Men’s Struggle for Status and Relevance

I often marvel at the broad lack of insight about what it is like to be a boy or man these days, as exemplified by the casual use of concepts such as “toxic” and “fragile” masculinity that are currently vogue. To fully understand boys and men, one has to take a step back and place their behaviors, cognitions, and ambitions in a broader evolutionary perspective. Social context and culture are of course critically important as well, but there are common threads to masculinity that cut across cultural contexts and run deep into history and longer evolutionary time. These threads form a web that can be spun in different ways across time and cultures, but the threads themselves are not created by these varied experiences, only rearranged by them.

In a broader evolutionary perspective, the key feature of life for most males is the intense competition for mates or for control of the resources (e.g., nesting sites) that mates need to reproduce — that is, male-male competition. To be sure, some species are monogamous with high levels of male parenting (e.g., California mice), which doesn’t eliminate competition among males but drastically reduces it.

Among mammals, this is the exception and not the rule. More typically, males compete intensely with one another for the opportunity to reproduce and a few of them have many offspring, some have a few offspring, and still, others die without ever reproducing.

The mandrill is an extreme example among primates but illustrates the point. In some groups, one or two dominant males sire three out of four offspring and two out of three males never reproduce. “Toxic” male mandrills win the day, but their rise and tenures are necessarily “fragile." They must struggle to improve their social standing as young adults, with most never getting very far. Even the successful males must continually defend their position within the group and all of them will sooner or later be displaced or killed. In some species, including our distant cousins (chimpanzees), males cooperate with one another as a means to improve their status within the group and in competition with other groups. Even with cooperation, we still see differences in males’ dominance and reproductive success, albeit not as extreme as that found in mandrills.

So, how is this relevant to people? First, mammalian species with an evolutionary history of intense male-male competition exhibit several consistent and easy to document sex differences. Males are physically larger and more behaviorally aggressive than females; males grow more slowly and sexually mature at a later age than females; and, males have a shorter lifespan. There is no question that this same pattern is found in people. Indeed, the history of early human empires and population genetic studies indicate that dominance and repression of other males were common, much like that found in mandrills and chimpanzees. Dominance in these situations is simply the use of force or threat of force to coerce others into relinquishing their property or doing as one wishes, whether or not it is in these others’ best interest. In some of these cases, the resulting increase in reproductive skew (a few males siring many offspring) approached that found in mandrills and certainly merits the moniker of “toxic masculinity.”

Betzig, in fact, argued that in each of the first human six civilizations — ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Aztec (Mexico), Inca (Peru) and imperial India and China — ”powerful men mate with hundreds of women, pass their power on to a son by one legitimate wife, and take the lives of men who get in their way” (Betzig, 1993). These claims are confirmed by population genetic studies. Zeng et al. (2018), for instance, found evidence for a drastic contraction of genetic variability among men 5,000 to 7,000 years ago from Africa to Europe to East Asia, with little change in genetic variability among women.

Genetically, the population size of women was 17 times larger than that of men. This does not mean that there were 17 women to every man, but rather a large proportion of male lineages disappeared during this time frame and other lineages substantially expanded.

The diversity of women’s lineages rules out disease or famine for this collapse of the male population. All that is left is war and the selective death of most men, almost certainly due to male-male kin-based coalitional competition.

Men, thankfully, have other ways to achieve status and social relevance, as illustrated by Henrich and Gil-White’s distinction between prestige and dominance. Prestige is based on the acquisition of culturally-important competencies (e.g., hunting skills and hunting returns) that can contribute to the well-being of others who then freely confer status to the individual with these competencies.

In many traditional contexts, men’s status striving often involves a mix of dominance- and prestige-based strategies, and this is likely true today in many modern contexts. Nevertheless, there has been a historical shift from dominance-based to more prestige-based forms of status striving, resulting in reductions in violence and increases in mutually-beneficial cooperative economic activity (see Daly & Wilson, 1988; Pinker, 2011). Such a shift does not just happen; it is built over centuries and involves third-party policing, cultural rules that suppress polygyny and thus the chief motivator of male-on-male violence, and economic expansion that creates varied niches for men (and women) to express their status-seeking. As Scheidel (2017) discussed in his sweeping review of economic history and inequality, the collapse of these systems often brings civil war and a large body count, that is, a shift back to more dominance-based status striving.

In any event, the relation between men’s success in culturally-important niches and their reproductive success–the ability to attract a wife and have a family–continues today in developed nations, although the strength of this relation is weaker than in traditional contexts or historically. The currency, so to speak, of success in developed nations is income. The evolutionary importance of men’s income and status has been underestimated in many studies because these studies have excluded men who were childless.

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This is a critical oversight because from an evolutionary perspective being childless terminates the man’s direct lineage. Fieder and Huber (2007) addressed this confound using a sample of 7,000 45- to 55-year-old Swedish men. When childless men were excluded, men in the lowest 25 percent of income had the most children, followed by men in the highest 25 percent of income. When childless men were included, however, men who were higher in the income hierarchy had more children than did men lower in the hierarchy, as was also found in studies conducted in the United States and Scotland.

The different patterns emerged because about one out of three men in the lowest income category were childless by age 45 to 55 and thus likely to remain so, whereas about 1 out of 9 men in the highest category were childless.

The key point is that men’s struggle for status and social relevancy continues today and the productive channeling of this striving is dependent on the existence of social and economic niches that they can occupy and are valued by other people. In the modern world, the channeling of boys’ and later men’s ambitions and competitiveness requires effort. They need to be socialized such that they focus more on prestige than on dominance in their strivings and they need the educational opportunities and institutions that foster the development of socially- and economically-useful competencies.

Unthoughtful declarations of widespread “toxic” or “fragile” masculinity, attempts to purge the historical record of successful men, and educational institutions that are better suited to girls and women than to boys and men are not the path to channeling men into prestige-based, culturally important niches. If anything, these social strategies are likely to drive many men away from these channels and in doing so could create a large pool of disenfranchised men with the potential to be truly toxic.

So, what’s it like to be a man? At their core, men have evolved to attempt to organize their social world and life trajectory in ways that increase their social status and influence within the wider communities in which they live and to attempt to gain access to culturally important resources that will allow them to attract a wife and contribute to the well-being of their families.

In short, men are focused on achieving status and recognition in a niche that is valued in the wider culture (e.g., a respected warrior or physician) and through this obtain some level of social potency and access to resources (e.g., cows, cash) that are important in that culture. In societies that are girded by prestige-based social and economic niches, men who are successful in these endeavors are more likely to marry, have children, and contribute to the wider community than are their less successful peers.

There is nothing “toxic” about such strivings, although for many boys and men the attainment of them is fragile and less likely to happen without appropriate social, familial, and educational supports.