This began as a response to u/Stahlboden in the parent sub:

One shouldn't do the good out of intention of receiving reward, but one also doesn't have obligation to be good if all they get for their goodness is scorn, exploitation and the last place at the finish line.

I have modified my response slightly to make it a stand-alone post here and added a few additional thoughts.


In economic terms there's an old bit of wisdom that says, "You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax." (That's why the people who pull the cart tend to vote for conservatives and the people who ride in the cart tend to vote for liberals.) The principle has general applicability as well, and might be stated as, "You get more of what you reward and less of what you punish."

Leaving aside questions of morality and religion for now, and acknowledging that the vast majority of the effort that "pulls the cart" is done by men, and acknowledging that the main incentive for men to expend all that effort is closely tied to improving their chances of reproductive success, it makes sense to examine what's being rewarded and what's being punished, and by whom. In a stable society the reward for women is the efforts of men (because men are human doings). Women get to live in a safe, comfortable society that protects their interests and ensures their welfare. The reward for men is the women themselves (because women are human beings), and the more successful a man is the greater his reproductive success, with the measure of that success being the number of women he gets, the youth and beauty of those women, and the degree to which he has exclusive sexual access to them.

But that will only remain true as long as the incentives are organized that way. (An even better way is to have men and women pair off exclusively and assortatively, which creates the best possible society for everyone at the cost of sexual variety for women and the most attractive men, but that only works when we include morality and religion in the equation.)

When stripped of sentiment and morality (as we have foolishly chosen to do as a society), and examined purely in economic terms (because after stripping away the moral aspects that's all that's left), it becomes clear that putting young women exclusively in charge of who would father the next generation was a terrible idea. We know that simply by watching them: what gets rewarded? Who gets a bevy of young beauties lining up to hop into his bed... the "gangsta' rapper" or the chemical engineer? The dope slinger or the accountant? We all know the answer. When it comes to winning the prize - sexual access to large numbers of attractive young women - it's not the guys pulling the cart. (Again, it's much better if nobody has sexual access to multiple partners... patriarchal monogamy is by far the best method of maximizing everyone's stake in creating a better society, but that social compact cannot stand in the absence of a common moral code that prohibits a sexual free-for-all.)

So what is our intrepid chemical engineer or accountant to do? If the reward is measured in the number of women he gets, the youth and beauty of those women, and the degree to which he has exclusive sexual access to them, he made a very poor decision by expending all that effort to become a good cart-puller. Number of women? He will be expected to be faithful to one (if that). The youth and beauty of that woman? He gets her only after her youth and beauty have begun to fade in earnest. Exclusive sexual access? He doesn't even get that, because she's already given that away countless times, and we have decreed that even husbands do not have any rights... she may (and almost certainly will) deny him at will, and he will be shamed for even asserting the existence of such a right. (For centuries the idea of fully reciprocal sexual obligations within marriage was known as "conjugal debt" or "marital debt," and was codified in canon law and influenced civil law both in Europe and the New World. That obligation was explicitly rescinded in the 20th Century.)

As I and many others have noted before, feminism has always been about allowing women to tear up their half the social compact while expecting men to hold up their end. The social compact was very efficient at producing cart-pullers (which benefited everybody), but now that feminism has succeeded in changing the incentives, we're seeing a lot more men refusing to put their necks into the yoke in favor of other pursuits. The men who can become Chads and Tyrones are doing so in record numbers, with many of the remainder being content to "ride the cart" themselves. There are still men who, for various reasons, are choosing to become cart-pullers, but each year there are fewer and fewer of them, and as a group they are aging out of their cart-pulling years and are not being replaced at the other end of the pipeline. Much of the movement of the cart even now is just the momentum from an earlier time when the incentives were less skewed.

I like your analogy about the "finish line." There are standard ribbon colors for races: the first place ribbon is blue, the second place ribbon is red, etc. If ten guys run a race, each one will get a ribbon, but we don't consider the guy who finished in tenth place as being "the tenth guy who won" as he receives his gray tenth place ribbon. We certainly don't consider him to be the guy who really won because his "victory" eclipsed those of the faster runners. Yet our gynocentric society has no problem telling the chemical engineer or the accountant who shuffles down the aisle with a post-wall woman with a couple of brats that he "won in the end."