Dec 03 2008
Are Men Obsolete ?
A friend of mine began this topic a long while back, and I come back to it now and then to read it and think about it , and go over the conversation we had afterwards. I still think it was a topic of merit, though he maintains he has no leanings toward writing. This posting is a colaboration of his topic, plus my input, with expansion based on concepts our conversation brought about. I hope it provokes thought in others as well.
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What does it mean to be a Man? Manhood is an achievement and a practice. An immature male is called a boy, but being a fully grown boy is not enough to be a man. Manhood is achieved by a male in taking and executing adult responsibility for a man’s role.
What then, is a man’s role? Across the range of human history and prehistory and through nearly all societies the role of the man has been nurturance. Nurturance using the particular abilities of the male of our species. This includes physical protection and physical support. Providing order, consistency, and an environment of security and physical support in which human society can live and grow. In almost all cases men have been the hunters and warriors, the builders and explorers. These roles suit their innate natures which differ on average from that of women.
Let me be clear, there are some women who are stronger, braver, and more adventuresome than the average man, and some men who are more feminine than the average woman. Male and female natures can be represented by two overlapping bell curves with differing means. On average the genders differ, but individual variation around these averages insures that the nature of the average does not tell you much of anything about a particular individual based on gender.
Males tend to be more physically active, impatient, assertive, aggressive, hierarchical, physically courageous, exploratory and prone to violence than the female of our species. Females tend to be more sedentary, socially caretaking, talkative, cooperative, and more prone to direct physical nurturing of others than men are. I base these assertions on observations of young children as well as adults.
Boys need a somewhat different upbringing than girls do. They need more structure and after a certain age need direct involvement by men to guide and control them. As boys near puberty they must become apprentices to mature men to learn to be men. This takes many forms and involves many lessons both specific and general. These lessons may include the learning of craft (building, hunting, athletics, seeing structure in the world, etc.), and must include the learning of self control and acceptance of responsibility for self and others.
Boys that don’t get this become not a support of society but a threat to it. They become either old children who retreat to passivity and dependence or big aggressive males with no idea who they are and where they fit, feeding their appetites at the expense of society. The problem is worsened by boys only going out alone and finding other boys to hang out with, who only think they have it all figured out,,and we have inexperienced boys leading novices. Real men need to be involved .. gangs are a symptom of men abandoning boys. The question is, at this point, how to get men to be interested?
Part of the problem is so many people being only self-serving, nowdays. Most people now spend their school and work days sitting in a chair or moving around inside a building. The isolation we have now in our lives feeds the problem. Children left to raise themselves, and isolating themselves on comps; parents, family, and friends shut out. The rise of technology and the conquest of nature have changed modern society from one needing the particular traits of both genders to one that primarily needs and reward those of the female. Successful and nuanced human interaction, communication, coalition building and social manipulation are the most important skills in average the work place. These play to the strengths of the average female and not to those of the average male. It is the “blue collar” kind of job that uses the strengths of the male nature, physical exertion, movement, exploration, aggressiveness, etc. In this respect, being male in modern society does not fit and males may well be on the road to obsolescence.
However, we still produce about as many males as females and we must find a constructive role for them or they will surely find destructive ones on their own. There is a limit to how many solders, policemen, lumberjacks, firemen, and beer truck drivers we need. Males must be acculturated into Manhood and men must have meaningful roles in society that suit their male natures. Otherwise, men will be obsolete.
As an aside, my son once told me when he was younger that he felt, somehow , that he lacked the skills to cope with life. That comment disturbed me since he is an exceptionally bright person. After my conversation with my friend, I often thought back on my son’s comment, and wondered if, being a single mom raising a boy, I might have inadvertantly created his confusion, simply because I can’t help but look at life through a woman’s perspective, and I raised my son, a male, to have a female’s perspective on life, and it simply confused his nature as a male. ( I am one of those females who relishes the harder side of life, doing construction, and farm work for years, yet able to enjoy putting on a dress and make-up and going out to a nice place to eat without embarrassing anyone. ) I had wanted him to enter the military when he was 18, but he didn’t. Later in his life, he did, and it really did help him in ways that awed me. I’m not saying all boys should run out and sign up, I’m simply using this experience to point out that spending time in an all male environment, in a structured training, that was sincerely geared toward males and acceptance of their inate natures was good for him. It did something for him that I simply had no way of understanding or administering myself. Out of this , I came to think that all boys reach a time when they seriously need the influence of mature, stable men in their lives.
