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In Is There Anything Good About Men?, Roy Baumeister offers provocative answers to these and many other questions about the current state of manhood in America. Baumeister argues that relations between men and women are now and have always been more cooperative than antagonistic, that men and women are different in basic ways, and that successful cultures capitalize on these differences to outperform rival cultures. Amongst our ancestors---as with many other species--only the alpha males were able to reproduce, leading them to take more risks and to exhibit more aggressive and protective behaviors than women, whose evolutionary strategies required a different set of behaviors. Whereas women favor and excel at one-to-one intimate relationships, men compete with one another and build larger organizations and social networks from which culture grows. But cultures in turn exploit men by insisting that their role is to achieve and produce, to provide for others, and if necessary to sacrifice themselves. Baumeister shows that while men have greatly benefited from the culture they have created, they have also suffered because of it. Men may dominate the upper echelons of business and politics, but far more men than women die in work-related accidents, are incarcerated, or are killed in battle--facts nearly always left out of current gender debates.
Engagingly written, brilliantly argued, and based on evidence from a wide range of disciplines, Is There Anything Good About Men? offers a new and far more balanced view of gender relations.
Roy F Baumeister
Roy F. Baumeister received his PhD in experimental social psychology in 1978 from Princeton. He has had a productive career with over 700 scientific publications, including 43 books. Scientific influence is measured by counting how often a researcher's work is cited in other scientific publications, and by that method, Baumeister is one of the most influential psychologists alive today. A 2022 comparison of 8.5 million scientists in the world, across all fields, ranked him #128, thus in the top 1% of the top 1% of all scientists. His book WILLPOWER: REDISCOVERING THE GREATEST HUMAN STRENGTH, co-authored with science journalist John Tierney, was a New York Times and Amazon bestseller. Much of his career has been spent tackling grand philosophical problems with social science data, such as in his books EVIL: INSIDE HUMAN VIOLENCE AND CRUELTY, MEANINGS OF LIFE, THE CULTURAL ANIMAL and THE SCIENCE OF FREE WILL. Over the years, he has held affiliations with diverse universities and institutes, including several in the U.S. (i.e., Harvard; Stanford; Florida State University; Case Western Reserve University; University of Virginia; University of Texas at Austin; University of California, Berkley; University of California, Santa Barbara) and several in other countries (i.e., University of Queensland, Australia; University of Bamberg, Germany; Jacobs University Bremen, Germany; Max-Planck-Institute, Germany; Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia). In 2023, he received the Distinguished Scientist award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and in 2014, he received the William James Fellow award from the Association for Psychological Science. He now lives in the mountains where he likes to take hikes with his small dog and ski in the winter. He also composes music on the piano.
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