Why males are doomed, even more than we thought before.
P.T. Barnum (or someone) famously said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He might more accurately have said, “There are 122 suckers born per minute.”
That’s the rate at which male babies are coming into the world today, and every single one of them is a sucker.
Not that this is anything new. Human males have always been suckers. What’s different now is that human females previously couldn’t do anything about the situation. Emerging technologies are changing that.
Allow me to explain.
I contend that everything human males do is fundamentally driven by a desire to reproduce. We are a carrier for our genes. This idea is not original to me, of course. But it struck me with force the other day, and I want to try to impart how basic and how all-encompassing the reality of it is for our gender.
From the time we begin to display an individual, personal will—as toddlers and perhaps even earlier—the irresistible urge to make ourselves desirable and successful as mates is the dominant force in our lives. It may be mostly subconscious (and for a given fraction of males, the urge is directed toward other males instead of females), but almost every boy and every man lives his whole life under the grip of a drive he has no hope of denying.
Think about everything you do. Examine each action in turn. Can you see how what you do is always aimed at either making yourself more desirable to a potential mate (who, by the way, does not have to be your current spouse or lover), and/or more attractive as a possible provider for the offspring of that mating?
Men are inherently competitive. It’s part of our animal nature. Other species act out this competition for status and power—qualities seen as desirable by females, who seek a mate to provide them and their offspring with protection and other advantages—through ritualistic fighting or other displays of strength and fitness. Human males do the same thing, except we act out the ritual competitions in school classes, on playing fields, in bars, on dance floors, in workplaces, on committees, ad infinitum.
We continually prepare ourselves and compete for the chance to reproduce. We may pretend to be doing other things; we may even think that we live on a higher plane. In truth, we are slaves to our reproductive urges. We are suckers because we allow ourselves to be fooled—or we fool ourselves—into believing otherwise.
Some of us go through periods when our confidence wanes. This can result in the typical “mid-life crisis” when steps are often taken by men that seem quite obviously intended to make them more attractive as mates or providers: they might buy a fancy car, lose weight, get a toupee, or simply have an affair. Not much mystery about what they’re trying to accomplish.
At other times, the crisis of confidence can persist and slide into clinical depression. In that condition, the male is unlikely to be successful at attracting new partners, or even keeping current partners. This may lead to a downward spiral where the man feels continually worse, takes increasingly poor care of himself, and consequently becomes even less desirable. The sad reality is that these men are proving themselves unfit as good gene carriers, and natural selection is winnowing them from the process.
As I said at the beginning, women have always had to choose from among the available men living near them when their time came to begin bearing and raising children. This was true even though men by their natures carried many unpleasant qualities: they were notoriously unfaithful as lovers (not to mention usually providing little satisfaction in bed); they frequently found excuses not to help with domestic chores, preferring the company of other men instead; they were far too often argumentative, frustratingly competitive, ridiculously jealous, and likely to start fights with other men for no reason the women could see. Worst of all, men would begin wars, go off to fight them, and maybe never come back.
Women have been stuck with these nearly unbearable beasts through the whole life of the human species. But they’re starting to gain other choices. They can now reproduce on their own, through donor sperm, and soon they may be able to do so through cloning, either using their own starter cells, those of others they like, or some combination. A whole new range of reproductive opportunities are opening up for women, and many of those do not involve men.
We’ve always been suckers. Now we run the risk of being obsolete.
Mike Treder is the Managing Director of the IEET, and former Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.