Pregnancy Envy

Move over, herr doctor

Women’s scripts are handed to us by biology, if we’re speaking in broad strokes. Our lives are defined - via choice, chance, often both - by either conforming to or diverging from the essentially single path nature offers us.

There hasn’t been much reason to incentivize women to follow this path because biology has done it for us (in some cases making it near impossible to avoid) for most of human history.

Men, by contrast, start with few scripts that can compete with pregnancy. Pregnancy is pro social. It is critical for a continuing society, which is why there’s so much dreaming of exowombs long before we have the skills to recreate the complex machine that is the adult female body. Speaking of adult female bodies, there’s another thing: there are men who get pregnant, but no one without a womb gets pregnant, and the people who own and operate wombs are overwhelmingly female. As with many things that are overwhelmingly done by only one group, pregnancy is near synonymous with the group who does the most of it: women. I would argue that it’s one of the most socially female-coded things available to the human body.

What do men have that even comes close? They have violence, but it’s considerably less dependent on direct use of primary sex characteristics than pregnancy (and thus is done by a lot more women than pregnancy is done by men). Violence, for that matter, is not pro-social, certainly not in the relatively uncomplicated way that “creating more children” is.

Violence is a tool of destruction, not creation. We have need for wrecking balls, but no one can function with a bunch of eager demolitionists running aimlessly through the streets, begging to be allowed to tear buildings down to fulfill their teleological purpose.

The purpose of a gender is what it does, after all.

So to build on a previous post where I suggested that gender roles were always much more for men than women: gender roles exist to create pregnancy analogs for men. They exist to offer men male-only scripts for creative rather than solely destructive contributions to society.

Furthermore, they have vastly better incentives than pregnancy does. Male bodies do not poke and prod at men to be pro-social cogs in their society to the degree that many women experience baby fever, so society built them vast, enticing carrots to fill the gap.

The probability of being a successful male contributor to a society is a topic of serious debate, but the size of the rewards for being an exceptional male contributor is no where in question. Be an exceptional man and you may command countries, or at least a reasonable country’s GDP. Be an exceptional man and have your pick of women, or creative/legal/religious impunity to act as if you do. Perhaps best of all, be an exceptional man and have no one deny that you are truly exceptional.

Status, then, is the currency of the male realm.

Men are required to have it. To the extent that women are also required to have status, their version has different headwaters, all trickling from outward appearance; nearly every other source is close to irrelevant.

Femininity is low status on several axes: it’s associated with lower competence - physical and intellectual to some degree, with serving other people: mothers (as indicated by this piece, the eclipsing, ur-female archetype, the one that rules the others), in service professions, in relationships. Status means being good at things such that you are offered service and deferred to as an authority and manager; feminine archetypes are if anything the opposite of both.

Perhaps for this reason, men respond very well to women playing low status in the improv sense. Men most often like women who treat them like the more important party in the dynamic: deference, asking questions, and doing things for them. Women are so used to this pattern that they will play this role even when they dislike the man on the other end of it. If the only way conversation on a date is going to proceed is if you ask a man questions about whatever seems to interest or animate him enough to fill the time, you’re more likely to put on your best Barbra Walters impression than you are to suffer through the consequences of sitting in silence or ending the date early.

Another second order effect of male need for pregnancy analogs, I would argue, is that male insecurity around status produces a lot of socially undesirable behaviors. From the relatively innocuous (embarrassing themselves by wanting to impress others from a place of low competence) to the societally dangerous (wanting to tear down the social fabric when they feel it did not deliver them adequate opportunities to earn status), men respond very negatively to women seeking the rewards of incentives built to coax men into being productive scientists rather than warlords.

Anecdotally, men seem poorly behaved, resentful, and impudent when forced to contend with women who enter their domain. Some men will deny that any women can truly compete with them, but for most men (intellectually anyway) that’s more of an egoic balm than the reality. Men who fall short of the exceptional tails - the places where they are more likely to outcompete most women - seem more likely to give up than men competing with other men.

A depressing thesis: the more opportunities we provide for feminine competence, growth (and with them, female status in classically masculine frameworks), the more men we produce who are resentful and/or give up.

This doesn’t mean it’s deterministically zero sum, either, in my opinion - there are plausibly ways to set up society to cushion the experience for men; we’ve just. Not really had to do that before so we’re low on starting ideas. But it’s nowhere close to impossible.

But the reason for it, to my mind, is clear: if male roles are not as clearly man-coded as pregnancy is woman-coded, men begin to question whether there’s much of a point for them to pursue them at all.

What’s curious, by the way, is that I’ve never in my life heard a man talk like this, I’m just about positive the average man isn’t looking at pregnancy and thinking “what I need is that, but For Men.” They act, though, as if that’s exactly what’s going on.