INTRODUCTION
WE PLACE UNREASONABLE TRUST IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS of male behavior. In early 2018, for example, Newsweek carried a story titled “Men Who Like Jazz Have Less Testosterone Than Those Who Like Rock.” It was an eye-catching headline. Although it relied on ideas we may already have about gender and behavior, it was meant to tease us with a fun bit of new information. Perhaps some readers were ready to accept the conclusion that rock ’n’ roll was manlier, because they thought this musical genre was more nakedly belligerent, and testosterone was a hormone they associated with aggressive masculinity.
Other readers might have been pleased by the Japanese study on which the article reported, because it made a correlation between high intelligence and the preference for what the authors considered “sophisticated music”—classical, jazz, and world music. But even for the readers who agreed with the conclusion that hard rockers must have more testosterone, there was just one little problem: it was absolute nonsense. The study was based on a minuscule sampling of men. Just how many men had been included in the study they claimed proved a connection between “rebellious music such as hard rock” and higher levels of testosterone? A grand total of thirty-seven, all young male students in Japan from universities and vocational schools.
These thirty-seven Japanese students were thus asked to stand in for the males of the world, all times and all places, as to the links between their “endocrinological predispositions and patterns of music preference.” The study contained zero cultural analysis about who was listening to rock, classical, and jazz music in Japan. Old or young? Urban or rural? Highly educated? People who had traveled abroad? It could all be explained by endocrinology, so why bother with demography? All it took for Newsweek to run with the story was the discovery of a claim made in a scientific journal that fit a preconception about manliness.1
This sort of conclusion is all too common. There is a pull on scientists hungry for funding that can lead some to play fast and loose when it comes to research about all kinds of sexy topics, from the effects of caffeine to mind reading to, well, sex. Journalists covering the sciences can feel similarly pressured to embellish the facts based on what they perceive will go over well with their readers. Yet researching the connection between biology and behavior can be dangerous. When journalists jump at the newest alleged association between a biological factor and human behavior, we often gain more insight into preexisting cultural prejudices than into new scientific discoveries. You like rock music? You obviously have a higher level of testosterone, which, as we all know, means you are more of a man. You like jazz? You might be more sophisticated, but you are also less manly.
Uncritical deference to biological explanations of behavior infects our thinking about women as well as men, but in recent decades, women have done a better job pushing back. Most people now understand, for example, that there is no predictable correlation between women’s menstrual cycles and their moods. But boys will still be boys, right? Despite decades of research contradicting this conclusion, we are still completely willing to believe that men can best be understood by looking more closely at their brains, balls, and biceps.2
Every day people are confronted with biological terms relating to hormones, genes, heredity, and evolution as they try to comprehend male sexuality and violence, as if these biological clues explain what makes men behave the way they do. One particularly effective strategy is to compare the males of the human variety with males of other animal species. When we do this, we tend to simplify the behavior of men to emphasize automatic, animalistic responses to stimuli. There is no room for the enormous range of male responses based on culture, history, and personality, and therefore no need for accountability. (And, let’s admit it, that is not being fair to nonhuman males, either.) If we hold that human male behavior is best understood in relation to what the males of diverse species do and feel, driven by instinct and impulse, then we are indeed selling men short. Men are animals. But what does that really mean?
Few people are so blind as to think that biology determines everything about what it means to be a man. But how many of us can claim not to harbor more than a sneaking suspicion that men’s physiology explains a lot of their behavior? It is difficult to resist the tidiness of biological answers to life’s big questions. Witness the popularity of the genealogy companies 23andMe and Ancestry.com, which make millions of dollars by indulging people’s beliefs that their DNA tells them “who they are,” and that their personality and character are somehow rooted in their ancestry.
How we talk about men, even in a casual or offhanded way, determines what we expect of men. Take testosterone. Some of our most widely read and smartest pundits casually endow this molecule with supernatural properties to make broader points about men. A search of daily news sources quickly yields mentions like: “a cloud of testosterone” (Frank Bruni), “hard-driving testosterone-fueled culture” (Walter Isaacson), “rhetorical-testosterone deficit” (Kathleen Parker), “testosterone-drenched” movie stars (in an article on an up-and-coming young actor), and “testosterone-measuring handshakes” (Charles Blow). James Lee Burke, one of my favorite mystery writers, leaves an indelible image in a 2016 novel: “I could hear him breathing and could smell the testosterone that seemed ironed into his clothes.”3
It’s not hard to see the poetic license here. But the pattern is meaningful because using testosterone as a figure of speech to describe masculinity has become harmful. When we view aggressive handshakes as explained by chemicals we are asking for trouble. And the tacit assumptions behind this way of talking are continually reinforced by poorly designed or misinterpreted research that lets men off the hook when they misbehave by attributing their behavior to distinctive male traits. Biology seems fixed. So by gluing it to male behavior, men can be exonerated for acts associated with male excess, particularly sexual violence. To the extent we believe in biobabble about men and their behavior, we naturalize patriarchal relationships themselves.4
What people believe about the intrinsic, natural characteristics of men has direct implications as much for political process as for our interpersonal relations, sometimes in related ways. A young man came up to me after a lecture I gave in the fall of 2017. He told me, “My mother voted for Trump. I think she overlooked his comments about women, because, you know, ‘Boys will be boys.’” The student paused, looking sheepish as he continued, “What I want to ask her, though, is ‘Is that what you think of me?’” He was clearly in distress imagining that his mother could lump him together with Donald Trump just because they both were men. “Did you talk to your mother about this, about how you feel?” I asked. He responded with the saddest face and said, “I can’t ask her. I’m scared to know the answer.”
I will get to Trump and the widespread acquiescence to his misogyny in due course. For now, he can serve as the archetype of seemingly intransigent beliefs about men’s inherent proclivities, including the extent to which people have come to believe that men’s biology regulates their sexuality and aggression, that only fools try to deny these truths, and that societies must be structured to accommodate and constrain them.
Male-or-female categories persist for all sorts of reasons, both practical and obsolete. When we watch Animal Planet, available on televisions in seventy countries worldwide, we nod with approval when we learn, “The male swan helps build the nest, while the female swan incubates the eggs.” This division of labor aligns with our ideas about the division of human labor. And exceptions to male-female swan behavior are not found. So it is remarkably easy to make the cognitive leap to thinking, “Well, maybe the human male-female patterns I am familiar with are hard-and-fast, too. Maybe my husband can’t really change.”
Biological extremism about men and boys is nonsense. But it’s nonsense with a tenacious hold on our imaginations, seemingly rooted in our experience and scientific evidence. Speaking about the influence of biological determinants of behavior, the eminent neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky once asked, “Why are people such suckers for the idea that genes are the be-all and end-all? It’s particularly bad right now.” He went on to refute the bad science behind such ideas but left the social roots of the predilection dangling.5
Men’s biology hasn’t substantially changed in tens of thousands of years. And for this reason alone the crisis in masculinity we face today can’t be understood or combated through a narrow biological lens. That’s where this book comes in. As an anthropologist, I use a different set of tools to answer the question about why people are such suckers for “Boys will be boys”—and why too many scientists are accomplices. Anthropology can uncover the complicated cultural origins of seemingly biological male behavior and show how certain essentialized beliefs about maleness promoted by scientists are themselves products of the same cultural influences. Scientists can be just as susceptible as nonprofessionals to thinking that particular chromosomes and hormones reveal the secret codes of human maleness, that there is just something about being a man.
I believe that the ways in which people think about men and expect men to behave can be dramatically renegotiated, but that this will require us to understand the entrenched views about men and women that we’re up against. And make no mistake: assumptions about male biological natures are just as intricately woven into the fabric of well-educated and liberal sectors of society as they are in conservative communities. How these wrongheaded ideas about maleness are expressed varies from place to place around the globe, but a startling feature of the contemporary world is how normal it is to hear people couch ideas about men, sexuality, and aggression in the language of pseudoscience.
An example: unchallenged assumptions about men’s underlying sexual and aggressive nature have received flagrant expression in the practice of modern militaries to ensure that male soldiers have access to sex with women and that they have adequate and regular release for their “sexual energies.” The French army has called them bordels militaires de campagne, and they proliferated in World Wars I and II and the wars in Indochina and Algeria. Never to be outdone, in one notorious example, on August 23, 1945, the US military authorities in charge of the occupation of Japan decided to set up a Recreation and Amusement Association, press-ganging 55,000 women to provide sexual services for the occupying troops. Official rest and recreation (R&R) centers sponsored barely disguised brothels for US soldiers during the Vietnam War.
In one of his novels, Mario Vargas Llosa has a military general complain, on behalf of male soldiers isolated in the Peruvian jungle, that “in short, abstinence makes for a hell of a lot of corruption. And demoralization, nervousness, apathy.” If you agree that men more than women have a particular and inveterate necessity for regular sexual release, then this all might make sense. But recognize the stakes here. Are you really ready to cede operating rights over men’s bodies to impulses that men themselves cannot be expected to control?6
There are practical implications if you think men’s bodies control their destiny, because it will affect how you understand basic matters like nurturance, ambition, competitiveness, forgiveness, assault, and war. Underlying beliefs about male sexuality can give scientific-sounding credence to claims that men’s and women’s sex drives are by nature distinct, and these claims in turn can help to explain why no new birth control methods have been developed for men in centuries, and why it might seem to make sense that so often birth control arbitrarily remains a woman’s responsibility.
Why biological explanations are so widespread, popular, and persuasive, and why biology has become a catchall explanatory tool today for understanding men, is not primarily a result of new scientific findings about testosterone, the cerebral cortex, or DNA. After all, the research doesn’t actually provide persuasive answers to the questions being asked. If the general public has become overly dependent on explanations patchworked together from gene interactions, hormone levels, and primate cousins, then it’s time to ask why this trend is happening now and why it’s been growing over recent decades.
One key to undoing these taken-for-granted ideas about maleness is to study the actual diversity of men and masculinities across time and place. Believing that your own experience as a man or with men is pretty much the way it is for everyone else, everywhere else, might seem reasonable, but in fact, as we will see, it is mistaken. Most importantly, there is more in jeopardy than right and wrong ideas: subliminal concepts about men as some kind of timeless and cultureless species apart feed into the thinking, “Don’t blame me. I’m a guy!” Nonsense.
Acting as if men can’t control themselves is hazardous. Naming a problem is an important part of solving it. So, here’s the issue as I see it: not only do we reach too quickly for biological explanations of male sexuality and violence, terrain not firm enough to support our conclusions, but the very language we employ about men compounds the problems by fossilizing masculinity and maleness. Because men are not a chain of chromosomal clones, by exploring the roots of the attraction to rigid biological explanations about men and their so-called inborn characteristics, we can free ourselves of unnecessary, self-imposed restrictions in how we think about male behavior.
Also unacknowledged is the fact that, for most men in the world, most of the time, women are central to what it means to be a man. Being a man first and foremost for most men means not being a woman. To be sure, there are other ways men define themselves and are defined: feeling more or less manly in comparison to other men, feeling more or less manly than other men at particular times, not being another kind of man (thin, rich, straight, hairy, white). Yet just as it is mistaken to think that men’s biology dictates that they have too little control over themselves, it is dangerous not to see women as central to everything about men, too.
There has certainly been a tendency in discussions of men and masculinity to assume that male-only interactions and spaces imply that women are largely irrelevant to men, at least after they reach adulthood. No one could deny the importance of women in the lives of children, starting with mothers. But it has been harder to think about the influence of women on men.
To say women are central to everything in the lives of men is more than a matter of mothers spending more time raising sons than fathers do with daughters, although that is important, as is the fact that mothers are routinely more present role models for daughters than fathers are with sons. We need to understand the influence women have not only on boys but also on adult males. We need to understand that women are central to most men’s very sense of manliness and virility. This means paying attention to the opinions and experiences of women regarding men, and how, for many men, masculinities develop and transform and have little meaning except in relation to women and female identities and activities in all their similar diversity and complexity.
This book is more about men than women, in order to focus the study and because there are specific problems that need our special attention. But women are relevant to many aspects of men’s lives, including when they are not physically present; their interpretation of events, identities, and activities involving men could not be more fundamental in making sense of men’s control over their own beliefs and actions. So throughout the book I use examples from the lives of women as well as men to understand modern men and masculinities. There is also a lot we can learn from decades of studies about women. After all, women are animals, too, and women have historically been the target of mountains of biobabble asserting that their bodies yoke them to one or another lowly behavior.
Where does masculinity come from? We need to address the idea, often taken as irrefutable fact, that male behavior is essentially identical across human history and the animal kingdom. Consider, for example, the following myths and half-myths:
With few exceptions, males spend less time and energy in parental activities than females. One, there are important counterexamples among humans as well as among nonhuman animals. Two, and more importantly, among humans we see enormous “elasticity,” that is, malleability and variation in patterns of parenting behavior—an ability among men to do “women’s work” and vice versa. For example, when women migrate for work, men can and do take on far more parenting duties than we typically expect of them.
Despite fervent and noble efforts, anthropologists have been unable to locate a matriarchal social structure anywhere on earth. True, but what does this actually tell us? In another example of elasticity, for the first time ever, in the past one hundred years of human history we have seen women rise to become political leaders in almost every country on earth. We are nowhere near equity, but pointing in that direction.
Except in the movies, we always find more men than women in the military. There are no longer physical reasons for this imbalance; culture, not biology, explains the disparity, even if Amazons have never existed except in Seattle.7
In culture after culture, sexual humor features more male than female exploits and fantasies. This is not an unsurprising finding if the people collecting and recounting sexual humor are men. Here and elsewhere, we should not make so many assumptions about female sexuality if we are just talking to men about men.
Troops of chimpanzees, “our closest cousins,” are led by alpha males, not females. It turns out that another of “our closest cousins,” bonobos, are alpha-female led.
The problem with every example here is that each one only superficially supports the claim, the supposedly irrefutable fact, that male behavior is consistent across human history and the animal kingdom. It is not consistent at all, in reality, and the first thing we need to do is pluralize. Instead of masculinity, we should think masculinities. Far from being irrefutable facts, many of our assumptions about men and masculinity are based on cultural beliefs dressed up in biological clothing. The phrase “Boys will be boys” carries with it the implicit notion that men are born and not made, and that as a result there is little that parents and societies can do to influence their desires and behaviors—we can’t fight biology; it’s better to focus on ways to restrain them and their diehard impulses.
And why is it that we use the phrase “Boys will be boys” only when we are saying something negative about what boys or men do? Somehow when men and boys do something thoughtful and generous we don’t hear anyone maintain, “Well, you know, he did really well cleaning up his room because, after all, boys will be boys.” Biology governs the rules of male misbehavior; only individual male exceptions to the rule can explain when they do something positive.8
In the United States we say “Boys will be boys.” In Mexico we say “Así son” ([That’s] the way they are), meaning that’s the way men are. The meanings of “manly” in modern China have fluctuated from the zealous Red Guard to the “search for the ideal man” to the wily capitalist entrepreneur who knows you need to quote science to be considered enlightened and successful. And though it doesn’t apply just to men, there is a Chinese saying, “You can’t stop a dog from eating shit,” that is often applied to boys; it means that we just have to accept that that’s the way they are and they are never going to change.9
In France you sometimes hear “Ça, c’est bien les hommes” (That’s men for you). In Portuguese, the relevant saying is “Como um rapaz” (Just like a boy). According to classicists, the expression “Boys will be boys” can be traced all the way back to an ancient Roman proverb: “Sunt pueri pueri, pueri puerilia tractant” (Boys are boys, and boys will act like boys). I do like how Latin hammers home the point about puerility.
Language matters, and the half-joke about the English expression “Boys will be boys” is no longer funny.
Among the delights and difficulties of studying gender and sexuality is that literally everyone has experiences and opinions about them. And questions. And disagreements. Through examples drawn from the anthropological treasure chest, and some personal anecdotes, this book will provide insights for our daily discussions about what men are like deep down, what we can reasonably expect from men, and what we should expect from ourselves as men. When teens undergo a circumcision rite among the Gisu in Uganda, they aim to tame “the wild animal,” so they can gain self-control and become responsible adult men. Historians of Europe write in the same vein that mastering one’s sexual drives has long been considered a sign of mental health and credibility, with lack of manly control indicating mental illness. In some historical periods, women’s supposed lack of such control was taken as evidence that they could not be trusted with important decisions or leadership roles. Of course, when the script flipped—supposing men’s unruly libidos to be higher—that became evidence that women’s delicate and demure constitutions must be kept well away from the sexually charged male atmospheres of politics and commerce.10
There has always been talk about men, and men writing about men, in every social commentary down through the ages. The difference now is that we are thinking about and discussing, positively and negatively, men as gendered, too. Although the term “gender” (as in gender issues, gender rights, gender equality) is often synonymous with “women” (women’s issues, women’s rights, women’s equality), it should not be. Gender applies, and should apply, to men as much as women. Anthropologists have long debated what exactly this might mean. Some studies in the 1970s suggested there were widespread global and historical patterns associating men with culture and women with nature, men with public spaces and women with private ones. Since then, feminists and other scholars have continued to grapple with whether we can reasonably make these and other cross-cultural generalizations about men, maleness, and masculinities.
We know that biology matters, and sexual reproduction is a clear illustration of important physiological differences between women and men. The fact that only women get pregnant and lactate is of obvious and fundamental significance and basic to a variety of gendered divisions of labor that have always been central features of human existence. The rub has come when we extrapolated from these real biological differences between men and women to assume that we could also explain other differences as biologically rooted in sex—for example, leadership ability, aptitude for mathematics, capacity for nurturing, logical reasoning, or intelligence.
The twentieth century proved to be a turning point in uncovering the extent to which apparent gender differences were not truly biological. The widespread introduction of reliable contraceptives (and plummeting fertility rates), improvements in obstetrics and women’s health in general (and reduced rates of maternal and infant mortality), commercial baby formula, and powerful feminist political movements have unmistakably transformed gendered divisions of labor in every corner of the globe. Or, better put, they have provided conditions in which these divisions of labor could change.
Despite these changes, ideas about men’s and women’s involuntary natures persist, to such a degree that we badly need to look more closely at what, after all, is biological, and less amenable to change, and where our own blinkered preconceptions about biology and sex have limited our expectations. Compared to the beginning of the twentieth century, many more people now know how hideous and horrific it is to believe that certain races are naturally more or less intelligent, industrious, or hypersexual. We need a similar challenge to our understanding of maleness and femaleness, our language about these issues, and the attributes commonly considered intrinsic to one or the other.
In these pages, we will go from Mexico City to Shanghai, from rehab programs in Oakland to the frontlines of war in Iraq, from the tragedy of sexual exploitation and abuse among UN peacekeepers in Haiti to the seemingly nonpartisan laboratories of endocrinologists. Thoughtful dialogue on these matters has never been more important, after the most publicized and consequential sex crimes in the history of the United States swept the country in 2017 and 2018. At the heart of every one of them was the question of men’s sexuality, how standardized it is, whether boys and men learn to act out their sexualities in certain ways, and whether they can be rehabilitated when things go seriously awry. Here, we will address the basic concerns running through each new revelation: Is there something inherent in men that makes them more prone to committing sexual assault? Are all men like this, or just some of those with power? Do they rape and murder because that’s what the males of the species do—indeed, is this what they all would do, if they thought they could get away with it?
We need to learn to better distinguish folk beliefs from underlying biological compulsions and restraints. Although I will not dismiss genes, hormones, and evolution, I will indicate when biological explanations reach beyond their reasonable limits. It’s long past time for the social sciences to work more closely with the life sciences and to get beyond biology-as-strawman for humanist ridicule.
This book is also about global cultural responses to the problems of misogyny and male violence. The powerful #MeToo movement that swept through the United States in 2017 demanded that men’s sexual assaults on women stop. Activists spent less time wondering why men were doing these things in the first place. Was it hard-wiring? Their evolutionary drives? Even those who work tirelessly for gender equality are affected by widespread theories about men’s fixed temperament. Some people insist that gender categories like “man” and “woman” are irrelevant to our daily interactions. Others strongly oppose any departure from two-gender thinking.
Anthropologists study patterns of human existence. We ask philosophical questions about what it means to be human, and our answers consider what happens not just between birth and death, but between conception and funeral. We look for commonalities but thrive on variation, because this proves how many options are available to us. That is why my approach in this study is to cast the net as widely as I can, which because of my own research experience means especially over the United States, Mexico, and China, to demonstrate regularities and anomalies, ambiguities and certitudes, when it comes to men and masculinities in the twenty-first century. The wave of retrenched conservative gender relations may take different forms in different places, but it is unmistakably global. More than just describing my observations and conversations with men and women about men, I hope to make clear both that this means the stakes are especially high and urgent and that the opportunities are great.
This will be a collective effort. If you are complacent about wage gaps or the lack of child care, you are part of the problem. If you raise your children by selectively warning the boys not to pressure the girls for sex, and the girls to be careful around the boys when it comes to sex, you are part of the problem. If you never question why all the modern forms of contraception are designed for women, or why only young men have to register for the draft, you are part of the problem. Maybe you, too, maintain some less examined, undeclared notions about men’s and women’s natures and conduct your life with at least implicitly naturalized gender guidelines.
Such confusing times provide openings for change that we can’t afford to miss.