Manthropology
Page 4
Why should male muscularity be so sexy? It’s not just because it signifies physical strength in the hunt and war, though that principle does operate. Big male muscles are also what is called an “honest” sexual signal, similar to the male peacock’s tail—an unfakeable indicator of how good the male’s genes are because they show he can afford their cost. Big muscles are expensive not just because of their energy cost, but also because the testosterone that builds them suppresses the immune system. This means that the disease-fighting system of any healthy, muscular male must be exceptionally strong, simply to remain functional in spite of such high testosterone. Thus, it makes perfect sense, from a mating-strategy point of view, for women to prefer muscular men for short-term liaisons, simply to access those genes. But therein lies the modern rub: thanks to contraception, those liaisons no longer have as many reproductive consequences. Sure, women’s instincts may still drive them to steal away for illicit pleasures with the occasional passing beefcake, but they save their reproductive potential for their tamer, less attractive but thoroughly-better-with-the-kids partner waiting patiently at home.
Sexual selection by modern women really might, therefore, be acting to remove male muscularity from the human gene pool. But what then of the second selective agent, death?
In this case the muscularity genotype may be in trouble from an unlikelier source—its owners. Muscular men are frequently more aggressive than less-muscular men. Interestingly, this is not because of their high testosterone levels; in fact attempts to link testosterone directly to aggression have largely failed. In pre-agricultural societies, where survival depended on individual strength, this aggression tended to spread genes for muscularity, since their aggression both won them female partners and eliminated male sexual rivals. One study of the hyperaggressive medieval Viking berserkers, for example (see BATTLE chapter), found that these violent warriors left more children and grandchildren than their less aggressive compatriots.18 Now, however, in urbanized societies governed by the rule of law, that aggression has turned back on its owners. Highly aggressive men are significantly more likely to die through violence in their youth, thereby removing themselves from the gene pool. They are similarly likely to be imprisoned while young, and to then commit further crimes incurring even longer sentences—again tying up their prime reproductive years. In the United States they even possibly (thanks to the end of the leveling effect of the draft in 1973) enlist for military service in greater numbers, making them statistically more likely to die through war.
Locked up in prisons, dying on foreign battlefields, or on urban back lots in gang turf fights, the genetic muscular legacy of Homo masculinus modernus might well be slowly disappearing. It will be up to those of us left behind—the weak who’ve inherited the earth—to face the indignities of our coming decline bravely.
Are we up to the job?
At first glance the answer appears to be yes. If medal counts are anything to go by, modern men are actually getting braver and braver. The number of medals awarded to U.S. soldiers, for example, has generally doubled or even tripled in every war this century, up until the first Gulf War. Medal counts, though, are not much help in comparing modern to ancient male bravery. (True, tribal males did have some, like the “counting coup” decorations of the Great Plains tribes in North America. We don’t, however, have precise enough data to fairly compare Cheyenne wearers of the coyote tail or eagle’s feather with modern Victoria Cross and Congressional Medal of Honor recipients.) We must look beyond the horrors of war, therefore, to the unbelievable horrors that some prehistoric men faced just in their everyday lives, to properly gauge their bravery. Try not to squirm, then, as we take a bloodcurdling tour through Australian Aboriginal penis mutilation; Kayapo Indian “man vs. wasp” fights; platform torture among native North Americans; and the finer points of Stone Age “trepanation” (open-skull surgery performed without anesthetic and while conscious).
I don’t know about you but I’m getting the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.
Bravado
One clear, sunny morning in 2005, rail commuters in Hanau, a small town near Frankfurt, witnessed an amazing spectacle. As their InterCity Express (ICE) bullet train left the station, a black-clad, bandannaed figure leaped ninja-style onto its rear windscreen and attached a vacuum-grip handhold. For the next 20 minutes the man, a twenty-something train surfer known as “the Trainrider,” held on for grim, buffeting death as the ICE cranked up to its cruising speed of 155 miles per hour. Convinced he’d be killed, passengers shot hurried emergency calls through to the Federal Border Guards, who arrived just as the ICE reached its last stop. Incredibly, however, the Trainrider was uninjured—he even escaped a possible 10-year prison sentence by the simple precaution of having bought a valid ticket.
The Trainrider was lucky; an investigation by Humboldt University’s Institute of Legal Medicine reported that in the six years between 1989 and 1995, forty adolescent males were seriously injured, eighteen fatally, while train “surfing” on Berlin’s S-Bahn and Underground lines.1 Surfing trains has become a worldwide phenomenon among daredevil young men, but techniques seem to vary: in Europe and the United Kingdom the aim is to mount the roof and ride freestanding without falling off; while South African thrill seekers sling themselves under slower-moving trains and perform the “gravel” maneuver—paddling their legs through the gravel fast enough to prevent them being torn off. The thing they share is an extreme disregard for danger. The Humboldt University report found that falling off, though gruesome enough and usually fatal, was not even the major cause of death for train surfers; most died from massive trauma after high-speed collisions with power poles, signal masts, and even other trains.
What makes young men so needlessly risk their lives? The Humboldt authors dismissed the simple urge to show off, instead wheeling out familiar suspects such as alienation, the search for recognition, and lack of facilities and positive role models, among others. Yet, curiously, they failed to note that most of these in fact confirm the thesis that young males universally experience strong instinctual urges toward reckless displays of courage. Why, for example, would anyone search for recognition through such foolhardy acts unless others found them impressive? In fact, what young male daredevils like the Trainrider demonstrate is what an evolutionary psychologist might call “conspicuous bravery”—bravery specifically aimed at communicating one’s evolutionary fitness and courage to one’s peers. Another word for it is the much maligned term bravado.
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Getting your kicks, Sioux style
Adolescence is a time for young males to show their courage. Portuguese teens go on rampages through their neighborhood backyards, while American boys indulge in extreme sports such as wave jumping, snowboarding, and “vert” skating. None of these, however, is anywhere near as extreme as the games nineteenth-century Sioux boys played. Brule Sioux chief Iron Shell, for example, described for one chronicler his tribe’s “swing-kicking game,” in which:
…two rows of boys faced each other, each holding a robe over his left arm…after the…stock question, “Shall we grab them by the hair and knee them in the face until they bleed?”…using their robes as a shield, they all kicked at their opponents…[who] once down…[were] grabbed at the temples with both hands and kneed in the face…until [they] could fight no longer.
Even supposedly gentler Sioux games took considerable nerve to play. In the “buffalo-hunt” game, one boy was required to hold up a cactus leaf, representing a buffalo’s heart, while the others shot arrows at it. In the “mud-throwing” game, similarly, boys threw balls of mud at each other using springy sticks—each ball containing a buried live ember.2
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At first sight, bravado presents a puzzle to an evolutionary anthropologist. Recklessly putting yourself at risk of injury or death, for no reason, hardly satisfies the cardinal rule of natural selection: that an organism’s attributes and behaviors should tend to propagate its genes. It seems, in
other words, to be maladaptive. Rational bravery, on the other hand—where individuals expose themselves to danger in pursuit of a goal—suffers no such ambiguity. Be the goal either hunting a dangerous animal for food, or swimming a crocodile-infested river to mate with an attractive female, the effect is the same: the courageous act brings reproductive rewards that outweigh its risk. Even apparently unrewarding acts of bravery can still be rational, particularly if they display altruism. Brave behavior performed for another’s benefit can, just like the big muscles mentioned in the previous chapter, function as an honest and unfakeable sexual signal to a potential mate—look how capable and fearless I am, and how willing to use that strength to help others! A recent University of Maine study into the mating preferences of American university women confirmed that altruistic, or heroic, bravery is seriously sexy: roughly three-quarters of the women expressed strong preferences for heroic risk-takers as boyfriends.3 Bravado, however, was right out—almost as many women stated they wouldn’t even date, let alone marry, a man who indulged in risks that weren’t altruistic.
To add to the mystery, young men don’t seem to have the foggiest notion that their bravado so signally fails to impress women. Another phase of that same University of Maine study, this time aimed at university men, revealed that they grossly overestimated how attractive their non-heroic risk-taking was to females (though they accurately predicted how attractive their heroic risk-taking was). Similarly ignorant was Lebohang Motsamai, a famed South African train surfer who told the BBC that he performs the “gravul” and other tricks because “when I do this they [the girls] are going to love me. They are going to say, eish, this boy is clever.”4
Why do young males maintain this mistaken belief in the sexual appeal of their reckless displays? A subsidiary survey in the University of Maine study gives a clue. That survey found that although swaggering bravado was unattractive to women in either a mate or a same-sex friend, it was highly desirable in a same-sex friend for males. This suggests that the real target of male bravado is other men. By advertising their willingness to take risks when nothing is at stake, men are simultaneously underscoring their worth as a formidable coalition partner for other males when something is. This is important because male-male bonds (the “band of brothers” phenomenon) are a central organizing principle of most human societies that have been studied ethnographically.5 Indeed, from the evidence of chimps and bonobos, it seems to have been inbuilt since at least the time of our last common ancestor, around 4.5 million years ago.6
A final piece is still missing from the puzzle, however. Male bravado might well be aimed at other males, but the logic of natural selection still demands it have some positive reproductive consequence in order to persist. Is there any evidence it does? In fact, there is. Frans de Waal’s primatological survey at Burgers’ Zoo in Holland recorded some intriguing details about the reproductive effects of male-male coalitions in chimpanzees.7 De Waal noted that Yeroen, an older chimp who had been overthrown as alpha male by younger rivals, still managed to get the lion’s share of mating opportunities by judiciously forming coalitions that pitted his rivals against each other. Even when these arrangements collapsed and Yeroen became subservient to a single dominant male, Nikkie, he still received a share of mating opportunities as the price of his support. This seems to tally with anecdotal evidence that modern human males who associate with attractive, high-prestige men greatly increase their own reproductive opportunities—as in the case of those roadies described by SPIN magazine who scored sex from “ramp-rat” groupies by hanging around with rock stars.8 Swaggering young men like Lebohang aren’t, it seems, so deluded after all. Their braggadocio does get them girls, just not in the way they think. (This, incidentally, neatly illustrates the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in evolutionary theory: the proximate cause of young men’s bravado, besides instinct, is their mistaken belief that it appeals to women; but the real, ultimate, cause is probably its role in establishing male-male coalitions.)
If we modern men are, then, dancing to an ancient tune in our love of braggadocio, the question remains: how well are we dancing? How brave are we? We obviously think enormously so: both in heroic bravery, if the upsurge in post-9/11 films extolling patriotic bravery is any guide,9 and in non-heroic bravado, if the rash of reported adolescent copycat fatalities following TV shows like Jackass is to be believed.10 But how, I wondered, would we fare in the harrowing ordeals of courage and masculinity that ancient male members of our species had to undergo: the initiation rituals, tortures, terrifying medical treatments, and dangerous wild-animal hunts? Luckily, each has a modern equivalent, so the answer seemed to lie in a simple comparison.
Initiation rituals, for example, are still a feature of male in-groups such as military units, school cohorts, and criminal gangs. In 1997 a furor erupted in the United States when film footage surfaced showing Marines being stabbed with badges as part of a graduation hazing ritual at the Corps’ training school for airborne warfare. The graduates writhed in pain, shirts bloodied, as instructors jabbed their golden graduation wings (backed by two half-inch spikes) repeatedly into their chests. This, it turned out, was a traditional Marine induction ritual called “Blood Pinning” (also known as “Blood Wings” in the Army airborne training school), which reportedly dates back to World War II. The then Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, called the practice “disgusting” and demanded the Corps eliminate it, but history was apparently against him—hazing seems to have long been, and to be still, an inevitable feature of male (and sometimes female) in-groups. A similar scandal, for example, shook the U.S. Naval Academy as long ago as 1905.11 The modern Russian army, similarly, has several brutal equivalents as part of its Dedovshchina (“rule of the grandfathers”), system, including the “dried crocodile,” during which conscripts are forced to hang upside down from a top bunk while the Deds, or “grandfather” soldiers, beat them savagely. One medical study, as well, reported that over two hundred and sixty thousand American university athletes surveyed had suffered from hazing incidents, and that for sixty-five thousand of them the hazing had included violent and illegal activities such as beating or kidnapping.12 Far from being isolated incidents, brutal initiations are, it seems, part and parcel of the universal male experience.
Nor are they the regrettable invention of bored modern grunts and students. Acts of bastardry such as Blood Pinning are simply imitations (and generally pale ones) of rituals that are tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands of years old. Romanian religious philosopher Mircea Eliade described the heart of these ancient rituals as “the ordeal”—a brutal experience that the uninitiated underwent to qualify for graduation into the group. The purpose of the ordeal seems to have been threefold. First, it provided a test of the would-be member’s strength and courage. Second, the violence of the initiation rituals seems to have symbolized the death of the uninitiated male’s earlier self, and his rebirth into the world of the group’s men. Third, the cruel abuse seems, paradoxically, to have strengthened in-group bonds by heightening the uninitiated male’s need to belong to the group. The ordeals themselves always featured one or more of the following elements: extreme pain, bodily mutilation, or the performance of extraordinary physical feats. How, then, do our modern initiation rituals compare on these three scores?
Blood Pinning, for example, is clearly painful, but probably mild compared to the rituals of urban American gangs, to which entry is often gained by being “jumped in”—beaten by existing members in a mass attack. (Gang researcher Mike Carlie Ph.D. described a ritual called “Freein’ Hoover,” in which would-be members had to pick six pennies off the ground while suffering multiple bashings by initiated gang bangers.) Even these, however, are a shadow of the torments endured by ancestral Homo sapiens males during initiation. One of the most painful was (and is) the initiation ritual of the indigenous Maués people of Brazil. Young Maués males don a palm-fiber mitt into which hundreds of stinging bullet ants—so-called because thei
r sting hurts worse than being shot—have been woven, stingers facing inward. Bullet ants have the most painful venom of any insect alive, yet the fourteen-year-old Maués boys must wear the glove for ten full minutes, resulting in blinding pain, paralysis, and days of uncontrollable shaking.13 Luiseño boys of prehistoric California possibly had it even worse, being made to wallow in a pit filled with stinging ants during the heminuwe puberty ceremony, and whipped afterward with stinging nettles.14 An even more astonishing use of dangerous insects was in the “wasp fights” of the Brazilian Kayapo, in which adult Kayapo males ascended ladders to assault—with their bare hands—huge nests of highly aggressive wasps until the enraged hornets stung them into semi-consciousness. An adult Kayapo man might engage in a dozen of these fights throughout his life. Hornets were also used (and probably still are) in the initiation ceremonies of the Keyo, a Kalenjin-speaking people of Kenya. Here, though, the real pain was inflicted with plants: during the hornet ordeal young Keyo men were also forced to crawl through tunnels woven from stinging nettles, and to have the same plant rubbed into their genitals.15 Even more sadistic ritual use of plants was (and still is) recorded among the Sambian men of New Guinea: not only do uninitiated boys there have stiletto-sharp blades of pitpit cane thrust repeatedly up their nostrils to cause profuse bleeding, they also have three-feet-long loops of vine forced down their throat to induce vomiting, then their glans penis slit with bamboo blades.16