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 -- a fact that allows them considerable reproductive variance. In other words, males may fail entirely to reproduce, or they may achieve a level of reproductive success many times that of a female. Even under ideal circumstances, females are limited biologically from conceiving as many children as a male may potentially produce. Females overall have less reproductive variance, but on the other hand, they 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. Males can be prevented by females and/or by other males from reproducing at all. Unequipped to carry offspring, a male is 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 persuasive endeavor (and who 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 interested in a long-term commitment will convince his reproductive partner(s) to remain sexually faithful to him – to forgo copulation with all other males – so that he does not invest resources in offspring that do not carry his genes.

The reproductive "carrot" for the male is the potential "genetic jackpot" of siring a large (virtually unlimited) number of offspring. Various factors determine whether a male will hit this "jackpot," but research has shown that there are fairly reliable patterns in females' preferences. Men with high status, who are in a dominant position, are often perceived as attractive to women. Furthermore, men who can invest resources in females and offspring also tend to be preferred. This investment can take several forms, including financial, material, and emotional investment. Each of these resources carries specific costs and benefits. It is important to note that a woman's mixture of preferences for these traits depends on the strategy she is employing at the time (e.g., long- or short-term strategy).

The male brain and body have evolved to avoid the genetic dead end of the "stick" and to attain the "carrot" of genetic longevity. Men face a high-stakes reproductive game, and their need to gamble tends to make males more willing than females to engage in risk-taking behavior. A male's life often seems to have evolved for living intensely, in a high-risk, high-stakes game. Consequently, across human cultures and animal species, males typically have shorter lifespans.

REVIEW OF BASIC MALE REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES

It will be useful to review some basic male reproductive strategies, particularly as they apply to human males.

A human male faces several ongoing reproductive challenges, and through the course of evolutionary history selection pressures have led to complex adaptations in order to address these problems. At the most basic level, a male must be able to become sexually aroused and perform sexually, and he must prefer reproductively appropriate sexual partners. In complex social groups, such as those of humans and some non-human primates, a male 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 also persuade at least one female that it is in her reproductive interest to copulate with him, and, unfortunately, his and her reproductive interests will sometimes conflict.

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

Each of these reproductive problems 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 for attempting to solve a particular reproductive problem. The following sections review these challenges and the various adaptive strategies that have evolved to address them.

MEN HAVE A POTENTIALLY FASTER REPRODUCTIVE RATE

As noted earlier, men are physically capable of siring offspring at a faster rate than are women. Men are able to fulfill their fundamental reproductive role in moments, compared to the woman's approximately nine months. The man's biological contribution involves the act of copulation and the contents of the ejaculate. Beyond that, his investment depends entirely on his willingness to invest resources, emotions, and commitment into offspring.

MEN HAVE HIGHER REPRODUCTIVE VARIANCE

Males range from remarkably successful to absolutely unsuccessful in the mating game. The limiting factor is the number of receptive, fertile females to which a male can gain sexual access. One particularly successful example is Ivan the Bloodthirsty of Morocco, who apparently holds the known human 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 during one of these matings, she will produce one offspring during that year. If the male impregnates four of his six mates that year, he can produce four times the number of offspring compared to the woman. 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 physical characteristics, like the rate at which she releases ova for fertilization, and the length of gestation. This provides little room for increasing 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 significantly greater variance in reproductive success. A male who mates with only one female and sires only one child is less reproductively successful than a polygynous male who sires, for example, 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 the offspring, males 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, reducing the risk of investing resources in offspring that are not their 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 level of paternity insecurity, the more likely the male is to contribute time and energy resources to the offspring of that female.

Before examining psychological mechanisms that have evolved in response to male reproductive challenges, it will be useful to investigate some of the more unexpected and surprising aspects of human male morphology.

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