Cultural Ironies and Men’s Expendability

With the rise of agriculture around 12,000 years ago, civilizations have been largely patriarchal. Men have tended to rule over women, and that power arrangement reinforced rationales for the differences between men and women.

Men and women were supposed to be masculine and feminine, respectively, and religion, art, and philosophy fleshed out those assumptions to train civilized boys and girls.

Ironically, though, while masculinity is generally a value system for dominators, and femininity is a program of submissiveness for the dominated, nature had other ideas.

In the Stone Age, nomadic bands of early humans were likely egalitarian out of necessity because there were few resources for imposing the will of an elite class, and early humans had the intelligence to cooperate and gang up against would-be dominators. The resources to sustain social inequalities would have to await the rise of sedentary societies and specialized classes that formed around agriculture. That new lifestyle of farming the land and domesticating animals trained people to expect and to approve of human dominators.

Still, early men and women weren’t biologically equal in that the two main genders had different reproductive roles, as is apparent from the colossal difference in body types. Women carry infants to term, birth them, and feed them with breastmilk. Men don’t.

Anthropologists in the 1970s proposed the Expendable Male Hypothesis to explain polygyny and hunter-gatherer men’s prominence in hunting. We think of a harem as being a sign of extravagant male power, but the opposite is true, according to this hypothesis. The male’s role in reproduction is much less labour-intensive than the female’s, so that a human population can grow with many women and few men, but not in the opposite scenario. Women matter more than men to sustaining or growing a population because few men can impregnate many women, as in polygyny.

This isn’t to say that men were useless in prehistory. Obviously, men supply a necessary genetic component to offspring. But that’s a fact about men in general, not individual men. Some men are necessary for growing a human population, but that doesn’t mean every man is necessary. By contrast, every woman’s womb and eggs are precious in a way that isn’t true for every man’s reproductive organs. Both maleness and femaleness are required for sexual reproduction, but individual women matter more than individual men in sustaining the population in evolutionary terms. When a womb is occupied for nine months, you need another womb to grow the population, yet a single man’s semen replenishes much more quickly.

What’s interesting about this hypothesis is that the Western cultural standard of masculinity might have arisen as a backlash to the natural fact of men’s expendability. If men had to live with knowing that they were more individually expendable than the women in their group, so that men went on dangerous hunts while women undertook the more important risk of giving birth, men must eventually have searched for a cultural compensation for that lower implicit status.

Western cultures conceive of masculinity as a set of virtues, such as strength, courage, independence, leadership, dominance, and assertiveness. There’s a grimness to this outlook, which would testify to men’s initial lowliness. Male strength is a matter of rising from the ashes or rectifying a bad situation. Male virtues are often martial, which is to say that men found themselves in combat, whether with other men, wild animals, or natural forces. This is because men were more expendable, and women were preoccupied with the more crucial task of propagating our species.

Leadership, for example, is a masculine virtue, but why would leaders have been needed in prehistory? Hunter-gatherer bands were relatively egalitarian, as I said, so why would men have eventually striven to lead? Perhaps it was to prove their worth, as an overcompensation for nature’s lowly estimation of men, as it were. Think of the grandstanding politician who makes a fuss about some minor issue to ingratiate himself with his constituents. That kind of pitiful performance might have been the origin of male leadership and thus the Western conception of masculinity.

Or why do masculine men strive to dominate others? Again, such behaviour would have been misplaced in prehistory because early humans were an endangered species, and small nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers couldn’t have afforded to waste their members on social games of exclusion. Only members who threatened the group would have been ostracized or killed. So why would masculine domination eventually be glorified as exemplary conduct for men?

Again, it would have been a matter of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, spitting in nature’s face, and taking the reins in a Promethean revolt against what would have seemed the unfairness of the evolutionary process.

Masculine men dominate women, other men, the wilderness, or any problem that arises because men have more to prove than women. Men must prove themselves because their Maker (nature) judged them inferior, as it were. Women have nothing to prove because their inherent worth is obvious: they give birth to new life and nurture the precious offspring with milk from their bodies (which was all that prehistoric babies could have eaten in their earliest months).

Share

There’s a second irony in the advent of femininity. Women’s greater indispensability led to early goddess cultures, which indicated that early humans celebrated women’s seemingly miraculous power to carry life to term.

But there’s a downside to being put on a pedestal and worshipped. We see this in celebrities who bristle at how their privileges infantilize them. Surrounded by sycophants and luxuries, celebrities paradoxically may seem subhuman. They’re overprotected because they’re deemed precious, so they lose the ability to care for themselves. Addicted to adulation, they become mascots for a corporation or industry.

Bill Murray, for instance, likes to surprise fans by showing up randomly at strangers’ weddings and other events. Why? Because he doesn’t want to be locked up in the prison of fame, and he craves ordinary human socializing, even if he can’t help but make a spectacle of himself wherever he goes.

Virginia Woolf said in A Writer’s Diary, ‘I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.’

Ironically, nature’s higher estimation of individual prehistoric women may have impeded them once humans began toying with cultural symbols to make sense of their condition. By hunting because of their expendability, men were the ones who could say they adventured. Men travelled far from the tribe, following wild animals, and risking death to bring back meat. Women were too precious to risk their wombs on optional adventures.

Thus, women’s very biologically ingrained indispensability made for an opposite dynamic. Masculinity arose as an overcompensation for most men’s lesser importance to most women. Nature deemed men inferior, so behaviourally modern, culturally active men rose to the challenge and assigned themselves superior worth with a host of ideologies. By contrast, nature deemed women superior, and that superiority caged women so that femininity arose as a debilitating culture.

Men challenged their lowly status in the prehistoric wilderness, while women fell into cultural prisons from their greater height in a strictly evolutionary assessment of their worth.

The upshot is that there’s a comical dimension to such cultural rationales. We obsess over shifting standards of political correctness and obey social conventions as though they were worthy of respect. We need some such fictions to cooperate with large numbers of strangers, as Yuval Harari pointed out in Sapiens. But the ironies that underlie the myths of masculinity and femininity show that we’re flailing in nature’s grasp.