Chapter 9

From Drmills

1 UNDERSTANDING MEN IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURES

UNDERSTANDING MEN IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURES

OVERVIEW

It is men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one’s likely to do anything about that.
Golda Meir (quote from Winokur, 1989)

Males cannot bear offspring themselves. This fact permits them to have considerable reproductive variance. In other words, males may fail entirely to reproduce, or they may achieve a level of reproductive success many times beyond that of a female. Even under the best of circumstances, females are limited biologically from having as many children as a male may potentially have. As such, females typically have less reproductive variance, but enjoy a virtual certainty of mating. Males must contend with both the "carrot" and the "stick" of their considerable reproductive variance.

The "stick" for the male is the risk of losing utterly in the game of reproduction by being prevented by females and/or by other males from reproducing at all. Unequipped to carry offspring, a male is totally dependent on one or more females to serve as his reproductive proxy. He must convince at least one female to allow him to mate. Males who fail in this endeavor (or, alternately, do not resort to a more desperate strategy) do not pass on their genes. And the reproductive game does not end there. Preferably, a male who is interested in a long-term commitment must also convince his reproductive partner(s) to remain sexually faithful to him – to forgo copulation with all other males – so that he is not investing resources in an offspring that does not carry his genes.

And on the other hand, there’s the "carrot," the potential "reproductive jackpot" of siring a large, virtually unlimited, number of offspring. Various factors play into whether a male will hit this "jackpot," but research has shown that there are fairly reliable patterns in female preferences. Men with very high status, who are in a dominant position, are often perceived as attractive to women. Furthermore, men who can invest some kind of resource also tend to be preferred. This investment can take several forms, via financial, material, or emotional investment. Each of these resources carries its own costs and benefits. It is also important to note that a woman's preference for one of these traits may depend on the strategy she is employing at the time (e.g., long- or short-term strategy).

The evolved adaptations of the male brain and body have been designed to help to avoid the genetic dead end of the "stick" and attain the "carrot" of genetic longevity. Men face a high stakes reproductive game, and gambling in such a game tends to make males, as compared to females, more willing to go out on a limb and engage in risk-taking behavior. A male’s life often seems to be designed for living intensely, as a high risk, high stakes game. Consequently, across human cultures and animal species, a male’s lifespan may be shorter.

REVIEW OF BASIC MALE REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES

Let us review some basic male strategies, particularly as they apply to human males.

A human male is presented with several reproductive challenges, often recurrent in the environment, such that over evolutionary history selection pressures have led to complex adaptations in order to solve these problems. At the most basic level, he must be able to become sexually aroused and perform sexually, and to prefer appropriate sexual partners. In complex social groups, such as those of humans and some other non-human primates, males must deal with male competitors who may attempt to prevent his access to fertile females, to steal his resources and/or female mate(s), or to injure or kill him. He must persuade at least one female that it is in her reproductive interest to copulate with him, and, unfortunately, her reproductive interests sometimes conflict with his own.

To make matters more complex, a man’s reproductive challenges do not necessarily end after copulation. If he has plans for a long-term commitment, it is also in his reproductive interest to try to ensure his paternity and avoid cuckoldry by attempting to ensure the sexual fidelity of his mate(s). If he does have reasonable assurance of paternity, it then becomes in his evolutionary interest to protect and provide for his offspring to enhance their survival and reprodutive success.

Each of these problems and evolutionary mechanisms presents a different set of challenges. Rarely will a single strategy be capable of solving a particular problem in every context. Thus, the human male must assess his situation and select an appropriate strategy to attempt to solve a particular reproductive problem. The following sections review these challenges and the various adaptive strategies that have evolved to solve them.

MALES HAVE A POTENTIALLY FASTER REPRODUCTIVE RATE

As we noted earlier, men are physically capable of siring offspring at a faster rate than women. Their biological contribution involves the act of copulation and the contents of the ejaculate. Beyond that, their investment is entirely dependent on their willingness to invest resources, emotions, and commitment into offspring.

MEN HAVE HIGHER REPRODUCTIVE VARIANCE

Males can be either highly successful or not very successful in the mating game. The limiting factor is the number of fertile, receptive females to which they can gain sexual access. One particularly successful example is Ivan the Bloodthirsty of Morocco, who apparently holds the known record for number of offspring, with over 600 children to his credit!

Consider a man and a woman, who copulate with various partners over the course of one year. Suppose they each have six partners during this year. If the woman becomes pregnant by one of these matings, she will produce one offspring during that year. If the male impregnates four of his six mates, he can produce four times the number of offspring that the woman produces in that year. A male’s reproductive potential manifests itself through his ability to mate with fertile women, whereas a female’s reproductive potential is limited ultimately by her own physical characteristics, like the number of ova she is capable of growing and releasing to be fertilized. This provides little room to increase her reproductive success to the potential rate of a man, aside from beginning to reproduce as young as possible and minimizing the period between births. Because the primary limit on a male’s reproductive output is access to fertile women, males show greater variance in their reproductive success. A male that mates with only one female and sires only one child is less reproductively successful than a polygynous male who sires fourteen children by ten women. Since some males monopolize the reproductive lives of more than one woman, it follows that other males are "reproductively disenfranchised."

MEN ARE AT RISK OF CUCKOLDRY

Because males do not bear offspring themselves, they are subject to paternity uncertainty. It is in the best interest of males who pair with long-term mates to pursue strategies to maximize their paternity assurance, so that he is not investing resources in offspring that are not his own. Across species, paternity insecurity also has ramifications for rearing of the offspring. The less promiscuous the female of the species, and hence the lower the paternity insecurity, the more likely the male is to contribute time and energy resources to the offspring of that female.

Before we examine the psychological mechanisms that have evolved to solve male reproductive challenges, we will first investigate some of the more unexpected and surprising aspects of human male morphology.

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