Male-male competition

“ Competition among males, with selection by 111the female of the superior male, is the process of sexual selection, and works to racial improvement. So far as the human male competes freely with his peers in higher and higher activities, and the female chooses the winner, so far we are directly benefited. But there is a radical distinction between sex-competition and marriage by purchase. In the first the male succeeds by virtue of what he can do ”

“ The foregoing distinction should be clearly held in mind. Legitimate sex-competition brings out all that is best in man. To please her, to win her, he strives to do his best. But the economic dependence of the female upon the male, with its ensuing purchasability, does not so affect a man: it puts upon him the necessity for getting things, not for doing them. ”

“ If males struggle and fight with one another for a mate, the strongest secures her; if the male struggles and fights with the female— (a peculiar and unnatural horror, known only among human beings) he most readily secures the weakest. The one method improves our strength—the other does not.
When women became the property of men; sold and bartered; "given away" by their paternal owner to their marital owner; they lost this prerogative of the female, this primal duty of selection. The males were no longer improved by their natural competition for the female ”

“ First, the duplication of the labor force by that female competition which, beginning its displacements pretty well up in the scale, drives the unlucky male to lower and lower levels, until forced out of the lowest by invasion126 by his own sex from higher ones, he finds no rest for the sole of his foot and takes to the road, an irreclaimable tramp. ”

“ There is the second spur, Combat, the competitive system, which sets one against another, and finds pleasure not in learning, not exercising the mind, but in getting ahead of one's fellows. Under these two wholly masculine influences we have made the educational process a joy to the few who successfully attain, and a weary effort, with failure and contumely attached, to all the others. This may be a good method in sex-competition, but is wholly out of place and mischievous in education. ”

“ It was called the competitive system apparently for no other reason than that there was not a particle of genuine competition in it, nothing but brutal and cowardly slaughter of the unarmed and overmatched by bullies in armor; for, although we have compared the competitive struggle to a foot race, it was no such harmless sport as that, but a struggle to the death for life and liberty, which, mind you, the contestants did not even choose to risk, but were forced to undertake, whatever their chances. ”

“ But there are extremely few, dependent only on mental faculties, in which they have not attained the rank next to the highest. Is not this enough, and much more than enough, to make it a tyranny to them, and a detriment to society, that they should not be allowed to compete with men for the exercise of these functions? Is it not a mere truism to say, that such functions are often filled by men far less fit for them than numbers of women, and who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition? ”

“ This makes masculine stock still higher, and as there are always buyers on a rising market, competition among women—purely unconscious competition—flourishes.
So men hang together, and women don’t. And men are the stronger sex because they are fewer! ”

“ What in the form of principle or theory was propounded as the equality of all has found here in competition its realization and practical carrying out; for égalité is—free competition. All are, before the State,—simple individuals; in society, or in relation to each other,—competitors.
I need be nothing further than a simple individual to be able to compete with all others aside from the prince and his family: a freedom which formerly was made impossible by the fact that only by means of one's corporation, and within it, did one enjoy any freedom of effort. ”

“ We have made mistakes, as old as humanity, about the world, and about women.
First, as to the world:
This we have assumed to be a general battlefield for men to struggle in; a place for free competition; full of innumerable persons whose natural mode of life was to struggle, for existence, with one another.
This is the individualist view, and is distinctly masculine.
Males are essentially individualistic—born to vary and compete; and an exclusively masculine world must be individualistic and competitive. ”

“ One technique that plays a most important part in this general purpose is competition, or the vying among the specialists for the favor of the community. Although the competitors are motivated by self-interest, each one seeking the custom of his fellow men, the effect of the rivalry is to bring an abundance into the market place, to the greater benefit of Society. To win favor for his offerings, as against the offerings of others in the same line, each competitor tries to improve his capacity for production, as to quantity or quality; each seeks to better his competence. ”

“ Our settled conviction that men are people—the people, and that masculine qualities are the main desideratam in life, is what keeps up this false estimate of the value of our present games. Advocates of football, for instance, proudly claim that it fits a man for life. Life—from the wholly male point of view—is a battle, with a prize. To want something beyond measure, and to fight to get—that is the simple proposition. This view of life finds its most naive expression in predatory warfare; and still tends to make predatory warfare of the later and more human processes of industry. ”

“ And our old society cultivated those qualities of unselfishness, and courtesy, and benevolence which you admire, at the sacrifice of the individual. But Western society cultivates the individual by unrestricted competition,—competition in the power of thinking and acting. ”

“ Not only is it impossible for two red-blooded boys to be together for any length of time without engaging in some kind of competition, but usually that competition takes the form of seeing "who is the best man!" ”

“ Then no wiser than those pigs are worldly men who compete, and grudge, and struggle with each other, which shall get most money, most fame, most power over their fellow-men. They will tell you, my child, that that is the true philosophy, and the true wisdom; that competition is the natural law of society, and the source of wealth and prosperity. ”

“ In short, Jonathan, it is no wonder that men sang the praises of competition, that some of the greatest thinkers of the time looked upon competition as something sacred. Even the workers, seeing that they got higher wages when the keen and fierce competition created an excessive demand for labor, joined in the adoration of competition as a principle—but among themselves, in their struggles for better conditions, they avoided competition as much as possible and combined. Their instincts as wage-earners made them keen to see the folly of division and competition among themselves. ”

“ Competition—the way a man threads his way through the men who compete with him—would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of spiritual values—the real monastery of modern life.
All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially, or clap them into jail. ”

“ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in Women and Economics, did this before me,—did it so well that it need never be done again. I merely wish to point out that different habits of action necessarily result, after long centuries, in different habits of thought. Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of material gains, immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strife is not only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visible reward are alone worth coveting. In this commercial age strife means business competition, reward means money. ”

“ HUMANITY AND THE FUTURE. Competition was natural enough at one time, but do you think you are competing today? Many of you think you are competing. Against whom? Against Rockefeller? About as I would if I had a wheelbarrow and competed with the Santa Fe from here to Kansas City. That is about the way you are competing; but your boys will not have even that chance—if capitalism lives that long. ”

“ But people compete with each other and undersell each other, and those who labor are mulcted of their due, and instead of turning to the earth—the inexhaustible mother—and working unitedly for the common weal, they continue that fierce competition and stultify each other's efforts and reduce each other to wretchedness. ”

“ Coöperation and competition at first glance may seem more radically opposed. For while dominance and coöperation both mean union of forces, competition appears to mean antagonism. They stand for combination; it for exclusion of one by another. Yet a deeper look shows that this is not true of competition in what we may call its social, as contrasted with its unsocial, aspect. The best illustration of what I venture to call social competition is sport. Here is rivalry, and here in any given contest one wins, the other loses, or few win and many lose. But the great thing in sport is not to win ”

“ So completely obsessed was he with this American sense of competition that he admitted competition even among mountains, and judged of some hundreds of the towering crests of the earth as he would have judged of six American hotel servants who struggled at the station for his bag. There is a very general idea--how general I cannot imagine-- that competition is productive of or conducive to individuality. The defenders of the extreme forms of competition invariably insist upon this argument, that the struggle develops personality and variety. ”

“ Even those of us who have never known what it was to have a man to lean on, who have had to fight our way through the world as the average male fights his, and (since things are made infinitely easier for him) under disadvantages unknown to the average man—even we find ourselves, unaccountably and at unexpected moments, acting in accordance with the belief in which we were reared, and deferring to the established tradition of inherent masculine superiority; deferring to it after a fashion that, being realized, is amusing to ourselves. ”

“ If dotards will contend with boys in those performances in which boys must always excel them; if they will dress crippled limbs in embroidery, endeavour at gaiety with faultering voices, and darken assemblies of pleasure with the ghastliness of disease, they may well expect those who find their diversions obstructed will hoot them away; and that if they descend to competition with youth, they must bear the insolence of successful rivals. ”

“ The thousands of spinsters of all classes who are now achieving “independence,” both in commerce and industry—not to mention the professions [133] —naturally only increase the acuteness of the economic difficulties which make their self-support a necessity; for, by competing with male labour they only aggravate the severity of the struggle, and increase ever further and further the age at which men can safely undertake matrimony. ”

“ In this way a class of unprincipled climbers has developed itself, which depends in the competition for place and promotion, not on its real ability and true merit, but on social connections and the protection of the powerful, and which thus loses in the matter of character what it wins in the way of success. ”

“ The effect of one individual upon others, then, is not confined to imitation. There is a constant tendency to vary from and to excel the model. My devotion to golf is mainly due to he example of some of my friends. My ambition is to outplay these same friends. Imitation and competition, apparently antagonistic, are in reality the two expressions for our social relationships. We first imitate and then attempt to differentiate ourselves from our companions. ”

“ The man who is constantly competing with men below himself, will be sure eventually to fall to their level; whereas, he who looks upward and determines upon competition with those who are above him, will be very likely to rise to their level. ”

“ Men could well spare the time in the leisurely days of the feudal government when they could live in competence by taking up their hereditary offices, professions, or trades and working in the same grooves as their ancestors had done; but in these days of fierce competition when every man must strike out for himself to earn a living, we have little or no time to go into the intricacies of etiquette. ”

“ In the first place, let us admit that, however dreadful were the incidents of the fight for the means of life called competition, yet, if it were such a school of character and testing process for developing the best types of the race as these objectors claimed, there would be something to have been said in favor of its retention. ”

“ Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. The sexual impulse may drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl. ”

“ Also competition is competition, Aaron, and we ourselves cop out a competitor's trade oncet in a while, too, Aaron, but Greenberg & Sen takes advantage, Aaron. They see that you are fond of that boy Fillup, and certainly it does you credit, because you ain't married and you ain't got no children of your own, Aaron. But it don't do them credit that they work you for business by pretending that they want the boy because he is a smart boy and that they are going to pay him ten dollars a week because he's worth it. ”