(2) The Male Nature
There are three main motivating factors involved in the human male behavior that I have been looking at:
othe procreative factor
othe dominator factor
oand the male hierarchy system
(the pecking order)
All three are interdependent certainly, but can be seen in their separate aspects.
The Procreative Factor
Every male activity derives from the primal urge to procreate. This is not startling or unexpected: indeed, it is obvious.
It is, nevertheless, a most significant fact in which men are almost untouched by the evolution of the species. In other aspects, however, men are absolutely astounding at what they are capable of developing. This huge paradox is responsible for the baffling behavior of the human being.
Men choose women who are beautiful, healthy, have good skin, have a wonderful shape, have sex appeal (suggesting reproductive readiness), are clean looking, are often smart and appear to have a marvelous gene pool. A TV documentary recently claimed that men are attracted to women who have the ratio of 7 to 10 from waist to hips as this is supposed to be the most desirable female proportion. This may be true. However, I don’t know if we can believe that statement, since there is not a heterosexual man in the world, young or old, who is not a fool for a beautiful woman whether she has the magic ration of 7 to 10 or not, especially if she has attractive breasts.
In much of the English-speaking world, and Middle Eastern world, actually in most of the world, sex has taken on a very unhealthy women-debasing attitude. In the West, there is a proliferation of playboy titillation mentality that sees women as sex objects only and worthless in any other role. So if a woman is not as close to the ideal female as the men want, those women are scorned and belittled with a variety of ugly names. Women are not often encouraged to prepare themselves for the highest leadership positions.
What you worship is what you value, and if your society only worships the all-powerful male, then women have no status. Women either resent these sex object demands or they turn themselves inside out trying to meet those figments of skewed male imaginations, in some cases, actually starving themselves to death. If people esteemed both father and mother figures, then females would have value, and the needs of women and children would be met.
Jacquetta Hawkes wrote about the ancient Minoan society on Crete that seemed “to have reduced and diverted their aggressiveness through a free and well-balanced sex life.”
Think about that observation in relation to our world that views sex as more sinful than violence and war. Jesse Ventura (a former wrestler and Governor in the US) said that he couldn’t understand how President Clinton, who lied about his sex life could be impeached, and President Bush who lied about going to war wasn’t impeached.
We have the US public image demanding strict sexual behavior from their politicians and leaders, tearing them to pieces in their frenzies of righteousness, yet their daily public entertainment is slutty porn and hideous violence.
Where else can an Internet porn site make $20M in one year as one did in the US in 2001?
As a consequence, we have celibate priests reduced to perversion–good decent men so twisted in their emotional development that they break god-promised vows. How can such emphasis on such vows exact anything but confusion? You can’t deny the most powerful human urge and not expect terrible consequences. Nowhere does Jesus deny procreation or sexual activities in the name of god–yet the Catholic Church leaders thrived on such power plays with their priests and followers.
Status & Position among Males
Briefly, men pursue their goals with awesome single-mindedness. The need to achieve enough status to be able to mate with the most desirable women in the world drives men in virtually every activity.
Look at these pursuits of status.
The cars, the technology, the military, the transportation provisions, the architecture, the market economy, all of these are in the pursuit of status on either smaller scales or grander scales.
Many men marry for decent regular sex, of course, but also to have status–the father of the family. Women believe their husbands marry them because they love them and that they are a team, a sharing unit in which their mutual good will determine the choices made in the marriage. And this is usually true. However, when it comes to love or status with a man, status usually wins. Salary and or status will determine the jobs he will take. Status will determine the activities he will agree to undertake and going to a child’s birthday party is not high on the list as I noticed yesterday when my next door neighbor had a few families over to celebrate their 10year-old’s birthday. The dads were not smiling as they got out of the cars.
Status & Competition - the game
Unlike Shakespeare’s world where all the men and women are merely players in life’s big drama, in the male world, all the men are competitors in a bunch of games. And the stakes in those games are absolute; they define who the men (and often the women) are in a very deep way. As spectators in a football match or a hockey game, if their team loses, they experience a real depression as though it was their own shame, as if their future will be lessened by the loss. Every endeavor is a competition and a serious competition.
Status rules. Status will determine whether a man will stay with the original wife. If he has earned all the status points and the trophy wife is the next achievement, the wife and kids are too often left in the suburbs.
Women generally do not understand these men. The wife of the CEO of Enron was interviewed on TV when the company first took a dive, and she protested over and over that her husband would never knowingly be party to the defrauding of people’s pensions. She was wrong.
Women think they know men from their experiences with them as caring husbands, caring fathers, and pillars of the community; they do not know men from the core of their drives and motivations. Many men are almost split-brained in their responses to life. Under normal conditions, they are logical, engaging, responsible people, but when confronted physically or mentally or emotionally with the male challenge, real or perceived, they become unrecognizable. They are not rational, logical or reasonable. If a man is determined to get a certain status symbol or live in a style that reflects the kind of swaggering person he sees himself to be, then he is single-minded in getting it. The wife and the kids can go without as his ego needs pre-empt all. How many stories have we read of the alcoholic Irishman drinking his earnings “to be one of the lads” while his wife and kids starved?
Men believe that the status symbol among the boys gives him the procreative edge, even though it may mean dumping the family (his procreated descendants). Ultimately, the status pursuit takes on a life of its own and is the driving force that changes the gears in his ride through his life.
Many men become endorphin junkies, addicted to their self-esteem builders; they need the buzz and if the greater danger gives them a greater reward, then they will take on the greater danger without considering the consequences to anything but their own emotional-mental well being. They will climb Everest; they will dive off of cliffs; they will ski off of cliffs; they will risk all.
And what is the biggest challenge, the greatest danger? What is the most deeply scoring, deeply challenging activity in the world?
WAR.
The Male Dominator Role
Man’s god-given right to oppress women and every other living being comes from a misguided