The Decline of Males
by Lionel Tiger
Golden, 256 pp., $ 23
The First Sex
The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World
by Helen Fisher
Random House, 320 pp., $ 25.95
The patriarchy seems to be crumbling. Men are earning less, fading from higher education, and committing more crimes and suicides. If pressed to locate the origin of men's fall, some might point to a smoky room filled with angry feminists sometime in the 1960s. But if two new studies are to be believed, they are of by about 500,000 years.
Lionel Tiger, author of The Decline of Males, and Helen Fisher, author of The First Sex, argue that men and women navigate modern society with minds adapted to life in small tribes on the African savanna. For Tiger, men are declining because their hard wiring is ill suited to modern realities. For Fisher, women are on the rise because emerging economic and social trends happen to favor the traits nature selected for them. Tiger bemoans the fact and Fisher applauds it, but both explain the decline of males and the rise of females through evolutionary psychology, the youthful discipline which seeks to understand human behavior by examining its evolutionary underpinnings.
Tiger is an anthropology professor at Rutgers University who worries that men are locked in a downward spiral that will ultimately leave them at the bottom of the social heap. Or worse. "The male is becoming so much trouble for everyone that in the future, in societies willing and able to control such matters, he will be lucky even to be born." Recently women's confidence and power have increased markedly, while men's have decreased. In the "inexplicit and undeclared war between the sexes," Xena the Warrior Princess is routing a disoriented, pitiable Iron John.
Tiger argues that the decline of males is largely due to female-controlled contraception: "It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the contraceptive pill on human arrangements." By making promiscuity less risky, the Pill allows sex for sex's sake, and, more important, enables women to control reproduction.
Tiger believes women's power over contraception alienates men from the "means of reproduction" and contributes to what he calls "paternity uncertainty." Tiger argues that this paternity uncertainty explains decreased fatherhood, a higher divorce rate, and a higher proportion of single mothers. For men, ensuring one's place in the next generation is the biological meaning of life. When a man is unsure of his place in the march of generations, argues Tiger, he is likely to resort to destructive behavior out of desperation.
Of course, birth control is nothing new. In its most rudimentary forms, it consists of "Dear John" letters and "Let's just be friends" lines -- in women's rebuffing male advances. Evolutionary psychologists call this female choice and use it to explain why men were forced to accept monogamy: Because they could refuse sex unless offered commitment, resources, and stability, women have always controlled the means of reproduction.
Tiger seems correct to emphasize the importance of paternity certainty to men. Women want good genes and resources, men seek a guarantee that their genes will be represented in the next generation, so a women agrees to be faithful, a man agrees to stick around to raise the kids, and marriage results. Marriage emerges from this kind of arrangement in every known society.
Even with marriage, though, paternity certainty was never assured. According to the theories of evolutionary psychology, men want to father children in extramarital relationships, because by doing so they might fool another man into caring for their own children, spreading their genes with little effort and no investment. Thus, a man's optimal evolutionary strategy is to maintain a faithful wife while having as many flings as possible. Humans evolved in an environment which favored marriage and adultery, and thus uncertainty was always common in humans' evolutionary environment.
And is paternity uncertainty really growing these days? Any study of the matter would have to track how many babies are products of their mothers' adultery -- a touchy subject, to say the least. Despite this difficulty, some studies have been completed, and the results show that somewhere between 5 and 30 percent of babies are conceived by married women in extramarital sex. But even at the worst, 70 percent of men can still be fairly certain about siring their children. And there's no evidence that this figure has declined in recent years.
What has declined is marriage -- and here's the curious thing, for evolutionary psychology predicts that it is women, rather than men, who should suffer from the rise of divorce and premarital and extra-marital sex. And, Helen Fisher claims in her new study, The First Sex, the exact opposite seems to be true. She argues that "we stand at the doorway of what may become an age of women." This is so because "thousands of generations of [women] performing mental and physical acrobatics as they raised helpless infants" have equipped modern women with an arsenal of skills different from (and superior to) those of men. For instance, women are "web thinkers"; they tend to think holistically, "in webs of interrelated factors, not straight lines." Women naturally excel at language skills. Women are more emotional, more sympathetic, and consequently more personable.
These traits are proving advantageous in today's economy. Flat corporations -- companies that eschew the traditional pyramidal hierarchy -- resonate with women's web thinking. The information age favors women's knack for language and communication. In fact, it is hard to find a recent economic or social trend unfavorable for women. According to Fisher, everything from the Internet to alternative medicine declares the rise of a new first sex. Fisher ends with a foggy vision of men's equal place in the wonderland that's about to emerge. But the implications of her argument are clear: If women's skills are in high demand, men's are not. There can be only one "first sex."
Fisher uses evolutionary psychology to explain women's rise, but, like Tiger, she shirks the consequences of her choice. Evolutionary psychology insists that lasting marriage is essential for women because it enables them to extract male resources necessary for protection during pregnancy and child rearing. For Fisher, however, contraception and abortion free women to "spend less time pregnant and caring for children than at any other time in human evolution." Likewise, rising divorce rates are an unfortunate result of women's place in the workforce, but do not tarnish her rosy view of women's future.
But even if we set aside the problem that the science Tiger and Fisher use doesn't actually support them -- and even if we set aside the problem that evolutionary psychology is fairly questionable science to begin with -- a question still remains: Why is it that two commentators with such different perspectives would start from a common observation of the decline of men?
The answer is that they start from the decline of men because it's true and stands as the most stunning sociological fact of our day. Not only are the statistics alarming -- on education, income, crime, and much more -- but men seem to suffer an affliction that numbers cannot express. Men often seem confused; manliness and gentle-manliness seem empty concepts; the proper socializing of young men seems increasingly difficult. Evolutionary psychology is not going to help us here -- indeed, the fact of modern male decline is one of the strongest pieces of evidence against evolutionary psychology. But an explanation we certainly need, and quickly.
Hugh Liebert is an undergraduate at Harvard University.