The sex ratio is roughly equal in our world, so that's never been why men have been considered expendable (in fact, several cultures have had a cultural preference of male children to female children, which isn't wholly compatible with the idea of men being expendable). Certainly, it can't be the sole reason-- men have less of an intimate investment in the act of procreation, and sperm is reproduced in more abundance than an ovum ready for fertilization. A woman also does the gestation of the child, as well as the initial nursing, and a man doesn't. A man can theoretically impregnate many, many women almost arbitrarily-- and certainly much more so than a woman can get pregnant by many men.
Sure, in a polygamous society there's no real issue. Assuming the men can reproduce with the minimum percentage of the population. However they are somehow monogamous. 1 man is not impregnating multiple women, on average. It's socially unacceptable.
The fact that women would be in more "supply" (never mind that the ratio isn't terribly skewed, according to the synopsis) wouldn't automatically mean that they'd be the ones setting up infrastructure, fighting in war, or maintaining the country-- if men are markedly better at those things, or society trusts them more with those things, or they manage to establish those fields as male-dominated (like how, for example, nursing became female-dominated), then nothing necessarily has to differ.
What are you talking about? When 100% of your society is relying on 20% for survival, you're very much going to dissuade them from anything that can result in large death tolls. Doesn't matter how better they might be, their lives are too important.
So far, there's no indication that men and women are different in this setting beyond the ratio. Regardless of the nature of war in this setting, they very easily could just have wars with less people-- or perhaps they don't bother with prioritizing men for war, anyways. Or perhaps they just have less war. Or perhaps there was more pressure to develop remote warfare. There are several ways this could go.
That's very true, they could, but I'm not counting on the author thinking that deep into it and I'm not throwing him bones for the sake of it. All we see hinted at is a society that is extremely skewed towards having women but is somehow not too different from ours. Maybe the novel goes into it more, but I've seen nothing to indicate that in the manga.
In nomadic societies, the prevailing theory was that men did the hunting and women did the gathering, presumably because men were physically better suited for hunting and women were either more adept at gathering or didn't need the strength of men to perform that task. Also, how would women act as protectors when they're left especially vulnerable during pregnancy and nursing, or when they're markedly weaker than men? How would it necessarily be the case that they act as leaders, if one of-- if not the primary-- underpinning of political power is physical might, which men have markedly more of compared to women? If women needed to be all those things, it's also possible that societies deprioritized reproduction altogether.
This is without considering that we're not merely socially, but have biological and psychological predispositions that interact with our social conditioning and-- at a community level-- interact with the environment and other likewise influenced communities in order to generate community culture.
You're forgetting humans are
evolutionarily sexually dimorphic and not innately. Men are are bigger and stronger because the bigger, stronger men were the ones who were seen as better mates and the ones who survived the longest (assuming no sickness or injury). It's was how we measured status in a hypergamous society. In a similar world but with a higher female skew, women wouldn't value bigger stronger men if it meant they were unable to consistently reproduce. Even if we restrict their deaths from things like living conditions, weather, etc. and just specify it as Combat and Hunting (as I have been), Women would be the ones needing to carry society forward simply from a logistical perspective. But let's throw all of that out for a moment and take a small scenario on how things could very well play out.
Lets say we have a group of 15 people, 3 are male as per the premise of the whole 1:5 thing. Now let's say those three men have now impregnated the 12 women around them (without fighting for breeding rights or injuring each other) and each woman has 1 kid. That means the 3 men have to provide for 24 people by themselves until the next generation is capable of going on hunts and becoming capable hunter gatherers themselves. This is where we hit a wall, a harsh wall. Hunter Gathering society had 100 times higher infant mortality rate than modern day. I remember reading somewhere that this era had like 49% of all children die before age 15. So if we take this number into consideration that's like, what 5-6 people? So half the next generation is already gone, assuming that only 1 of the newborn men died (extremely gracious counting), that's only 1 man left to support 18 people by himself in the next generation.
The 3 men have no other choice but to go at it again and, assuming the women had 1 child each again (and we're going to be even more gracious and say 100% of this generation survived) so there are 12 more children born, another 2 men in that group, and there are now 30 women and children. But now what that means is that it is now 3 men in total for the next generation....and 24 women to feed and take care of.... This concept is just... a landslide of negative population rates. The men would have to breed constantly to ensure there were enough men to teach in the next generation and every time they do, they increase their total load of non-males to take care of both for themselves and the future and if any of the men die, the next generation has an even harder time keeping up with the inflation. That's a massive strain on so few people.
The dominant strategy would likely be that you teach the larger female population how to hunt, fight and gather and use the male population for breeding and agriculture, taking turns on who hunts and protects and who breeds and when. This ensures the population is stable enough to survive and protect itself as time goes on, this would likely also have the side effect of tilting sexual dimorphism towards women since the bigger, stronger women are going to be the survivors while males in general wouldn't need to struggle to as hard. This, again, leads to a female dominated society. Like, I keep looking at this whole 1:5 scenario from a numbers perspective and I just can't see it tilting any other way.
...you'd have to assume that every single person is doing construction for the premise of this math to be relevant. That's not even considering occupational death in other fields, whether this society's managed more efficient and less risky means of construction, whether they just happen to not suffer occupational death as much as in our world, et cetera.
True, very true. In my defense, however, the point I was making was that jobs that have high mortality rates, aren't likely to be assumed by men either because they're disallowed or disuadded from taking them since men are, as this manga put it, rare. The number itself was just some random stat I knew that I could use to make that case.
You're putting a lot of thought into the premise,
I OVER THINK, OK!? DON'T JUDGE ME, MOM! I HAVE FRIENDS TOO!
But in all seriousness, I can't help it. When I see a story with an interesting premise, my mind just wanders about where the author of said story could go. I, often, get disappointed with manga because it's an industry and editors like to play it safe but many times I can still find something to enjoy in it regardless. I find the concept of ratio skewed societies interesting, just absolutely fascinating. Like the things you could do with a society skewed one way or another is boggling, you don't even need to make social commentary on anything. Just the character living that life would be interesting enough to me.
This part of my brain is very unhealthy but is rich in dopamine.
but you're also not accounting for the sheer number of potential factors at play, and you think the base circumstance of the 1:5 male-female ratio could only lead to specific consequences.
Well I'm very much simplifying it for the sake of my brain trying to math things out and trying to keep things brief(-ish). It's why I keep saying "Assuming there's no this or that." I'm aware how external factors can alter the numbers, but I truly believe even if we accounted for external factors then society still wouldn't sit in the favor of men.
I think you're mixing and matching that manga with Virgin Extinction Island (which is not porn--or porn without porn-- and is also really funny and a bit thought-provoking).
I've read it, I bust my gut I won't lie. Though I stopped mid-way through because some other things got in the way. I just never picked it up from there.
That said, the 1:39 manga is aggressive Fanbox bait that serves as the prelude to porn, and I'm willing to reckon that it's only lauded because it is aggressive Fanbox bait that serves as the prelude to porn. Me personally, I think this manga can turn out to be good-- or at least, make me think a little.
I started reading the 1:39 manga but I never really got into it. I thought it was kind of boring. What's keeping this one on my Reading list is the fact that I'm interested in how the author is going to try and portray his harem. I'm pretty sober on the idea that he'll be super accurate or relatively realistic with the concept now, so I'm going to try and enjoy what I can from what little I think the author is using.