what new thesis is being introduced and why it's not verified by the sources.

It appears you cannot just "revert all of that". Instead, you are expected to go through each statement made on the page and explain what new thesis is being introduced. You can then remove the specific statements for which you could demonstrate SYNTH.

Antovigo (talk) 16:56, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Without reading all of your latest post, I reverted all of what you added. I also cut other material that is not about male expendability. I can and did revert/remove all of that. Mathglot can further explain why. I do not feel like debating a new account's odd interpretation of the rules. And I state "new account" rather than "newbie" because I am not convinced that you are a newbie. Do not WP:Edit war over this. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 23:18, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Flyer22 Frozen, asking a question, dismissing the reply while admitting not reading it, then making up random allegations about your interlocutor does not speak in favor of intellectual honesty on your side.

Mathglot, Flyer22 Frozen summoned you to explain SYNTH to me. Specifically, I'm wondering about these quotes from Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not.

SYNTH is not mere juxtaposition: SYNTH is when two or more reliably-sourced statements are combined to produce a new thesis that isn't verifiable from the sources. Given just about any two juxtaposed statements, one can imagine that something might be insinuated by the juxtaposition. Don't. If the juxtaposition really does constitute SYNTH, the insinuation will be obvious to everyone. Gray-area cases aren't SYNTH, just unclear writing.

And most importantly:

SYNTH is not presumed: If you want to revert something on the grounds that it's SYNTH, you should be able to explain what new thesis is being introduced and why it's not verified by the sources. You don't have to put the whole explanation in the edit summary, but if someone asks on the talk page, you should have something better ready than "Of course it's SYNTH. You prove it isn't."

I clearly asked Flyer22 Frozen to explain what new thesis was being introduced. They were unable to do so but still proceeded with the reversal they wanted to make. Is the page Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not wrong (and therefore should be corrected), or is Flyer22 Frozen's reversal abusive? Should be either.

Thanks a lot for the clarification.

Antovigo (talk) 18:14, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

No need to ping me since I watch this article/talk page. Just reading a bit of your comment before reverting you, and seeing you invalidly invoke WP:Verifiability WP:Notability and scrolling down and seeing you state "It appears you cannot just 'revert all of that'.", I made the decision to not waste time and unnecessarily debate you. And that's something because, as editors such as Johnuniq know, I can debate extensively and for hours. Anyway, hours after reverting your content and removing other content, I read your "23:18, 25 February 2020 (UTC)" "16:56, 25 February 2020 (UTC)" comment, and it further confirmed to me that I was right not to debate you. You can take your case to the WP:Original research noticeboard for more opinions. There, we can see if anyone agrees that some of what you added should be re-added. I could agree to re-add a bit of the material if reliable sources about what that topic is are added.

You stated that I was unable to "explain what new thesis was being introduced." This has nothing to do with being unable to explain anything. You added sources about "Maternal sensory sensitivity and response bias in detecting change in infant facial expressions: Maternal self-efficacy and infant gender labeling", "Testing the Kundera Hypothesis: Does Every Woman (But Not Every Man) Prefer Her Child to Her Mate?", and similar, and deemed this to be about male expendability. If you don't want to state that you deemed it so, it's still the case that you included sources that are not about male expendability and material that is not addressed as being about male expendability in other sources. You included sources/material that is better suited for other Wikipedia articles. With regard to WP:Synthesis, I do not see what you don't get about it stating, for example, "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. If one reliable source says A, and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C that is not mentioned by either of the sources. [...] If a single source says 'A' in one context, and 'B' in another, without connecting them, and does not provide an argument of 'therefore C', then therefore C' cannot be used in any article." "WP:What SYNTH is not" is not a policy or guideline; see what it states at the very top about what it is.

As for "Of course it's SYNTH. You prove it isn't.", see WP:Burden. What reliable sources do you have that are specifically about male expendability? How do they define male expendability? These are questions that need to be asked because we can't have editors just adding anything they personally think is male expendability or is related to it. We can't have them adding sources about "maternal sensory sensitivity and response bias in detecting change in infant facial expressions" and extrapolating that as being about male expendability unless a reliable source (preferably a reliable academic source) considers it an aspect of male expendability. When we see how sources define male expendability, then one can validly state "this aspect falls within the topic." You can start by looking on Google Books for sources.

Oh, and not being convinced that you are a newbie (which obviously doesn't mean you couldn't have been around before without becoming very familiar with a number of Wikipedia rules) does not equate to "making up random allegations." Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 23:00, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Unbiasing and accuracy

I am an external contributor, I never knew about this term before and I am not an activist. But the text was "sounding weird", we can hear an unsavory tone, and the writing is just poor in general. I hence checked the sources, and it appears the editors who wrote the sections summarizing Benatar's thesis and its criticisms were quite not as neutral and factual as it could have been.

For example, this is what is currently written[1] (emphasis mine):

> Benatar posits that society leaves men behind in discussions about discrimination, focuses entirely on women's struggles while ignoring the fact that men are the main victims of discrimination.

This sounded surprising. So I checked the sources, and here is what a review by The Kelvingrove Review writes, literally in the 2nd paragraph[2]:

> Benatar acknowledges that the sexism against women and girls (which he calls first sexism) is still a more severe problem in most parts of the world. However, he argues that, contrary to popular belief, men and boys can also be subject to discrimination.

So it appears there is just plain misinformation mixed in this page. I won't list everything here, I will try to rework a bit, but I'm not a specialist, so I'd suggest that anyone interested and knowledgeable in this subject to rework the entire page from the grounds up by referring to the sources (instead of personal interpretations of the sources). 213.211.155.159 (talk) 00:07, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm done with my edits. I used the review I linked to above, it's not very famous but it's a real journal [3] and another source for criticisms. If this source is deemed inadequate, no problem. This shouldn't change the validity of the edited content, as I only used this review as a proxy for the source material. Going to the source material would be better, if anyone would like to do that, and can get access to it. 213.211.155.159 (talk) 01:23, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Mormon Lost boys

@User:Alssa1 You didn't give a reason why you reverted my edit. If it's because the lost boys aren't explicitly referred to in this article or male expendability in their article, then fair enough. But it is related, as they were seen as disposable by the FLDS leadership due to the desired sex ratio. Also, on this article it says "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." which is pretty much what happened with the FLDS. 24.44.73.34 (talk) 22:10, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

The problem with adding it under "See also" is that it would encourage editors to add every single instance of male gender expendability to that section, which simply would not be useful. The purpose of the section is to cover topics that are arguably 'tangentially related' like the concept of Misandry. Now if you wanted to create a list of instances male gender expendability, you would have my support in doing so; I just don't think putting it under "See also" is beneficial to the article. Alssa1 (talk) 22:11, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

"Discrimination" sidebar

I think this article is not related with discrimination at all. It should be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.212.196.193 (talk) 23:08, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Nobody answered. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.120.14.204 (talk) 17:09, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Knock-knock. Whom this is discrimination of? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.120.66.199 (talk) 16:44, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

We're not talking about your feelings -- Python Drink (talk) 22:42, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

It describes a situation where a negative evaluation (assignment of value to life) is assigned on the basis of sex (male). So on that basis it a description form of discrimination. Whether or not you agree that the phenomenon exist is another matter. AndersThorseth (talk) 19:46, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Bias

I added the bias tag because I believe must of the content of this article, most clearly the beginning of the Overview section, should not be given in Wikipedia's voice as if the specifics of the male expendability idea were set, confirmed and accepted. Is it believed that it is more acceptable to kill a man than a woman, overall? The idea that one man can impregnate many women seems true intuitively but history shows that emperors with large harems don't have as many more children than monogomous men as we might think.(Source: Testosterone Rex) I think "Social scientists who ascribe to this idea believe that society [does this] and [does that]" would work better. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:32, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

I removed your bias tag. You are apparently unhappy with the very much mainstream description of human social practices as described Professor Cynthia R. Daniels in the Oxford book Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction ISBN 9780199700073. Nothing she says is unusual or surprising. Her summary of the situation is accurate and neutral. I cannot believe anyone would say her description is biased. Binksternet (talk) 23:44, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

How would you feel about rewriting the Overview section to "Professor Cynthia R. Daniels of [Impressive Credential] points out that, in human reproduction, the required participation of the male is breif..." etc. The content might be even more impressive that way. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:47, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Absolutely not. Daniels is by no means alone in her view, and she is not so biased about this issue that we must apply the guideline Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Attributing_and_specifying_biased_statements. There's no need to list her name and make the reader think that she is by herself in this view. Multiple scholars have written about it exactly the same way, for instance this 1988 paper by Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia J. Higgins which says "Because fewer of them are needed to produce and maintain offspring, from a population maintenance perspective, males are more expendable than females." There's also this 1979 paper by William Etkin which says "the male mammal plays so ephemeral a role in the biology of reproduction that he is definitely expendable." Many more of these out there. We should be using Wikipedia's voice for the paragraph in question. Binksternet (talk) 00:06, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

From what I can see and the links you have kindly provided, Daniels is a sociologist, Mukhopadhyay is an anthropologist, and Higgins is a cultural anthropoligist. They're not biologists. The bioligist wrote his paper in 1979. I don't think presenting their beliefs about biology as if they were universally accepted is wise. We have learned so very much about the biology of sex/gender in humans since the development of genetic analysis. As late as the 1990s, we were still calling introns junk DNA.

Here's an even better example. In 1998, ten years after the Mukhopadhyay-Higgins paper, books about weight and nutrition said "If you exercise out 3500 more calories than you take in, you'll lose one pound of fat because one pound of fat has 3500 calories." Today, we know that human metabolism is far more complicated. Exercise out that many calories and your body will just use energy more efficiently. We know more about how human biology works today than we did then.

You know what this article needs? A criticism section. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:15, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Diet advice is irrelevant to this issue, so your comparison to diet books falls flat. The mainstream and widely known truism is that men are expendable because they are not as critical to reproduction, and they are built with stronger shoulders and arms—better for hunting and fighting. Basic human biology hasn't changed very much for 10,000 years at least, so 50-year-old scholarship is still valid. Binksternet (talk) 00:33, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

That's where you and I differ. Male expendability is not a biological idea. "Men are expendible," "men are not critical to reproduction," and so on are not biological facts. They're not well-known truisms. They're conclusions and beliefs. Some scholars, such as Daniels (I presume, not having read her book myself yet), can defend these conclusions very well and build plausible and convincing models out of them. However, they're not the only possible conclusions and models that can be built out of human biology. While basic human biology probably hasn't changed much since 1970, what we know about it has grown by leaps and bounds. Sometimes ideas that look very plausible turn out to be wrong.

We don't want to tell the reader "this is true of humans." We want to tell them "this is one way to think about how humans act and why." Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:37, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia's purpose is to summarize the literature, maintaining proportion with the weight of ideas that are found in the sources. The "idea" that individual males are more expendable than females is so thoroughly intertwined in thousands of years of literature that we must portray it as the standing belief, the mainstream idea of how human society is structured. We present it in Wikipedia's voice as the way things are. "This is true of humans" just as it is true for mammals in general and many other animals.

Any ideas to the contrary must be presented as challenges to the established order. They must be depicted as new, not widely accepted, revisionist.

The topic here should mostly be about the recent men's rights movement co-opting the arguments of feminism as a method for reversing the advances of feminism. Complaints about male expendability only appeared with men's rights activists. Popular writings about male expendability represent a backlash to feminism, part of the misogyny of the manosphere. Scholarly studies define the topic. Binksternet (talk) 04:21, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it is necessarily true of mammals in general. Moose have harems. Elephants live in matriarchal herds and bachelor herds. We're not sure what's going on with whales. Bonobos are just having one heck of a time. Some human societies embrace official polygamy, some tolerate unofficial polygamy, and some are mostly monogamous. It looks like what's happening here is that you find the assumption that society considers men expendable very plausible. I agree. It's plausible. But there are other ideas about the way society works that are just as plausible.

Articles like Consequentialism are not written as if the theory in question is necessarily true. Wikipedia describes the idea and its tenets and quotes experts but does not say "An act is moral if it has good consequences, regardless of intent" in its own voice. The idea of male expendability is far less mainstream than consequentialism. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:52, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

@Binksternet: You've listened to me and I've listened to you, and it looks like we just disagree. I asked for more opinions here at the NPOV noticeboard. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:19, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

I found the discussion at NPOVN enlightening. Two of the ideas in the article that are giving me pause are "most vertebrates could restore their populations if the males but not the females were killed off," which you claim is an accepted and mainstream biological fact. I disagree. (1. Most species don't have things that kill off adult males but not also adult females in similar numbers. 2. Historically, human women in Western society who can't find husbands are not encouraged to have children with shared men.) Another idea in this article is "and what happens with moose and frogs and elephant seals necessarily carries into human society's attitudes." I found one source that can refute that:

• The Significance of Meaning: Why Do Over 90% of Behavioral Neuroscience Results Fail to Translate to Humans, and What Can We Do to Fix It? "Multiple recent reviews argue that animals may be just too different physiologically, anatomically, and psychologically from humans to be able to predict human outcomes," and the author cites four in the beginning of the Introduction alone. The author is a Stanford scientist with many areas of expertise, including medicine, biology, and behavior.

I think this is enough to justify either stronger sourcing for the implied claim that the statements about biology made in this article are mainstream enough for Wikipedia's voice or switching to "Proponents of male expendability theory believe..." However, I can find more such sources if you feel it is necessary. Perhaps some on wild animals instead of lab animals. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:47, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Nothing in Wikipedia policy says we must use biologists exclusively for this claim, and throw out anthropologists, sociologists, etc. Many of the sources talking about human male expendability don't refer to other animals, so biologists would not be as relevant. Human behavior is not the territory of biologists. The question of whether individual human males have in fact fathered many children is also not relevant unless the sources discuss it... Suffice to say that if multiple sources suggest the possibility, then that's enough for us to mention it. Binksternet (talk) 03:43, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

WP:CHERRYPICKING warns against assuming that a source that is reliable for one thing is necessarily reliable for other things, but if the sources used in this article don't actually say "only a few males are required to father the next generation" etc., then it doesn't matter whether they would be reliable for such claims or not. We should remove them as unsourced. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Is this pruning job what you were looking for? The removed sentence isn't vitally important to the narrative. Binksternet (talk) 14:26, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

That is the kind of thing I'm talking about. I think we should take all the sentences that are like that one and not state them in Wikipedia's voice.

I'm not convinced that a consensus of biologists, sociologists, any set of professionals believes that if many men but not women die, then the few remaining men can father the next generation. I can't think of a single case of that happening in human history, ever. I think it would need only the best sourcing to be stated in W's own voice. However, it would be fine to say "For example, Professor Daniels theorizes that a few men could father the next generation..." if that is indeed what her book says. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:10, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

• I think the core problem is synthesis. The vast majority of sources in this article do not mention "male expendability"; in fact, Daniels, the source focused on so much above, doesn't use the word expendibility at all anywhere in the entire book. My larger concern is that it feels like this article is almost entirely the result of synthesis - editors starting from the premise of Farrell's book (ie. "male expendability is a real social issue") and then working backwards to find arguments for that. Here's my proposal to resolve this: We should go through and remove any sources that don't talk about "male expendability" directly, unless someone can point to clear quotes in them that plainly mean the same thing. Then, once we've done that trimming, we should evaluate what's left and rewrite the article to reflect that. --Aquillion (talk) 06:08, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

  @Aquillion: I don't agree. You cannot simply remove sources from the article just because they don't mention the word "expendability." The sources may use synonyms or mention the same idea in general terms. And I don't agree with your assertion that any SYNTH is involved: according to you, what statements does the article make that isn't directly supported by a source? All 3 of the sources you tagged with "improper synthesis" directly support the statements preceding them. Ciridae (talk) 06:41, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

What do those statements have to do with the concept of male expendability? Point to the synonym or the mention of the idea; I've been going over the Daniels and see nothing. From what we have here, nothing in the Daniels paragraph touches on it even obliquely; it was connected to the topic only by the synth-y "because of this...", which was an editor making a personal argument by combining it with an unrelated source. Even without that, in the context of inclusion in this article, the paragraph implicitly says "male expendability is a thing because of these biological facts"; but we cannot use Daniels as a source in that way unless something in Daniels supports that connection. In other words, if we want to say "male expendability is a thing because of these biological facts", we can only cite it to a source directly stating that, or words to that effect; we cannot cite Daniels for some random unrelated facts in a way that implies that these facts are the reason for the concept of male expendability. And if we have sources making the connection, we must rely on those sources, not Daniels. The other things I tagged are similar - if you think there have synonyms or mention the same idea in general terms, then find it in the source and quote it. Otherwise, they (and the text cited to them) needs to go. EDIT: I pulled the parts I felt were synth away from the "arguments" they were being used to support, which reduces the problem but illustrates the fundamental issue here - they are less synth-y now, but their basic inclusion is still a problem for the reason I outlined. Editors cannot include random bits of biology or facts about gender demographics to try and illustrate a point about male expendability themselves; we need to use sources actually making those arguments, which, as far as I can tell, these ones do not. --Aquillion (talk) 07:44, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Disclosure: I've been trying to get my hands on Professor Daniel's book and haven't been able to. I haven't read it yet.

I think removing a source and the text it supports because it doesn't mention the subject of the article is appropriate in this case. (By which I mean I might be able to think of a time when it isn't appropriate, like when it supports some supporting information but other sources have got the main idea covered.) My main concern with Daniels is that she isn't a biologist and her book is being cited to support biological conclusions that are stated in the article as fact. Now, if it turns out that that page of the book has an interview with a biologist or something, that would be one thing, but even then it should be stated as that biologist's own conclusion. For example, the idea that one man can father many children just because he creates sperm has been questioned. The example given was emperors with hundreds of official female partners: They didn't have as many more children than monogamous men as the numbers would suggest.

The one thing that would do the most to protect this article from deletion is a "Criticism" section. Who doesn't believe in male expendibility and what did they have to say about it? But I can't find any criticism. That suggests that this concept just might not be important enough to have its own article. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:32, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Anthropologists are perfectly good sources for describing human behavior linked to human biology, which is what this topic entails. Your attempt to diminish the expertise of Daniels is lacking foundation.

I never wanted this article to exist. It was written anyway, by the now-blocked neo-Nazi activist sockpuppet Smooth alligator who was trying to push the POV that males are somehow being attacked by society's traditional practices, that males are disadvantaged in human society. A ridiculous assertion, considering more than two thousand years of male dominance. This article was one-sided when I first encountered it last March, so I looked for and found many scholars writing directly about male expendability, and I summarized one of those scholars into one paragraph devoted to setting the biological foundation for the observed human behavior.[4] Let's not return to the unfounded condition that this article was in before my expansion. The biological foundation is critically important to understanding this topic. Binksternet (talk) 03:10, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Her university does not list her as "anthropologist." It lists her as "political scientist": [5] So does her own website: [6] I'm not diminishing her expertise. I'm repeating her own claims. She's never held a biology or anthropology position and her CV lists no biology papers: [7] She wrote one comment in Nature but that's it. Biology is not her area of expertise.

But the real issue is that Daniels is the only voice claiming that a group of humans can lose most of their adult men and then repopulate with the ones who are left with little trouble. We should not imply that it's a general belief shared by many scholars.

Because the biological claim is the foundation of the idea of male expendibility, we do need to either confirm that it is verifiable or list it as someone's opinion. Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:25, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

You're focusing on wording that is not in the current version of the article. There's nothing to fix. Binksternet (talk) 21:17, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Also, you have not acknowledged that there are multiple scholars holding the position that male expendability is based largely on aspects of reproduction such as one man being capable of fathering many children. Above I cited Mukhopadhyay, Higgins and Etkin. There are many more. Binksternet (talk) 21:24, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

The text that's bothering me is the first paragraph of "Overview" in the current version.

I haven't acknowledged that multiple scholars think that because I don't know that they do. If there are many sources supporting this, then great! Let's get them in the reference section! Right now, the article cites Daniels and only Daniels as support for this. I still think we should attribute the idea, but references citing these multiple scholars of yours sound like an improvement to me.

This article has the same problem in other places: A questionable idea is stated in Wikipedia's voice and then only one source is cited to support it, and it's not a source summarizing ideas of the field but rather stating one person's opinion. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:06, 8 November 2022 (UTC)\

The paragraph that is bothering you is the exact paragraph that I am adamant to keep. It gives a strong and accurate foundation for the rest of the article; a foundation which represents mainstream biology, anthropology and sociology. Since the argument of the manosphere is counterfactual, it helps the reader by laying down a bedrock of hard facts. Binksternet (talk) 06:01, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

I request that you add a source or sources saying that these ideas are mainstream in biology, anthropology, society or any combination of these. (I do have one source that contradicts the idea that these claims are mainstream: The book Testosterone Rex.) For now, I've attributed them. The kind of source I'm thinking of would be something like a sociology testbook, but that's not the only type that would work. Is that something that you are willing and able to do? Because we can just leave the text attributed until then. There's no time limit. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:38, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

I will get some more sources when I have a spare few hours in a row, probably in two days. Until then, the article cannot host a gross misrepresentation of the cited source with your POV wording including "Proponents of male expendability theory believe that the idea has a biological foundation." The book by Daniels analyzes the male expendability notion, rooting out the modern antifeminist concerns and describing how the concerns have varying degrees of validity. Daniels is by no means a "proponent"—she just sets the scene for the rest of the analysis by describing the pre-existing biological and sociological conditions which were in play when the "male expendability" complaints started coming from the manosphere. Binksternet (talk) 21:39, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Fine, but the text must be attributed in some way until we have a source showing that these ideas are mainstream. I'll try one more time. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:02, 10 November 2022 (UTC) EDIT: Yeah, that's much better than what I put yesterday. Thanks for holding me to a high standard. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:06, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Historiography of the topic: classic sex role studies versus men's rights movement

This Wikipedia article was written starting halfway into the topic, looking only at the recent trend by men's rights activists who have been using the arguments of feminism against feminism. MRAs have written about how men are unfairly treated by expected societal gender roles in the same fashion as feminists saying women are mistreated. (See Angela McRobbie's The Aftermath of Feminism, Molly Dragiewicz's Equality with a Vengeance, Ana Jordan's The New Politics of Fatherhood, etc.)

The first half of the topic was ignored completely: how and why the males of many species are considered the expendable sex. How deeply ingrained this pattern is in human society. All the scholarship from anthropologists and biologists who were studying long-term patterns in humans and various other species. Nothing about this aspect was covered here until March–April 2022 when one paragraph was introduced referring to human reproduction and its ramifications in gender roles.[8] Just one paragraph! It should have been a major section, fully fleshed out with historical examples, setting the stage for the next section.

This article was started by a sockpuppet who was interested in neo-Nazi alt-right topics, men's rights, reactionary social movements, etc. Subsequent contributors retained his focus on MRA complaints, not seeing that the topic was historically enormous, far beyond any recent concerns by MRAs.

Let's continue to develop text and find sources for the pre-MRA concepts that this topic calls for. We should set a context for the MRA material. Binksternet (talk) 05:33, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

I think that we should probably rely less on The Myth of Male Power directly as a source, and, when we do cited it, it should be in the context of discussing it directly as a foundational book of the MRA movement rather than relying on it unattributed for facts. It's a controversial work by a controversial author and should reasonably be considered WP:BIASED, yet right now we're citing it a ton of times without attribution. --Aquillion (talk) 06:59, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

The "in humans" section is a mess.

It seems like a completely random assortment of factoids and articles someone came across somewhere, with little academic coverage. The first paragraph is devoted entirely to a single quote from the National Coalition for Men (the article otherwise doesn't mention mail expendability at all), which seems WP:UNDUE. The second paragraph is reasonably sourced but, again, feels drastically undue as a full third of the "in humans" section given the relative narrowness of the study. And the final one cites a single opinion piece to make the connection between "women and children first" and the topic of this article, then cites a bunch of others sources that don't mention this article's topic at all - it's very WP:SYNTHy. --Aquillion (talk) 06:55, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Yes, it's a patchwork quilt, taking bits and pieces from oddball sourcing. Binksternet (talk) 12:14, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Attributing statements by Warren Farrell

This removal is completely inappropriate. As a founding figure of the male rights movement and a lifelong activist, Warren Farrell is an extremely WP:BIASED source; per BIASED, we are required to make that bias clear every time we cite him. It is not enough to just give his name; we must mention his connection to the men's rights movement. Sometimes biases are complex or unclear, but this is not one of these cases - he is clearly an activist and cannot be cited without making that fact clear. The only alternative to attribution is to remove all citations to him entirely and discuss him only via secondary sources (but those are also going to describe him primarily as a men's rights activist, since that is what he is notable for, so we would likely still have to state that fact.) --Aquillion (talk) 08:02, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

No, your statement was inappropriate. Farrell is also covered by BLP and any editor is well within their rights to remove any unsourced statements regarding him, which is exactly what my removal was. Ciridae (talk) 08:33, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

I think the text should acknowledge Farrell's bias. Some readers might even see it as a credential. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:27, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Well, in any case, if the objection is to a lack of sources it's easy enough to find sources covering this aspect, since it's the main thing Farrell is notable for. I've added three but can produce many many more if needed. Note that these sources also discuss the particular book we are citing here (it was what made Farrell a leader of the Men's Rights Movement). --Aquillion (talk) 10:39, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't call him "extremely biased" (just "biased"), and wouldn't agree that we need to repeat this every time we cite him; but it's more than appropriate to explain who he is, the first time we bring him up. DFlhb (talk) 20:51, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Exposing Men by C. Daniels

I managed to get Professor Daniels' book out of the library and I started it today. I'll be updating this section. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:26, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

• Chapter One: On the very first page, Daniels refers to the idea that men can father many children and that their energy investment in making babies and raising children is small and fleeting as an assumption that should be questioned.
• Chapter Two: Daniels considers male reproductive biology under-studied, explains different beliefs that humans have had about reproduction throughout history and gives a timeline of scientific discoveries. For example, some cultures thought that the sperm was the "seed" for the whole individual human, some thought the egg was, etc. She also links them to the social roles men and women had in those cultures. As for the biological ideas used in this Wikipedia article, Daniels believes they are wrong, so we cannot use her as a source for those ideas in Wikipedia's voice.

Request for comment: State ideas about biology in Wikipedia's voice?

Should the article state the biological beliefs underlying male expendability in Wikipedia's voice or attribute them? Editors disagree about whether these beliefs are mainstream among scientists or not. 02:22, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Please see this edit for the two main versions of the text that we have been using. Here is an example:

In human reproduction, the required participation of the male is brief, but the pregnant female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. Also, the male body produces many millions of sperm over a lifetime, allowing one man to impregnate many women. By contrast, the female body can produce far fewer children. Finally, men are generally stronger, can run faster and throw farther than women. These biological conditions have permeated human society such that...

The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology: In this model, human reproduction is understood to require only brief participation from the male parent, but the pregnant female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. Male expendability assumes that the many millions of sperm that male bodies can produce over a lifetime would allow one man to impregnate many women while the female body can produce far fewer children. Finally, men are understood to be generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. According to male expendability theory, these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...

Attribute

• Attribute First off, the source cited for those statements, Exposing Men by Dr. Cynthia R. Daniels, doesn't say they are true or that other scientists believe them (that I know just yet). I got my hands on a copy and I'm only partway through it, but Daniels seems to say ideas like "the required participation of the male is brief, but the pregnant female is faced with a long-term investment" are wrong or at least questionable on the very first page. We shouldn't use a source that says the statements are not true to support the idea that they are. I also do not think that biologists in general believe that men's actual investment in reproduction is necessarily small or that one man can father many children on many women. I read in Testosterone Rex that emperors with many wives and other partners don't father as many more children than monogamous men as we'd think. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:33, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

That females produce larger gametes in smaller quantities than males? There are some sources in the article for female, male and sexual dimorphism. That the pregnant female is faced with a long-term investment relative to the male? That's WP:BLUESKY territory. - Scarpy (talk) 09:40, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

I disagree. Very few human societies have developed with single-parent families as the norm, though of course they do occur. And so on. Johnbod (talk) 13:57, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

• Attribute. This is the most conservative/middle-ground take we can take while still discussing the matter. It may seem to be blue sky to some (and I would initially agree with that), but it's not a universal truth so therefore we should handle it in the most careful way possible, and that is to use attribution. --Masem (t) 17:08, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

• Attribute. Even if it is basically true it does not seem to me to be a major factor in how people work, I think there wwould need to be more sources directly confirming it before talking about it as confirmed truth. It is the sort of thing that might give great survival benefits in a crisis but has little effect in normal life, though you only need a 0.1% difference for the genes to be affected so it is possible. I can't see proper studies being able to do anything with it any time soon so we've really got to just attribute it. NadVolum (talk) 15:41, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

• Attribute as a stopgap measure before TNTing, per discussion in the "Comments" section below. The article needs to make very clear which statements are coming from men's rights activists, which from theologians, and which (if any) from actual biologists. Generalrelative (talk) 17:22, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

• Attribute I think both of the examples given above aren't that great, because one is almost treating these things as uncontested universal facts, and the other is treating them almost as if they're entirely theoretical. But I think some sort of attribution (to researchers, research fields, people, groups of people, results from studies, theories) and more context would improve the readability and informativeness of the page, as well as as complying with WP:NPOV slightly better as not all reliable sources treat all these things as uncontested truths in all contexts. I have not examined this very thoroughly so I may come back and add more comments later. --Tristario (talk) 23:14, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
• Attribute of course. Johnbod (talk) 13:57, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
• Attribute or remove entirely. We ought to attribute it if we are going to use this source at all, since we don't have anyone else discussing it; but I still feel we should omit Daniels entirely, since she doesn't even talk about male expendability. Her use here is essentially synthesis - she's included because editors believe she supports the thesis presented in the article, but nothing in her text actually talks about it directly. --Aquillion (talk) 10:42, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
• Attribute is the most reasonable option. Wikivoice is for scholarly consensus; other editors haven't proposed sources that would indicate such a consensus exists. DFlhb (talk) 20:56, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Use Wikipedia's voice

• Use Wiki Voice if there were notable sources to attribute saying any of the above are not true, would deserve due weight. I think you'd have a hard time finding that in a biology journal, but have a look if you'd like. In other news, water is wet and people eat tacos on Tuesdays. - Scarpy (talk) 09:34, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Sure, I can do that. In addition to the already cited Exposing Men by Cynthia R. Daniels and Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine which both (can be read to say) that the ideas are not true, I checked Google Scholar using the keywords "human male" and "investment in reproduction" and limited the search to studies published after 2000. I found "Health, Evolution, and Reproductive Strategies in Men: New Hypotheses and Directions": "human males are unique in that they exhibit the capacity to devote a significant amount of time and energy to offspring and mate care, often spending much more of their lives providing paternal investment compared to other primates and indeed many mammals." I didn't have a hard time at all. Took under five minutes. Would you like me to cite more? How many? Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:04, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

• Wiki voice for sure. This is definitely Blue Sky territory as observed by Scarpy. Like "no shit Sherlock" that women are saddled with a long-term commitment of time and energy to bear and birth a child while the male can run off. But for those looking to the literature for support, I have good news. As seen in the lengthy discussions above, there are plenty of observers stating the obvious, that the physical attributes and reproductive capabilities of men and women have shaped society over thousands of years to put men generally in the position of warrior, protector, explorer and hunter, while the women generally hold the home together. For instance this 1988 paper by Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia J. Higgins says "Because fewer of them are needed to produce and maintain offspring, from a population maintenance perspective, males are more expendable than females." There's also this 1979 paper by William Etkin which says "the male mammal plays so ephemeral a role in the biology of reproduction that he is definitely expendable." Robert Trivers wrote in 1972 about parental investment, saying that women have a larger parental investment in child rearing, and that the death of a male is more easily absorbed by the population. The men are more expendable. A great many more sources exist for this basic truth. Binksternet (talk) 00:41, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

I found a full text link to the Mukhopadhyay and Higgins study and they only talk about the biological ideas in the article to say that cultural models based on them are wrong. On the first page, they say they're only looking at anthropology, not biology. p. 468-9 They say models that assume women are smaller and weaker and less brave than men "now appear simplistic." p. 473, they say that people who assume men's physical strength affects what they actually do are wrong. I didn't find that "population maintenance" line in there anywhere. What page do you say it was on? Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:02, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Mukhopadhyay and Higgins discuss many authors of the decade 1977–1987 who wrote about the concept that physical differences between men and women, and/or reproductive imperatives, are the basis for male expendability. The news they announced is that a number of feminist authors were beginning to question the long-accepted Western view that reproductive and physical differences were indeed the basis, with these authors finding various exceptions to the rule in this or that society. The relevant kernel is that, for centuries, the idea was prevalent that reproductive and physical differences between men and women informed society's gender roles. Ernestine Friedl's 1975 book is cited in Clare Boulanger's 2012 book Biocultural Evolution: The Anthropology of Human Prehistory, saying that "hunting is a more dangerous occupation than gathering and should therefore be allocated to the more expendable sex, seeing as it is far easier to replenish a population with one man and ten women than it is with ten men and one woman." The mainstream view still stands. Binksternet (talk) 19:22, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

• Use Wiki voice if you can find valid arguments for and against it, like any other biological/anthropological theory.--Ortizesp (talk) 17:39, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Comments

The main problem with this article is that it presents it like this a mainstream concept in evolutionary biology, when none of the sourcing is from evolutionary biologists, with most of the sourcing to men's rights activists and religious scholars. Hemiauchenia (talk) 17:16, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. I think the problem here runs far deeper than merely whether beliefs about male expendability are properly attributed. The article as a whole should be reframed to properly reflect the state of scholarship on the topic. Generalrelative (talk) 18:54, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

• I don't think we should be citing it at all; its current usage strikes me as essentially WP:SYNTH, in that it's being presented as an argument for the much more sweeping claims in the rest of the article. As I mentioned above, she doesn't even use the term "expendability" or anything that could reasonably be considered similar. In particular, the first sentence of the paragraph cited to her (The idea of male expendability in humans stems from biological differences) does not seem to come from her text and instead seems to be synthesis by an editor - she does not state that these differences led men to be viewed as expendable. --Aquillion (talk) 10:46, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

What does the academic literature in relevant scientific fields like evolutionary anthropology say? If this hasn't been searched then I don't see how we can really know which way to go. Basics of human reproduction are BLUESKY, but drawing any conclusion from that regarding this hypothesis isn't. Male provisioning and overall social systems are an evolved part of many species, so it may not be as cut and dried as it seems at first. People far more qualified than us have likely written on the matter. If neither version is sourced then neither should be in place. If only one is but the source speaks in a way that indicates there is debate on the matter, it should be attributed. But ideally more sources would be checked to determine weight. Crossroads ^-talk- 19:57, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Folks truly scoured the internet for any and all mention of this purported phenomenon during the AfD discussion back in January. As I stated there, I was far from impressed by the quality of those sources. And as Hemiauchenia points out, few of the sources that do refer explicitly to "male expendability" are by actual biologists. The exceptions that were presented were relatively insignificant articles from decades ago: this (from 1974) and this (from 1983). Hardly the kind of sources upon which to build an article. Generalrelative (talk) 20:13, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

While I don't think being a social idea inspired by biological facts should necessarily count against male expendability having its own article, I do think Crossroads is right. If it weren't too late to change the way the RfC is phrased, I'd probably ask to change it to make it clear that the stuff that comes after the "such that" is the larger issue. My own belief is that, on the population level, "human reproduction" doesn't end at birth but at successfully raising offspring to their own reproductive age, and the fact that it's easier for men to make sperm than for women to complete a pregnancy is not the limiting reagent. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:37, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

• I am manifestly unimpressed with the Keep !votes from the first time around. We should AfD this nonsense again and get better buy-in so that it doesn't get railroaded by the WP:SPA MRA accounts. This page reads almost like a conspiracy theory. jps (talk) 12:32, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the original form of the article was super-duper pro-MRA, written by a sockpuppet. The bit about biological basis wasn't in there, because it doesn't fit with the intended tone of outrage that men are shoved into dangerous roles. If there's a biological basis (which there is) then the MRA rage is shown to be misguided. Binksternet (talk) 23:45, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

That it's easier for men to make sperm and complete the sex act than it is for women to complete a pregnancy is biologically true. It's the "and therefore if most of the men died off the remaining men could father an entire next generation by themselves" and the "and therefore all human societies consider men expendable" that are unproven and highly questionable ideas. It ignores the contributions that fathers and stepfathers make after the baby is born. For most of human history, the major limiting reagent in bringing children to reproductive age hasn't been access to sperm. It's been access to food and resistance to disease. THAT'S what we need to source. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:06, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

We've no evidence that sort of thing happens in nomad societies or the San, hunters don't provide just for their own famly and anyway the women also gather food. And they don't normally suffer from lack of food. It also ignores the rather sad lack of investment many men show in their childrens welfare. So true to some extent but not a proven truth. Best just to consider that as another made up story to show the other made up stories are just that rather than based on research. NadVolum (talk) 00:21, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Proposed replacement texts

The attribution issue affects much of the article, but let's brainstorm replacements for the example texts down here...

The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology and human reproduction. Because it takes far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to go through pregnancy and childbirth, male expendability theory concludes that, should large numbers of men die or be removed from the society, only a few remaining men would be needed to father the next generation. Male expendability also assumes that men are generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. According to male expendability theory, these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...

Improvements?

Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:12, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Introducing it as "male expendability theory" might lead the reader to presume that this is a biological theory. Giving it a biological-sounding rationale certainly contributes to this impression. As it stands, one has to do additional Googling to find out that none of the primary exponents of this "theory" –– Cynthia R. Daniels, Warren Farrell, Walter J. Ong, Ivana Milojevic, Øystein Gullvåg Holter –– are experts in biology. That's a huge WP:NPOV problem. Generalrelative (talk) 00:25, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

That's one of the key problems I had here as well. In fact, Daniels says on the first page of the book cited for this article that she does NOT believe in such things. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:16, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

The idea of male expendability is based on a number of assumptions and beliefs about human biology and human reproduction. It takes far less time and energy for a man to produce sperm and complete sexual intercourse than for a woman to go through pregnancy and childbirth. From this, proponents of male expendability conclude that the required participation of the male is brief while the female is faced with a long-term investment of time and energy. They also believe that because the male body produces many millions of sperm over a lifetime, one man could impregnate many women. From this, they conclude that only a few men are needed to father the next generation, and large numbers of men are therefore expendable. Male expendability also assumes that men are generally stronger and capable of running faster and throwing farther than women. Proponents claim that these biological conditions have permeated human society such that...

So this seems to be the idea. Now we just need to find out who these proponents are. Daniels and Higgins are out, or at least the specific Higgins and M paper cited above is out. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:21, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Aha, my mistake. The case for this article even existing is growing ever more tenuous. Generalrelative (talk) 17:50, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Got one! Biskernet was good enough to answer my "what page" question. Per page 473 of the Mukhopadhyay and Higgins study. The confusion was that it's not Mukhopadhyay and Higgins who believe in male expendability. They're summarizing the views of an earlier publication by Friedl. Per WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT, it would be okay for the article to read, "According to Drs. Mukopadhyah and Higgins, the 'relative expendability argument' was first written down by Dr. [Firstname] Friedl in 1975: 'Because fewer of them are needed to produce and maintain offspring, from a population maintenance perspective, males are more expendable than females.'" However, they did not say whether Friedl was talking about humans or other animals. We could source this article properly if we tracked down and read Friedl's own paper.

I think that's probably the problem with the sources given in these articles. Daniels doesn't seem to believe in male expendability, but maybe someone cited her work when they should have cited her as having quoted someone. Mukhopadhyay and Higgins don't seem to beleive in male expendability, and information in the article is attributed to them directly when we should be saying that they're summarizing older works. Maybe the sources aren't bad or there for decoration as I'd feared, just misidentified. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:01, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Found it. It's source #95: Friedl, Ernestine. 1975. Women and Men: An Anthropologist's View. New York. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Drat. It's a book and probably only available in dead tree format. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:44, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Placement of Ember source

I think the Ember source/Yale source should go front and center in the lede.

• Carol R. Ember; Milagro Escobar; Noah Rossen; Abbe McCarter (November 19, 2019). "Gender - Human Relations Area File". Yale University. Retrieved December 8, 2022.

Out of all the sources given for this article, it's the only one I've seen to clearly state what male expendability is. It also does so well. It also calls male expendability by that name. No inferences or synthesis on our part is needed. It's got a publisher people have heard of. I think putting it in the fore makes this article much stronger and much less likely to be deleted.

Unlike other sources, this one specifically states that yes it is talking about human populations and not making assumptions about "most vertebrates."

Unlike other sources, it's not paywalled, availble with full text, and completely searchable via the CTRL-F function. Readers skeptical of other sources can get a good look at this one with no weeks-long wait at the library. This article has been subject to so much questioning that it absolutely needs at least one source that's just there for people to see.

It does not support the biological claims made in the overview section, at least not directly, so it doesn't belong there. We could quibble about this one, I guess. In short, the authors describe the male expendability model but they don't say that they think it or the biological ideas underlying it are correct. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:40, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Agency, personification, etc.

Allow me to set your minds at ease about such phrases as "male expendability maintains that." It's perfectly normal English to say "this idea/philosophy says" even though of course ideas don't have mouths or lungs.

Here are some on-Wiki examples:

• Consequentialism, first line: "...is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds..."
• Confucianism, next to last paragraph of the lede: "...Confucianism holds one in contempt..."
• Constitutionalism, Core features section, first line: "One of the most salient features of constitutionalism is that it describes and prescribes both the source and the limits of government power..."

And that's just the letter C!

If you would fee more confident with something other than examples, let me know, and I'll see if it's practical for me to find it.

The outcome of the recent RfC was that the biological ideas that male expendability uses as a foundation must be attributed as beliefs and assumptions and not given in Wikipedia's own voice as if they were generally accepted as true. "Male expendability maintains that..." is one way we can do this but who says it's the only one? If you can think of some way to say "Male expendability relies on the idea that men are physically stronger and better at running and throwing than women. That is why it maintains that society is the way it is about men" without saying "men are physically stronger and better at running and throwing than women" in Wikipedia's voice, go on and give it a go.

The issue is that the article isn't saying "Men in the Olympics are stronger and faster than women in the Olympics." That's provable. We can just look at Olympic records and see that yup, the most highly trained well-fed men tend to better marathon times than the most highly trained well-fed women. But the article is saying "Men as a class are much stronger and faster than women as a class and that has been the case across human cultures, across continents, across thousands of years so much so that it still affects our industrial Western society today," and no one has ever proven that. It's plausible, not verifiable. But I had one grad school professor flat-out scoff at the idea. He said (paraphrased) "When people are stressed and underfed, the difference in strength is negigible. Women worked in mines alongside men. Women defended forts alongside men." More likely, a difference in upper body strength might have made more or less difference in society depending on what was going on. I can't think of even one female English warbow archer, but the medieval Japanese style of archery lent itself very well to women. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:20, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

The RfC did not give you free will to torture the English language and create ridiculous word combinations for this article. It also did not give you the right to cast around for anecdotes to prove some point about men and women. You are fighting against the scholarly texts I cited on the subject of human biology and society. You are appear to be on a mission to change the mainstream viewpoint, to "right great wrongs". Wikipedia is not the place for that. Binksternet (talk) 04:18, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

I speak English and did not find Darkfrog24's edits to be at all torturous, nor did I find them to be at odds with reliable sources. It seems to be rather you, Binksternet, who are on a WP:1AM mission here, and it is beginning to come across as disruptive. Generalrelative (talk) 06:40, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Binksternet, you did indeed cite reliable sources from scholars of good reputation. But when I tracked down and read those sources, I found they didn't say what you claimed they did. The fact that you have cited page numbers when I asked for them and otherwise helped my efforts to see things for myself indicates that this was in good faith.

The net result is that the article now cites what Mukhopadhyay and Higgins did say, which makes it stronger and more likely to survive any other deletion discussion that may occur. All our hard work will stay where it can help Wikipedia's readers. Your and Birdledew's source-hunting has had good results! Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:02, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

@Binksternet: what's it going to take for you to acknowledge the results of the RfC that we not list beliefs/conclusions/assumptions about biology in Wikipedia's voice? This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know what would make you feel reasonably okay even if you don't agree. If something goes wrong later because of it, it will be very very on record as not your fault.

To put my own cards on the table, I'm thinking of an assumption or conclusion as anything not accepted by biologists in general as established fact. "It takes longer for a woman to complete pregnancy than it does for a man to complete the sex act"? Established fact; we could look up any number of sources if we needed to. The "Therefore one man can [no 'hypothetically'] impregnate many women" is a conclusion/assumption, and one I've seen questioned and contradicted in at least one RS. "Many many human cultures have practiced polygyny"? Verifiable fact (okay, technically what counts as "many" is an opinion but you get my drift) (since it's about anthropology, it's cool that the source is written by anthropologists). The implied therefore-human-society-does-this and this-is-because-human-biological-reproduction-is-like-that are conclusions/assumptions.

Not all assumptions/conclusions have RS that say they're questionable or not true, but any statement that does have RS that say it's questionable/not true should be treated like an assumption/conclusion. Sound reasonable to you? Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:08, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't know what makes you think you can re-invent this topic by sitting in front of a computer and pondering about it. You keep clogging up the previously straightforward prose with hypotheticals, to blunt the message. The message is that MRAs whining about male expendability have an uphill battle against longstanding cultural norms and traditions, all of which have a strong foundation in biology and physiology. Everything you are doing here is an attempt to validate the MRA viewpoint by subterfuge aimed at minutiae in the text. Your behavior here is tendentious. Binksternet (talk) 18:16, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

My goal is to limit the text to what 1) matches reliable sources and 2) matches the result of this RfC, which was to limit Wikipedia's voice to facts.

I think the statement "According to [source], men's rights advocates claim that male expendibility is one of the reasons men have an uphill battle against longstanding cultural norms and traditions, all of which have a strong foundation in biology and physiology" would be a great addition to the article, but we would need to find and cite that source, attributing the statement to it.

I believe the truth is that the male expendability argument does not have a strong foundation in biology or physiology. I think the men's rights advocates are wrong. I think the anthropologists are engaging in an interesting thought experiment that might have something to it but I also know anthropologists tend to be cagey about biology because the way their predecessors misused it in an attempt to justify racism. If I had the sourcing for it, I'd create a whole criticism section full of scholars saying why the idea of male expendability is wrong. EDIT: I just had an idea. New section! Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:30, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Hashing out "hypothetical"

It seems Binksternet and I have different ideas about the conclusion of this RfC. Let's hash out our differences one at a time here on the talk page instead of in the article

Let's do this thing one at a time. You made it clear you don't want the word "hypothetically" in "one man could at least hypothetically impregnate many women." Do you have proof or a source to cite saying proving that biologists believe it's not hypothetical? Something more convincing than the sources that question the idea (Testosterone Rex, for one). I guess my problem with leaving the "hypothetical" out is that it leads the reader to think of one man going from woman to woman to woman having 365 kids a year, when examinations of emperors with access to large numbers of wives and other partners show that the numbers are much lower. Is there some other way we could convey this idea that we'd both recognize as appropriate? Let's hash it out here instead of in the article space. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:28, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Genghis Khan is said to have had several hundreds if not several thousand children, unreliable numbers perhaps, but it was found that 16 million men in central Asia are direct male decedents of a single man living around the year 1200. So it is not only in principle. I would suggest something like this: "one man could under beneficial circumstances impregnate many women in a short time." AndersThorseth (talk) 14:28, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

I have seen that specific assertion contradicted in the book Testosterone Rex. In that case, the author was talking about the specific case of a man who had access to a different woman every night for a year. The author cited emperors with access to large harems. But it's been a while since I read it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 11:56, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Synthesis issue

@AndersThorseth: I observe that you did supply a source for the additions you made today. However, I'm concerned that this may have made the synthesis issue in this article worse. I do think the study you posted does show that male nonhuman animals from species with harem social arrangements engage in high-risk behavior, but I'm not sure it isn't WP:OR to place it here. Is there any source from an anthropologist or biologist saying "and that's part of male expendability"? Otherwise, we're the ones drawing that conclusion ourselves. My feelings on the content supported by the 2014 study showing that more human women than human men have reproduced are similar but less pronounced. I'd like to see a source saying "And we the experts conclude that this concerns male expendability." It would make an excellent addition to Polygyny, though. EDIT: And I've added it over there. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:47, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

I'd like it if you took a look at the RfC we had a few weeks ago. The community's opinion can change, even when issues are only slightly different, but that's what it was at the time. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:49, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

AndersThorseth's contributions have inspired me. How do we all feel about going through this article and removing any content not supported by a source that mentions/describes the term "male expendability," no matter how long it's been in here? Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:48, 4 March 2023 (UTC) EDIT: So that meant removing the entire livestock/animal husbandry section. How are we feeling about this? Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:58, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: I have to say I find the approach of the RfC and to some degree the whole article a bit baffling. For me this article is about "a special interpretation of a set of biological, and societal facts" the facts are generally completely indisputable while the interpretation is the one that could be questioned. The claim of male expendability for me is this: "due to the high redundancy of the male biology and the low redundancy of female biology, society sets the value of male lives lower than female lives". This would imply three implications that need to be shown: 1) Males are often redundant in biology, 2) society places less value on males and 3) that the first two are connected.

It’s completely fine for me to put into question (attribute to authors, require sourcing etc.) the interpretation i.e. the hypothesis that there is a general causal connection. But facts that go into the interpretation are not subject to be called "assumptions" or "beliefs", calling facts "beliefs" is not acceptable on wikipedia. This would only be consistent with some extremist social constructivist views that have their own very prominent set of problems, and they certainly have no place here.

The article has to deal with the three implications. This to me says that examples of male (biological and societal) redundancy are permissible, without the value statement attached. And also examples of society devaluing male life is permissible without stating the causal relationship.

For the livestock example e.g. chick-culling it is quite different - all three elements are completely lined up. A large number of male chicks are born every year, due to their biology, they are deemed “surplus” and killed. Three elements: Redundancy, low valuation and direct causation. [[9]], saying this is not an example of male expendability because nobody used that exact word is a misunderstanding of what wikipedia is.

In the literature maybe other words than expendable are used like “surplus, redundancy, extra, superfluous, excess etc.” it does not change the meaning of the mindset/theoretical underpinning behind. AndersThorseth (talk) 14:09, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm calling them beliefs and not facts because I'm not convinced that they're true. Sometimes a person thinks something is a fact, but they're wrong, and we need a way to talk about that. But even more often than people being flat-out wrong, things are often more complicated than the believer thinks they are. I read Testosterone Rex and it debunked some of the ideas that were in this article when I first found it. For example, emperors with access to large harems did tend to have more children than men with one wife, but usually only a few more. This is because reproductive biology is more complicated than just male access to females.

Take your chick culling example. They're not deemed surplus solely because of their biology. They're deemed surplus because they do not have sufficient monetary value. If young male chicken came back into fashion as a delicacy, the financial value of male chicks would rise and farmers would cease to think of them as surplus. It's more complicated. There's another factor, economics, that enters into the mix. Frankly, I think whichever Wikipedian put chick culling into this article just saw the Smithsonian source and thought "This reminds me of that male expendability thing."

The concept of male expendability seems to be, at its core, "because nature works this way, society works that way." Animal husbandry isn't nature. It's a human-created system. We could argue that nothing in animal husbandry has anything to do with male expendability as it's understood in this article.

But it doesn't really matter whether you think chick culling is male expendability or of I think it isn't. If we can find an published anthropologist saying "chick culling is an example of male expendability," then it belongs in the article, and if we can't, then it doesn't.

To put all my cards on the table, I'm skeptical of male expendability as a concept. The closest way to put it is that I think it's notable but I don't think it's true. However, that just means that all of us working together as believers and skeptics will produce an article that is impeccably sourced and very unlikely to be deleted. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:11, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

This would imply three implications that need to be shown .... In the literature maybe other words than expendable are used like “surplus, redundancy, extra, superfluous, excess etc.” it does not change the meaning of the mindset/theoretical underpinning behind.

I wanted to highlight these two sentences, because to me they suggest a potential conflict with WP:OR, a core Wikipedia policy. Determining that two terms have the same "theoretical underpinning" is original research: we need WP:RS (preferably secondary or tertiary sources) that make that argument affirmatively. For this reason, I support User:Darkfrog24's proposal to remove sections based solely on sources that don't discuss male expendability. Suriname0 (talk) 23:56, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

So this would be along the lines of "Source A says outright that male expendability created chivalry" and "Source B says outright that the Birkenhead drill came from chivalry," but we ourselves do not get to add A and B together to say "the Birkenhead drill came from male expendability." We need a Source C that says so outright. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:31, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't agree that it is a contentious issue whether or not there are several other words with the same or very similar meaning as "expendable". This is why disambiguation(s) are used quite often on wikipedia. AndersThorseth (talk) 12:59, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: I have to say I don't understand your position. Do you contest the fact that the only strictly necessary male part of a 9 month pregnancy is a five minute intercourse? Do you contest the fact that childbirth mortality for much of human history has been about 1%. So a woman takes the work and the risk of a pregnancy. Do you content the fact that Djengis Khan is estimated to have had around a thousand children and is now the direct forefather of 16 million men scattered all over central Asia. That is not complicated, to me those are verifiable facts. Can you specify what you think is complicated?

You can of cause point to other facts that are equally as valid, but with opposite implication, like the inability of society to tackle domestic violence, the cross-cultural prevalence of marriage, like the slowness in the development of healthcare for women, the Indian dowery systems etc. These are facts that point in another direction contradicting a special male expendability.

The complication is whether or not a set of facts can be used to deduce that males in general are considered expendable due to sexual dimorphism and societal prejudice. I can fully understand that you are skeptical of the inference from biology to society, I have no problem with that. But I do find it hard to accept that pointing to the fact that a word (expendable) has synonyms [[10]] should be considered original research. Anthropologist don't work with chick-culling, agricultural scientists do and they may call the same phenomenon something else. But again I would like to work with you to improve the article. AndersThorseth (talk) 11:02, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Here's the part of my position that matters for this article: We the Wikipedians should not draw conclusions. We should cite professional published sources that draw those conclusions.

Now I'll get into more detail. Human reproduction has been a politicized and culturally important issue for as long as there has been human culture. Right now it's the manosphere. In the 1970s it was the emergence of gender studies. Religions and traditions and chastity and all that have been around for thousands of years. It's all behind us like a wave. Every single one of us is swimming through so much bias that we usually don't even see it. It's not that there are no concrete facts. It's that the boundary between "obvious fact" and "oh well I'm sure this next bit must be true too" is very, very hard to see. With thousands of years of culture and tradition and mythmaking surrounding human reproductive biology, we must be more careful than ever to cite sources. Bias may be inescapable, but at least it'll be properly cited bias. That's easier to correct later.

"Anthropologist don't work with chick-culling." Okay, then since male expendability is an anthropological concept, chick culling probably does not have anything to do with male expendability and doesn't belong in the article.

Now let's talk about your facts. "the only strictly necessary male part of a 9 month pregnancy is a five minute intercourse" You forgot that reproduction doesn't end at pregnancy. It ends when the offspring themselves are capable of reproducing. The simplified version of male expendability assumes that the only thing the father contributes is sperm. You know what else fathers contributed for most of human history and prehistory? Food. With two parents gathering food, the fetus was better nourished and the kids grew up stronger, healthier, and prettier. They'd have stronger immune systems, so they'd be less likely to die from sickness or be covered in pock marks if they lived. This made them more likely to survive to adulthood and more marriagable once they reached it. I looked at a bunch of anthropological studies when sourcing this article and anthropologists say that societies are more likely to be matrilineal when it's women who are in charge of all the food-producing resources, so this fatherly influence may vary in magnitude from culture to culture, but "men only need to have sex but women have to be pregnant for nine months" is not the end of the story. It's more complicated. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:12, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Regarding synonyms, I disagree. I think a source that does not say "expendability"/"expendable" is okay only if it describes the concept of male expendability so clearly that any chance that it could have been talking about something else is negligible. Just because "surplus" and "superfluous" can mean the same thing as "expendable" in some contexts doesn't mean they always do.

Remember, this is the social sciences. The social sciences have a HEE-YUGE problem with specialized terminology. Think about what the word "privilege" means in general English. Okay, now think about what it means in the term "white privilege." They're so different that they might as well not be the same word. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:02, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Well only part of the problem is particularly related to social sciences, about half the problem seems to be related to biology, so it is not surprising that different words may be used. To your second point I suspect that the definition and "rationale" in beginning of the article are not actually very covering or indeed correct, so finding sources that cooperate it will be made more difficult. AndersThorseth (talk) 14:32, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree with your sentiment on not drawing conclusions, but I have to say I think you are misunderstanding the concept of male expendability. Its not called "father-expendability" which would be a much more dubious concept as you outline, but to a much higher degree "non-father-expendability", men without families are statically not in a good place and by the looks of it have never been. Yes, a child is more likely to grow to adulthood if protected by a physically strong individual. But being protected by something also means that that something has to step into the danger instead of the child. And if that something is destroyed in the process, is there in general someone to step in instead? Yes it is awfully complicated but it not an augment to not discuss that this could very well be an effect. We need more specialist sources since some of the sources seem to be generalists. This is also why I think the sperm/egg situation is an example of something deeper and not the cause of the effect. So it should be removed from prominence in the article. AndersThorseth (talk) 14:13, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Fighting for Life by Walter Ong

I do not have my hands on a paper copy of Walter Ong's 1981 book Fighting for Life. I used the handy link provided and the included search tool to look for "expend" and "cull." I got no results. Does the term "male expendability" or a description of the concept appear anywhere in this book? If it doesn't, then maybe it's not a good source for this article. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:02, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Archive.org's search function doesn't seem to be working. The book does discuss the concept in the chapter "The expendable sex" (p. 52) and some of the following chapters too. From a quick skim, the closest it comes to verifying the text you removed, though, seems to be this (p. 53, which is also where the cite you removed linked to):

Agonistic behavior can be interspecific (between individuals of different species) or intraspecific (between individuals of the same species). In both cases male and female behavior commonly differ. Among many vertebrate species, the male or males in a close-knit group are typically the most active in warding off predators (Edward O. Wilson, 1975:46, 121-22). They are larger and often equipped with special weapons, such as tusks, and thus more effective. But their strength is a by-product of their uselessness. Evolutionary selection makes it advantageous that males rather than females develop the size, strength, and aggressiveness that successful fighting demands. One reason is that fighters are the individuals most likely to be killed, and a species can more easily survive the loss of males than the loss of females. A colony of one surviving male and twenty females can in most species reproduce itself with a proficiency that cannot be matched by a colony of one surviving female and twenty males. Paradoxically, males, at least in many instances, have become big and strong in —for there are also other evolutionary pressures—so as to serve as the chief extraspecific defense fighters, because for the other individuals and for the species itself they do not count so much as the so-called “weaker” sex does. Even when males are not larger and stronger than females, they are often the ones assigned to lethal risk situations. Male dung beetles of the family Scarabaeidae regularly do the work at the surface of dung piles and outside of their burrows and thus are eaten in fantastic numbers by predators while the females work safely within the burrow under cover (Heinrich and Bartholomew, 1979:148, 151).

And it's talking about animals in general, not exactly human social dynamics. There's more discussion of humans a bit later in the book, which I skimmed over but may still be useful. ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 14:37, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Hm. It's not exactly on target but it's not exactly off target either. I have to think about it, but I think the issue is that he's not talking about humans; he's talking about other animals, and he's not a zoologist, biologist, mammologist or entymologist. On the issue of dung beetles, Walter Ong is an amateur, and he was speaking in the 1970s, so he's missed out on over forty years of development that even a modern amateur might have heard about. Right this minute, I'm leaning toward "do not include" on Walter Ong's take on nonhuman animals. But like you say, he might have something to say about humans later in the book that would be within his area of professional expertise as a cultural historian. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:43, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Now if Heinrich and Bartholomew say "and that's male expendability" in their 1979 study of dung beetles, then we might be talking. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:46, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

The chapter heading "The Expendable Sex" followed by text about male expendability is exactly on target. When he's not citing his own direct research, the author is relaying to the reader his assessment of the literature on the topic. There's no reason to remove it. Binksternet (talk) 16:03, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

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.

Can you quote the part of the source that verifies this? ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 17:28, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

@Binksternet: We need to do two things 1) Resolve whether it is okay to cite Walter Ong for a source even when he's talking about things in which he is not an expert, like biology. This applies to what Ong said about non-human animals. I'm going with no on that one. This would be a suitable topic for the Reliable Sources Noticeboard.

2) Determine what Walter Ong did say that is within his area of expertise as a cultural historian and religious scholar. This applies to what he said about humans. We shouldn't take it to a noticebaord until after we know what Ong said.

3) Then we can address question like whether Ong's book is too old or if it's contradicted by newer sources. There has been a lot of research into gender studies since 1981.

This article is on a controversial subject and has already been up for deletion once. We should source it with even greater care than we would a regular article. Seeing all the great sources that @Birdledew: found really changed my thinking on why this topic is notable. We should protect everyone's hard work. Can you come to the rescue with specific page numbers again, Bink? Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:16, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Our job is to summarize the literature. Ong is part of the literature, which is why he is represented in the article. Feel free to cite contradictory theses as you find them. Binksternet (talk) 21:19, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

But where does he actually verify that claim? The passage I quoted is largely talking about nonhumans and says nothing about social expectations or jobs. ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 21:24, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Ong actually might not be part of "the literature." When scientists say "the literature," they mean "the formal studies in this specific field." Ong isn't a biologist, so he might be part of the literature per human cultural history but not per dung beetles, praying mantises, or non-human mammals. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:40, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

"The literature" in Wikipedia terms is the mass of published works available to both lay persons and experts. When he published text under the heading "The Expendable Sex", Ong became part of the literature. Binksternet (talk) 22:05, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

@Maddy from Celeste, Binksternet, and AndersThorseth: We're now live at WP:RSN [11] Hop over and weigh in, all! Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:28, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Birkenhead drill

The Bailey source covers the history of the Birkenhead drill well, but it does not mention male expendability. The Delap source is paywalled. The abstract doesn't mention male expendability, but the body might. Does anyone here have access, through a university or library account, perhaps? Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:23, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Delap doesn't contain the word "expendability", and it also doesn't use the term "Birkenhead Drill", though it does extensively refer to the Birkenhead wreck as a central example of "women and children first", and chivalry. I think "drill" should be removed, with a slight copyedit to instead refer to the "the 1852 Birkenhead wreck"; and Baumeister 2010 (already cited!) should be used here to contextualise and show the connection to male expendability, since he makes that link explicit. DFlhb (talk) 10:04, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't object to "Birkenhead drill" even if one of the sources calls it something else. But what does Baumeister say about it? And if Delap doesn't mention male expendability, then we shouldn't use it here. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:15, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Questionable use of the GQ article as source

@Timothytyy: The sentence: "Manosphere critics of feminism have argued that poor and working class men "are cannon fodder abroad and..." is a mischaracterization of the content of the source. The quote is clearly written in the voice of the author and should be attributed to him and not to anyone else. Note that the author a few sentences later twists and (still in the narrator voice) turns these very arguments around and against the people he is portraying, so please reconsider you reversal of my edit. But as the whole GQ article looks more like hit piece than any kind of journalism it is not clear that it should be as source in the theory section at all. AndersThorseth (talk) 14:15, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

@AndersThorseth Ok but do you notice what you were typing? Can you explain "I an article on the"? I notice your English grammar is very good, so how can I believe your edit was constructive? Timothytyy (talk) 14:39, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Well thanks, no I did not notice the typo, sorry about that. AndersThorseth (talk) 15:05, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

While we're on this subject, the author is wrong about something. Women do want to work as garbage collectors because those jobs are well compensated and have pensions. The albeit fictional Parks and Recreation did a whole episode about it. Women generally seek dangerous and dirty jobs more than people think they do, usually because those jobs involve good pay. Women fought against hiring discrimination in coal mining. There are woman depiuties and prison guards ands sandhogs. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:10, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

You are of cause right that some women seek dangerous and physically demanding jobs, it is just not very many. So death and injury from working is still mostly men. Statistically he is not wrong - on-site builders in the UK is 99% male[[12]]. I don't know what people think that number would be but I actually thought it would be lower, do you have any data on peoples expectations of gender diversity versus actual diversity? AndersThorseth (talk) 09:27, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Some of that is going to be women either pushed out of or quietly excluded from the industry. I typed "women in coal mining" into Google and found these in two seconds: [13] [14] Women seek these jobs for their good pay. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:36, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes some people will try to pressure women to not work dangerous jobs - There are people who think that men should do dangerous jobs. Its almost like they think that the burden of possible death and injury is something men should bear. If only we had a word for that kind of thinking and behavior... AndersThorseth (talk) 20:35, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

@AndersThorseth @Darkfrog24 Please stop your discussion. This is an article's talk page, not a conflict-solving place. Timothytyy (talk) 00:10, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I agree, mostly. As I see it there is both a discussion on what this article is actually about and what constitute knowledge in a much wider sense, the latter not being appropriate for this talk page. But I will redraw for now as I saw very little progress in the discussion. AndersThorseth (talk) 09:27, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

@AndersThorseth So what is the original meaning of the sentence (if it is a typo)? Timothytyy (talk) 01:58, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

It was supposed to be "In an article ..." AndersThorseth (talk) 09:04, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Understood, thanks for explaining! Timothytyy (talk) 10:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Suggestion for a new into

Due to the problem of finding sources for a(n apparently) contentious subject with a vague definition here is a suggestion for more precise definition and to my mind better definition. I realize it is more academic in the wording, but I believe it encapsulates the subject much better:

Male expendability, male disposability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis is the hypothesis that due to the contingent aspects of the male role in reproduction, then consequently male lives are generally of less concern to a population than female lives. The hypothesis considers the disproportionate amount of effort and participation required by each of the sexes for procreation to be the basis of a system of values, whereby females generally are to be protected by the group and males are often left to fend for themselves or sacrificed for the good of the over all population. In humans, this would mean...

What do you guys think about it? AndersThorseth (talk) 14:47, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

I think the one we have now is better. 1) Remember, Wikipedia is for general audiences. It's not much good if the reader has to look up a bunch of five-dollar words when regular price will do. 2) It sounds like this definition is coming from you, not from a professionally published source, and that would make it WP:OR, even if we later learn that you are 100% right.

What we actually need is something like an undergraduate sociology or anthropology textbook that has a definition of this concept in it.

Cards on the table: I don't think we should phrase the intro in such a way that implies that male expendability is true. It should be reasonably clear that while this is something that a few legitimate scholars do believe in, it's not necessarily the way the world really works. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:27, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

I have to say I don't see how what we have now is better. Using "cheap" words for something complicated is not generally a good idea, 1) what policy of wikipedia says that all articles should be for a "general audience"? - there are plenty of highly specialized subjects that are absolutely not for the general audience. Most math articles for instance are close to unreadable without a BSc in math or equivalent, the same goes for most of the articles on the grievance studies which are typically riddled with jargon and confused "reasoning". 2) Yes, I wrote that to encapsulate a subject that is difficult. You keep bringing up WP:OR as if there are not plenty of scholarly articles sourced already. Introductions to articles are not in general sourced - they are there to lay out the subject and summarize the article, not copy-paste some university text book.

Its not our job to find out if I am "100% right" (later), but to lay out a subject and what various people are saying on that subject.

You keep bringing up that you don't think this hypothesis is true - like it matters what you think about that...? The hypothesis has been brought forward multiple times by multiple authors in multiple fields (Apparently also in an offhand way indicating that this is basic understanding of how nature works). The hypothesis exists and whether or not it is true is another question entirely, we can put some evidence from both sides i have no problem with that. If you want to criticize the hypothesis I suggest you add some sources to a new criticism section - that would be interesting to see. AndersThorseth (talk) 22:54, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Darkfrog24, you need to recuse yourself from this topic. You have been fighting it from Day 1, the reason for which is suddenly clear. Plenty of other writers, and humanity in general, disagree with you. How about Ernestine Friedl? Are you saying that Wikipedia readers should not be reading her assessment, and instead be reading yours? That's rich. Binksternet (talk) 04:26, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24:, I agree with AndersThorseth and Binksternet here.

1. Wikipedia is not for "general" audiences; that's Simple Wikipedia. We don't try to simplify "complicated" topics; they have to be written with all of their complexities. Especially, we don't need a source for the article lead so long as it accurately summarizes the body of the article. Nor do we need a source for BLUESKY facts.

2. If you are letting your beliefs interfere with your editing, you need to recuse yourself from editing the article. Your beliefs regarding male expendability are irrelevant. There are already enough reliable sources that establish the existence of "male expendability", and yes, that includes Farrell. Any reliable sources that disagree with the theory have to be summarized in a Criticism section.

Ciridae (talk) 05:14, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I do wish we had a criticism section.

Let me be clearer. My belief that male expendability probably isn't true isn't interfering with the editing. It's inspiring me to, say, actually get Professor Daniels' book out of the library (with a multi-week wait), and then actually read it and check it against the text attributed to it, and otherwise make sure the sources say what they say and are linked together properly. Darkfrog24 (talk) 11:40, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I found a source. It looks like notes from a university lecture. They look like they're meant to go with a spoken lecture. They contain a summary of male expendability under the name "expendability theory" and many of the other subjects we cover in this article: [15] I don't know if we can use this in the article, but it could be good for our own references and perspective. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:46, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I checked the Ember source and it also gives a reasonable definition of male expendability that we could use for inspiration.

Society’s population is limited by the number of reproductive-aged women, not the number of reproductively-aged men. This is because women usually have only one child at a time, but men can impregnate more than one woman. Indeed, most societies in the ethnographic record allow or prefer polygyny as a form of marriage. Therefore, if there are dangerous activities to be undertaken, “expendability” theory suggests it is more adaptive for men, rather than women, to perform them.

I'm not loving bits of this, but "more than one" is suitably restrained language. It doesn't imply 365 a year. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:23, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

1947 source

Here is an older source discussing the expendable male, the text viewable in Google search snippets:

• 1947 – Man, Weather, Sun by William Ferdinand Petersen. From page 200: "From the point of view of organic survival , the mechanism is logical because the male is the energy expender, designed to alter the unfavorable situation by fighting and by working; the male is the expendable organism and we must have more at perilous times." From page 373, talking about sex ratio and survival of the societal group. "In unfavorable situations we produce more males because the male is the energy expender, i.e. the expendable organism that can best alter the unfavorable situation by working or fighting."

An enterprising soul could hunt down a hard copy and obtain a fuller understanding of the author's thesis. Binksternet (talk) 05:53, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

It seems useful - Do you know what kind of book this is? I was not able to discern that from a glance. AndersThorseth (talk) 12:43, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Not sure. The author, an American M.D., wrote a handful of other books about medical issues and weather, 19th century American history with regard to weather, and general medicine topics. Binksternet (talk) 13:20, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Just requested it at my library. Let's see what we can see. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:21, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Suggestion for "in popular culture" section

As we are discussing an idea or hypothesis that could potentially be culturally very pervasive and therefore also turn up in popular culture. Here are some potential topics:

• the TV tropes article on the subject - aptly named "Men Are The Expendable Gender" [16]
• the widely popular movie franchise about a group of men being called "The expendables"
• In Denmark a popular author published a novel called "11%" about a matriarchal society where male babies are culled down to 11% and men are kept in cages for breeding.
• The finding of this gender studies scholar of media violence that males are over-represented and that their abuse is generally faster and less emphasized than that of women [[17]]

AndersThorseth (talk) 08:09, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I saw The Expendables and I don't think has much to do with male expendability theory. But do we have an interview from the writers or directors saying otherwise? The novel sounds okay. Does the text of the novel say anything about male expendability? Have you read this novel? Darkfrog24 (talk) 11:42, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

The premise of the book is that apparently a 11% male population is all that is needed to avoid inbreeding, the rest are redundant. Its feminist dystopian science fiction. I have not read it.

About the film about a bunch of men that has nothing to lose and will not be missed, called the The Expendables, I don't know what to tell you more. Stallone said... "These guys don't fit in this kind of world. They are 'The Expendables.' That's why they're called that." [18](www.nola.com) AndersThorseth (talk) 13:04, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm going to go with no on the movie. The word "expendable" can mean many things in English and "not necessary for the population to restore itself through reproduction" is just one of its meanings. In my experience, this is normal in the social sciences. The "assigned" in "sex assigned at birth" is more specific than the general-English "assigned." Ditto for the "privilege" in "white privilege."

I just read the TV Tropes "Men are the Expendable Gender" page, and I'm on the fence about it. It says that it's about when the plot decides to kill someone and picks a man for no in-universe reason. It would fit better in a pop culture section of the Women-are-wonderful effect. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:14, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm having trouble looking up the 11% novel because the figure 11% appears in so many ways. Do you have the author's name? Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:16, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Its Maren Uthaug, it not translated to english as far as I know, but it might be, some of her other works have been translated i believe. AndersThorseth (talk) 15:40, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

If any Wikieditor has read it in Dutch and they say it's an example of male expendability in fiction, then I'm for it. If there is any English or translated RS about the article that we can cite that says it's an example of male expendability in fiction, then I'm for it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:15, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, if the Wikipedian reads it and finds that it describes male expendability in such detail that any chance that it's not male expendability is negligible, then I'm for it. I'd still prefer an article in which, say, the authors say they got the idea from anthro. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:36, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

If I understand your position correctly here then you think that in order to use a source it should state both that men are expendable and the reason behind explicitly, is that correct? If so I don't agree. The title of the article is Male expendability - that concept should be addressed no matter the reason purported. If the opinion of a persons/source is otherwise notable in general and in particular regarding finding men expendable, then I find it useful for the article. Subconscious motivation which is in play here is a tricky thing to nail down. But it all comes down to if this is an article about a narrow academic subject with no real world consequences or a broad biological and social phenomenon with all sorts of possible ramifications. And there we seem to disagree, quite a bit actually. AndersThorseth (talk) 16:05, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

You do understand my position correctly. This article is about a specific anthropological concept, not about any way in which male people are treated as expendable.

This difference in thinking is a good thing. With your attitude and my attitude together, we will keep each other honest and produce good content that will stand up to even very close scrutiny. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:18, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm not actually sure its a good thing, it seems to me that whatever "common ground" was there is shrinking for each sentences written on this talk page. According to the lead definition that you have just defended - Male expendability is, in short, the phenomenon where society treats men as expendable, full stop. But we should not reflect how noteworthy people and organizations label men expendable. I am sorry that position is pure nonsense to me.

I'm not sure I can, in good conscience, continue to edit this page if this is the policy that will be in place. I am sorry to say that it reminds me of gaslighting i.e. telling someone that what they can read with their own two eyes is not "actually" what is written. I will have to use some time to reconsider my continued editorial work on this article. AndersThorseth (talk) 22:46, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@AndersThorseth: I concur with your position that the concept of male expendability discussed in a reliable source should be addressed no matter the reason purported in said source. Ciridae (talk) 05:17, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

"If the opinion of a persons/source is otherwise notable in general and in particular regarding finding men expendable, then I find it useful for the article." Jumping in again to say that this sounds like WP:OR or WP:SYNTH. In other articles, particularly articles about concepts, cultural references need to be very explicitly connected, e.g. a review/criticism of the work making the link explicitly. (You may also find the essay WP:POPCULTURE useful: "The source(s) cited should not only establish the verifiability of the pop culture reference, but also its significance.") Suriname0 (talk) 21:30, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

AndersThorseth's position does not advocate for OR or SYNTH; that would be a stretch. If a reliable source says male expendability exists but gives a different cause for it than others, then a summary of that source should be included. As far as pop culture references are concerned, I'm good with a critical review of the pop culture work that also references male expendability. Ciridae (talk) 05:14, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Short description

Another user recently added "short description: Hypothesis in anthropology" to one of the sister articles. I realized that with all the improvements we've made to this article over the past few months, the current version and its sources support "male expendability is a hypothesis in anthropology" far more strongly than "Societal biases which make violence against males acceptable." In fact, the article in its current form doesn't talk about violence against men the way that term is generally understood. The old one did because it mentioned the targeting of boys in genocides, but we removed that text. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:22, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Organization

I think we've solved many of the sourcing and bias problems in this article over the past few months, but the organization could be neater. The "overview" and "theory and concept" sections seem pretty arbitrary to me. I plan on experimenting in the next few days. Any ideas? Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Maybe we could change "theory and concept" to "history," showing when men's rights advocates began using this idea. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:19, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Delap source

I found a place to download the study on the Birkenhead Drill in full text. It's on Researchgate. So far, the word "expendability" does not appear in it, but I'll read the rest to see if male expendability is described using other terms. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:51, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm partway into it, and the author's main thesis seems to be that "women and children" first was never common in practice and, in reality, it was more about race and social class than about women in general. It gives an example of a crew that abandons a whole ship full of Indian pilgrims, other crews that evacuate the "ladies" but not the "women," meaning non-upperclass women. I'll keep going. Maybe Delap quotes someone who talks about male expendability. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:06, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, this thing is mentioning class and social heirarchy and "women as hysterics," "the single or 'surplus' woman," vs married women wanting to stay in danger with their husbands... I'm on page 18 of 32 and there has been zero discussion of human biology or reproduction.

Okay, page 20 quotes people in 1912 criticizing feminism... I don't think a Daily Mail editor from more than a hundred years ago is a good source for "and this is how people act now," especially when the source he's quoted in contradicts him, but this is where this source comes closest to mentioning male expendbility.

Page 22, feminists of 1912 writing that women should go first [out of dangerous situations and in politics] because of their role as mothers. However, they are not saying to let women live because then they can then replenish the population by reproducing but rather to let women live because motherhood gives them a "different value system" that helps them make important decisions for society. In the American suffrage movement, one of the talking points, since discredited, was that if women were allowed to vote, there would be no more wars because mothers would never want their sons killed. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:38, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Page 27, role of professionalism... Stewardesses in 1909 insisting on staying on board sinking ships because they considered themselves crew and not passengers.

Page 32, done. Zero mention of reproduction or human biology. This is a solid source but it does not support the specific information for which it is cited. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:44, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Manosphere sources

Per this exchange, I think the manosphere souces, such as Farrell, are reliable for what the people in the manosphere believe but not for facts to be given in Wikipedia's voice. We discussed this in an RPG a while back, but that was specifically about biological concepts, not about less concrete ideas. Thoughts? Or do any of the anthropology sources say "well being and health"? I'm reading the "Myth of Male Power" interview source, and Farrel doesn't strike me as generally reliable. He takes the legend of the Spartan agogae at face value. He offers scenarios with no proof. He says polygyny exists "so that a woman will not be stuck with a poor man," and this is not how the anthropologists describe it. He thinks nurses have "desirable hours." He says that the most dangerous jobs tend to be male dominated while making no mention of women working to break into those jobs. I think that if any idea or phrase is mentioned only in Farrell, we should list it as his opinion and not state it in Wikipedia's voice. We currently do this in the Overview section. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I disagree. Don't club reliable academic sources like Farrell under a single umbrella and then try to discredit them. Farrell has degrees in social and political sciences and long work experience in the field. He is reliable, even if people don't like what he says. Ciridae (talk) 04:55, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Well, that's generally the standard we should use for concepts that are primarily or only discussed by a small number of scholars. Generally safer to attribute. And in this context, where the concepts are politically fraught, attribution makes even more sense. Suriname0 (talk) 13:04, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps the best thing to do would be to mention Farrell's credentials and reputation, "[Credentialed] social scientist and men's rights movement founder Warren Farrel says 'Society does XYZ to women and men...'" Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:54, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, it would be best to add that he's a political and social scientist. But he's not a founder of the men's rights movement, not even close. He's a prominent advocate currently, it is true, and other so-called "sources" may have even called him a founder, but the "movement", diffuse as it is, is quite older than that. Ernest Belfort Bax may be more of a 'founder' given that his books regarding men's rights were published in 1896-1913.

And I see no problem in attributing Farrell and using his voice instead of Wikipedia's voice. I believe those who care about 'male expendability' will find the former more impactful than the latter. Ciridae (talk) 02:31, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Right now, I think calling him a "men's right's activist" or "men's rights writer" would get the idea across. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:37, 4 June 2023 (UTC)