NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. As will become obvious, often in these endnotes I delve into more scholarly tangents and recondite matters. In addition to providing references, my purpose is to expand discussion of less essential but still intriguing points; to give the original of a term that I have translated from another language; and to offer special thanks to specific colleagues who have suggested a particular interpretation, example, or quotation. I hope the notes will be helpful, suggestive, and entertaining.

For the Newsweek article, see Dovy 2018. The original scientific paper is “Negative Correlation Between Salivary Testosterone Concentration and Preference for Sophisticated Music in Males,” by Doi et al. 2018. The purpose of the academic study was “to clarify the biological basis of individual differences in music preference.” Hormones were the biological factor of choice. The researchers could not explain why they found no correlation between testosterone levels and music preference in thirty-nine women. Despite the fact that the original study lumped classical, world, and jazz music together under the category of “sophisticated,” it’s anybody’s guess as to why Newsweek selected jazz and not classical as the “sophisticated music” linked to low levels of testosterone. Could it be that jazz in the United States is more associated with African Americans and classical with whites?

2. I sometimes use the term “we” loosely in this book, a shorthand way of discussing ideas and activities that are widespread although not universal. Academic texts usually shun such sweeping inclusiveness. But a central point I am trying to make is that more of us share fallacious beliefs about men and masculinity than we might like to admit, so let’s not disregard the possibility of our own involvement in problematic approaches to maleness.

3. Bruni 2016; Isaacson 2017; Parker 2010; Bernstein 2017; Blow 2017; Burke 2016, 28.

4. As far as I can tell, the term “biobabble” comes from Krugman 1997.

5. Sapolsky 2005, 49.

6. Vargas Llosa 1978, 8.

7. I should perhaps qualify this statement: the anthropologist of war Brian Ferguson (personal communication) believes there is evidence in the Black Sea, Dahomey, and other regions of ancient groups of women warriors. The fact remains that in none of these instances were women ruling society overall.

8. My thanks to Michael Kimmel for this insight.

9. “Search for the ideal man”: xunzhao nanzihan, . The adage in Chinese is Gou gaibuliao chi shi, . My thanks again to Mengqi Wang for suggesting this expression to me.

I debated leaving out the Chinese characters and transliterations of Chinese terms and names in this book. After all, with a little work and ingenuity those who know Chinese could figure out the original Chinese on their own. And then I traveled back to China and was again struck by the amount of English that is found on street signs, shops, metros, elevator speakers, restaurants, and newspapers. All this has no doubt made English just a little less daunting for those in China who have never formally studied it. I decided that if readers found the Chinese characters too annoying, they could easily skip over them. We English speakers need to grow more accustomed to foreign tongues and writing. After all, who could read the following Chinese banners along the sidelines at the World Cup 2018?

So, in the spirit of “Okja” and submersing oneself in foreign languages, to the more adventurous reader, I ask you to spend a little time looking at the characters. They won’t bite, and you might even make a bit of sense of them with practice. That said, they’re mostly in the endnotes.

10. On Uganda, see Heald 1999; on Europe, see Laqueur 1990.

CHAPTER 1: GENDER CONFUSION

1. Kimmel 1994, 131 (emphasis in original).

2. Trump tweeted on July 26, 2018, 5:55 a.m. and 6:04 a.m.: “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow… [t]ransgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.”

3. Take these examples: “People in the United States no longer know how to change a sparkplug.” You have to remind yourself that “people” means just men. Or, “Bengals fans decided that they should bring their children and leave the wives at home” (where “fans” really means “male fans”). Or, “A majority of professors voted to admit their female colleagues as members of the faculty club” (where “professors” really means “male professors”). On the terms “marked” and “unmarked,” see Waugh 1982.

4. Rubin 1984, 4.

5. Best-selling author Jordan Peterson was an inspiration to incels during this period. See Peterson 2018.

6. See Marks 2015, 91.

7. Hofstadter 1992 [1944], 204. It is no coincidence that Hofstadter was involved in radical left political activities in his youth.

8. See Milam 2019, 7–8.

9. De Beauvoir 1970 [1949], 29. Not accidentally, de Beauvoir titled her first chapter “The Data of Biology.”

10. Wilson 2000 [1975], 547. Notably, Anne Harrington writes that in the 1980s psychiatry in the United States became a biological discipline. See Harrington 2019. Wilson claims feminist credentials of sorts. As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2014, quoting Wilson, “‘Ants don’t offer any good moral lessons or any lessons about organization,’ he says. ‘All ants that you see are female, and you know, I’m an ardent feminist, but that’s feminism run amok.’ Male ants are allowed to be with females only for a short time. ‘They have only one function in the colony and in life itself, which you don’t want to expatiate in The Wall Street Journal,’ he says with a smile.” See Wolfe 2014.

11. Wilson 2004 [1978], x, 38.

12. Prum 2017, 81.

13. I regret that I am not exaggerating how far Wilson extended his purview. On the second page of his 697-page book, he explicitly criticizes the views about biology (and “socialism”) raised by “Marxists,” “Old Marxists,” and the “New Left” (2000 [1975], vi). Contra a basic tenet of every brand of feminism, Wilson also argues that “even with identical education for men and women and equal access to all professions, men are likely to maintain disproportionate representation in political life, business, and science” (2004 [1978]:103). Many have made this point about the politics and science of these white southerners and northern Jews, including, recently, Sapolsky 2017, 384.

14. On the muxe’, see, especially, Miano Borruso 2002 and Stephen 2002.

15. Cited in Miano Borruso 2002, 149.

16. Among his many publications on the Sambia, see Herdt 1994.

17. Herdt 1994, 3, 304.

18. On the hijras, see, especially, Reddy 2005.

19. Marx 1977 [1844].

20. Pinker 2002, 351.

21. See Pinker 2002. We will look more closely at this and other analyses of rape in Chapter 5.

22. King James Version.

23. It goes without saying that the Southern Baptists are hardly alone in insisting that men lead and women follow. Catholics do not have female priests any more than Orthodox Jews, with rare exceptions, have women rabbis.

24. See Fausto-Sterling et al. 2015. Though this is a study of mothers and infants, I am confident that its conclusions would apply perhaps even more to fathers and infants.

CHAPTER 2: THE SCIENCE OF MALENESS

1. The numbers are an approximation as there is little regulation in this industry. In 2014, Time magazine ran an article by David Von Drehle, “Manopause?! Aging, Insecurity and the $2 Billion Testosterone Industry.” See Von Drehle 2014.

2. On the history of sex hormone research and its applications, I draw especially on Oudshoorn 1994 and 2003 and Fausto-Sterling 2000.

3. Especially helpful in understanding the science and social implications of testosterone are Hoberman 2005 and Sapolsky’s essay “The Trouble with Testosterone” (in Sapolsky 1997) and his 2017 magnum opus Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. See also the very different treatments in Fine 2017; Herbert 2015; and Morgentaler 2009.

4. As for warning labels, the marketing firm Global Industry Analysts advises, in its 203-page report of February 2018, that there are “growing concerns over cardiovascular risk of TRT,” and that such heart problems could represent “a key challenge to growth” of TRT in all global markets. The firm is also surprisingly quiet in responding to popular beliefs about testosterone, especially that higher levels of the hormone may cause more aggressive behavior and sexual predation by men. Regardless, sales have boomed because of the growing sense among older men that their happiness and value are tied to maintaining youthful bodies. See Global Industry Analysts, Inc., 2018.

5. Hoberman 2005, 25, 27.

6. Herbert 2015, 22.

7. Oudshoorn 1994, 17.

8. Sapolsky 1997.

9. In his benchmark 2006 survey of the scientific literature on testosterone, British endocrinologist John Archer writes, “There is a weak and inconsistent correlation between testosterone levels and aggression in [human] adults, and… administration of testosterone to volunteers typically does not increase their aggression.” See Archer 2006, 320. Just to make matters more complicated, neuroscientist Lise Eliot writes that “growing evidence suggests that the neurotransmitter serotonin is actually a better marker than testosterone for aggression and violence” (2009, 269).

10. See discussion in Sapolsky 2017, 106. Biological anthropologists are largely in accord with these conclusions. Primatologist Agustín Fuentes, for instance, notes that “testosterone itself is not associated in any causal way with increased aggressive behavior or in the patterns of the exhibition of aggression” (2012, 143). Richard Bribiescas writes that “increases in testosterone are not associated with greater aggression or libido,” adding that the range of testosterone levels among American men is “quite extreme, with tenfold differences between the highest and lowest men without any apparent pathological effects” (2006, 132, 169).

11. Eliot 2009, 268.

12. Herbert 2015, 116–118, 143, 194.

13. See Alex Jones’s advertising on his InfoWars store website for men interested in “Super Male Vitality.”

14. Hershatter 1996, 90.

15. Furthermore on the biology of Low T, it is important to remember that what “low” means is always relative to some other “high.” In the United States, the lows of men in their fifties and beyond are being compared to the highs of men in their twenties. On average, the testosterone levels of men in the United States begin declining in their thirties by approximately 1 percent per year, or roughly 10 percent per decade. This process is directly correlated with greater rates of obesity as men age. This much is known. But also notable is the fact that although average testosterone levels drop for men in the United States, this is not universally true. In studies among pastoralists in Kenya, for instance, average levels remain far more constant for men into old age. (My thanks to Benjamin Campbell for help in understanding how and why testosterone levels are different in older men in different countries and nutritional settings. For more information, see Campbell et al. 2006.)

What all this means—for sexual interest and abilities, energy levels, and more—is debatable. Men grow more obese, and for some reason they don’t realize that their more sedentary lives and worsening diets could be leading factors in simultaneously decreasing their energy and libido. Yet, instead of altering their diet and activities to offset these changes in physiology, a growing number of men in the United States have resorted to seeking medical boosts to their testosterone levels: most of those who do (60 percent) use gels they wipe into their armpits, whereas 25 percent prefer injections and another 12 percent apply patches.

16. Richardson 2013, 201. My discussion of genetics, genomics, and sex differences is guided by this study.

17. See Jordan-Young 2010, 79; Richardson 2013, 225.

18. Oates 1988, 69–70.

19. Bartra 2014, 180.

20. Hofstadter 1992 [1944], 164.

21. Duden and Samerski 2007, 168.

22. Fausto-Sterling 1992, 269.

23. Raine 2013, 33; Connell 2000, 22.

24. Cooper and Smith 2011, 9; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014, 11.

25. Ibid., 85.

26. And, of course, like-minded scientists squabble even among themselves. Joe Herbert writes about digit ratios that “lesbian women overall have more male-like ratios than heterosexual ones. But in males there is no difference between gay and straight men” (2015, 51).

27. Raine 2013, 194–198. Importantly, the 2D:4D hypothesis may be headed for the archives. Recent meta-analysis surveying all major scientific work on this conjecture concluded, “We find no evidence of 2D:4D better predicting aggression at different levels of risk” (Hönekopp and Watson 2011, 381); see also Wong and Hines 2016. My thanks to Agustín Fuentes for guiding me to these two papers.

Another whole line of inquiry darts between humans and other primates to draw out evolutionary lessons on the origins of male violence. We will review the accuracy and utility of such comparisons more closely in Chapter 3.

28. Austen 2016.

29. See Marks 2002 on the significance or not of “shared DNA.”

CHAPTER 3: MONKEY SEE, HUMAN DO

1. One could also draw parallels to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s discussion of identity, comparing Enlightenment thinkers with those who lump together and see the common humanity in all of us, versus those who stress identity politics and in this way, according to Appiah, overstate differences between people. See Appiah 2018.

2. My thanks to Gail Mummert for reminding me that “ox” (buey) here has a double meaning: as a beast of burden and as a fool.

4. See Pierson 2005.

5. Leach 1964, 152. Regarding Leach, then again, perhaps the matter is more one of longing. As John Berger famously wrote in Why Look at Animals?, “In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy” (2009, 21).

In Spanish, goats are cabrones; dogs are perros; donkeys are burros; pigs are cochinos; rats are ratas; a beast is a bestia; a cow a vaca; a slut a zorra; and worms are gusanos.

The Chinese: duck, ya, ; chicken, ji, . For those interested, there are various theories as to why men here might be compared to ducks and women to chickens. The most likely, if least salacious, is that a homophone for chicken (ji) is used in more formal expressions for female prostitutes ( and , changji and jinü); if so, “duck” could simply be part of the wordplay with another familiar fowl. Also in Chinese, dinosaurs, konglong, ; frogs, wa, ; a turtle egg, wangbadan, ; and monkeys, houzi, .

6. See, especially, Darwin 2009 [1872]. Descartes’s term was bête-machine.

7. Milam 2019, 227.

8. Translational sticklers object to this rendering of Lévi-Strauss, insisting that the closer translation would be “Animals are good to think.” The original French reads, “Les espèces sont choisies non comme bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à penser.” In English, see Lévi-Strauss 1971 [1963], 89. And if you want to get even sticklier, really, “espèces” literally means “species” in English, though this is often translated (in context) to mean “animals.”

Our deeply obsessive, sometimes neurotic, and perhaps even incestuous relationship with nonhuman animals had also already caught the attention of Sigmund Freud, who wrote about totemism and human-animal affiliations in a long-discredited lumping of “savages and neurotics.” See Freud 1990 [1913].

9. Nagel 1974. Then there’s the fanciful comparison made by Jordan Peterson (2018, 7) between humans and lobsters. The commonalities? Men and lobsters need territory and safe hiding places, are sometimes soft and vulnerable, and, “like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western,” sometimes wave their arms about to look tall and dangerous. If you try hard enough, you can compare men to anything.

10. Albee 2000, especially 80, 82, and 86 (emphasis in original). Edward Albee’s Martin was drawn into his human-animal-divinity love affair through the eyes of Sylvia the goat. Getting naked with Sylvia was how Martin expressed his devotion to the goat. Perhaps Albee’s tableau is not markedly dissimilar from a notorious scene described by philosopher Jacques Derrida (2002, 372), when the Frenchman was confronted naked by a pet cat. The sage reported his deep shame before “the insistent gaze of the animal.”

11. De Waal 2001, 295.

12. De Waal 2013, 12.

13. See also Richard Prum’s delightful discussion of the variability of ape sex in his Evolution of Beauty (2017).

14. Interview with Frans de Waal by author, March 10, 2014, Yerkes Laboratory, Atlanta, Georgia.

15. Interview, March 10, 2014.

16. De Waal 1999, 260.

17. Interview, March 10, 2014.

18. Hrdy 2000, 80.

19. Hrdy 2009, 3; interview with Sarah Hrdy by author, May 5, 2014, La Citrona Farms, Winters, California. She also writes, “The last outstanding distinction between us and other apes involves a curious packet of hypersocial attributes that allow us to monitor the mental states and feelings of others” (2009, 9).

20. Hrdy 2009, 162, 168.

21. Jordan-Young 2010, 118.

22. See Zuk 2002, 51.

23. See Hrdy 2000, 82, referring to Hrdy 1981.

24. Hrdy 2000, 92, 90.

25. Prum 2017, 277 (emphasis in original).

26. Fuentes 2012, 14.

27. King James Version.

28. One of the more cited sources is Larry L. Wolf’s 1975 “‘Prostitution’ Behavior in a Tropical Hummingbird,” in which he writes, “Since sexual behavior in these cases is being used for [sic] an energetic benefit for the female, I term this ‘prostitution’ behavior.” Would it be unfair to ask what Wolf knows about human prostitution? At least he had the good graces to put “prostitution” in scare quotes. On harems, this word is used by virtually every primatologist, although they appear to know nothing of human harems and have encountered only primates whose dominant males have sex with many females. The notion that this arrangement was completely one-sided, “in favor” of the males, and that these same females were having sex only with the alpha male, turns out in many instances to have been an artifact of primatologist bias and not what was occurring on the ground. Nonetheless, now that we have untold documentation of female primates having sex with many males (and not a few females), no one, as far as I know, talks of females manipulating harems of males. That would apparently just spoil the salacious (covetous?) fun of our human male observers. A standard text used to compare male mallard ducks and humans is Barash 1980.

29. Prum 2017, 172–173 (emphasis in original).

30. Pinker 2002, 163.

31. See Marks 2002, 29.

32. De Waal 1999, 258.

33. De Waal 2013, 60 (emphasis in original). For a discussion of this issue for general readers, see de Waal 2016, 26; for a more academic analysis, see de Waal 1999.

34. For a searing exposé on exaggerated analogies between ant and human behavior, see Gordon 2010, 1, 4. Gordon is a biologist of ants.

35. De Waal 2016, 13.

36. Gould 1995, 433.

37. In response to reading a journal article sharply critiquing anthropomorphism in microbiology (Davies 2010), a student of mine wrote that microbes “most likely” don’t have a sense of agency, revealing again the allure of biological explanations (and my failure as a teacher).

CHAPTER 4: THE MALE LIBIDO

1. Eliot 2009, 300.

2. I went to talk with my colleague about the slides and learned that he had removed the one with cheerleaders from the latest version of the lecture, and that the whole football players / cheerleaders finale had been used mainly to prompt discussion and debate among the students. I raised my concerns about overdrawn parallels and we agreed to continue discussing these issues.

3. Spain: Brandes 1980; Morocco: Mernissi 1987; Indonesia: Heider 1976.

4. Among the many studies at the time that found differences between women and men in visual sexual stimuli, see Fisher and Byrne 1978 and Malamuth 1996. See also the history of the science of gendered visual stimulation in Jordan-Young 2010, Chapter 6.

5. See Eliot 2009 and Jordan-Young 2010 on all questions related to sex and the brain.

6. Bribiescas 2006, 83.

7. Eliot 2009, 15 (emphasis in original).

8. Fausto-Sterling 2000, 52 (and throughout). Estimates vary, but Fausto-Sterling says 1.7 percent of all births are intersex babies, adding that this can’t be taken as an exact count (51). Ahmed and Rodie write, “Genital anomalies may occur as commonly as 1 in 300 births” (2010, 198). Either way, it is not an enormous percentage, and it could be argued therefore that intersexuality doesn’t significantly impact the idea that there are two kinds of sex organs. But that would also be like saying because the number of redheads in the world is less than 2 percent, we should ignore them as in any way reflective of hair color. Which would be a shame.

9. Joel 2011, 2. See also Joel 2016.

10. See Laqueur 1990, esp. 150.

11. Eliot 2009, 5, 6 (emphasis in original).

12. See Hyde 2005, 590.

13. Arizpe 1990, xv.

14. McNamara 1974, 108. I have conducted research with Mexfam, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) affiliate in Mexico, for decades, and I represent the third in four generations of my family to work with them. More details on the history of family planning, contraception, and indigenous midwives in Mexico are in Gutmann 2007.

15. The most famous is Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude, first published in 1949 and read by every generation of schoolchildren thereafter. It may be difficult for people from English-speaking countries to appreciate how one book could have been read by every literate person in a particular country. The only equivalent book that nearly everyone in the United States has read—and its content is not at all equivalent—might be The Cat in the Hat.

16. See Hirsch 2003. Hirsch and Nathanson (2001, 413) point out that withdrawal as a form of birth control has been incorrectly classified as a “traditional” method (in contrast to “modern” methods). As they report, dichotomous taxonomies of traditional and modern don’t do justice to the evocative contours that men and women who have practiced withdrawal use to describe it.

17. A program officer from the National Science Foundation, with whom I had some correspondence in the early 2000s on vasectomies in Mexico, informed me that he thought a research project on the subject was unnecessary, because one could easily correlate vasectomy rates to macho and non-macho cultures around the world. This was a culturalist a priori explanation that, if followed to its logical conclusion, would provide metrics for how macho a culture might be. In the United Kingdom at that time, 18 percent of men had supposedly been sterilized; in Mexico, the figure was closer to 2 percent. Therefore, I queried, did he think the UK was nine times less macho? At least his argument rested on grounds other than men’s inherent biology.

18. Statistics are reprinted in Pile and Barone 2009, 298.

19. One sociodemographic factor did correlate to men’s decision to get sterilized: “paridad satisfecha,” i.e., when a man decided he had as many children as he wanted.

20. See Viveros 2002 on the study of vasectomies and men’s sexual and reproductive health generally in Latin America.

21. Sprinkle children around: dejar hijos regados.

22. On the sterilization campaign in India, see, especially, Gwatkin 1979 and Tarlo 2003, as well as Mistry’s brilliant 1997 novel A Fine Balance.

23. My friend told me she had not heard about Freud’s famous essay on the “Wolf Man” that recounted a similar historical basis for infantile neurosis. See Freud 1995 [1918].

24. Jordan-Young 2010, 132.

CHAPTER 5: MEN’S NATURAL AGGRESSIONS

1. In his 411 BC play, Aristophanes famously had women withhold sex until their men had found a way to make peace in the Peloponnesian War. Spike Lee (2015) did something similar to stop gang wars in Chicago in the time of the Iraq War. In response to the fascist advance in Spain in the 1930s, Virginia Woolf issued a feminist call to antiwar arms in Three Guineas (1938), asking how women could oppose the wars of men. In her essay on war photography, Susan Sontag (2002) concludes, “We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is—and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine.”

2. On gendered crime, violence, and aggression, see Kruttschnitt 2013 and Collins 2008; and on these issues and cross-cultural variation in male violence against women, see also Fuentes 2012 and Smuts 1992.

3. Smuts 1992, 31–32.

4. For a claim to the now largely discredited “selfish gene,” see Dawkins 1976. Wrangham and Peterson (1996) write about demonic males, blurring boundaries in the name of cross-species male esprit de corps. The role of the rise of agriculture in the decline of humanity is discussed in Diamond 1999. Carl von Clausewitz (1989 [1832]) argued that war should be understood less as unique and more as the militarized projection of politics.

5. This is a rough count, because a number of countries have qualified conscription, such as in case of emergencies or when the ranks cannot be filled by volunteers. Conscription is not enforced in some of these countries, and often there are mechanisms, such as lotteries, that select only a percentage of eligible young men. In many countries, there are legal exemptions and ways for wealthier youths to avoid participation in military life.

6. Among those required to register are “undocumented [male] immigrants” and “U.S. citizens or immigrants who are born male and have changed their gender to female.” On the other hand, “individuals who are born female and have changed their gender to male” are exempt from registering for a possible future draft by the US military. In other words, if you are male and between eighteen and twenty-five years old, and you sneak across the US-Mexican border, risking life and limb, coyote smugglers, and La Migra, upon arriving on the northern side of the international divide you are expected to dash off as quickly as you can to register for the draft of the country that has done its best to prevent you from entering. Young men residing without papers in the United States are simultaneously subject to both deportation and conscription by the US government. And if you are a transwoman, the fact that a lot of people might have thought you were male at some earlier point trumps anything you might know about yourself, while your trans brothers can never be draft-ready because they do not meet some fixed notion of manhood, whether genital, chromosomal, or morphological.

7. Fuller versions of the stories of Tina and Demond can be found in Gutmann and Lutz 2010, which is based on the oral histories of six antiwar veterans.

8. Years later he was able to return to school and finish a PhD in sociology at the City University of New York. In 2013, Demond began as an assistant professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

9. Herbert 2015, 147, 148.

10. Bribiescas 2006, 143, 222, 223. See also Bribiescas et al. 2012.

11. Brown 2014, 132.

12. Awori et al. 2013, 3.

13. Zeid 2005. I was part of a team that conducted interviews on SEA in 2007 with UN peacekeepers in Haiti, Lebanon, and Kosovo.

14. Interview with Daniel Morales, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, February 27, 2007.

15. Pinker 2002, 162 (emphasis in original).

16. And rarely does an intellectual and his scholarship get the praise and endorsement from influential corporate movers and shakers that Pinker has received from Bill Gates. See, for example, Galanes 2018.

17. Martin 2003, 378, critiquing Thornhill and Palmer 2000.

18. Joanna Bourke points out with respect to rape, “It is not simply that the statistics are not collected in a consistent or reliable manner. They cannot exist” (2007, 15).

19. Sanday 2003, 357. See also Kimmel 2003.

20. Herbert 2015, 101; Bourke 2007, 178.

21. Pinker 2002, 164, 162, 359–360, 369, 362.

22. Kipnis 2017, 8 (emphasis in original). Furthermore, Kipnis (2017, 14) called attention to one underexamined assumption in discussions of rape culture, namely, an underlying ethos that “men need to be policed, women need to be protected. If rape is the norm, then male sexuality is by definition predatory; women are, by definition, prey,” and women’s agency is effectively undermined.

23. Thornhill and Palmer 2000, 67. Why most poor men do not rape, well that is supposedly a mystery. Why rape rates vary from society to society and region to region is likewise evidently mysterious. One way to get around the thorny problem of not being able to back up any of these claims with hard evidence is, as many have noted, the invocation of the almighty conditional. To take a random page from the Thornhill and Palmer book, we read, “One probable reason why such men are likely…,” “physical attractiveness in men may have connoted…,” women “may receive few material benefits…,” “The female’s strategy might…,” “This display may…,” “which may increase the man’s perception…,” “may result in…,” “If a woman’s display…,” “would involve testing…,” “could be explored empirically.” All of which “calls for further research” (2000, 70, emphasis added). To which we can only add, Amen to that.

24. If only what Patty Gowaty declared in 2010 were true: “Because of the important differences between rape and forced copulations, those of us who study animal behavior agreed years ago to refer to ‘forced copulation’ in non-human animals, and to reserve the term ‘rape’ for humans” (2010, 760).

25. In order, Bekiempis 2015; Kingkade 2015; Filipovic 2015; “Many US College Men Deny” 2015; Culp-Ressler 2015 (emphasis in original). The academic in me can’t resist a few corrections: nowhere do the authors of the original study state where the students they studied were enrolled; the authors of the report did not all teach at the University of North Dakota; and for a subsequent news article in 2017, albeit on International Women’s Day that year, to talk about a 2014 study as “new” is a bit of a stretch. The scholarly article the news items refer to is Edwards et al. 2014.

26. Statistics here are culled from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. See www.nsvrc.org/statistics, which is updated regularly.

27. See Sanday 1981, 2003.

28. It will be recalled that forty-nine of fifty states voted for Nixon in 1972. Only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia voted for the Democratic candidate, George McGovern.

29. Bender 1970.

30. Some estimates state that as many as 90 percent of women in the United States will at some time suffer from premenstrual syndrome (PMS), and a much smaller number, perhaps 2–5 percent of these women, will regularly be wracked with the most severe symptoms, known as premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Legal claims in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and other countries have been made in recent years arguing that women who experienced PMS or PMDD during an illegal act should be exonerated or given lighter punishments because of their disorder. Although generally unsuccessful in getting clients entirely off for various crimes, including those involving violent outbursts directly linked by the lawyers to PMS and PMDD, these pleas may have resulted in lighter sentences.

Lawyers in these cases often declared that their clients’ PMS caused changed mental states, and because they did not have the requisite mens rea, or guilty intent, they should not be charged for the crimes committed. With PMDD becoming a full-fledged syndrome in DSM-V beginning in 2013, lawyers arguing for insanity, diminished capacity, or especially mitigating factors could offer greater legal foundation and could enjoy greater success.

There are serious questions to be raised as to whether the newly sanctified category of PMDD represents a step forward or a circling back to earlier concerns with women and hysteria. It’s hard not to be concerned that women are being stuffed back into the emotions-out-of-control box. “Each time the defense is accepted,” writes physician Laura Downs in recounting feminist fears about PMS claims in legal cases, “it lends credence to the characterization of women as creatures driven by hormonal whims” (2002, 6).

It is difficult to point to a correlation between menstrual cycles and aberrant behavior without sliding down the slippery slope to generalizing about women being unable to control their biological processes, their “hormonal limitations,” whether gynecological, endocrinological, or mental. In the workplace, in divorce hearings, and in the political arena, stigma and stereotyping associating women’s physiology with the uncontrollable leads to discrimination against, exclusion of, and inequality for women.

My thanks to my student Silvina Hernández for her research on PMS. Studies on legal cases involving PMS defenses include Press 1983; Lewis 1990; Solomon 1995; and Downs 2002.

31. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014, 77.

32. See Lutz 2009.

33. “Transcript” 2016.

34. The line by Xi (2012) in its original Chinese was: «Dang jing wu yiren shi nan’er, meishenma ren chulai kangzheng,» . Xi’s call to manliness had historical echoes as well for all assembled. During the tenth century in China there lived a concubine named Madame Huarui, also known as Consort Xu. She was a well-known poet when the dynasty of her emperor, Meng, was overthrown, and when she was asked by the new emperor, Taizu, to write a special verse to mark the dynastic succession, she is reported to have responded on the spot with a song:

The king on the rampart flies the white flag (junwang cheng shang shu jiangqi, ).
Deep within the palace how could I know?
(qie zai shen gong na de zhi, )
One hundred forty thousand all disarmed!
(shisi wan renqi jie jia, )
Among these was there not a single man?
(geng wu yige shi nan’er, )

My thanks to anthropologist Mengqi Wang for sharing this literary reference. The translation of the poem is by Anthony C. Yu (see Wikipedia entry for “Madame Huarui”).

Elanah Uretsky has a delicious illustration of the trials manly men face in China: they must be able to handle the “heat” of life. On the menu at a restaurant in Kunming, China, she spots Manly Fried Rice (nanzihan chaofan []). When Uretsky asks the proprietor of the establishment about the name, “she explained all the pressures contemporary Chinese men endure in their daily lives: ‘They have family pressures (jiating yali and social pressures (shehui yali that they deal with on a daily basis, which makes their lives very stressful.… A real nanzihan is a man who can eat such hot and spicy food without saying it’s hot.’” Uretsky 2016, 54.

The term from Major General Luo Yuan (Luo 2010) was «Yanggang zhi qi, hulang zhi shi,» .

CHAPTER 6: I AM, THEREFORE I THINK

1. Tiger 1984 [1969], 208; see also Dyble et al. 2015.

2. See “Report of the Committee” 2017. See also William Domhoff’s classic on the Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness, 1975.

3. This leaves aside situations in which there are too few facilities for women.

4. See Kogan 2010, and more generally, on the topic of gender and bathrooms, the entire collection in which this work appears, edited by Molotch and Norén (2010).

5. Grossman 2009, 175.

6. If this happened with an ultra-orthodox Muslim man on a plane, would it make a difference in the public imagination? Islamophobia in the name of defending Muslim women against the tyranny of their men is a widespread hypocritical dogma in the United States and other countries.

7. That is, between acoso and tocar.

8. “Pushes against you with his shrimp”: “Te arrima el camarón.”

9. Curious counterexample to the brute behavior of riders on the subway at rush hour: when the large jitneys called peseros pack as many as fifty people on during rush hour, it’s often easiest to board in the back, far away from the driver or assistant taking the fare. This then requires you to pass money forward, from hand to hand, involving as many as six or seven people, and if change is required, for it to come back the same way. One after another says, “Me lo pases” until the money reaches the driver. The politeness and consideration of strangers never fails, nor does the money ever fail to reach its recipient.

10. There are many scholarly writings in Mexico on men and masculinities. Among the ethnographies, reportage, and accounts that document the lives of men in Mexico are Fernando Huerta’s study of Volkswagen workers in Puebla (1999); Guillermo Núñez Noriega’s work on male identities and intimacy in northern Mexico (2014); Rodrigo Parrini’s study of male prisoners (2007); Carlos Monsiváis’s chronicles of sexuality and affect in Mexico (1988); and my own books on a Mexico City squatter settlement (2006 [1996]) and men’s sexual and reproductive health in Oaxaca (2007).

11. See Gutmann 2002, 229.

12. “Es molesto viajar aquí, pero no se compara con la violencia sexual que sufren las mujeres en sus traslados cotidianos.” A video was available via CNN. See “‘No es de hombres,’ la compaña contra la violencia sexual que intrigó a México,” CNN Español, March 31, 2017, cnnespanol.cnn.com/2017/03/31/no-es-de-hombres-la-campana-contra-la-violencia-sexual-que-intrigo-a-mexico.

13. “NoEsDeHombres Experimento Pantallas,” YouTube, Primera Vuelta Tamaulipas, posted March 30, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tngqqSUKBY.

14. See Brown 2006.

CHAPTER 7: FATHERING

1. Rich 1996, xi–xii.

2. Lewis 1963, 338; Yang 1945, 127–128. James Taggart reports the same kind of sleeping arrangements in the past in a rural area east of Mexico City, with “the youngest child sleeping with the mother on one mat, the father with one or two of the next youngest children on a second mat, and the other preadolescent children on as many other mats as are needed” (Taggart 1992, 78).

3. On this photo and several other anecdotes from Mexico City, see fuller discussions in Gutmann 2006 [1996].

4. See Hochschild 1989.

5. Mead 2001 [1928].

6. Parsons and Bales 1955.

7. On mother migrants and father left-behind caregivers in Southeast Asia, see Lam and Yeoh 2015; Thao 2015.

8. Quoted in Thao 2015, 146.

9. Luhrmann 2000, 8.

10. Prum 2017, 97. And, yes, I realize this is abusive anthropomorphism. I am not humorless when it comes to animal comparisons!

11. Birenbaum-Carmeli et al. 2015, 167, 168.

12. My thanks to my colleagues on the project, especially Lorena Santos, Anabel López, Ana Amuchástegui, Elyse Singer, and Florencia Barindelli, and to funding from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.

13. Winnicott 1953.

CHAPTER 8: REVERTING TO NATURAL GENDERS IN CHINA

1. “Women Hold Up Half the Sky”: «Funü neng ding banbiantian,» .

2. Zhang and Sun, 2014, 121.

3. Yang 1999, 50 65.

4. See Hong Fincher 2014; Davis 2010; Wang 2018.

5. Wang 2018, 87–88.

6. None of this is unique to China. Furious debates in the United States coinciding with the publication of Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg were echoed in China. Part of Sandberg’s bestseller’s appeal resided in the fact that she was the chief operating officer of Facebook. That affiliation was also coupled with anxieties experienced by younger women (and their parents) who wondered if women could “have it all,” and what that might mean in real life. Sandberg’s book was quickly translated into Chinese as Xiangqian yibu, (One step forward).

7. See Kam Louie’s literary work on Chinese masculinities, in particular his emphasis on achievement in scholarship and the fine arts alongside the martial arts as the quintessence of manliness in particular historical periods in China. Louie 2002, 2016.

Especially helpful in thinking about the gender binary in modern China are Brownell and Wasserstrom 2002; Barlow 2004; and Davis and Friedman 2014. The quip about a “cult of chastity” is from Laqueur 2002, xiii.

8. A literate person in China is defined as someone knowing 2,000 characters in urban areas, and 1,500 characters in rural areas. Comparable figures for India, for example, were 18 percent in 1950 (close to China’s rate) and 44 percent in 1981. Perhaps most telling, in India in 2011, literacy rates were 82 percent for men and 65 percent for women; in China by 2010, they had reached 98 percent for men and 93 percent for women.

By the 2010s, women slightly edged out men in student enrollment in higher education in China, although this was not true in the top-ranked universities.

9. This kind of “entertaining” is called yingchou, .

10. Zheng 2012, 653, 658. Zheng has written some of the best ethnographic studies on masculinity and contemporary prostitution in China. See also Zheng 2009a and 2009b; Johnson 2014.

11. Second Wife: ernai, ; Little Third: xiaosan, .

12. Three-High Women: Sangaonü, ; “If You Are the One”: feicheng wurao, ; “I would rather cry in a BMW, than smile on a bike”: «Wo ningyuan zuozai baomacheli ku, ye buyuanyi zuozai zixingcheshang xiao,» .

13. Hukou: .

14. Although it is often referred to in the Western press as the Shanghai Marriage Market, Blind Date Corner is a closer translation of the Chinese (xiangqinjiao, ) and carries fewer connotations of a sales transaction occurring. My preference for translating the spot as Blind Date Corner was solidified one Saturday in 2017, when I returned to Shanghai for a few days. As I strolled along the walkways of the park, a friendly young French man approached me and asked, in an almost conspiratorial, fellow-foreigner whisper, if I realized that women were being sold there. I thought he was making an ugly joke, but it seemed he was serious: he was taking the French, marché du mariage, quite literally.

My research at Blind Date Corner was made much easier through a collaboration with architect-anthropologist Non Arkaraprasertkul. We often wandered among the gawkers at Blind Date Corner, tag-team style. I warmed up the crowds with my hackneyed (and only semi-coherent) Chinese, and then Non stepped in to rescue the conversation and the ethnographic experience. Our animated conversations often gathered a pack of onlookers.

15. Regardless what you might have heard about yin-yang thinking, these terms are not reducible to neat female-male categories in Chinese philosophical traditions.

16. By 2018, Blind Date Corner was still thriving for parents, but for matchmakers it had become a more difficult venue. The municipal government had decided that making money on finding mates for parents would no longer be tolerated. As a result, matchmakers retreated into less conspicuous locations in the park, though they remained fairly easily identifiable by their thick notebooks in hand—parents sat empty-handed, as before, waiting and waiting for another parent to approach.

17. Wang 2016. “If You Are the One”: feicheng wurao, ; “One Out of a Hundred”: baili tiaoyi, ; “Luo Ji’s Thinking”: Luo Ji siwei, ; “Fatso Luo”: Luo Pangzi, .

18. My wedding band never stopped tenacious matchmakers from asking, “Wouldn’t you like a Chinese wife, too?”

19. “Just a pretty boy”: shuaiqi vs. shuai, vs. ; beauty: piaoliang, ; delicate in her manner: qingxiu, ; proper in her conduct: duanzheng, .

One popular advice columnist in China who goes by the nickname Ayawawa tries to help people understand the differences between men and women by a scale she has invented for “Mate Value”: for men, this MV is established by his age, height, looks, wealth, IQ, EQ (emotional quotient), sexual capacity, and willingness to make a long-term commitment. For a woman, in ranking order, by her age, looks, height, bra cup size, weight, academic degrees, personality, and family background. See Kan 2017.

20. Shizai qian tuo, . Xi’s message was that “the majority of women will conscientiously shoulder the tasks of respecting the elders and loving the young, responsibility for educating their children, and assume their role in fostering family values” («Guangda funü yao zijue jianfu qi zun lao ai you, jiaoyu zinü de zeren, zai jiating meide jianshe zhong fahui zuoyong,» . Even using the rather antiquated term funü () was meant to elicit images of women from bygone eras. Sun Yatsen University feminist scholar Ai Xiaoming gathered responses to Xi’s talk; see plus.google.com/109044788314125982317/posts/R3Hyy5uUn5T. My thanks to anthropologist Minhua Ling for bringing this speech and the reactions to my attention.

Also of note is the eager fascination people in Mexico, China, and other countries have in the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair. One man in China told me he didn’t understand the fuss in the United States over Bill and Monica: if (male) national leaders in China don’t have “Second Wives,” he assumed there was something wrong with them. In Mexico City back in the day, I remember having trouble getting friends to talk about anything else. Did I have any new dirt? Why was Bill stupid enough to get caught? Why did anyone other than Hillary care?

21. My thanks to my student Kevin Dhali for compiling the numbers on the flyers.

22. Leftover woman: shengnü, .

23. “Welcome to the Age of the Leftover Woman”: «Huanying laidao shengnü shidai,» . Cosmo may have been inspired by a still earlier incarnation of the same derogatory idea here, the 2003 Japanese novel by Junko Sakai, Makeinu no toboe (The distant barking of losing dogs), though in that case single women over thirty, “the losing dogs” of the title, were the objects of reflection. My thanks to anthropologist Minhua Ling for this reference.

24. “Outside the law”: feifa tongzhu, ; “trial marriages”: shihun, . Even the infamous gender ratio in China was evening out over time. In 2004, there were 121 boys for 100 girls; in 2015, 114 boys to 100 girls. Worldwide, the figure that year was 104 boys to 100 girls, so China still produced a flagrant disparity, but the trend was clearly moving in the direction of demography’s so-called natural sex ratios.

25. Here and throughout this chapter I supplement my own fieldwork with the work of a range of scholars, including Hong Fincher 2014; Zhang and Sun 2014; and Merriman 2015.

26. “Leftover/Saintly Fighters”: sheng/sheng doushi, ; “Leftovers Who Must Win”: bisheng/shengke, ; “Buddha’s Leftovers from Fighting the Wars”: douzhan shengfo, ; “Great Leftover/Saint, Equal of Heaven”: qitian dasheng/sheng, .

27. “Picky”: tiaoti, .

28. “Very high demands”: yaoqiu hen gao, .

29. “Their standards are too high”: biaozhun tai gao, ; “serious inquiries only”: feicheng wurao, (the same as the TV show that is nonetheless usually translated into English as “If You Are the One”).

CHAPTER 9: CAN WE CHANGE OUR BIOLOGY?

1. Quote from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen, collected in Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. Copyright © 1993 Leonard Cohen and Leonard Cohen Stranger Music, Inc., used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

2. Curiously enough, in Mexico City AA is mainly for men; women suffering from the same afflictions are more likely to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings, even if they are alcoholics and have never come near an opiate (see Brandes 2002). For more a more technical paper on alcoholism and ethnicity, and the following story of Jimmy and Dennis, see Gutmann 1999.

3. Martin 1994, 263.

4. Kolata 2012.

5. Fink 2017.

6. The symbolic relationship of guns and the phallus will not be rehearsed here, but it is not insignificant that one suggestive slang term for ejaculation in China literally means “to shoot like a canon” (dapao, ).

7. Even when the killers don’t fit the exact profile of young, male, and white, they usually fit two of the three categories and their killings fit social profiles. The person who slaughtered fifty-eight people in Las Vegas in 2017 was sixty-four years old but was white and male. The person who murdered forty-nine people in Orlando in 2016 identified himself as Afghan but was young and male.

8. For a recent academic discussion of fetishes (that unsurprisingly bears a strong resemblance to Karl Marx’s thoughts on “commodity fetishism”), see Graeber 2005.

9. Keller 2010.

10. See Lancaster 2003 for a dissection of the search for the gay gene. For an influential scientific study on the “discovery” of the gay gene, see Hamer and Copeland 1994. Important ethnographies of men who have sex with men include Núñez-Noriega 2014 and Parker 1998.

11. Several of these broader points apply also in India, where Western biomedicine and Indian Ayurvedic medicine are practiced in often very integrated ways today.

12. On questions of TCM discussed in this section, see, especially, Farquhar 2002 and Zhang 2015. Quotes from Farquhar 2002, 64, 67, 235.

13. Quotes on impotence, TCM, and biomedicine in China are in Zhang 2015, 185, 173, 186.

14. When it comes to beliefs about the spirits of ancestors coming back to disturb descendants, the experience of my friends in Mexico City is not unique. One famous example studied by anthropologists is found among the Acholi of Northern Uganda, where unhappy spirits of the dead, known as cen, are said to “haunt the clan and its new children for generations.” The beliefs have been especially prominent during civil war, the AIDS epidemic, and mass displacements (Finnström 2008, 192).

15. Marks 2015, 87. Marks was making a broader point about bodies in general rather than in their gendered qualities, but it applies just as well here.

16. Lock 2012, 129. For academic papers on the social implications of epigenetics, see also Lock 2013, 2015, and 2018 as well as Richardson 2017. See Lock and Palsson 2016 for an accessible presentation on the social implications of the new field of epigenetics. Prior to 1995, they note, the annual number of publications with “epigenetics” in their titles stood at less than 100. By 2010, there were 20,000. While the growth in the number of articles about testosterone reflects mainly changing social and political currents reducing men to their hormones (see Chapter 2 of this book), the growth in the number of articles about epigenetics represents the emergence of a new field of inquiry that is taking biology by storm. The key, harkening back to Lamarck, is its renewed appreciation for the lasting impact of environmental factors interacting with human bodies.

17. See Lock and Palsson 2016 for a more thorough examination of these issues. For an influential paper on these themes, see Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987.

18. Lock and Palsson 2016, 8–9, 79 (emphasis in original).

19. Richardson 2017, 32. Richardson also cautions that while epigenetics holds this promise, it has yet to be realized by those conducting basic epigenetics research.

CHAPTER 10: DON’T LET MEN OFF THE HOOK

1. See Peterson 2018, 51.

2. “Paradoxically, while sex is a biological category in a way that race is not, sex and gender are understood to be more open to choice and change than are race and ethnicity” (Brubaker 2016, 6).

3. My thanks to two Brown University undergraduate research assistants, Drew Hawkinson and Alan Mendoza, for insights on the they/them/their movement on campus. Laura Kipnis explains, “Sex on campus isn’t just confusing. It’s schizophrenic” (2017, 36).

4. Muguet 2017.

5. Spade 2015 [2011], 209; Foucault 1980, xiii.

6. Halberstam 2018, 9.

7. See Núñez Noriega 2014.

8. In 2012, Argentina passed a comprehensive transgender rights law allowing anyone to fill out a form, without approval of a judge or a doctor, to change their legal gender identity. In December 2018, Germany’s highest court ruled that binary gender designations were discriminatory and that, with medical authorization, Germans could choose “diverse” on birth certificates and other legal records. LGBTQ groups objected that no medical approval should be required. See Eddy 2018.

9. Luhrmann 2000, 8. She was writing in a different context (the medical training of psychiatry students), but her point is germane here, too.

10. Bruni 2018. His conservative colleague David Brooks wrote around this same time, “I disagree with academic feminism a lot—with those vague oppressor stories about the patriarchy, with the strange unwillingness to admit inherited-gender differences and with the tone of faculty lounge militancy” (Brooks 2018). Those inherited-gender differences are left unspecified, naturally, because such allegations need no explanation or justification if we take them for granted.

11. Dallek 2004, 315.

12. Nussbaum 2018.

13. Wang 2013, 12; Gould 1978, 532.

14. Bannon and Correia 2006, 5.

15. On alpha and beta male baboons, for example, see Gesquiere et al. 2011, 357.

16. Sahlins 1976, 101. Similarly, although Karl Marx was an early and devoted fan of Darwin’s work, he wrote a letter to Friedrich Engels on June 18, 1862, in which he ruminated on certain problems in the naturalist’s latest revelations:

I’m amused that Darwin, at whom I’ve been taking another look, should say that he also applies the “Malthusian” theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr. Malthus’s case the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only—with its geometric progression—to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, “inventions” and Malthusian “struggle for existence.” It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes [the war of all against all] and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an “intellectual animal kingdom,” whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures in civil society.

17. Fausto-Sterling 1992, 160. Agustín Fuentes writes: “If we believe we are aggressive at our base, that males stripped of social constraints will resort to a brutish nature, then we will expect and accept certain types of violence as inevitable. This means that instead of really trying to understand and rectify the horrific and complex realities of rape, genocide, civil war, and torture, we will chalk at least a part of these events up to human nature” (2012, 154).

18. Sherry Ortner asked, “Is female to male as nature is to culture?” (1972, 5).

19. For example, McCormack and Strathern 1980.

20. Ortner 1996, 176.

21. Donald J. Trump, as quoted in Scott 2018.

22. See the English translation in Paredes 1993 [1967]. My thanks to Sherry Ortner for this example, offered in response to a lecture I gave at UCLA that included my thoughts about her earlier nature-culture comparison.

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