Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.
Lear to Edgar and Fool, King Lear,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
BEFORE WE CAN UNYOKE MALENESS FROM MANLINESS, BEFORE WE can reexamine social policies based on faulty beliefs about virile compulsions, we need to abandon much of our biological language about men and masculinity. Human sex is not best understood as a form of animal mating. War is not explicable by blood tests for paternity, testosterone levels, or anything else that relates to men’s physiologies. Any science, new or old, that is used to legitimate and maintain unequal social relations, if it is repeated often enough, can take on the veneer of inevitability over time. Questionable science gets normalized into a fog of half-baked but influential ideas. This is a time of gender confusion with the potential for gender renegotiations. It is unlikely women who have gained access to positions denied their grandmothers will cede ground, but there is no doubt that there are conservative forces that would like them to do just that.
Reshaping modern masculinity affects men and the women with whom men share their lives. We have nothing to fear from biology, but only from folk biology that lets men off the hook and sells men short. We are at a crossroads in thinking about modern masculinities around the world, and we must come to terms with the biological determinants of men and maleness. How should men act? Treat others? What can be changed about men and masculinities? Biology should mean opportunity, not destiny.
We need to know why only men are subject to military conscription, why there is no modern form of contraception for men, why men still dominate in government, business, and cultural life in every country on earth. Are these social facts inevitable, or are they not? Recent decades have brought enormous changes in the power of women in every facet of social life, so perhaps the answer is too obvious. But these changes have also brought renewed confusion and challenge to fundamental ideas about gender. And the backlash is formidable. One distressingly popular author writes in his rules for life of the quest for vindication on behalf of all men who feel left out of these developments empowering women. For “every spurned male” who feels denigrated by talk of gender equality, Jordan Peterson appears to counsel that revenge is the reasonable antidote to the chaos that he says has intensified as a result of women’s assertiveness.1
We need to know why men rape. Is it primarily a matter of natural male responses to stimuli? Talk about rape culture on college campuses and throughout society predated the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s. But it picked up momentum as women and men debated the degree to which rape is something all men are capable of committing, whether more men would rape if they thought they would not be caught and punished, how much rape was cultural, and how much it was natural to the male biology and essence. These discussions are vital if we are to address the problem of sexual assault, and they are opportunities that can help us clarify our language and our beliefs about men, maleness, aggression, and sexuality.
We need to know why racialized ideas about biological capacities and animal impulses are, in the main, publicly marginal and despised in the academy and mainstream media—although they become more dangerous in periods of white supremacist resurgence—but beliefs about men’s biological capacities and animal urges have them as barely removed from the state of feral beasts. Turn on any news program, read any account of gender issues, and you will invariably hear about testosterone, Y chromosomes, alpha males, and boys who will be boys. Reducing certain kinds of people to animals has historically been an effective way to pigeonhole them. Animals are incapable of reason, they must be controlled, and they should not be allowed to make decisions for themselves or others. If you doubt the existence of a widespread belief that men are in some fundamental sense not able to control themselves because they are men, the way a shark cannot help eating a seal, then think instead about alpha gorillas, and about how often their sexual predations and aggressive behaviors are compared to the behaviors of human males. A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. Admittedly, this is infinitely more complex because men are in control of so many aspects of our social, economic, and political life; still, and crucially, we gain absolutely nothing if we believe that men, because they are male, are obliged by nature to act in preordained ways, good or bad.
Language can shift perceptions. And narrow-minded ideas about men and maleness employing scientific jargon can be contested. For one thing, we can expand our understanding of what it means to be a male animal. For another, we can learn to use a less extreme vocabulary to describe the actual experiences of people born with bodies that supposedly confer one or another identity on them. The greatest problem arises when we accommodate men because we believe that they are at their core animals who cannot help themselves, and when we come to believe that we cannot change that fact of life, evolution, and DNA. That, like it or not, men can at best be constrained from their irrepressible compulsions.2
If the term “gender binary” sounds like jargon, that’s because you haven’t been around students lately. “Male” and “female” no longer work for everyone as the only possible categories. For today’s college students, the clear line dividing male from female often looks a lot fuzzier than it did to past generations. Like with the words “discourse” and “plutocracy,” all it takes is a political movement to move a word from the academic lingo column to the list of popular phrases. Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the mid-aughts, is at the forefront of this movement. One of the ways they are challenging the gender binary is by shedding the pronouns they were raised with and adopting “they” to replace “he” and “she.”
The pronoun moment might be a movement akin to their mothers’ demand for a shift from Mrs. and Miss to Ms. And like the title shifts of that earlier generation, today the They Movement is part of widespread and intense discussions on college campuses in the United States about larger issues, in this case about queerness, gayness, and transgender politics. How influential they will be in the long run remains to be seen, but their rejection of the gender binary certainly holds important insights and lessons about gender confusion, the science of maleness, and thinking rooted in the detection of gonads to understand basic issues of gender identity.3
When introducing themselves at the first meeting of a club or campus organization, students at Brown University often include a new factoid. In addition to name, year, and major, they give their preferred pronouns: he/him/his, she/her/hers, or they/them/theirs, or something else entirely. In a remarkably quick adoption of new gender norms that began in the mid-2010s, it has since become routine in casual conversations as well as classrooms. In response, younger faculty began asking for pronoun information on the first day of classes, and many students are putting their preferred pronouns on their email signatures. In just a few years, students have campaigned for greater acceptance of gender and sexual fluidity, trying to move beyond the neat gender frames of their parents and grandparents. Sometimes these issues are tied to queerness, but not always. Sexual orientation is often treated as a separate, if related, set of issues.
Students are challenging either- or restrictions and dichotomous ways of dividing up the world between two neat groups of men and women. But the United States is not the only place where these dichotomies have prevailed. The fact is that most cultures throughout history have categorized people into male and female. Anthropologists studying New Guinea talk of sexual and gender “polarity” as not just pervasive there but universal, even considering the male initiation rituals practiced among the Sambia and others described in Chapter 1. In a mean-spirited defense of the gender binary, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe of France declared in 2017 that he was banning the use of gender-neutral language in government documents. For my students, however, the demand to “break down the binary!” is an urgent and righteous objective. Youths around the world today are so dissatisfied with the strict male-female classification system that they are championing new ways of cataloging gender.4
One of my students told me about an invitation he had received: “Hey guys, I just wanted to throw a party to celebrate the 2 year anniversary since I started hormones and all the wonderful things that happened after that. Let’s celebrate spring and femininity in whatever form that means for you!” They called it the Hormone Party to raise money for their friend, who was transitioning. In recent years, trans people have challenged the idea that gender identity is sacrosanct, often contesting this view with a far more wide-ranging commitment to gender justice and social justice in general. When they are treated as “impossible people who are not who we say we are, cannot exist, cannot be classified, and cannot fit anywhere,” this is a denial of the slipperiness of gender identity categories and a negation of gender diversity and inclusion. The emergence of trans social movements that refuse to get shoehorned into now more acceptable categories of gay and lesbian is an affront to social mores in a society already having a hard time coping with what it means to be a man or a woman. Transpolitics expand a distrust of whatever has been called normal, perhaps as part of a search for what French philosopher Michel Foucault called “the happy limbo of non-identity.”5
All told, there is great variation in how trans people live gender and sex. For some it is a binary affair, and transitions seek to bring union to body and mind. For others, a primary goal in life is to escape such dualisms altogether. When Caitlyn Jenner appears on the front cover of Vanity Fair, it is not as an ambiguously gendered person. And there lies the rub: when bodies are realigned with identities, as radical as it all might seem, there can appear to be only two gendered possibilities, and trans experiences are used to demonstrate this. The gender binary is a powerful whirlpool that can pull down even the unruliest gender insurgents into its vortex. As trans scholar Jack Halberstam has written, “the concept of being without a gender, however, is whimsical at best, since there are few ways to interact with other human beings without being identified with some kind of gendered embodiment.” When strictly dichotomous thinking about gender begins to fray at the edges and impede new ideas, authorities on all things male and female either begin to question foundational premises or their work ossifies. We are too prone to casual, unthinking, and harmful stereotypes about male sexuality.6
Calling yourself queer in college today can be an act of solidarity as well as an announcement of sexual interests. A student from Mexico describes his friends who have come out as gay as also having become “queer over time.” In a series of studies of cowboys in northern Mexico who are married to women and call themselves straight, but who nonetheless regularly have sex with other men, anthropologist Guillermo Núñez-Noriega describes how identity and behavior may sometimes seem at odds. Or, better put, how they can seem at odds to those who lack the imagination to envision gender, sex, and sexuality in any language other than what they are used to. For some of my students who don’t identify as queer, these Mexican vaquero-cowboys, reminiscent of characters in the movie Brokeback Mountain, defy their basic views about men and masculinity and suggest gender-nonconforming options. A queer lens helps them to think outside a dualistic default framework, either gay or straight.7
Where the They Movement will go is far from clear. There are already signs it is spreading throughout society, including on television programs (Showtime’s Billions) and in the workplace; pronoun innovations are likely to increase as today’s students graduate and start jobs. But in the closing years of the 2010s, students are once again pioneering new ways of thinking and talking about being gendered persons. They are asking that we add some new ways of talking about gender that allow for the growing gender fluidity they experience in their lives. As always, the lodestar we chase is breaking with inflexible ways of understanding men and masculinity dressed up in the language of biology, and discovering the numerous ways in which maleness is being reconsidered and renegotiated in different social contexts around the world as we approach the 2020s.
If double vision is all we perceive when we look at gender, then it’s time for new glasses. Any way you slice it, the gender binary looks like it is headed for phased retirement. Although our biologies have not changed in many a millennia, what it means to be a man or a woman has altered in fundamental ways over decades. Biology narrowly construed can no more explain culture than culture narrowly construed can explain biology.8
On October 6, 2018, by a vote of 50 to 48, the US Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh as associate justice of the US Supreme Court. The social schisms that troubled the nation through the outpouring of protest against and in defense of Kavanaugh revealed more than just the fact that many senators and citizens believed his denials of sexual assaults on women in high school and later, more than just that many felt that even if he did these things it should be chalked up to youth, and not held against him forever, and more than just that so many people could overlook his sexual assaults because they liked his conservative politics. Support for Kavanaugh from high and low also showed what millions of men and women wanted, or at least expected, from a man, especially a man of high accomplishment and naked ambition.
What we have here is an example of what anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann called “a moral vision that treats the body as choiceless and nonresponsible and the mind as choice-making and responsible.” The Kavanaugh hearings signaled the issue by implicitly distinguishing between his responsible judicial (i.e., mental) capacity, on the one hand, and his all-too-male body, on the other, which provided fewer options for controlling his actions, especially with respect to women. The spectacle implied that when people happen to inhabit male bodies, it is futile to try to hold them truly accountable: the best we can hope to accomplish is to find effective mechanisms to contain men in their rawest form.9
It would be easy to limit discussion to the performances of the key actors in the infamous hearings that led to Kavanaugh’s confirmation: The federal judge becomes frantic, infuriated, vengeful. He screams at Democratic senators who have the temerity to ask about his drinking habits, demanding they reveal their own. Women protesters gather in the thousands, infiltrate the hearing room, bang on doors, shout down the nominee. What Kavanaugh deems appropriate behavior—crying, taunting, and all-around belligerence—flows seamlessly with what many observers presume are lies under oath about his high school yearbook and calendar entries from that time. The key actors contend over matters juridical and political. But the heart of the confirmation deliberations revolves around gender and sexuality, the collision of fundamental convictions about what men are and what they are not, what they can be and what they cannot be, what they do and why they do it.
If you’re reading this book, my censure of Kavanaugh and his supporters may be so much preaching to the choir. Yet it is too easy to sling arrows at tyrants alone. We also need to be self-critical. It is easy for all of us to downplay how we teach men to behave in certain ways, and how we spread the cultural ideas that create the illusion that men are the victims of their own biology. In that spirit, I offer relevant editorial comments regarding Kavanaugh and the hearings from two widely read liberal social observers, New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni and philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
The Supreme Court seat hung in the balance. The issues focused on men, maleness, and male sexual violence against women, all of which were crying out for thorough and sophisticated description and analysis. In an op-ed about Brett Kavanaugh, Frank Bruni wrote, “That’s him riding a wave of testosterone and booze, among similarly pumped-up, zonked-out buddies.” It was a potential learning moment on all counts, an opportunity to take discussion about masculinity seriously, to introduce new insights and findings, and not simply to repeat formulaic ideas about what causes men to sexually assault women. Yet instead we were tutored again about the liability all teen boys carry in them, the scariest of all biological compounds, testosterone.10
What’s wrong with a frivolous reference to a hormone? What’s wrong with a colorful turn of phrase, given that Bruni’s underlying message was a scathing rebuke of Kavanaugh? What’s misguided is the unintentional but explicit suggestion that teenage boys have a chemical that makes them do things they would not otherwise do; that if you are a boy and have this chemical in abundance, then you, too, will do such things; and that the problem with Kavanaugh’s sexual attacks can be meaningfully traced not to the character of the individual boy or to the specific act of sexual attack but instead to an adverse mix of testosterone and alcohol in a generic male body. Of all the things Frank Bruni could have written about Brett Kavanaugh, why testosterone? Was testosterone to blame, even in part?
What’s wrong is that neither testosterone nor alcohol makes anyone do anything. In the case of testosterone, unless Kavanaugh had abnormally high levels of it (an assertion no one has made), the argument is untenable. If there is any correlation between violent activity and testosterone, it is that the violent activity may cause the level of the hormone to rise, not the other way around. If you are going to employ the term testosterone, you should know that and teach that. As for alcohol, it may disinhibit people and encourage their pent-up desires, but it is not causal. If you are not repressing an urge to sexually assault people, no amount of booze will oblige you to abuse another person, any more than intoxication on an airplane will in itself force you out of your seat to dance in the aisles. To hold an organic substance inside Kavanaugh’s male body accountable for his actions is to legitimize egregious behavior.
By using testosterone as an explanation in this way we might as well be back with Lyndon Johnson and one of his more memorable responses when reporters asked him why the United States persisted in Vietnam: “Johnson found it difficult to sustain his rationality in dealing with war critics,” according to one historian. “During a private conversation with some reporters who pressed him to explain why we were in Vietnam, Johnson lost his patience. According to Arthur Goldberg, L.B.J. unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ and declared, ‘This is why!’” To attribute Kavanaugh’s sexual assaults to testosterone in any way is to argue, in essence, that we may not like it, but, dammit, that’s just the way men are, especially powerful men like Lyndon Johnson and potential Supreme Court justices. It not only exonerates men for their individual and military assaults, it tells boys and men that this is just what is anticipated from the most manly men.11
In an essay on the Kavanaugh hearings, Martha Nussbaum wrapped up an old trope in a new skin: “And then, beneath the hysteria,” she wrote, “lurks a more primitive emotion: disgust at women’s animal bodies. Human beings are probably hard-wired to find signs of their mortality and animality disgusting, and to shrink from contamination by bodily fluids and blood.… But in every culture male disgust targets women, as emblems of bodily nature, symbolic animals by contrast to males, almost angels with pure minds.”12
What is most curious to me about Nussbaum’s comments is that, if anything, the symbolic performance was precisely the opposite: Kavanaugh was on full bestial display, while Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who courageously accused him of the early sexual assault, was judicious and analytical in her crafted statements. Nothing in the hearings bore out Nussbaum’s particular gendered representations and imaginings. Kavanaugh was a beast whose unleashed nature was completely reasonable to his supporters. The abject lesson was that if his blood boiled, this is just what happens when you corner a wild animal. (And Kavanaugh, of course, was not the only one to rage: Senator Lindsey Graham’s rant during the hearings was likewise keyed to demonstrating unbridled, visceral rage and intimidation.) The debate about the teenage years bore out that adolescent boys are like unbroken stallions. Neither beatific behavior nor rational performance from Kavanaugh was in evidence, nor was either of these encouraged.
Kavanaugh’s demeanor in congressional sessions was the opposite of aberrant; he was entirely in tune with the times, giving free rein to the inner male. And the same thing is happening around the world. In China, for example, the God of Biology has partially supplanted Confucius (and Mao) in providing the basis for understanding men and masculinities. My colleague Lingzhen Wang has noted that “primitive passion, raw sexuality, and natural instincts embodied by minority or rural men became vital in this articulation of postsocialist Chinese manhood.” Conjectures about men and women, whether in China, in Mexico, or in the United States, are too often based on essentialized gender categories, betraying overreliance on what Stephen Jay Gould called “speculative stories” about human behavior—here, about men, maleness, and masculinity. In this way we are developing proscriptions for social policy founded on those same faulty conjectures and end up preventing clearer analysis about key issues, such as why men assault women and what we can do to stop them.13
As a result of feminist perseverance, we are perhaps now more cautious than in the past about using red-flag terms to describe women, such as “hysterical,” “emotional,” “whiny,” and “conniving.” We need to pay attention to corresponding expressions about men that are not helpful. The more we avoid phrases that reduce women to a shared set of impulse-responses, the more we allow women to experiment with who they are and what they want. Unless we do the same for men, we condemn them to reacting to the world through preordained bodily pressures, with far nastier consequences for everyone else. If we call a man brutish we might have a very specific image in mind about what kind of person he is, or how he has acted on some occasion. The same could be said if we call a woman bossy. But who benefits, and at what cost?
If toxic masculinity is antithetical to what a good man should be, what exactly is the opposite of toxic masculinity? It was not hard to find examples of famously nontoxic men on the Internet in the 2010s. People were looking for a different kind of male hero. Former pro football players and movie stars often headed the lists of the most nontoxic masculine men; the point seemed to be that you could be a big, strong guy and still not want to mistreat women and other men. Fair enough. Still, we continued to operate in restricted air space: you flew as masculine or feminine (presumably based on your equipment), and your only choice was what kind of masculine or feminine.
The whole point of talking about toxic masculinity is, or should be, to critique a form of noxiousness that employs masculinity to make its point and enforce its rule. It’s a good thing that the term “toxic masculinity” came into being: it’s a jolting critique that captures pernicious and harmful male behavior. Perhaps the phrase “male behavior” still slides too easily into thinking there’s something about being male, but toxic masculinity provides us with a way to talk about particular kinds of widespread and destructive behavior that is especially associated with certain forms of maleness. We need this kind of language if we are to address gender inequalities. But caution is also warranted, so we don’t go digging for roots to the problem that don’t exist, in this case an imagined inherent need for men to embody good or bad kinds of masculinity.
We sometimes say certain attributes are especially manly or womanly, or we associate particular ways of interacting with gender. We may think of cooperation as feminine, for example, and of domination as masculine. But if the goal is simply to alter the trait list for what constitutes masculinity, we remain stuck in the same binary gender ruts. By buying into the idea that alternative, nontoxic masculinities should emphasize cooperation over domination, we are essentially arguing that men, because they are men, have to act in masculine ways, so let’s expand the definition of what masculine can include.
Neither cooperation nor domination has to be embedded in gender, however. And really, there is no mandatory requirement for the labels “masculinity” and “femininity” in the first place. They have been central to human relationships, but they are not ultimately essential to them. They can be diverting to play with, but they can be tremendous burdens. In the end, we do not need separate trait lists for masculine and feminine any more than we do for left-handers versus right-handers. To maintain these beliefs in gendered ways only helps to perpetuate unhelpful explanations that drag us back into identifying every behavior as either masculine or feminine, a framework that only makes sense if their distinct biologies oblige men to operate within one set of parameters and women another.
Gender confusion has stirred more than a few women and men to speak out against the abuses of powerful men and their personal and social ways of domination. These voices have made clear that their distress is widespread and deep, and it has led to righteous protest throughout the world. Growing numbers of women and men have sought ways to explain, without excusing, the behavior of these men. Disentangling taken-for-granted ideas about men’s natures, their bodies, and their biologies is at the heart of addressing the distress arising from gender confusion.
The extent to which popular scientific frameworks about men, maleness, and male sexuality and aggression permeate our thinking is alarming. A major 2006 World Bank document on men, masculinity, and gender in development instructs us in this way:
The concept of alpha and beta males has come to social science from animal biology, particularly the study of primates. Consider the notion that beta males may be systematically overlooked within their social structures (or within the social structures on whose sidelines they lurk). These may include men who are homeless, alcoholic, imprisoned, mentally ill, disabled, or just plain socially inept. The image conveyed by a range of derogatory terms in English—geek, loser, nerd—is clearly that of a male.
Indeed, much of the focus on gender inequality in contemporary societies comes from comparing the alpha, or “winner” males, with the situation of women.”14
If theories of nonhuman primate categories like alpha and beta males are used by the World Bank to guide its personnel in how to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in gender equity aid, and through this report to suggest that human male behavior is directly connected to biological and evolutionary presumptions, we’re beginning from a perilous starting point. If alpha male primates have something to tell us not only about men’s violence and sexuality, but about their migratory patterns, their fathering conduct, their leadership techniques, and their food preferences, life expectancy, hygienic habits, and speaking and sitting styles, then remedial efforts are crippled out of the gate. In particular, comparing human males with the males of other primates in a book about human men and masculinities requires a narrowly biologistic framework that can never fully or adequately explain individual differences among Homo sapiens males.
More egregiously, by associating “alpha males” across the animal kingdom as social “winners,” the report’s editors, Ian Bannon and Maria C. Correia, fail to address an entire literature showing the physiological implications of being an alpha or beta male primate: one team of baboonologists, for example, reports that “alpha males exhibited much higher stress hormone levels than second-ranking (beta) males, suggesting that being at the very top may be more costly than previously thought.” Stress, hypertension, suppressed immune function, mental health issues, and injuries from attempts to unseat presiding alpha males are some of the risk factors they face.15
Not only do the World Bank’s pronouncements about men and women have major repercussions for development funding throughout the world, but they showcase the prevailing ideas about men undergirding the thinking of men (and a few women) who wield leadership power in finance, government, industry, and every other aspect of social life in every corner of the globe. It would have been one thing to slip in the phrase “alpha male”—it’s hackneyed, but nothing worse than that. To evoke alpha maleness in an extended cross-species comparison trespasses into altogether more dangerous territory.
Discussing this circular reasoning to reinforce preconceptions, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote about the use and abuse of biology, including the relationship between human and nonhuman animal behavior and the reiterative history of comparative animal studies. “Since the seventeenth century,” he said, “we seem to have been caught up in this vicious cycle, alternately applying the model of capitalist society to the animal kingdom, then reapplying this bourgeoisfied animal kingdom to the interpretation of human society.”16
If we expect men to act in certain ways because they are males, and think that males of all primate species have special, circumscribed, common ways of going about in the world, then how can we resist the temptation to explain and excuse male sexual assaults (and participation in war, and much else) except by recourse to biological reasoning? Writing against claims of cross-species “rape,” for instance, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has said that using “the word rape to describe animal behavior robs it of the notion of will, and when the word, so robbed, once again is applied to humans, women find their rights of consent and refusal missing. Rape becomes just one more phenomenon in the natural world, a world in which natural and scientific, rather than human, laws prevail.”17
The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s activated a revolution in scholarship about women, and later about men. Because anthropology is in many ways the most commodious of disciplines, covering everything from human origins to gossip to power to sex in every nook and cranny on earth, second-wave feminists looked early on to anthropologists to answer several questions:
Have men always dominated women in every society and historical period in the world, and is this therefore a human universal?
When, how, and why does male authority become characteristic of human relationships?
What significant variations on these themes could anthropologists uncover that might be chalked up to cultural particularity?
Early books by feminist anthropologists tackled cross-cultural issues like the public and private lives of women and men: Did women in some societies have more power in households than they did society-wide? Or emotions: Were women and men hardwired differently, or were the differences mainly cultural? And questions of power in general: Were men in charge everywhere and throughout history? If you could find significant exceptions to this general state of affairs, then you could prove it was not some essential and irreversible part of human social arrangements. If you couldn’t, some argued, that proved something basic about evolution and inevitability.
Among the earliest and boldest of the insurgent anthropologists was Sherry Ortner. In a 1972 essay read widely by scholars and activists alike—and one that could have been the inspiration for Martha Nussbaum’s 2018 Brett Kavanaugh piece—Ortner argued that “the secondary status of woman in society is one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact.” Her purpose, she stressed, went far beyond mere academics: “I wish to see genuine change come about, the emergence of a social and cultural order in which as much of the range of human potential is open to women as it is open to men.”18
The reason women and men went along with the order of things, and had since time immemorial, she said, rested on ingrained cultural thinking that accepted women’s inferior status in running the affairs of state and socially significant institutions. A few simple examples illustrate her point: in 2018, nearly five decades after Ortner wrote her essay, less than 20 percent of the 115th US Congress were women; since 1789, only 52 US senators had been women. Moreover, in 2018, only twenty-five women were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. In Mexico, women got the vote in 1947, but only at the municipal level. It was not until 1953 that they could vote for president and stand for elections. And not until 1983 were they welcome in cantinas.
It would be hard to question Ortner’s position that women’s leadership was and still is devalued in the United States and other societies. Rwanda, which has the highest percentage of women (a majority) in its national parliament, has arrived there through stringent quotas demanded by foreign powers. To extend Ortner’s analysis: it is not biology that leads to the second-class status of women in every society, but cultural prejudice, complicity, and indolence.
Yet Ortner went further, insisting not only that men were universally identified more closely than women with culture, but that women were symbolically associated more often with nature. In English, we talk about Mother Nature, not Father Nature. Beginning with women’s bodies and their “natural” procreative functions, Ortner believed, women have always been tied to the reproduction of life, while men (who don’t have this creative ability) need to create culturally, socially, and politically.
This men-are-to-culture as women-are-to-nature thesis generated heated debate. Entire books were published critiquing Ortner for her concept. There is no universally accepted meaning of “nature,” for example, so it’s hard to say women are always more associated with it: it represents different things in different contexts. Counterexamples were easy to come by. Ortner’s conclusions rested on gender universals that looked increasingly problematic given the vast array of gender relationships and practices in the world and historically.19
Ortner developed her own response, though, in which she essentially doubled down on her original contentions but added an escape clause. In a 1996 essay, she concluded that universal male dominance was an accurate characterization, and that her symbolic association of men with culture and women with nature was correct. However, she now added, all these identities and beliefs represented, more than anything else, “an unintended consequence of social arrangements designed for other purposes.”
Early divisions of labor in hunter-gatherer groups were influenced by who gets pregnant, experiences childbirth, and lactates versus who does not, with those who do not presumably more available for roaming after game. It all snowballed over the millennia, with men fulfilling many functions and needs on larger and larger social scales, to a point where men directed governance and commerce everywhere and always. No one set out to do this, there was no intent on the part of men to seize power from women; but just as certainly, explanations were developed by men and women to justify and promote this gendered arrangement, and, as Ortner supposes, “men as it were lucked out.”20
Is that all there is to it then? Does the patriarchy come down to no more than a matter of luck? To some extent, and fortunately, it does. Because the alternative explanations as to why men are in charge could be that there is something predetermined by God or by DNA. Inequality, oppression, and patriarchy are not inherent in gender divisions of labor at the level of societies any more than in families. But they can be, and there’s the rub. We can all go around believing in the inevitability of men being in charge as the normal state of affairs, like it or not, defend it or not. But among the things that distinguish human animals from the other kinds is the ability to take stock of situations and change attitudes and behavior in radical directions.
And we humans can directly address certain physical factors that have contributed to this long-standing gender division of labor. For starters, although it takes parts from a man and a woman to make a woman pregnant, and women, not men, give birth and nurse—we can change several of these “facts of life.” There is nothing stopping men from feeding their babies and being the primary caregivers for their children or adopting children of their own. Especially in the twentieth century, more than ever before in human and animal history, sexual reproduction became changeable in ways never before imagined. Indeed, by the end of the twenty-first century, it may become possible for men to give birth and lactate under certain circumstances (for example, with uterine transplantation or an artificial uterus, combined with hormone treatments). It is inconceivable that male chimpanzees (or bonobos, for that matter) could be taking on primary child-rearing duties in one hundred years. Maternal mortality went from a serious challenge for women worldwide as recently as 1900 to a problem for women lacking access to good health care in 2000. Although there is still a long way to go, especially among marginalized populations, reproduction and reproductive health for billions of women globally has been seriously improved over the past one hundred years—among other things, allowing for new opportunities to bridge male/female divides that we may have long assumed were inevitable, and opening up new possibilities for our understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality for people of all kinds. It’s not hard to see that until fairly recently, when modern, reliable forms of birth control for human females became available, women had a lot more reason to be “choosy” about how often they had sex and with whom, and that over the centuries this choosiness could easily be mistaken for something natural in human females.
With these changes and the social and political pressures of the world of the future, gender divisions of labor could be contested as never before in human history. Indeed, they have been challenged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the changes we have already seen. At this fortuitous moment in the history of scientific advances relating to human reproduction, it would be terrible, in my opinion, to hang onto outmoded ways of thinking about men and women that would otherwise interfere with the fullest possible expression of new gender identities and ways of sharing activities like child care.
Whether men have been fortunate or not to wield authority down through the ages, Ortner’s analysis of men lucking out is much more satisfactory than assuming men are animalistic machines who lack women’s supposedly innate and fundamental ability to nurture their offspring, much less to control their own inoperable inner impulses. As the fable goes, the elephant got its long trunk when one day a crocodile pulled on a youngster’s previously much shorter nose. Ever since then, elephants have had stretched-out snouts. That’s known as a just-so story. Boys will be boys because they’re made that way, they will always be that way, and they can’t help themselves any more than mallard ducks can around female ducks. That’s another just-so story.
Beyond the fact that culture and nature mean different things to different people, and whether men have ever actually been more associated with culture (whatever that means) and women with nature (the same), today it is worth considering the extent to which this association is often the reverse in the popular imagination. To be sure, rational and scientific thought is still widely considered more masculine than feminine—and emotions more feminine than masculine. Yet without falling into the opposite overreach, we could also conclude that in crucial respects in many parts of the overly biologized world, men are now popularly linked to nature, in that their sexuality and aggression are said to originate in their barely controllable bodies. Women are widely expected to provide cultural balance to counteract men’s animality, so that men can’t do more social and familial harm than they would if left to their own devices.
How and when men are considered closer to nature than women today in Shanghai, Mexico City, or Providence, Rhode Island, is related in no small part to people believing in this kind of gender fatalism. Any belief system that places the males of our species beyond the pale, picturing them as powerless to change, puts one hell of a historical burden on our boys—and our girls.
Why does so much of this naturalized folk biology about men pass muster with the same people who righteously decry histories that compare nonwhite peoples to nonhuman animals, or that degrade Africans as rapacious predators, Chinese as swarming ants, and Jews as rats—and who rightly criticize the president of the United States for saying, of undocumented Mexicans, “These aren’t people. These are animals.” The righteousness often slips into playful jest, however, when it comes to comparisons of males in human and other species. There’s just something about those men and their antics, sexual and aggressive, that seems to lend itself to spontaneous mockery. All well and good, and no doubt cathartic, when the issue is to make fun of those holding the most powerful positions in society. But when the jokes about men come to stand for comprehensive and concise analysis of them as a homogeneous category (and not just powerful men), we run the risk of living out our predictions; perhaps most importantly, we in effect tell men that although we may not approve of this or that attribute, we also understand that they in some ways can do little other than submit their corporeal selves to evolution’s dictates, animal urges, lascivious impulses, and bellicose inclinations.21
In the United States, the cowboy has a long and emblematic history representing a certain kind of stoic, rugged, masculine allure. The same symbol works with the Mexican vaquero, and in fact the folklorist Américo Paredes has traced the origins of the cult of machismo in Mexico to the American cowboy. At one with the untamed outdoors, the cowboy image is usually completed with a horse and a magnificent, mountainous landscape in the background. The American cowboy came to be complemented by the civilizing influence of the female schoolmarm. Whatever you think nature is, cowboys might be as close as you can get to it. Schoolmarms, on the other hand, were uniquely cultured and educated. This gendered archetype has had a profound impact on the social imagination: that there are more Hollywood westerns set in the nineteenth century than there are World War I movies is testament to the prominent position of the uncivilized cowboy in society.22
Now I suppose there isn’t anything necessarily natural about every cowboy, or inescapably cultural about every schoolmarm. But by popular consensus, these associations work. Whether popular culture provides a mirror in which we are our reflections, or images of cowboys and schoolmarms themselves plant these ideas, is something that hardly matters. Commonly shared language and representations are a vital part of making sense of the world, of relationships, of hierarchies, and of life lessons. So it may be worth noting an odd symmetry or similarity in everyday sayings in many parts of the world about a key part of the male anatomy: the testicles.
Commonplace sayings about testicles endure throughout the world, their meanings a ball of confusion. Take Mexico. If you say about someone, “El tiene muchos huevos,” you are saying he has a lot of balls (literally, eggs), which means the same thing in Spanish as it does in English. But you can also say, “Es un huevón,” he’s ballish/eggish, indicating a man is lazy. In both cases, meaning rests on the idea that a man’s testicles imbue him with his essential personal qualities, whether he is bold or lethargic. It hardly matters if you are saying something positive or negative about a man; what counts is that he has these organs and that these organs stipulate his very being and behavior.
In the same way, I am struck, and I will admit a bit disillusioned, every time I see a scene in a movie where a guy gets kicked, punched, or otherwise hit in the balls. Sure, it turns the tables when men are brought down symbolically. It’s funny to see someone get their comeuppance. What bothers me is the way this happens, because each time it also says that testicles are the soul of men and masculinity, and the way to motivate a man is through his groin. It’s not just in movies, of course, as boys often make a game of “goosing” each other, and men will involuntarily smile when a friend gets struck too hard in the groin in a game of pickup basketball.
We need to reexamine why this is all so amusing. Is it because men are so unable to control their hormonal inclinations on Mexico City’s Metro that they need to be penned off? Is it because men are intrinsically better at presiding over households that “leftover women” in China have every reason to be anxious? Is it because men are incorrigibly unreliable sex partners that birth control should be produced only for women? If men have an inborn urge to commit rape, is US vice president Mike Pence right not to eat alone with any woman who is not his wife? If so, maybe Mrs. Pence should be wary of dinner dates herself.
If testosterone really is the elixir of manly achievement, shouldn’t we be dosing our boys from birth? If untethered misogyny is deep-rooted in men, is Donald Trump merely revealing the id underneath all the other, more genteel leaders? If sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers shows men reverting to their involuntary sexual and aggressive drives, should women-only contingents form all UN missions?
The #MeToo movement gained widespread visibility in 2017 on a surge of rage, powered by women who had been sexually abused, assaulted, and harassed by men. If we choose to embrace the idea that attacking women is central to men’s entrenched instincts and identity, the battle has no winners. If we accept that violence is a core feature rather than a flaw of male behavior, and that assault is men’s essential nature reasserting itself, we cripple our ability to identify and combat misogyny, gender bias, and discrimination. The day we see a boy or a man kicked in the balls and it is not funny, we will know we’ve made some progress.
We can do better, and we need to ask more from modern masculinities. We owe it to our daughters, our sons, and ourselves to reeducate our brains, our institutions, and our public policy to recognize that men are so much more capable and complex than today’s summary judgments on the biology of masculinity would have us believe.