There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
LEONARD COHEN1
BUT WHAT IF MEN REALLY ARE PRISONERS OF THEIR BODIES? WE can deplore men’s sexual assaults on women and disparage deadbeat dads; we can threaten, punish, and quarantine men. But can we realistically hope to change the spots on these leopards? Maybe our only choice is to establish better social controls and admit that men cannot ultimately escape their inner sex. Maybe getting tugged back to accepting biological realities is just what we need in this era of gender confusion. Because men’s biology has not changed appreciably in tens of thousands of years, it could seem foolish to look anywhere but to society and culture to address the problems that men cause. But whether biology is part of the problem or not, it certainly looks like it is not part of the solution.
One can decry the fact that with problems as varied as alcoholism, mass murder, and impotence, biology is used as a cudgel and crutch. Yet recent scientific work reveals just how much the biology of bodies and bodily processes is changeable. The discovery that bodies themselves are more malleable than we ever appreciated is bound to have dramatic ramifications in addressing social problems like male violence that were previously thought by so many, scientists included, to be more hardwired to maleness, and therefore less receptive to social influence. Some of the most exciting work in biology today is focused precisely on new understandings of how bodies and behavior interact, how organisms evolve, and how just thinking about masculinity can alter our nervous systems. More fundamentally, vulgar biological explanations for male and female behavior are especially egregious examples of pandering to common stereotypes that would ignore the past several decades of biology: confirmation of the innumerable ways the biochemistry and genotypes of all organisms are influenced by environmental factors. We should be relieved, not frightened, by the understanding that humans can change not only their cultures, but even their biologies, and that maleness is best appreciated as a product not so much of preordained laws of evolution as of very adaptable human interactions.
Accepting biological determinants outside of our control—such as ancestry—can be comforting in times of distress and despair. Men will use ancestry to explain all manner of sins. Here’s a familiar example. In the mid-1990s, I did a stint in alcohol and addiction studies, including fieldwork in a rehabilitation program called the Addictions Counseling Center in East Oakland, California. One evening, as we sat in a circle of ten men, a white man who looked to be in his fifties started us off. “Hello! My name is Jimmy and I am an alcoholic.” Jimmy had moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia in the 1960s and quickly fell into taking all sorts of drugs, from LSD on through cocaine. He confessed that he’d been on an alcohol and street drug bender for more than three decades. “I’m from German stock,” announced Jimmy, “so I love to drink.”2
Dennis was the next man to speak. In his early thirties, he told the group about his own addiction to methamphetamine, the restraining order his mother had placed against him to prevent him from visiting her, and his mixed admiration and jealousy of a brother’s recent graduation from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He began, “Well, I’m part German, too. And the German side of me also likes to drink.” With that, he pointed to the left side of his body. “But, the other side,” he added, pointing to his right side, “is Indian and Filipino and can’t handle it.” You have no doubt heard this kind of talk before. Jimmy and Dennis were giving new meaning to anthropologist Emily Martin’s description of people who treat “the body as nation-state.”3
After the meeting, I stopped Dennis on his way home and told him I didn’t get the part about being Native American and Filipino, and how this could have the opposite effect on your body and give you a physical intolerance for alcohol. Dennis recounted that he’d seen a program on PBS and heard that Asians and people of Asian ancestry had a higher rate of alcohol intolerance. Compared to people of European or African ancestry, Dennis told me, this medical disorder, called the Asian Flushing Factor, caused more people from Asia and Southeast Asia, and even Native Americans, whose ancestors had come from that region some 15,000 years ago, to have more difficulty absorbing alcohol. The resulting “vasodilation” (causing reddening of the skin, called “blushing” or “flushing”), he said, was widely discussed by medical practitioners.
The problem with this thesis was that the medical literature could only claim a higher incidence of flushing after alcohol consumption among some populations. The idea is that flushing indicated embarrassment at being unable to handle the alcohol. It’s a strange claim, more about people’s psychology than anything else. The fact that this kind of flushing never stopped anyone in China or Japan from drinking was either unknown or irrelevant.
And more particularly in the cases of Jimmy and Dennis, if you believe biological ancestry is the card that trumps other explanations about alcohol consumption patterns, then focusing on your genetic framework can lead to complacency in prevention and intervention programs.
The ideas about heredity that Jimmy and Dennis shared in Oakland revealed the influence of science programs on TV and the power of scientific explanations to make sense of confusion about every aspect of life, from addictions to relationships to gender and sexuality. They reached out to science—or maybe they felt as if science were reaching out to them—to solve problems, relieve despair, and find hope. They wanted to change their addictive behavior. The only way they thought they could do this was by coming to grips with what they perceived to be the biologically ethnic origins of their addictions and cravings. If they believed they couldn’t change their ethnicity (and therefore their biologies), at least they could have a clearer recognition of what they were up against, and perhaps that understanding would help.
I was halfway through a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City when my then wife, Michelle, and our six-month-old daughter, Liliana, went back to the United States to visit family for a couple of weeks. On the street where we lived, our presence was conspicuous, and our comings and goings were the subject of widespread observation and discussion. Why didn’t we just boil tap water for thirty seconds like everyone else? Was that rash on Liliana cleared up? And who was that who visited you yesterday? Where did you get that red underwear you hung out to dry on the roof? So much for the anonymity of the city. In neighborhoods like ours, it could feel like living in a fish bowl.
Michelle and Liliana left for North Carolina, and I was looking forward to a concentrated period of fieldwork and a brief break from tending to an infant who had quickly earned the sobriquet La Cabroncita, Little Bossy. After seeing them off, I headed to the market that was set up on Wednesdays and Saturdays under pink tarps stretching for blocks and blocks. The fruit and vegetables were fresh and inexpensive, and the sellers kept things lively. It was a great place to chat with merchants, friends, and neighbors.
Norma spotted me before I saw her. She approached, smiled at the vegetable seller, and nonchalantly asked if Michelle and Liliana had gotten off on their trip okay. I said they had. Then Norma quickly got to her point. Taking her right forefinger and placing it under her right eye, as if pointing to the eye, she told me simply but sternly, “Te estamos vigilando, ¿eh?” “We will be watching you.” She and the others would be keeping an eye on me, not to help or protect me, but to guard against me doing anything foolish. I needed to watch my step.
Tempted to retort, “What are you implying, Norma?!” I bit my tongue and played out the line of interrogation, asking, neutrally, “What do you mean?”
She didn’t miss a beat. Clearly this intervention had been planned for a while. “If anything happens that shouldn’t while Michelle is away, we’re going to notice, and she’s going to find out as soon as she returns. You just need to watch yourself, Mateo. Of course, I am really going to be watching the women. I know you can’t help yourselves.” Right there Norma was announcing the bottom line: men cannot help themselves, so women must find ways to manage them.
It was not the first time, nor the last, that I would be told men couldn’t resist the offer of sex. Norma’s warning came from deep-seated concerns, and I had no doubt she meant what she said. Her mother, Ángela, had taught me a favorite expression that ran along the same lines: “¿A quién le dan pan que llore?” (Who cries when they’re given bread?) It was a bit of wisdom that spoke as much to rural poverty, where you eat anything that’s offered to you, as it did to men’s “natural” proclivity to accept every sexual favor proffered.
Norma may have been teasing a little, but how much of her warning was just for laughs? To what extent did Norma think I was tempted to fool around in Michelle’s absence? Would Norma have said the same thing to any man whose wife was gone for a couple of weeks? I didn’t think she was making threats to women whose husbands left on trips. There was one notorious neighbor whose husband was a migrant worker in the United States and able to return for only a month or so every year. Over the years this woman had taken a parade of lovers after her husband left for the next eleven months. Maybe Norma planned to go on alert against that woman in case she tried to ensnare me.
What is often left out of this kind of thinking is that there is no such thing as a human body outside of time and space. Biological transformations occur throughout the life of every body, even male bodies, and these changes might even be heritable. Masculinity is not biological, but even if it were, we are not the amalgamation of two parts (biology and culture), but instead one complex whole.
The implications for understanding men’s sexuality and violence is related to the idea that our minds and thoughts are separate from our physical bodies, a concept that has dominated highbrow and everyday discourse for centuries in the West. It has special resonance when it comes to male bodies. That’s why we get the expression “He thinks with his dick.” An equivalent for women—“She thinks with her pussy”—makes no sense in ordinary speech. That statement doesn’t exist because of underlying popular attitudes about differences in what motivates and explains the sexualities of men and women—although certainly the notion that “it must be her time of month again” is prevalent, and it’s analogous in pathologizing female behavior. The difference is that while women’s reproductive capacity is invoked by reference to menstruation, in the case of men the implication is that they are largely motivated by their sexual urges, and more comprehensible if you imagine penises as divining rods.
Being a biological (not just a cultural) man, a father, and a husband have been central to my anthropological research: not only have I been threatened with exposure if I were caught having any aventuras with women not my wife, but I have been propositioned because “men gotta have it”; I have also been treated as an inferior parent because I was a man, and unduly celebrated when I defied expectations. An assumed—if usually undefined and immutable—maleness about me has always influenced how I have been treated by women as well as by other men. My sexuality as a man has succumbed to a taken-for-granted fetishization that is then in circular fashion attributed to my maleness itself.
Insisting on the biological roots of especially men’s aberrant behavior is commonplace. Consider the following news items from the New York Times on the hot-button issue of how to explain the mass murders that have become so prevalent in the contemporary United States.
“In a move likely to renew a longstanding ethical controversy, geneticists are quietly making plans to study the DNA of Adam Lanza, 20, who killed 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Conn. [on December 14, 2012]. Their work will be an effort to discover biological clues to extreme violence.” The researchers from the University of Connecticut quickly responded to the massacre and were going to look for genetic mutations associated with mental illness, or those that might have made Lanza more prone to violence.4
“Las Vegas Gunman’s Brain Will Be Scrutinized for Clues to the Killing,” the headline boasted. The content of the article was more modest. Dr. Hannes Vogel, director of neuropathology at Stanford University Medical Center, was going to examine the brain of the man who earlier that month had killed fifty-eight concertgoers. “The magnitude of this tragedy has so many people wondering how it could have evolved,” the pathologist offered, quickly adding that he doubted he would find anything. Rather, “all these speculations out there will be put to rest, I think.”5
What if these scientists did find some brain abnormalities? What could be the possible ramifications here? Find a gene for the perpetrators behind most mass killings in the United States—young, male, white people? And then what? Mass testing of DNA of all white males under a certain age who live in the United States? Prevalent attitudes about whiteness (as well as masculinity and youth) take for granted that their sociodemographic status is not the key to understanding their actions. Imagine if most mass murderers were young African American males. We would never hear the end racial profiling pertaining to the backgrounds, families, and personalities of these young men. Why no racial and gender profiling when it’s white male youths?
The popular perception that brain disease, mental disorder, and aberrant psychological states alone could trigger mass murders in Newtown in 2012, Columbine in 1999, Oklahoma City in 1995, and Las Vegas in 2017, to mention only a few examples, may seem compelling to many, but it misses key factors. So does simply noting that 42 percent of the guns in the world are in the hands of people in the United States. Gun ownership is related to mass killings, but it does not in itself explain them. To be sure, in the United States in 2017 there were around 101 guns for every 100 residents (the highest ratio in the world). But this does not explain not just why there are fewer mass murders in Saudi Arabia (where there are 35 guns per 100 residents), Finland (34 per 100), Uruguay (32 per 100), and France (31 per 100), but why there is such a negligible number of them in those places. And although gun ownership in Switzerland is not, as is sometimes said, compulsory, the Swiss do maintain what can fairly be called an active “gun culture,” focused on hunting, that has never spilled over into mass shootings.6
Even if we find biological indicators of troubled minds, or when we note the astronomical number of guns owned by people in the United States compared to most of the rest of the world, that still doesn’t explain why mental illness among young white men manifests in the United States more than anywhere else in the form of collective killings. Nor does turning up oddities in the brain tell us anything automatically about behavior. No one could argue that genetic anomalies found in the brains of mass killers in the United States are unique to those with US birth certificates. Yet mass killings are far, far more common in the United States than anywhere else on earth outside of war zones. Why aren’t masculinity, youth, and whiteness seen as key social factors in every news story, police report, and postmortem review? That is perhaps the most troubling question: Why are mass murderers typically young white men from the United States?7
Perhaps we should be more open-minded about those seeking the biological origins of mass murders. Maybe they’ll turn something up, and at worst they will be wasting only their own time. But it is not just a matter of being open to the possibility of root biological explanations to explain social trauma such as mass killings. The danger lies in thinking we can resolve social problems through biological diagnoses any more than we can understand and resolve social inequalities through biological reasoning. The history of racial profiling on IQ in the United States should help us appreciate the alarming consequences of relying on this framework to solve questions of motive and prevention in mass murders. Yet we continue to look to biology for more answers than it can provide.
This problem of tracing men’s bad behavior to genetics and hormones is getting more pronounced and pernicious, including in the general pathologization of violence as deviant and a product of the “criminally insane.” Just as sanity shows itself in untold ways, so, too, insanity. Crazy doesn’t in itself cause violence or war. If mass murderers didn’t find receptive audiences, they could end up as isolated voices yapping at shadows. At the core of mass murders in the United States are social relations anchored to whiteness, masculinity, and youth.
When people today in Shanghai, Mexico City, or Providence, Rhode Island, say that male violence is “genetic” or “innate” or “evolutionary,” they are sharing a belief that in a meaningful sense people will do what they do regardless of public policy interventions, and suggesting that we could stop wasting precious resources if we stopped trying to change behavior that is inevitable, especially when this behavior reflects something so elementary as natural selection. Like it or not, the acquiescent reasoning goes, we first have to accept that often men are just acting the way they are meant to.
If blind faith in biology is advanced to explain social problems associated with men and violence, it is not mainly because science today has become too compelling to ignore: it is because social analysis of men and violence has become too anemic and unconvincing.
What the history books will say in a hundred years about our compulsive itch for biobabble in 2019 is not clear. Why so many sensible denizens of earth have yielded in our time to the numbing influence of extreme forms of biological understandings when describing gender differences and relationships itself needs to be explained. Gender confusion has led to a revival of blind faith in folk biology. For many gender-conforming people, as well as more than a few nonconformers, gender and sexuality have become petrified and unbending concepts. Even within the transgender community, it’s hard to dodge naturalized categorization.
The term often used in the United States to speak critically about the degradation of female bodies is “objectification.” Women are judged by how well they conform to stereotypical standards of beauty. Undoubtedly there are examples in which men are treated in a similar fashion, but more often than with women, the male body is fetishized as an object of potency and power. Regardless of the various and antagonistic psychoanalytic readings of fetishism (centered on the penis or its lack), the male body as cultural fetish goes a long way to explaining how maleness is simultaneously a bane and a blessing in societies in which the body and the mind are popularly considered to be distinct entities.
Consider, for example, the classic anthropological analysis: fetishes are objects with human qualities fashioned by humans. What is special about these objects is that they in turn seem to have power over the same humans who created them. This is precisely what happens so often when male sexuality and aggression become fetishes: these qualities are fashioned by humans in particular cultural and historical moments but are said to have magical, deeply spiritual, properties, and then these male sexuality and aggression fetishes, almost Frankenstein-like, come back to haunt their very creators as unbridled, overpowering male impulses. Some fetishes take on animal characteristics, like guardian spirits. At the least, even if you don’t fully accept them, you’d best show proper deference toward these fetishes.8
Examples of the fetishization of male sexuality are all around us, from beliefs regarding male adolescent masturbation to men’s extramarital affairs, from men shirking responsibility in contraception to men’s sex overdrives, and to men’s handicapped status as engaged fathers. Yet how much are Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra about allowing men to get back their erections for sexual satisfaction, and how much are those erections tied to proving they (still, with help) have what it takes to be real men? After all, the erect penis, in humans and many other species, is the observable ne plus ultra when it comes to unambiguously demonstrating sexual interest and desire.
Part of the issue surrounding the treatment of male sexuality as a fetish, a supernatural force of its own, is that it represents a deeper Western philosophical tradition that separates minds and bodies. Whether the mind and body are seen as “autonomous,” “corresponding,” “in parallel,” or in some other arrangement, and even if they are appreciated as separate but equal, the idea that minds and bodies (in this case, male) act in some way separately “on their own” feeds too easily into attributing more automatic responses in the actions of men, and in that way to acquiescence to male bad behavior. When we look at the brains of mass murderers and ask, “What went wrong?,” if we don’t ignore the fact that virtually all mass murderers are men, but simply view this as a biological clue to such an extreme form of aggression, we miss the social clues that might or might not be related to some distinct morphology present in their bodies, and how cultural norms of aggression may have activated changes in body chemistry and composition.
Anthropologists use the term “ascribed” to mean what you’re born with and compare this with “acquired,” meaning what you learn along the way. If we think that the causes of mass murder are really more biological than cultural, then it will be far easier to focus on nature (vs. nurture), bodies (vs. minds), and ascribed (vs. acquired). This whole way of framing things is problematic. As the feminist historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller put it, we need to accept that we are talking about “the mirage of space between nature and nurture”—human behavior cannot be usefully separated into such arbitrary categories, but still we imagine a space that does not exist. And, again, we need to pay close attention to the panhuman experience when it comes to men’s sexuality and aggression: variation, variation, variation.9
Human biology does not float free of human social relationships. Consider one recent controversial example, the “gay gene.” Much of the motivation of researchers who sought and then declared they had discovered the gay gene was to prove that gayness was “natural,” and therefore not a matter of individual or social choice, and for those of a certain religious bent, presumably something that was God-given and God-sanctioned. Difficulties in discussing the gay gene, however, quickly emerged. What does “gay” really mean? It is so open to interpretation as to render moot a biological description, much less a biological source. All men who have sex with other men are gay, say some. Others respond that gayness is an identity, not an act. Some say it depends on who does what to whom.10
The problem with talking about the gay gene is, ultimately, that there is no biological material that is shared by all gay men because there is no universally accepted meaning of gay to begin with. The quest for the gay gene is a classic case of fetishizing the body and looking for bodily explanations (genes) to explain cultural categories (gayness).
As with male sexuality, fetishized phrases, such as “the biological or cultural roots of male violence,” get us nowhere because they treat biology and culture as if they exist in hermetically sealed form. We need to focus our attention on the complex interactions that constitute male sexuality and violence, those that happen not simply on the scale of genes and the endocrinology of individuals, but on whole social bodies in particular times and places.
In the contemporary United States, for most people most of the time, there is only one systematic way to approach medicine, illness, and healing, and that is through biomedicine as taught in all accredited medical schools and practiced by the approximately 1 million doctors in the country. In China, biomedicine is one of two systems of medicine: the other is called Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). And despite its name, “traditional,” and its ancient roots, TCM is considered in China to be every bit as up to date as biomedicine among a wide range of people. Although many in the United States have heard of acupuncture, and many know it as a Chinese form of healing, and may have even experimented with it, acupuncture is widely regarded in the United States as an old-fashioned therapy. Advocates for TCM in China would view that appraisal as quaint, because for them the heart of the difference between the two medical approaches rests on the emphasis on holism and balance in TCM and the emphasis in biomedicine on separate body parts and distinct (immune, digestive, cardiovascular) systems. We can learn about changing men and male bodies by comparing TCM and biomedical practices—for example, by looking at issues like libido, how medical conditions like impotence are diagnosed, and what remedies are suggested to resolve them.11
The efficacy of one medical model or another is of less concern here than what we can learn from TCM to help us think about issues of male sexuality and violence. Central to its holistic approach, TCM is not based on anatomy, much less on what its practitioners regard as an artificial separation distinguishing “mind” from “body.” Though to Western biomedical ears TCM might sound more mystical and quasi-religious than rooted in the physical chemical and biological world, TCM doctors tend not to cede the ground of science, and in fact, according to anthropologist Judith Farquhar, “to an increasing extent through the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese medical researchers and clinicians staked their careers on the essential scientificness of Chinese medicine.” TCM doctors emphasize the unity of bodies, not their compartmentalization.12
The specific ramifications of TCM for men and maleness reside in the fact that “the divide between social gender and natural sex that informs our [Western] careful sex-gender distinction is not particularly pertinent to common usage in modern Chinese,” writes Farquhar. Despite whatever you may think about yin and yang, for those who follow TCM the binary approach to women and men is inadequate, as is the notion that sex equals biology and gender equals social and cultural factors. What this means is that biology and culture are said to be joined in the body in irreducible ways, an approach that guides diagnoses and therapies by those practicing TCM.
In a comprehensive study of what he calls “the impotence epidemic” in China, anthropologist Everett Zhang argues that the growing reports of erectile dysfunction (ED) in China were a positive development because they reflected a rejection of the sexually repressed days of Maoist China. Now men can attend to this problem when it occurs, and they can do so without shame, because they live at a time when sexuality is recognized as a potentially healthy part of life for men and women.
In Zhang’s study we learn about differences between TCM and biomedicine at every stage of a patient’s care. Biomedical doctors in China tend to approach the issue of ED as one of erections, ejaculations, and above all, blood flow. TCM doctors are far more likely to note symptoms like a white coating on a man’s tongue and a weak pulse, symptomatic not only of ED issues but also, more profoundly, of problems with the kidneys. They believe that blood flow is involved, but they do not identify the problem so narrowly or recommend treatment that addresses blood flow alone. Thus, biomedical urologists stress blood dynamics and the need to increase the flow of blood into the penis, while TCM practitioners most often seek to “smooth out the liver,” which entails especially getting a man’s qi (his “vital energy”) to circulate along the liver meridian. This approach is said to facilitate the flow of blood to all parts of the man’s body.
As one biomedical doctor also sympathetic to TCM counseled, “Chinese medicine produces better effects in terms of improving sexual desire and controlling ejaculation. It also improves the general status of the body, whereas Viagra can improve the rigidity and the frequency of erections.” For TCM specialists, it is also not a matter of just substituting one newer pharmaceutical product, like Cialis, for another, older one, like red ginseng. Instead, it’s a matter of addressing overall bodily issues that may seem to biomedical doctors to be unrelated to ED, or indeed, to other aspects of sexual dysfunction, or even sexuality in general. Zhang hails in particular those men who, rather than going from one system of treatment to another, circulate back and forth between them.13
In this way, Traditional Chinese Medicine, when applied to men’s sexual problems, is presented as a new-old integrated approach to male minds and bodies. A greater awareness of the tenets of TCM by those now more captivated by biomedicine alone could move the needle away from excessive worries about male hydraulics, which are tied to engrained models of mechanical functioning in bodies in general. The interactions between blood and other bodily processes also holds the door open in TCM to not just curing what might ail men with their erections, but changing their very biologies in the course of treatment, so that erections become a mere byproduct of overall healing. When ED is identified as a problem of aging, for instance, biomedical doctors often assume that treatment through medications must continue forever. For TCM doctors, in contrast, treatment for these and other ailments can change male bodies, meaning that, at some point, treatment may no longer be necessary, as is more typically expected in the case of psychological afflictions not seen as necessarily permanent.
How much men inherit the bodies they are born with, how much they are a product of their ancestors, and how much they can change about them are of course topics of popular debate all over the world. For most people, it’s more than a question of where you get your curls or big feet: it can also involve a legacy of temperament. When my daughter Liliana would get fussy in Mexico City, a neighbor liked to rib me, saying she was acting “Matt-ish.” For most of us, inheriting physical and personality traits from our families is most often a matter of what we have picked up from our parents. But in Mexico City one time I came across a belief that family endowments could be traced back much further. I was told about an inner warrior quality that had traveled down generations, hidden inside a family’s genepool.
I learned about it all one day when I was talking with an old friend from the Santo Domingo barrio. She told me about a gender predicament that neighbors were confronting, one they had solved using similar hereditarian logic. It seemed that a young man had been getting into trouble by hanging around with a street gang. He’d gotten into real fights for the first time in his life. His parents were panicked. They knew it wasn’t just something boys do. His best friend from childhood wasn’t aggressive. So then, why him? They considered all the possibilities they could think of: It was not his family, because he came from a good, stable, loving home. It wasn’t school, because he was doing pretty well there. Nor was it the neighborhood, because the street where they lived was usually tranquil.
Then his mother remembered something having to do with family, but three generations earlier. Her son’s great-grandfather had participated in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, an incredibly violent time. Millions died. The great-grandfather had no doubt witnessed, and maybe participated in, all that slaughter. And he probably had passed down that manly violence in his blood to his own great-grandson. The fact that the young man didn’t know about his great-grandfather seemed to prove the point even better: he couldn’t be consciously mimicking ways he might imagine his great-grandfather had acted a century earlier; it had to be hereditary.
A family in anguish about a young man’s violence has everything to do with gender confusion. They found relief from their distress by concluding that it started with an inherited trait, a biological craving inside the young man. Then they knew better what they were up against, and their despair could be eased. Despair and distress leads to a search for solutions. And biological solutions can be awfully attractive to those in distress.14
In this time of widespread gender confusion and contestation, what we think of men as biological animals will be an important part of how much we think we can change and how much we do change. Recent work in biology holds some promise to help us realize new understandings about men’s “animality,” and in general this work can help ease us away from the nature-or-culture dichotomy related to men and maleness. We cannot choose to alter our DNA, but we can choose how to react to our environment, and that is our saving grace. The burgeoning field of epigenetics, however, points to significant changes in gene expression that can be triggered by behavior. Whether in jest or not, the words we use matter. “You’re such a guy!” and “I have my manly needs!” is language that reflects ideas about men and masculinity that can be especially problematic because it belittles how malleable men actually are. Male bodies, just as much as female bodies, are more reactive and dynamic than passive and static.15
Since roughly 2000, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) has been making a comeback of sorts in the new biological field known as epigenetics. Epigenetics has opened up vast new avenues of research that reassert “environmental” factors in gene expression, and some believe that changes in gene expression—and how genes are regulated differently in different environmental circumstances—might mean that the behavior of one generation can be passed on to the next.
Regardless of whether it turns out to be accurate to say that the environment, defined broadly, can change individual bodies, or that these changes can be inherited, epigenetics has already reached relevant findings with implications for changing male bodies, changing male behavior, and changing beliefs about maleness. Even at this early stage, conclusions from epigenetics research make clear that although you may not pass down the violent tendencies you used in the Mexican Revolution to your grandchildren, the interactions between genes and your surroundings matter: particular genes get more or less activated, and more or less relevant to human behavior, depending on everything from climate to war, from compassion to toxic masculinity.
What is more, even how men talk about themselves and think about themselves as men can have an impact on gene expression and in that way affect how DNA counts in men’s lives. Take the question of inheritance again. Until fairly recently, “vertical” transmission of DNA from parent to offspring was how we understood genes being passed from one organism to another. Now, within the field of “horizontal gene transfer” (HGT), we are finding new evolutionary pathways. The main way that antibiotic resistance, for example, is spread is laterally. This can happen when a mobile and resistant segment of DNA gets inserted laterally into another chromosome. As with new work on epigenetics, the likelihood that HGT research will show that genetic material moves horizontally in other ways between humans opens up the possibility of relevant new insights into human behavior and relationships.
“The world is more Lamarckian than we used to be,” primatologist Sarah Hrdy told me in 2014. She obviously didn’t mean that the biological world was different, but that new understandings of the world had changed our obligation to Lamarck for his insights, which he offered over two centuries ago, and which had been cited ever since mainly as the butt of ridicule. Lamarck made two major claims: one was that if certain body parts were used more or less, this could have an effect on those same body parts in subsequent generations; the other was that characteristics acquired by one generation could be passed down to subsequent generations. It is this second contention that is more relevant to the field of epigenetics today. Lamarck believed, in other words, that changes in the environment could change one’s physiology, and that these changes could be inherited by one’s offspring.
Hrdy expanded: “Social scientists are so excited that everything is epigenetics now. Because it gets them out of a bind. They were increasingly in a bind because they were sort of being pinned with a label of claiming, ‘Genes don’t matter!’” Genes of course do matter, but epigenetics shows that just saying “genes matter” doesn’t really tell us anything yet, because genes by themselves don’t cause anything to happen, and genes themselves are not impervious to social, behavioral, and other conditional factors. Hrdy anticipated that with epigenetics it had become increasingly clear that environmental factors can change how genes are activated and come into play, and that was why social scientists would now feel a certain vindication for their perpetual insistence that factors such as social inequalities can reshape human bodies in ways that biologists only a generation earlier may have been more prone to resist in their theorizing about evolution and heredity.
If this were a true finding of epigenetics in general, then it would have direct ramifications for men and masculinity, because gender relations of inequality would involve those who are in superior, patriarchal conditions as well as those who are not, and men’s bodies might get reshaped in the process just as much as women’s.
Has it turned out that my friends in Mexico City were correct when they linked the violent inheritance from a peasant farmer who had participated in the Mexican Revolution to his great-grandson? Or that husbands who beat their wives can pass genes activated for violence on to their sons? Or that people who grow up in a society in which there has not been a generation without war in nearly a hundred years (such as the United States) somehow genetically absorb the violence of their progenitors? All these conclusions would be possible only if you link social and interpersonal violence with genetics from the start. Just because epigenetics may point to social factors as triggering gene expression does not mean that every social phenomenon has a gene to trigger. The rate of mass murders does not rise and fall because of misfiring neurons or testosterone overdoses or brain tumors or misactivated genes.
Many social scientists who study social problems pay little attention to biological factors; usually we treat them as background vapors. Though in certain subfields, such as medical anthropology and environmental anthropology, belittling the biological has been less prevalent, the greatest work in these subfields in recent decades has persuasively debunked claims of universal and uniform biologies, unveiling, for example, the varieties of ways to experience menopause; or disputed a narrow molecular focus on disease etiology—for example, in afflictions such as schizophrenia; and in general revealed the social roots of what biomedical practitioners more commonly diagnose as individual pathologies, in conditions, for instance, like PTSD.
As leading researchers who study the social consequences of epigenetics insist, however, studies focusing on nature and biological evolution have too often been divorced from those on nurture and social, economic, political, and cultural contexts. In a series of publications on epigenetics and Alzheimer’s disease, medical anthropologist Margaret Lock makes clear that there is a renewed recognition among some scientists of “a molecularized ‘social body’ situated in time and space.” According to Lock, “This shift in epigenetics is not so much away from genetics and genomics as it is moving beyond them as the new science explicitly demotes the reductive agency of genes.” Lock’s further challenge is for social scientists to consider “the social ramifications of this shift.”16
As much as epigenetics has vindicated social scientists’ beliefs in sociocultural and economic factors in determining human behavior, it has helped even more to provide biologists a way out, a framework within which to examine interactions between genes and environment, and an escape route from the straitjacket of biological provincialism. However, scientists have only begun to scratch the surface of what epigenetics might imply for men and maleness, including the socially contingent nature of pernicious forms of masculinity. Renegotiating and reshaping masculinity depend on a fuller appreciation of not only the pervasiveness of certain kinds of male behavior but, especially today, their conditional and unfixed potential.
Yet to talk of environmental factors is not yet to emerge from another kind of provincialism, that which makes the unit of analysis the individual or family. The full significance of epigenetics will be shackled if left there; political and economic circumstances, such as poverty, racism, and patriarchy, must be factored in. Indeed, it is in such comprehensive considerations, in integrating nature and nurture, genes and their social activation, that epigenetics can also resonate most with the fundamentals of Traditional Chinese Medicine, in particular the objective of unifying more strictly biomedical aspects and more properly social elements into a holistic description of the individual body, the social body, and even the body politic.17
Caution is required here. We should not yet jump to the conclusion that our lifestyle alters our genes and that we will pass these changes on to our children. As Lock and coauthor Gisli Palsson write, “whether or not epigenetic changes are transmitted intergenerationally in humans remains a matter for heated debate, but [even] if this proves not to be the case, irrefutable evidence shows that epigenetic changes arise anew in ensuing generations if living conditions are not substantially improved.” They conclude, “A major perceptual shift is underway; one in which the gene has been demoted and nature/nurture is conceptualized as an indivisible entity, albeit malleable, in which nurture is the active, initiating force, to which the genome reacts.”18
One potentially important lesson from the first decades of epigenetics research is surely that, as with “male hormones” (aka testosterone), men’s Y chromosomes have been getting a bad rap, or at least they have had to bear more than their fair share of the blame for folk biology addressing men, maleness, and violence. Men’s sexual assaults on women (and other men) are no more genetically driven or governed—and male aggressors no more deserving of impunity—than poor communication skills are the leading cause of military invasions and occupations. Biology has been used in recent decades to provide inscrutable evidence about why men’s indiscretions (and worse) seem so widespread and deep-seated, along with the implication that we can physically restrict men, but cannot really hope to physically change them. We need to be skeptical about these pervasive and malignant beliefs. Bioskepticism is not a dismissal of biology. Instead it calls our attention to the need to make chromosomes, anatomy, and evolution far more scrutable and accountable to all.
In a paper on the new science of epigenetics, historian of science Sarah Richardson concludes “that epigenetics may counter traditional ideological conceptions of male and female differences by documenting a diversity of sexual phenotypes and that epigenetics may provide methods for studying the biological embodiment of gender by yielding mechanisms for the environmental and social mediation of sex.” Among other things, bioskepticism will help us get out of the business of conducting biopsies on the brains of mass murderers only to discover they are young, white, American males. That evidence was available to us before we began picking apart their brains. The significance of epigenetics for men and masculinities is not simply that maleness is not preordained, or that talk to the contrary is bad science, but that denying the interactions between environment and human biology is harmful to men’s social recovery and revitalization.19