Letters to the Editor

• Reply to Jifry

  [Read the article: Where there are no good men left]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I don't know much about the dating pools in San Francisco and Manhattan, since I don't live there. However, from what I know about what life is like in those cities from people I do know who live there, I would guess that yes, overall life is much better for women in those cities than in, say, rural areas or small towns where there's much less sexual imbalance.

  Life as a woman is not all about getting a man. Getting a man is *nice*, if you're heterosexual, but it's not as important as respect, financial security, the ability to live your life the way you choose, and the freedom to make choices in general. Given the choice between getting a man you didn't choose, and choosing a man you don't get, I think the first may be more reproductively viable but the second is vastly more likely to allow you to be happy and healthy. And from my personal experience of life in large liberal cities that aren't SF or NY, I would guess that overall, the quality of life for women in such cities is fairly high, although they may be unhappy with their love lives.

  I'd also like to address the issue of men being inherently violent raised by a different poster. As nearly as I can tell, this is not necessarily true. All or almost all historical societies have *required* men to be violent because other neighboring societies are full of violent men; a society of non-violent men could only survive if totally isolated from other societies. In fact I believe there have been some... on islands. I believe that giving women reproductive control and sexual freedom, and having either equal numbers of women and men or slightly more women, increases the value of *male* life, and makes men therefore less willing to freely sacrifice themselves in war or risk their lives in committing violence. If all of one's neighbors are either structured similarly, thus being full of men who aren't particularly eager to go to war, or technologically so much more inferior to you that they can't realistically hope to conquer you, a society can afford to have most of its men be non-violent. And in fact we seem to see that societies with strong social welfare programs, high degrees of sexual equality, relatively few taboos on female sexuality (in comparison to history), and easy access to reproductive controls for women do seem to become much more reluctant to make war. Even our country, which has been backsliding badly in all of these areas, is less willing to suffer the deaths of our young men than we were in Vietnam, when the sexual revolution was brand new and the majority of voting adults didn't have it as a formative experience.

  The solution is not to live without men. Think about murdering your baby boys in order to preserve such a lifestyle, or never having children at all. *Most* women are not pleased by either idea. We have no means of selectively conceiving a gender, so the only way to control for gender in a society that reproduces at all is to have second-trimester abortions after you've already invested three months of morning sickness in the pregnancy (you can't tell the gender until about 20 weeks), sex-based infanticide, or sex-based exiling of teens or adults. The only way to get a stable society going that encourages the majority of men to be non-violent is to be highly technologically advanced and allow women free sexual choice, including freedom to choose who with, when and *if* they reproduce. Helps to be surrounded by friendly societies that have the same configuration, too.

  Permalink Wednesday, February 22, 2006 04:04 PM