Babies
Who is this “new father” who is suddenly all over the talk shows and pages of pop-culture mags, supposedly rehabilitating the reputation of modern males with his new-found paternal skills? Where did he come from? According to authors Karen Hansen and Anita Garey in their book Families in the U.S., he’s the lineal descendant of several ancestral fathers. Way back in the Middle Ages, when the church ruled supreme, lived “Dad the moral guardian”: the father who assumed the main burden of shaping, usually by brute force, the moral character of his offspring. Then, with the advent of industrialization and the rise of the middle class, came “Dad the distant breadwinner”: the classic, aloof Western paterfamilias of the 1930s and 1940s. Many harassed modern dads might think that’s where developments should have stopped, but this glorious escape from responsibility in fact proved temporary. The influx of women into employment in the post-war era prompted entirely reasonable complaints that men weren’t pulling their weight domestically—reasonable to everybody except men, that is, who by that time had forgotten they were supposed to be pulling at all. There were also concerns, sparked by the spread of psychoanalytic sex-role theory around the same time, that the absence of men was turning a generation of boys into sissies. Thus was born the “involved father,” typified by the Father Knows Best sitcom dad, Jim Anderson, who played with his kids, attended recitals and baseball games, and was always available to dispense allowances or paternal advice.
The “involved father,” however, tended to limit his involvement to his older children; infant care in general, and diaper changing in particular, were left to the wife and mother. That sufficed for a while, until the women’s movement—and its wannabe masculine little brother, the men’s movement—finally forced the reluctant hand of the “involved father” into the diaper bucket, too. Thus was born today’s model: the “new father,” the dad who spent time with his kids, was involved with them during infancy (not just later childhood), was available for actual child-care (not just play), and was as equally involved with his daughters as his sons.1 The trademark of the “new father” is his determination to share in every aspect of parenthood, bar none. Some “new fathers,” for example, go so far as to wear an “empathy belly”—a device that not only simulates a thirty-three-pound weight around the midriff, but also features a rib-belt to constrict the lungs, mobile lead weights that simulate foetal movement, a warm-water pouch to emulate the heat of pregnancy, and a specially positioned weight that mimics a fetal head pressing into the wearer’s bladder.
Somewhat less exotic specimens of fatherhood are the Aka Pygmies, who still live in the rainforests of the Western Congo Basin, much as they have done for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years. These tribal peoples are genuine Pygmies, in that their males average less than 5' in height (compared to our 5'10"). Like their neighbors, the Mbuti Pygmies, they probably get their short stature from a mutation making them resistant to human growth hormones. Their bands of around one hundred people make their living by gathering edible forest plants and insects, and hunting small to medium-sized animal prey in communal “net hunts”—although Aka men, again like the Mbuti, also bring down elephants and wild boar with the spear. The Aka crop up in any discussion of fatherhood thanks to the pioneering fieldwork of Professor Barry Hewlett, from Washington State University, on Aka fathering. After researching the Aka for fifteen years and living with them for some months, Hewlett submitted a Ph.D. thesis that called their men “the best fathers in the world.”2 Aka men, Hewlett reported, not only spent large amounts of time with their children every day, much of that time was in direct physical contact with them, skin-on-skin. They treated their daughters exactly the same as their sons. They also took genuine interest in their infant children, sharing their care substantially with the child’s mother, rather than just playing with them. So dedicated to infant care were Aka men, Hewlett reported, that they even, at times, suckled their babies. (The skeptical reader, of course, will at this point raise the sensible question of how Aka men could suckle infants when they don’t have breasts. Or the ability to lactate. Incredibly, however, it turns out that a substantial minority of Aka Pygmy men do grow them. That’s all I’ll say about that right here, though; if this flash of male cleavage isn’t enough and you can’t wait for a full explanation, I suggest you leaf forward.)
It’s immediately obvious that these characteristics make the Aka the perfect foil against which to test the claims of the Western “new father.” Aka Pygmy men have substantial achievements in all four areas of prowess claimed by the Western “new father”: they spend time with their kids, they are involved with them during infancy, they are available for child care and not just play, and they seem to treat their daughters the same way they treat their sons. Thanks to Hewlett’s work, we also have precise figures to compare, since he meticulously recorded everything from the percentage of time Aka fathers spent within three feet of their children to how often Aka infants crawled to their dads around the campfire. All we have to do, then, is find comparable figures for the Western “new father” (we’ll substitute the TV for the campfire) and we can transport him to a clearing in the Congo rainforest for a “dad-off” with these diminutive super-fathers. True, such an exercise might lay us open to the charge of running an unsavory, exploitative freak show. All I can say, however, is that I will do my best to ensure the Western “new father” is treated with the dignity he deserves and isn’t forced to model his “empathy belly” or “man-wrap” baby carrier for amused Aka gawkers too often.
To kick off proceedings, then, just how much time does the much-improved Western “new father” spend with his children? And how does that compare to his female partner’s efforts? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), American men still lag considerably behind their women.3 A married, employed father, for example, spends an average 1.21 hours a day engaged in child-care activities, while his employed wife spends 1.97. The discrepancy between unemployed dads and moms is even more pronounced—1.75 hours compared to 3.21, or almost double. True, these figures are a vast improvement on those of the past forty years: a miserable 17 minutes a day in 1965, 26 minutes in 1985 and 51 minutes in 1998. Yet the true difference between a husband’s and wife’s time with the kids may remain even greater than those figures suggest. The BLS stats also reveal that a wife still does four times as much housework (which generally is child-care in any house peopled with anklebiters) as her husband. It seems, in fact, that the preferred childcare activity of the modern “new father” is simply being there. Statistics from another study record that dads these days are within eyesight or earshot of their kids for an average 3.56 hours a day, most of this being on weekends.
Given that numerous other studies show father-presence is an essential element of children’s wellbeing, this is an undeniable improvement on the “distant breadwinner” dad of old. In Aka society, however, it would probably be considered child abuse by neglect. Aka Pygmy dads, Hewlett records, are available to their children for an average twelve hours a day, every day of the week.4 That’s not just within earshot, either—Aka dads stick within arm’s length of their offspring for that entire time. How on earth do they do it? Partly it’s through actually holding their kids, which Aka dads do for almost a quarter of their time while in camp. They also sleep with their kids, along with their wives, on incredibly narrow beds (about eighteen inches in width), until well into the kids’ early teens. Aka dads also take their children with them just about everywhere. Hewlett reported that he often witnessed drinking parties where Aka fathers downed palm wine (a naturally occurring alcohol) with their children perched in their laps or on their hips.
Outraged Western “new fathers,” of course, might justifiably protest that they’re not allowed to take their kids to bars anyway. They would also probably take refuge in the claim that the Aka are freaks—one-off exceptions to the no-doubt poor efforts of other ancient and tribal dads. While it is true that the Aka are in a class of their own among hunter-gathers (Hewlett records that Aka men hold their kids for five times as long as the men of any other culture), they are by no means the only doting fathers of the tribal world. While figures as meticulous as Hewlett’s are rarely available, the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski nonetheless reported that Papuan Trobriand Island men were extremely devoted fathers, carrying their children around for hours at a time.5 Melanesian Lesu men of New Ireland, similarly, were known for playing with their children daily, often spending hours at a time with them and taking them along when they gathered socially with other men. After hearing this, the Western “new father” might even be tempted into a perverse sulk, stating that if he can’t be the best in time spent with his progeny then, by God, he’ll be the worst. Even that honor (such as it were), however, would be denied him. The men of numerous ancient and tribal groups outdid us in neglect, too. One example will do: the Rwala Bedouin tribesmen of Saudi Arabia and Syria a century ago spent so little time with their children that a Rwala boy could easily reach adolescence without having spoken to his father more than once or twice.6
Spare the rod
The phrase “Spare the rod and spoil the child” has its origin in a biblical verse, Proverbs 13:24. It has justified many a savage caning for unfortunate Christian school children, yet some ancient tribal disciplinarians took the advice to even greater extremes. The Tswana people of South Africa, for example, literally applied the rod, sometimes with fatal consequences.
The bogwera initiation rite of the Tswana featured a disciplinary ritual in which young boys were made to confess their sins and were then punished for them. Punishment was meted out with thorny sticks nicknamed dichoshwane, “ants,” or dinotshe, “bees.” Miscreants were whipped on the body until the ants and bees ripped open their skin. Serious wrongdoers were stretched out on their back with their head tilted while their bared throat was repeatedly hit—it was this use of the dichoshwnne that sometimes resulted in death.
Just as savage were Rwala Bedouin Arab fathers of the Syrian desert. They disciplined their sons by stabbing them with daggers—or sabers in the case of particularly weighty offences. Crying out was specifically forbidden and prompted further punishment.
Yet even Tswana and Rwala boys, if they survived, eventually escaped their father’s control. Ancient Roman men, on the other hand, were subject to their father’s total authority for their entire lives. Even elderly Roman senators, grandfathers themselves, might find themselves subject to an autocratic father’s whim. Thanks to the legal institution of patria potestas, too, this was no joke: Roman dads could seize their sons’ properties and income, force them to divorce, and even kill them with impunity. The founder of Rome, Brutus, is reputed to have done exactly that, executing two of his own sons for military incompetence. 
In the endurance contest of time spent with the kids, it seems, the Aka have it all over the Western “new father.” They spend three times as long with their children as Western dads do, and at much closer range to boot. What about the second marker of the “new father” then: involvement with one’s infants, rather than just one’s older kids? This symbolizes “new fathering” because the earlier “involved father” didn’t do it—if a child wasn’t old enough to don a baseball mitt or throw a football it was still, by definition, it’s mother’s concern. A quick glance at the statistics shows that modern dads have indeed jettisoned this attitude: in fact, they’ve reversed it. The figure of 1.21 hours per day spent caring for their children, given earlier, relates to children under the age of 6; for children over the age of 6 that figure drops to 47 minutes per day. True, the under-6 measure is not a precise one, but it nonetheless indicates that dads these days spend more time with their infants than their older kids, not less. The only proviso I would add is that those low levels of housework show that modern dads still aren’t quite up to all aspects of caring for their infants. Be that as it may, how does the modern dad’s improved connection with his infant kids compare to that of his Aka competitors?
Hewlett’s figures show that Aka dads are much more intensely involved with their infant children than the Western “new father.” In the first four months of their infants’ lives Aka dads hold them for 22 percent of their time in camp (the percentage is lower when the men are out on a hunt). This figure declines as the infants get older, but is still at 14.3 percent when the infants are eighteen months old. This is not surprising, given the words of one Aka father quoted by Hewlett: “We Aka look after our children with love, from the minute they are born to when they are much older.”7 Hewlett found, what’s more, that this is no idle boast: Aka men really do undertake a lot of infant care. When babies fuss at night it is most often their fathers who take them outside to soothe them. It is also often their fathers who wipe the infants off with leaves after they urinate or defecate (frequently on the father himself). They kiss their infants more often than the children’s mothers do. Aka men have no qualms either about assuming other supposedly female duties such as chewing their babies’ food for them and feeding them. One might think, of course, that Aka men can’t do quite everything for their babies that their mothers can—nurse them, for example. Incredibly, however, it turns out that Aka men do suckle their children.
This fact was brought to the world’s attention in a newspaper interview with Hewlett in 2005.8 The paper reported that the professor had occasionally witnessed male breastfeeding during his fieldwork with the Aka. Skeptics raised the sensible question of how men could breastfeed without breasts, but the mystery only deepened with Hewlett’s insistence that he had, in fact, witnessed frequent instances of gynecomastia (male breast growth) among young Aka Pygmy men. While this sounds remarkable, it is supported by the reports of frequent gynecomastia among the unrelated Mbuti Pygmy people of Eastern Congo. What’s more, male lactation (milk production) is not an unknown phenomenon. It occurs, even in the absence of identifiable breasts, in some groups of Western men suffering from a hormonal imbalance, such as cancer patients and concentration-camp survivors. The two major hormones involved are prolactin, which stimulates milk production in the breast, and estrogen, which in turn stimulates the production of prolactin and the growth of breast tissue. Putting these facts all together, could it be, then, that Aka dads have truly crossed the final frontier into breastfeeding, super-dad stardom?
To find out, I contacted Professor Hewlett directly. He quickly set me straight—yes it’s true that Aka dads frequently offer their babies a nipple, but this is simply, he says, for comfort, not for breastfeeding. Given that mechanical stimulation of the nipples, even men’s nipples, does generate prolactin production, however, might such suckling not produce lactation in the occasional Aka father? Hewlett had never witnessed this, and after asking several Aka men directly had, in fact, been told that Aka men couldn’t breastfeed, since their “nipples were too small.” So what about the curious male breast growth that Hewlett, and others, had noticed among the Aka and other Pygmy men? Clearly, some Aka men, at least, experience surges of estrogen sufficient to prompt breast growth. But this, Hewlett thought, was probably related to diet or peculiarities of Pygmy growth, rather than Aka fathering and suckling. I’m not so sure, however. A 2001 study by the Mayo Clinic found that Canadian men who were expectant fathers developed elevated levels of estrogen and reduced testosterone. It doesn’t seem too far a stretch, then, to theorize that the caring, paternal style of Aka men is a contributing cause of high estrogen levels and gynecomastia among them (though it could just as easily be the other way around). Suffice it to say that, for whatever reason, a substantial minority of Aka men carry a visible symbol of their caring, fatherly abilities on their own bodies.9
In any case, although Aka Pygmy men are apparently unique in their suckling behavior, they are not unique among ancient and tribal men in care of infant children. Other tribal fathers took very loving care of their infant children too. Malinowski, for example, made it clear that those Trobriand Island fathers began their devoted attention in their child’s early infancy:
He (the father) will fondle and carry a baby, clean and wash it, and give it the mashed vegetable food…The father performs his duties with genuine natural fondness…looking at it with eyes of such love and pride as are seldom seen in those of a European.10
Accounts of Melanesian Lesu fathers, similarly, spoke in glowing terms of their connection with their infant children:
The father and mother are equally tender towards the child…A man plays with his child…talking pure foolishness to the baby…Or they may croon one of the dance songs to the infant.11
Malinowski pointed out that such tender paternal behavior tended to occur in matrilineal societies (those tracing descent through the female line), since fathers in those societies were not the primary male authority figures (a child’s mother’s brother was). Patrilineal descent, on the other hand, tended to discourage close paternal affection, as in the case of the African Kipsigis people, whose fathers don’t hold their infants at all for their first year of life. Clearly we modern fathers are, to some extent, throwing off our patrilineal roots in moving towards a model of greater infant care. Yet these figures show we still have a long way to go before we get anywhere near the efforts of Aka, Trobriand Island, or Lesu dads.
Rounds one and two, then, seem to have gone to the Aka and their support crew of tribal super-dads. But what of the two remaining markers of the “new father”—child-care rather than play, and equal treatment for sons and daughters? To take the first of these first, why exactly is a greater proportion of care as opposed to play considered a desirable trait of the modern “new father”? It’s for two reasons: first, it indicates a willingness to do the heavy lifting of childcare (though what was that about the housework?), and second, it shows a high level of intimacy and comfortableness with one’s children. At first glance, the figures for the involvement of the “new father” in actual child care do seem to have improved dramatically. According to a University of Chicago study, employed, married fathers went from spending seventeen minutes a day caring for their kids in 1965 to fifty-one minutes in 1998 (the latest figures available).12 Yet the same study also showed that the ratio of care to play actually remained the same—that is, play had increased even more dramatically.13 Sure, dads were giving more time overall to their kids, but they still preferred to spend that time in play, rather than care—diaper changing, feeding, and other tasks. Another study by the University of Michigan, similarly, showed that playing with his kids still takes up 39 percent of a modern dad’s total involvement, as opposed to 28 percent for caring activities. For mothers, on the other hand, play takes up just over 21 percent of their total involvement. There is also a marked difference in the nature of mothers’ and fathers’ play: dads far more frequently engage in vigorous, physical interaction with kids than mothers do.
The comparison with Aka dads here is revealing, for despite their extraordinary levels of involvement with their kids, Aka fathers almost never play with them. Hewlett reported that he witnessed just one episode of father–child play in 264 hours of recorded observations. Aka children, when interviewed, also reported that their fathers rarely played with them. We are so conditioned to think of a father’s role as a playful one that this would sound distressingly neglectful to us, were it not for all the other figures on Aka dads’ superior care. So what’s going on? There are two main reasons for the non-playful nature of Aka dads’ interaction with their kids. First, that they have a strong role in teaching their children, which Western men have largely surrendered to the state. Aka training is a daily, minute-by-minute affair and starts from a remarkably early age, as Hewlett writes:
I was rather surprised to find parents teaching their eight-to-twelve-month-old infants how to use small pointed digging sticks, throw small spears, use miniature axes with sharp metal blades, and carry small baskets.14
Aka dads don’t need to invent games to play with their kids, since their whole life with them is, effectively, a teaching game. Beyond that reason however, lies another: the sheer intimacy of the understanding that Aka fathers have for their children. They spend so much time caring for them, Hewlett writes, that they become expert at knowing what their child needs and when. An Aka father can, it seems, read his young child far better than a modern Western father, even a “new” dad, can read his child. Looked at in this way, the preference for play shown by Western fathers is not an inbuilt, biological drive, as is sometimes stated, but a simple product of not knowing exactly what to do. Hewlett points to a major difference between European and Aka fathers in support of this: European men almost always initiate their interactions with their child, he says, while Aka men almost never do. They don’t have to—their deep familiarity with their kids allows them to interact comfortably, easily, and naturally.
Kids on parade
Child beauty contests have had a bad reputation since the tragic murder of JonBenét Ramsay in 1996. Yet they have continued to grow to the level where, according to the Pageant Center Web site, twenty-five thousand such contests are held every year, generating in excess of a billion dollars.15 The Pageant Center claims that child beauty parades were invented in Florida during the 1960s, yet it might surprise them to know that some tribal peoples had, by that time, already been holding child beauty contests for hundreds of years.
In ancient Hawaii, doting grandparents apparently lined up their pa’i punahele, “little favorites,” for periodic ho’okelakela, “beauty contests.” These, however, were quite different from today’s extravaganzas of fake spray tan, baby’s breath, and pint-sized satin evening gowns. In line with the Polynesian love of corpulence (see “When fat was the new black”) pa’i punahele were stuffed with food to make them as fat as possible. They also might have had trouble tottering down the catwalk, since pa’i punahele were carried everywhere and not allowed to walk for the first few years of their lives. Even so, these arrangements were still probably healthier than modern-day child beauty contests; a study published in the Journal of Eating Disorders found that girls who had been contestants in child beauty pageants were more likely to have significant body-dissatisfaction issues.16
At this point things are looking grim for the “new father”—3 out of 4 rounds have now gone to his Aka rivals. Can he fight a rearguard action on the last supposed marker of his “new” fatherhood: equal treatment for sons and daughters? Initial signs, once again, seem promising. The Western world has none of the female infanticide that so skews sex ratios in some Asian and African countries (112 boys are born for every 100 girls in South Korea, thanks to the advent of sex selection based on ultrasound). Yet look a little deeper and some intriguing patterns emerge. Despite the absence of any tendency to abort female fetuses, 48 percent of American expectant fathers still say they want a son, as opposed to 19 percent who hope for a daughter. After the child is born, too, subtle differences in treatment set in, possibly not even consciously noted by the dad himself. Fathers are, for example, more motivated to work harder, and for more money, once they have had a son. They spend more time playing with them, too—an hour a day during weekdays as opposed to just half an hour with their daughters.17 (The discrepancy becomes even more pronounced in the case of stepfathers, who spend more time with sons than daughters in every category of child-care, not just play.) The difference in fathers’ attitudes to sons and daughters can even affect the man’s marriage. Fathers are more likely to marry the mother of their child, for example, if that child is a son. One study of couples who had learned the sex of their child through ultrasound even found that those couples with sons were more likely to marry before the baby was born. The list goes on: parents with sons are more likely to start a university fund; levels of happiness and marital harmony are higher for couples with male children, and divorce rates lower; when couples do divorce, the father is more likely to seek custody if sons are involved, rather than daughters. In each one of these measures the difference is small, but marked. The figures don’t lie—the Western “new father,” despite his undoubtedly sincere protestations of equal love, does not treat his daughters exactly the same as his sons. Do the Aka show the same tendency?
Interestingly, we don’t have any data on this problem—not a scrap.18 Professor Hewlett didn’t even address the issue in his fieldwork among the Aka. So completely absent is the question that his excellent book on Aka dads, Intimate Fathers, doesn’t even carry index entries for sons and daughters. This may, of course, be a simple matter of research focus, but I think something deeper is going on. Hewlett’s study does not investigate differences in Aka dads’ treatment of sons and daughters, I’d suggest, because there are none. Aka society is so blind to status differences between men and women that the idea of treating boys differently to girls doesn’t occur to them. The evidence lies in Hewlett’s descriptions of male and female roles in Aka life. These are, he writes, characterized by an extremely high level of equality:
Aka women challenge men’s authority on a regular basis and are influential actors in all kinds of decision making. Women participate in decisions about camp movement, extramarital affairs, bad luck on the hunt, and sorcery accusations…the capabilities of men and women are very similar, and therefore tasks can be reversed easily.
Aka women participate actively in supposedly male activities such as net hunting, and are, in fact, responsible for killing the small antelopes and other prey that the men chase into the net (they don’t, however, take part in the rarer spear hunts for elephant and wild boar). The high status of Aka women is shown through the lyrics of one of their popular dingboku, “women’s dance songs”: “the penis is not a competitor, it has died already! The vagina wins!” It is also evidenced by the fact that neither Hewlett nor any of the other anthropologists who have worked with the Aka witnessed incidents of male violence toward women. (Interestingly, there was some female-on-male violence, generally from wives who cut their husbands’ faces with knives or hit them with burning logs for sleeping with another woman. Even here, though, a more usual female tantrum involved simply tearing their shared hut down.) So while I admit that we have no direct data on Aka dads’ treatment of daughters compared to sons, I’m still, regrettably, able to award them probable victory in this round, too.
On every defining measure of “new” fatherhood, then, we modern men have proven to be deadbeat dads. Despite our national fatherhood institutes, parenting programs, dads’ clubs, and birthing classes, we’ve been out-fathered by a bunch of forest dads who couldn’t even read a “Prepared for Pregnancy” pamphlet, let alone Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood. At this point, however, the humiliated “new father” might well protest that the comparison is unfair. Fathering these days presents special challenges, he would argue, ones of which the Aka could never have dreamed. What about those innovations the “new father” has dreamed up to meet those challenges, such as his embrace of stepfathering? Or being present at his child’s birth? Or bringing his kids up without any discipline (a favorite complaint of right-wing radio shock jocks)? How could the Aka possibly match the Western “new father” in those, since he, presumably, invented them?
Well, let’s see.
Stepfathering, it’s true, is often considered a speciality of modern families in the post-sexual-revolution era. Yet our self-proclaimed skills in inclusive parenting seem to evaporate whenever the census-taker comes around: in 2004 less than 6 percent of American children lived with their mother and a stepfather, as opposed to almost 25 percent who resided with just their single mother.19 What’s more, outcomes for children living with those stepdads are sometimes less than best. Research carried out by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly in the 1980s showed that stepfathers were responsible for higher rates of (and more severe) child assault and murder than biological fathers.20 Direct maltreatment is, thankfully, rare even among stepfathers, but neglect in favor of one’s biological children, unfortunately, isn’t. Another study of American stepfathers showed that on four measures of investment in children—financial support from birth, time spent with them, children’s university attendance, and financial support while studying—they lavished fewer resources on their stepchildren than on their own kids.21 The distinction held even when a man’s stepchildren were living in the same family as his biological kids. While most modern stepdads make genuine efforts to love their stepchildren just as much as their own, it seems they’re simply not particularly good at doing so.
The Aka, by contrast, seem to manage better. Stepfathering is, for a start, much more common in Aka society than among Western “new fathers.” Due to the early age at which Aka parents die, and their surprisingly high divorce rate, over 40 percent of Aka children live with at least one stepparent by the age of sixteen. Every stepchild Hewlett interviewed said their stepfather had treated them well, sometimes even better than their own father had. True, Hewlett notes that stepfathers didn’t seem to provide as much direct care as biological dads did, but he also cautioned that his data was too limited from which to draw valid conclusions. In Aka society there certainly seems to be some benefit in having a stepfather—Hewlett states that almost every child in his survey who had lost a father also died within months, unless their mother remarried. This is probably due to the dangerous conditions in the Aka’s jungle home, coupled with the loss of the father’s substantial contribution to child care. Other tribal societies in jungle habitats proved even more skilled at sharing custody and stepfathering. Some, indeed, extended their sharing to the mother herself. Men of the South American Bari, Canela, Mundurucu, and the Mehinaku Indian tribes believed that it took the semen of several men to make a child, and that each then carried the responsibilities of a father. Remarkably, kids lucky enough to score such multiple dads had better survival rates than children with a single father.22 (Although we must not, of course, idealize all ancient tribal fathering: Aché Indians of Paraguay, for example, actually killed children whose fathers either died or left the group.23) The Western “new father,” by comparison, seems rather selfish—a study done in 2004 showed we tend to save our best fathering efforts for those children who physically resemble us.24
If our stepfathering boasts have proven mere bombast, then, what about our presence at our children’s births? This is certainly a new development—fifty years ago husbands weren’t even allowed inside many U.S. maternity wards during their child’s birth; these days more than 90 percent attend.25 It’s also something Aka fathers don’t do, so it seems we’ve finally scored at least one victory over those smug, super-paternal show-offs. Aka fathers don’t have particular taboos against fathers attending childbirth (Hewlett records at least one father who did assist when his wife went into labor alone in the forest). Most other ancient tribal societies, though, did. The fluids associated with childbirth were often considered so polluting that fathers avoided a woman’s labor on pain of death. That doesn’t mean, however, that they played no part in their child’s birth. Some tribal males were required to build a special hut for their wife to give birth in. Others had to observe extensive restrictions, such as the Mehinaku of Brazil, whose fathers had to abstain from sex, isolate themselves in a secluded hut, and avoid certain foods (such as fish) for months after the birth. Among the Garifuna people of Honduras, this period could last three years.26 Some tribal fathers, on the other hand, did attend their child’s birth. Their activities there, however, weren’t limited to holding their wife’s hand and uttering the occasional “Push!” Among the Aka’s pygmy neighbors, the Mbuti, fathers were (and still are) required to strip naked and expose their penis (try doing that in the maternity ward and see how far you get). Among precolonial Burmese mountain people, not just the father but all the men of the tribe stripped off and assumed a variety of obscene postures, supposedly to scare off evil spirits. Even more extreme, however, were those societies that practiced couvade, “sympathetic pregnancy,” rituals. Some of these simply mimicked the wife’s pregnancy, as in the case of those South American Indians among whom, according to anthropologist Yves d’Evreux:
He [the husband] lies-in instead of his wife who works as usual; then all the women of the village come to see and visit him in his bed, consoling him for the trouble and pain he had in producing his child; he is treated as if he were sick and very tired without leaving his bed.27
Others, however, involved the sadistic infliction of pain on the father to make him empathize with his wife’s suffering. Some ancient Brazilian tribes, for example, slashed the father all over his body with the teeth of an agouti (a rodent with teeth so sharp they pierce Brazil nuts) and poured tobacco juice mixed with pepper into the cuts. An even more directly empathic experience, though, was required of the Mexican Huichol Indian father in the olden days, who:
During traditional childbirth…sits above his laboring wife on the roof of their hut. Ropes are tied around his testicles and…each time she feels a painful contraction, she tugs on the ropes so that her husband will share some of the pain of their child’s entrance into the world.28
Now if that doesn’t make any “new father” slink off to discard his “empathy belly” in shame, he’ll have to add self-delusion to his list of shortcomings.29
It seems cruel to continue, but for the sake of the exercise, what about our supposed invention of noncorporal discipline of children? The past few decades have, it’s true, seen a march away from physical discipline. Corporal punishment is now illegal in all European schools and most European homes, schools in three Australian states, and schools in twenty-three American ones. This is certainly an improvement from the barbarism of earlier times. As late as the 1820s Alfred Lord Tennyson was flogged so severely for forgetting his lines while reciting a school text that he was confined to bed for six weeks. And medieval punishments, of course, had been even worse, as when disrespectful Saxon children in early England were fastened to walls with the joug (“metal collar”) for passersby to pelt and abuse.30 Yet not all ancient and tribal societies have been as cruel as ours. It’s probable that the Aka Pygmies, for example, have never used such brutal punishments. Pygmy fathers today rarely hit their children; Hewlett says he only witnessed it once in fifteen years of research among the Aka. (In fact, in Aka culture hitting children can constitute grounds for divorce.) Aka fathers don’t even attack their children verbally; Hewlett records that he almost never heard a Pygmy father, or mother, say the word “no” to a misbehaving child. (They generally just shift them away from the object of misbehavior.) Nor do Aka dads demand an overly high level of respect from their children. Hewlett reports with some amusement the words of an outraged villager of the Ngandu (a neighboring people who treat their children more strictly than the Aka):
Young pygmies have no respect for their parents; they regard their fathers as their friends…they always use their first names. Once I was in a pygmy camp…and a son said to his father, “Etobe your balls are hanging out of your loincloth” and everyone started laughing. No respect, none, none, none…31
I may be misjudging him, but I’d wager many a “new father” would be tempted to foreswear his noncorporal punishment principles when Timmy comes out with that little number!
Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
We often brag that our children receive the most enlightened sex education of any children in history, in contrast to the dark ignorance of medieval and Victorian times. Teachers in most American states (those that haven’t gone the “abstinence only” route) provide what they call “comprehensive” sex education, but it might well astonish those educators to find that sex ed in the ancient world was sometimes so comprehensive it even included on-the-job training. On the island of Tongareva, for example, a boy’s first growth of pubic hair:
…marked his introduction to copulation: a mature woman was appointed by his father to press back his foreskin over the glans and to instruct him, by actual demonstration, how to copulate. After that the boy began for the first time to wear a loincloth (i.e., to conceal his genitals) and was deemed…ready for actual (in contrast to playful) copulation…32
This sounds almost like abuse, to our ears, but it is worth remembering that attitudes to children’s bodies could be very different in ancient societies. Manchu mothers of ancient northern China, to give one of numerous examples, might often be seen in public sucking their infant son’s penis (for pacification), though they would never dream of kissing his cheek—an explicitly erotic gesture in Manchu culture.
Why should we modern fathers be so much worse than the Aka, despite our fantastic riches in resources and self-help books? In our defense, it isn’t entirely our fault. Anthropological studies of good fathering (defined as intimate and emotionally warm) have found that it is far more common in hunter-gatherer societies. The studies have also identified the conditions that seem to inhibit this approach in other cultures. One of those, as mentioned, is the patrilineal-descent system, but there are others. Researchers have discovered, for example, that the most distant fathering tends to take place in pastoral, or herding, societies. This is mostly because such societies allow the accumulation of enormous private wealth. This in turn encourages men to adopt promiscuous mating strategies like polygamy in which their number of offspring goes up, since they can now support them, but their investment in each goes down. There’s also the problem that herding takes a man away—often a long way away—from his family and thus removes him from the fathering scene. It’s also the case, finally, that herding societies tend to be quite violent ones. The fact that so much wealth is tied up in a mobile, easily stolen resource means herders often have to employ extreme violence as a deterrent. The drawback, of course, is that such aggression is not conducive to warm and empathic fathering (see, the “Spare the rod” box for sobering evidence of this).
It is immediately obvious, too, that our society—that of the “new father”—satisfies at least two of these conditions. True, we no longer have to resort to hyperaggression to deter our foes (the justice system now does that for us), but we are still very much like a pastoralist society in that our workplaces usually take us away—again, often far away—from our homes and any opportunity for sustained fathering. We are also quite an acquisitive society, which, as we have seen, encourages promiscuity and inhibits paternal investment. (True, we don’t always father the huge broods that those polygamist pastoral fathers do, but it’s not just the extra children that dilute those fathers’ paternal investment. It’s also the weakened attachment to any particular woman that results from having multiple sexual partners—which high-status males in our society also report.) Similarly, the fact that employed fathers who take “the daddy track”—forgoing work time to care for their children—suffer worse career outcomes, and are considered less conscientious employees by their employers, demonstrates that there is a cost placed on paternal investment in our society.33
Clearly our fathering fundamentals need some attention.
Remarkably, though, even the superpaternal Aka also have their fathers who don’t dig the daddy track. The Aka don’t have many high-status positions to strive for, but they do have some, among them the posts of kombeti, “headman,” nganga, “healer,” and tuma, “elephant hunter.” Hewlett found that men who had held those positions generally showed less intimate fatherly care than those who had not. Just like their Western counterparts, this was probably because they devoted most of their effort to status-seeking activities, rather than fathering.34
But these men are the exception, rather than the rule, and a small one at that. For most Aka men, their unique culture allows them to nourish their fathering instincts free of such poisonous influences. What conditions allow this? Hewlett identifies three, the first of which is equality between men and women. Aka husbands, Hewlett writes, spend a lot of time with their wives, enjoy their company, and have such a high level of respect for women’s work that they see nothing demeaning in helping them perform it. This leads directly into the second condition Hewlett identifies: the fact that men and women work together in activities such as net hunting and caterpillar gathering, putting the father at child-care ground zero all day, every day. This in turns leads into the third condition: the high level of father-child bonding. Aka fathers grow so emotionally close to their young children because they are physically close to them throughout their entire childhoods.
This, Hewlett says, has strong implications for our own society. Not only does it mean that we must find ways to bring fathers’ workplaces closer to their homes, be it through workplace child care or flexible paternity leave. It also means that our current focus on ensuring quality time for dads with their kids may be misguided. Quality time, Hewlett says, simply cannot substitute for quantity time.
That is the real lesson of the Aka. Following their example may well help us improve in future, but right now we are once more in desperate trouble. Homo masculinus modernus has come in second-best, yet again, in a fight over the last possible quality that makes a man worthy of the name: his skill as a dad. On top of our previous failures—see BRAWN, BRAVADO, BATTLE, BALLS, BARDS, and BEAUTY—it is a bitter blow. But since all these aspects of masculinity—strength, courage, beauty, sporting, and literary skill—have proven to be simple ploys in the age-old struggle to mate, and thereby save ourselves from genetic oblivion, our mediocre efforts beg the question: just how well do we do, then, with the ladies? How good are we in the arts of Venus, especially in comparison to those ancient men who have so soundly thrashed us elsewhere?
Certainly, we are, once again, not short on boasts about it—recall Wilt Chamberlain’s unbelievable claim of twenty thousand lovers. Then there are the claims of the “seduction community,” immortalized in books such as Neil Strauss’s The Game and TV shows like The Pickup Artist, that they have brought the art of seducing women to heights exceeding even those of the legendary Casanova. Seduction “gurus” in the community insist they can get a woman to sleep with them within seven hours, to pay them for sex, and to have orgasms on vocal command. This last, admittedly, is difficult to believe, but it’s merely a more extreme version of our supreme confidence in our ability to satisfy women sexually as never before in history. Who, after all, discovered the clitoris and the female orgasm, complete with their excitingly updated cousins, the G-spot and female ejaculation? What man in history has ever employed the sophisticated techniques we have to induce the same? Who has ever been as sexually liberated, had more adulterous affairs, consumed such explicit pornography, or even been as gay as us?
There’s only one way to find out. Strap yourselves in, ladies and gentlemen, as we embark on a tour through sex-toy manufacture in the European Palaeolithic; Hawaiian pili (“touched by the wand”) swingers’ parties; and Andean Moche ceramic kettles so pornographic they’d have Larry Flynt firing up his kiln for a piece of the action. Oh, and don’t forget to bring some tissues—not for the fluids, but the tears.
Which I have a very strong suspicion it’s all going to end in.