Sexual Freedom and the Male Status Paradox

Should we give job preferences to men?

All around the world, women care a lot more about their partners having money and high status than men do. There are good evolutionary reasons for this. Throughout the history of our species, males have more often had to materially provide for their partners, since women have been preoccupied with pregnancy and child rearing. This evolutionary insight is confirmed by looking at survey data and actual behavior in the real world.

Despite this clear and straightforward fact, I’ve rarely seen anyone make an obvious argument that seems to follow from it: men should get preferences in jobs, and probably other things that involve material status like inheritance.

This is because a dollar is worth a lot more to a man than a woman, in the same way that it matters more to a poor person than a rich person. The latter fact is used to justify economic redistribution, and the logic seems equally sound when comparing the sexes.

When it comes to buying goods in a store, a dollar is equally valuable in the pocket of an individual of either sex. But it does more to contribute to a man’s social position and future prospects of starting a family.

There’s even evidence that couples are least stable when the woman earns more than the man. A Swedish study of lottery winners showed that men who won were more likely to get married and have children, while married women who won got divorced at nearly double the baseline rate. This means that if you are choosing between a male and female employee, giving the man the job is more likely to create a family, while giving the woman the job might destroy one.

Usually, arguments that rely on the idea of job competition rest on economic illiteracy. You should never restrict immigration, free trade, or the deployment of new technologies on the grounds of labor competition, although you may have other reasons for taking these positions. Destroying jobs is how progress happens. Labor competition can drive wages down and even put people out of work in the short run, but there is no other way to improve living standards. We’re all better off when we think about how to make society more productive rather than see jobs as scarce goods that we need to distribute fairly.

But here, there are potentially positive sum outcomes to society giving jobs to males over females. Doing so can lead to more sexual attraction in the world, more coupling, and more families. In theory, it is basically the equivalent of waving a magic wand and making all women more physically attractive to the opposite sex, but doing it for men instead, who are judged less based on looks and more on relative wealth and status.

Here, you might be saying that mate preferences will change to account for new technological developments. That always happens to some extent, but one of the key lessons of evolutionary psychology is that people in modern societies continue to operate using behavioral modules that are no longer adaptive.

For example, men like big breasts. The evolutionary reason for this is that boobs indicate sexual maturity, fertility, and necessary energy reserves. Someone may be tempted to argue that, these days, everyone has sufficient calories and baby formula has already been invented, so men should stop prioritizing breast size. But attraction doesn’t work like that. Even if the object of attraction is no longer as good a signal for reproductive success, women are still rational to get breast implants.

Likewise, female preferences can’t just “get with the times” because we’ve achieved greater sexual equality in the economic realm. Women’s attraction to those with more resources and status than themselves is as hardwired as men’s attraction to breasts. When a male earns more money than a woman and has a more desirable job, she is more likely to want to partner with him. It does little good to tell her “Stop caring so much about money! That’s just caveman values talking. Today, you don’t actually need a man to support you.” We don’t choose what we’re attracted to. Instead of adjusting their desires to take into account modern conditions, a lot of people will simply end up not partnering up.

It seems that a lot of right-wing economic populism, of the type represented by groups like American Compass and politicians like JD Vance, is about trying to create a world where men have higher status than women, with the implicit assumption that this will lead to more family formation. Hence, they prefer an economy that creates more manufacturing jobs, where men tend to have an advantage, over one with more service jobs, where women do relatively better. The problem here is that government central planning is difficult enough to do when you are directly shooting for a particular outcome. Trying to remake the economy as you’re hiding your ultimate motivations from others and not explicitly pursuing your real goal – in this case increasing relative male status – is even less likely to succeed. This is why right-wing economic populism simply makes everyone poorer without doing anything for family formation.

“You won’t believe this. The key to us getting married young and having a lot of kids is…tariffs!”

In his 2022 Senate campaign, Blake Masters would show how based he was by talking about how it should be possible to support a family on a single salary, while usually not specifying which sex would be the one working. This argument made no sense. Objectively, you can definitely live a 1950s lifestyle on one salary today without much problem. But most women are not going to marry you if that’s all you can provide. I’m often extremely hard on right-wing economic populists despite agreeing with some of their social goals because I think that by refusing to be honest about what they want, they talk themselves into dumb economic views and end up building ideological constructions based on their trying to avoid saying what is actually bothering them.

So does this mean that we should just directly advocate for male preferences in hiring, whether through government or the private sector? Well, to start, we can say that women caring more about a partner’s income is another good reason to get rid of affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws meant to help women. I’m of the belief that such programs shouldn’t exist anyway because the market punishes irrational discrimination, and even if it doesn’t, freedom of association matters. If government policies to help women are also bad for family formation because they raise the status of females relative to males, that is just another reason they shouldn’t exist.

At the very least, we can say job preferences in favor of men are much easier to rationally justify than discrimination going in the other direction. Here, we can add that men who face financial difficulties in life are more likely to abuse drugs, suffer depression, and commit suicide, so even if we didn’t care about marriage and babies, there are other reasons to make policy with the idea that jobs matter more to men in mind.

All that said, I don’t think male job preferences can work in terms of helping family formation. There’s a Catch-22 quality to the debate. Men become more attractive if they are higher status than women. But what does it do to a man’s status when he argues for special preferences from society on the grounds that he needs them in order to attract a partner? We can call this the male status paradox. Men need higher status than women to have reproductive success, but a man arguing that case loses status.

Whenever I see men talking about how they need to be protected in the labor market from competition or they want society to do something for them, I am overwhelmed by disgust. I can just imagine how women feel, given that they have been evolutionarily constructed to be repulsed by losers. This is why “men’s rights” has a stench to it and is a lot less politically powerful than feminism.

It also explains why women, particularly those who are successful or highly educated, react so negatively to the traditionalist and populist right. They understand that the ultimate goal of such movements is to reduce their status, as can be seen in the outraged reaction to Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark. Right-wing populists, in addition to taking standard conservative views on social issues, tend to glorify things that men are better at than women, like toughness and physical labor. If a trad movement took power in a Western country with the goal of raising relative male status, the situation would end up like Iran, where you would win over some of the lower classes but get massive resistance among the more educated segments of the public, particularly women. Any gain in increasing mutual attraction by using government to artificially boost male status would probably be more than cancelled out by women resenting the way that they are being treated.

And here is perhaps the genius of religion, and why faith traditions that call for male leadership in public life have proved so adaptive. Religion creates patriarchy without men directly having to argue for it. “Look, honey, I’d love for you to have equal rights and responsibilities, but it’s just not in God’s plan. It’s right there in the Bible. So what are you going to do?” Religions give men higher status, thus making them more attractive partners, without the ick-inducing sight of men saying that they need to keep women down in order to have a chance of finding a mate. This doesn’t require that everyone in a community even believe in God. Rather, it’s enough that people believe that others do, which creates communal norms that everyone feels obliged to follow.

Even without religion, an economy favoring male skills in the labor force gives us the same effect. When hard manual labor is the best way to earn a living for most people – which has been true throughout most of history – men will have a lot more money than women, and we don’t even need evolutionary theory to explain why women will be more inclined to be housewives, since material incentives alone will make such a life more attractive. But the way heterosexual attraction works likely compounds the effect. The problem with the American Compass types is that they have convinced themselves that you can just have government decide to rearrange the economy to engineer higher male status without making everyone much poorer, which would not be sustainable as a policy orientation.

To the extent that we can get rid of female status-enhancing aspects of the economy that make society worse off in the aggregate – like anti-discrimination laws – we should definitely do that. And maybe we should in fact sacrifice some economic growth for more family formation, but we need to be honest about what we’re doing. A movement that emphasizes crank economic ideas as a mask for social goals is going to draw in true believing cranks, and end up pushing for policies that are unlikely to help anyone.

In the last three quarters of a century, we’ve seen four general trends that have reduced male status relative to female status: the decline in religion, the decline in the value of physical labor relative to social skills and intellectual labor, birth control making pregnancy optional, and government programs and initiatives to benefit women. It is thus unsurprising that coupling and birth rates are falling everywhere, with the partial exception of communities that remain strongly centered around a religious tradition, despite living standards improving for nearly everyone.

Maybe the outcome isn’t so bad? Why do we need low status men to form families anyway? There are good reasons to worry about population decline, but if the declines are coming disproportionately among the less productive members of society, one can argue that this is at least a silver lining. And indeed, there’s today a positive relationship between income and fertility among men. Perhaps we should focus on pro-natalism directed at the upper class – where the wealthiest men still outearn practically all women – since the sexes have achieved more relative equality at the left end of the socioeconomic spectrum, meaning that many low status men don’t have much hope of starting families no matter what we do.

Pro-natalism has two components: encouraging coupling, and then the decision to have children. High-status men still get married at relatively high rates, so with them it is mostly a matter of convincing them and their wives that having kids is something worth doing. But there may be hard limits to what society can do for those who are unable to attract a mate in the first place.