NEW-AGE SENSITIVE GUYS
These days, we expect men to be more sensitive, vulnerable, loving, sympathetic, and supportive; to be less competitive, territorial, and violent; to be monogamous and to share the child rearing fifty-fifty. Actually, what we’re asking is that men be more like women, and for some that’s a tall order. Their biology protests You’re joking, right? I’m not programmed for this. And yet, without such mutual concern and equality modern life would be intolerable for both men and women. An ironic footnote is that, as men become the New-Age sensitive guys women want, some women are less able to find them sexually attractive because they strike too many feminine chords. I find this amusing because it reminds me that we’re dealing with ancient hungers, ancient drives, and trying to adapt them to a society for which they weren’t designed.*
To their credit, many men do soften their instincts. Indeed, in a world plagued by war, this is essential. We no longer live in small bands, armed with spears and rocks, where words like “anger,” “revenge,” and “hate” result in violent, tragic, but limited destruction. We have raised the ante until everything is at stake. Evolution cannot keep up with our passion to invent new ways to possess, rule, or destroy. We have changed the world, but not ourselves. How are we supposed to use ancient attitudes to solve contemporary problems? You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks. Our patterns of behavior didn’t evolve to deal with life in a teeming metropolis or with weapons of mass destruction. But that is why love means so much to us. As Konrad Lorenz has pointed out, only truly aggressive species would need to evolve love. Our violent nature is what makes love possible. Totally peaceful creatures would not need the balm of love.
Glance in the mirror, and a predator stares back at you. Prey animals—antelopes, horses, cows, deer—have eyes located at the sides of the head, so that they can watch for danger creeping up behind them. In contrast, a tiger has eyes facing front, so that it can use its stereo vision to precisely pinpoint the whereabouts of the next meal, run it to the ground, and leap upon its neck or flank with bared teeth. Humans have the eyes of a predator, a tiger’s eyes, and that tells us something about our ancient origins. But we also have colossal brainpower. We are not just dangerous, we are ingenious. Without mechanisms for subduing our violent, craven, and predatory appetites, we would have wiped ourselves out, adding our name to the long roll call of extinction. But evolution gave us a powerful peacemaker. Our ability to love has saved us from ourselves.
ADULTERY
If we voyaged to a distant star and observed our kind there—naked with a big tuft of hair on the head—we would probably refer to them as “crested primates.” And we would be fascinated by their paradoxical home lives. Humans throughout the world flirt, fall in love, and marry. Ninety percent of American men and women marry, and many societies prize monogamy. Some have even built it into their religious and legal laws. Emotionally, the same sort of law exists—men and women are perpetually searching for their “one true love” with whom to form a lifelong bond. Despite that, humans are deeply unfaithful. Unfaithful even if the risks to life, limb, and family are high. In one of many polls on the subject, 72 percent of married American men say they’ve been unfaithful, and 54 percent of American women. However, adultery is reported as a constant in all cultures. If evolution’s plan is for us to meet and mate, then what part does adultery play in the equation?
There are many reasons why female adultery may have evolved over the millennia. Females could barter sex for extra food. Having a backup male to help raise the kids might come in handy if a female’s mate ran away or died. If a female chose a mate who turned out to be unfit, she stood a better chance of passing on strong genes if she mated with someone else. Genetic variety is always a safety net—when a female has offspring by different fathers, each child receives a slightly different genetic inheritance, and the chance that one of the children will survive is all the stronger. A savvy female might have made friends with many males so that they wouldn’t hurt or kill her offspring. If the males couldn’t be sure which of them was the father, they would all look after her child.
Whatever the cause, women with a strong sex drive who were unfaithful to their “husbands” produced more children who survived, and thus the genes for that tendency to cheat were passed on. Men and women who felt powerfully devoted to each other as “husband” and “wife” also produced more children who survived. Men who impregnated as many women as possible also produced more children, even if they didn’t stay to help raise them. It was in this way that our contrary sexual urges probably evolved, with the result that we now have men and women who are happily, gratefully monogamous, and yet chronically unfaithful.
THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES
If men and women are designed to fall in love, mate, and bear young, then why are they always fighting? Because their biological agendas are different. An average man’s ejaculate contains only five calories, and is mainly protein. It shoots out at twenty-eight miles per hour, roughly the speed limit on my street, which suggests the colossal pressure men must feel when they’re erect. But one ejaculation contains about 200 million sperm. In theory, the neighbor boy could populate his own planet. If he wants his genes to survive, he should impregnate as many girls as he can. Parents of girls sense this and are worried about his “intentions” toward their daughters. After all, a female can produce only one egg a month and not many in her entire lifetime. If she becomes pregnant, she will be weaker and more vulnerable for nine months, less able to support herself, and then will have to nurse the baby and look after it for years. The male’s investment is a bit of spunk on a romantic evening. The female’s investment is many years of self-sacrifice. It’s in her best interest to choose someone who will stay by her and help support her child. Biologically, it’s in the male’s best interest to love ’em and leave ’em. A T-shirt prominently displayed in the window of a beachfront shop in West Palm Beach summed up the male imperative perfectly, if crudely. It showed three hot young women from the rear—mainly blond hair and buns in thong bikinis—you couldn’t see their faces at all. Underneath were the words Jump ‘em, Pump ‘em, Dump ‘em.
The battleground is minute. The time limit is roughly thirty years of life. Both adversaries are generals. Both desire the same goal—the perpetuation of their genes. What differs is their strategy. She wants a man who will stick around, and because that’s never a surefire thing she becomes very choosy. She hopes to fall mutually in love with someone protective but nurturing, faithful and fit. She tests his sincerity, grills him about whether or not he really loves her, if he would go through fire and water for her. She uses words like “always” and “forever.” She’s jealous and possessive, but with a twist: it doesn’t matter if he screws around, provided he’s not in love with those other women. She knows he’s driven to sow his seed in other fields. What she cares about is his practical fidelity, his staying with her to make sure she and her offspring survive. So, angry and tearful, she forgives him once or twice, or pretends not to know, but puts her foot down if it’s chronic or seems serious. He’s also jealous and possessive, but he allows her no slips. If she becomes pregnant by someone else, he’ll end up supporting a child with none of his genes. To him, that would be catastrophic. So, if she even looks lasciviously at another man, he goes on the rampage. This is not true just for individual men, but for whole countries.
For example, reports of rape and infanticide in Bosnia-Herzegovina fill today’s newspapers. Overwhelming an enemy is not enough. Bloodthirsty warriors want to murder unborn generations, making sure that only their own genes will survive. Perhaps the most obvious example of this was in 1300 B.C. A monument at Karnak, Egypt, chronicles King Menephta’s revenge on the Libyan army, which he vanquished. It lists the severed penises that his army brought home: Phalluses of Libyan generals—6. Phalluses cut off Libyans—6,359. Sirculians killed, phalluses cut off—222. Etruscans killed, phalluses cut off—-542. Greeks killed, phalluses presented to the king—6,111.
Men and women have trouble understanding each other because their bodies speak slightly different dialects of survival. Some of the words are the same, but the meanings vary, each gender has its own slang, and at times the grammar can be different. As Deborah Tannen has demonstrated so entertainingly in You Just Don’t Understand, when men and women speak the same sentence they often mean totally different things. When men get together, regardless of what they’re discussing, there is always a subtle element of competition, a jockeying for position and power. When women get together, regardless of what they’re discussing, there is always a subtle element of making connections and bonding. For example, if a couple is out driving and they get lost, the man is unlikely to ask a passerby for directions. He wouldn’t want the stranger to think he isn’t masterly enough to navigate. It infuriates him. It makes him lose face, and in his reckoning there are few crimes as disturbing as another man’s laughter (a form of manslaughter). The woman, on the other hand, has no trouble asking for directions, and she would gladly provide help to a stranger who was lost. For her it is not a question of status, but connection. Most often, the man drives around getting more and more lost, and the woman yells at him for being too stubborn to ask for directions.
A woman spins out a web of forevers, which she finds reassuring and cozy. She tries to build an extended family in the community, give parties, do things together as a couple. The man says he needs his space, doesn’t understand her mania for socializing, and doesn’t want to feel tied down, or that she’s smothering him. They compromise by developing their own private time and public time. He goes out hunting hoops with the boys. She goes out gathering at the shops with the girls.
The purpose of ritual for men is to learn the rules of power and competition. Watching sports together, for example, they see the formal enactment of ritual, become loyal to a team, learn to conceal their vulnerability. The purpose of ritual for women (going to lunch together, sharing a favorite salon, etc.) is to learn how to make human connections. They are often more intimate and vulnerable with one another than they are with their men, and taking care of other women teaches them to take care of themselves. In these formal ways, men and women domesticate their emotional lives. But their strategies are different, their biological itineraries are different. His sperm needs to travel, her egg needs to settle down. It’s astonishing that they survive happily at all. Love provides many remedies in this battle: a no-man’s-land where both are safe, a messenger between the lines, an island of bliss in a fen of misgiving.
*Some women I know are thinking of marketing a New-Age Sensitive Guy doll. Pull a string in his back and he says: “You look great without makeup.” “Relax, I’ll do the dishes.” “Have you lost weight?” “Let’s just concentrate on your pleasure.”
THE CHEMISTRY OF LOVE
MOTHER LOVE, FATHER LOVE
One day my friend was packing for a business trip when her five-year-old son went into a paroxysm of despair. She reassured him that she would soon be back, and, in any case, that his father would be home to look after him and his sister. “It’s not the same thing,” her son moaned. “You hatched us.”
As any five-year-old knows, mother love and father love are different. In general, young children go berserk when separated from their mothers, but not necessarily when separated from their fathers. Harry Harlow has shown in classic studies with monkeys that fear of losing one’s mother is not just a human phobia. Other young animals feel a special attachment to the mother, too. How could it be otherwise? A tiny hobo in its padded cell, the baby spends nine months sharing mother’s food, blood, air, hormones, angers, and joys. At birth, it still cannot construe the world; it is a totally vulnerable sensing machine. It does not know that mother left briefly to run errands while it slept, or went shopping for her own food, or bought the blankets that keep Baby warm. Mother is physically intimate with her baby, obsessively kissing it, rocking it, caressing it. Mother herself is food, is warmth, is safety. A soft, fragrant reservoir of life, her breast seems but an extension of the baby’s body. The baby continues to be attached to her by the umbilical of its need. Loving mother is really a form of self-love. Beginning as one loving whole, a single world, mother and child will in time become separate beings; just as lovers, beginning as two separate beings, in time become one world, one whole.
Nothing is more absolute or unquestioning than a mother’s love, which is a gift freely given, a last of last resorts to a troubled soul. Even serial killers have mothers who love them. Erich Fromm explains this visceral feeling in The Art of Loving:
Mother is the home we come from, she is nature, soil, the ocean…. Mother’s love is unconditional, it is all-protective, all-enveloping; because it is unconditional it can also not be controlled or acquired. Its presence gives the loved person a sense of bliss; its absence produces a sense of lostness and utter despair. Since mother loves her children because they are her children, and not because they are “good,” obedient, or fulfill her wishes and commands, mother’s love is based on equality. All men are equal, because they all are children of a mother, because they all are children of Mother Earth.
A father’s love, on the other hand, is more distanced, and often has conditions attached to it. Fromm characterizes it as earned or deserved love, pointing out that fathers subconsciously say to their children: “I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me.” Fatherly love tends to punish and reward, to set limits, make demands, expect obedience. A child may or may not deserve his or her father’s love. It is a love that judges, and therefore a love that can be lost. Mother love is the love of the ancient earth-ecstasy religions, when people worshiped the fecundity of the wide-hipped land, the sultry heat of the summer sun, the all-embracing spirit of the earth. They worshiped a goddess who poured forth her love as she poured forth her children, nursing them with water from her breasts, cradling them against her flowing haunches. But, by the time of the Old Testament, god had become a father figure who issued demands, expected obedience, and judged his children, punishing or rewarding them according to their actions. We admire monarchies and crave political leaders because it’s impossible for us not to wish to return to childhood and certainties. We seem to yearn eternally to recover that parenting. Part of the nature of being a child is being ruled by tyrants and obeying laws that aren’t tailor-made.
Of course, both are important to a child’s well-being—feeling that she will always be completely loved, no matter how foolish or ugly or sinful she may be; and feeling that she’s worthwhile and valuable as an individual. From mother’s love, a child learns how to love; from father’s love, a child feels worthy of love. This doesn’t mean that a deeply loving single parent can’t raise an emotionally healthy child, or that abuse doesn’t sometimes happen in a two-parent home, but it strongly argues in favor of both parents helping to shape a child’s sense of self.
Throughout much of the animal kingdom, fathers guard or provide food for their young but are not intimately involved with child rearing. The idea of “motherhood” and “fatherhood” as roughly equal roles is a human invention. In our early evolution, Mother needed to stay with her infant, nursing and protecting it. Father needed to be free to hunt and fight to protect mother and child. This was a major part of his job description. Violence was an important element in his life; combat was one of his trades. What kept the ancient family in balance was a division of tasks. Females evolved a greater drive to nurture and make peace, males evolved a greater drive to battle and dominate. Contemporary men still feel those dammed-up urges. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that 85 percent of all violent crimes in the United States are committed by males. Indeed, there is a strong link between males and crime in cultures throughout the world. Females enter the crime statistics in a big way only when their hormones change during and after menopause. I know many unwarlike men who feel great tenderness for their children and friends. I know single fathers who are raisin
g their children with sensitivity. But, in general, men continue to commit most of the violent crime in the world, and women do most of the nurturing and loving.
In one study, researchers took women of various ages, some of whom had children and others not, and showed them photographs of babies. Their pupils automatically dilated, signaling interest and emotion. The same physiological response did not happen in men—unless they were fathers with small children. This is even the case with rats—the fathers become more attentive parents after they’ve spent time with their pups and gotten used to them; mothers respond instantly. Such studies as these suggest that females are predisposed to feel an instinctive, automatic concern for children; but men learn to feel that way only when they have children of their own. Even so, fathers desert their infants twenty times as often as mothers do. Unlike expectant fathers, pregnant women undergo hormonal upheavals that prepare them for child rearing. Bathed in a chemical glow, they don’t need to think about how or why or when to love their babies. The sky is blue. The ground is underfoot. They cherish their babies. What could be simpler?
THE CUDDLE CHEMICAL
Oxytocin, a hormone that encourages labor and the contractions during childbirth, seems to play an important role in mother love. The sound of a crying baby makes its mother’s body secrete more oxytocin, which in turn erects her nipples and helps the milk to flow. As the baby nurses, even more oxytocin is released, making the mother want to nuzzle and hug it. It’s been called the “cuddle chemical” by zoologists who have artificially raised the oxytocin level in goats and other animals and produced similar behavior. Oxytocin has many functions, some of them beneficial for the mother. The baby feels warm and safe as it nurses, and its digestive and respiratory systems run smoothly. The baby’s nursing, which also coaxes the oxytocin level to rise in the mother, results, too, in contractions of the uterus that stop bleeding and detach the placenta. So mother and baby find themselves swept away in a chemical dance of love, interdependency, and survival.