Sadly, it seems we modern males have once more been trounced by our ancient forefathers. The verbal skills of modern rappers really are closer to Homer Simpson’s than to the Greek Homer’s. But this begs the question—why, then, do we bother? Why do rappers invest so much effort in proving their worth at wordplay when their literary skills, compared to pre-civilized standards, are so patently inadequate? The short answer, of course, is that they don’t know they are. Only our blissful ignorance of Homer’s poetic feats—and those of the Slavic guslars, the Maltese spirtu pront singers, the Inuit nith duelists, and others—allows us to make the ridiculous claims of superior wordsmithing that we do. Even if we did know, however, the evidence is it wouldn’t make any difference. As with those earnest young fighters who sign up in droves for ultimate-fighting classes, even though not one would make more than an appetizer for an ancient Greek pankratiast, our inability to perform doesn’t kill our desire to try. Rappers would still battle because the drive to demonstrate verbal skill is actually an essential one to the art of being male. The reason, as ever, is those omnipotent arbiters of male genetic fate—women. Numerous scientific studies have shown that women rate verbal creativity in men very highly. In a survey of thirty-seven different cultures across the world, for instance, women cited intelligence and creativity as their second-most important attribute in a male mate (the first was kindness).22 More tellingly, creativity rises to first place when women are ovulating. This is important because other studies have shown that the male attributes women find most attractive when their menstrual cycle is at its fertile peak correlate strongly with genetically desirable traits. To put it simply, ovulating women give the most honest insight into the genetic traits they really value, since it is then that their offspring get stuck with the consequences of the woman’s mating decisions. There is plenty of evidence, too, that men are acutely aware of these female predilections. One intriguing experiment at Arizona State University in 2006 found that males could be provoked to extravagant displays of involuntary verbal creativity when shown photographs of attractive women and told to imagine going out with them. (One dreads to think what lengths they would go to if presented with a real, live muse.) Once again, however, even clearer evidence can be seen on the street in the long lines of young female dancers who line up to audition for sexually explicit rap videos. As hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan points out, “the road and the ’hood are populated with women who would do anything sexually to be with a rapper for an hour, if not a night.”23
* * *
A muse of manure
A principle stated repeatedly in this book is that the instinctual drive to perform certain actions doesn’t necessarily correlate with any actual skill at doing them. Poetically, no man epitomizes this more than William Topaz McGonagall, the anti-poet laureate of Victorian-era Scotland. McGonagall was certainly afire with some muse: he published more than two hundred lengthy poems over an extended career, and wrote several autobiographies. Unfortunately, he was completely talentless, and is now known to history as one of the worst poetasters (second-rate poets) to ever mangle the English language.
McGonagall’s literary career kicked off with what he called “the most startling incident in my life…the time I discovered myself to be a poet, which was in the year 1877.” Audiences who heard McGonagall perform were equally startled. The poetaster proved totally unable to scan (hold a poetic meter), as shown by this stanza of his most famous work, The Tay Bridge Disaster:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say,
That ninety lives have been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.21
Undeterred, McGonagall took his act on the road, spending the next twenty-five years getting pelted with eggs, flour, rotten vegetables, and dead cats as he read his poetry to clearly unappreciative audiences in pubs, fairs, and circuses.
These assaults didn’t even scratch McGonagall’s remarkable self-belief, however. He still had the temerity to trek over sixty miles through a thunderstorm to petition Queen Victoria for the post of poet laureate in 1892. In typical McGonagall fashion, however, it turned out Her Majesty wasn’t even home.
The crowning humiliation of McGonagall’s life, however, was probably the time he was forced to pay for the privilege of appearing as Macbeth in a performance of the Scottish play at Giles Theatre in Dundee (McGonagall also considered himself an actor). McGonagall had the last laugh, though. When the time came for him to die at the hands of MacDuff he refused, bringing the house down with a ridiculously extended combat scene.
* * *
This seems puzzling: why do women demean themselves by trading sexual availability for the chance to worship at some rapper’s feet? Why do women rate verbally creative men so highly they are willing to endanger their long-term relationships for the chance of a fling with them (according to the evidence of their preferences at ovulation)? The reason the male voice acts as such a powerful trigger for female sexual behavior is because of the information it conveys about masculine evolutionary fitness. If the stomach is the way to a man’s heart and the eyes the window to his soul, then truly is his voice the road to divining his suitability as a mate. Even its pitch and volume carry useful information: a low, robust voice can indicate a powerful body and high testosterone, both attributes preferred by many women. This is strikingly shown by one scientific study demonstrating that baritone opera singers have more lovers than tenors do.24 (The tenors needn’t feel so bad, though, it was ever thus. anthropologists can testify that deep-voiced hunter-gatherer men father more children than their high-pitched brothers.)
* * *
War of words
Both Hitler and Churchill regarded their fiery words as real weapons of war, even though they delivered them from the safety of parliamentary or propaganda pulpits. Some ancient orators, though, literally backed their words with their bodies. Tahitian rautis (“exhorters”) chose the thick of battle to declaim their ferocious poetry—the better to stir their soldiers to frenzied violence.25 Naked but for a girdle of leaves, and weaponless save for a stingray-tail dagger (with which they were nonetheless deadly), rautis led Tahitian troops into war by thundering out tales of their ancestors’ glorious deeds mixed with commands to slaughter the enemy. Though bloodthirsty, these were full of rich poetry, to wit:
Hang on them like the forked lightning that plays above the frothing surf…
Devour them as does the wild dog…
Let the army be an open passage [on the reef] within which is a furious shark…
Rautis often kept up their efforts for days on end, moving through battlelines by day and camp by night to urge their soldiers on. Some were even known to die of exhaustion. The general dread in which they were held can be seen in the cry of protest common to Tahitian men receiving onerous commands from their wives or others: tini rauti teia—“this is equal to a rauti.”
* * *
An even more reliable guide than the pitch of a man’s voice, however, is his verbal skill. This is because the ability to produce quick, complex, intelligent speech is polygenic—it depends on a large number of genes, each equally essential for the finished product. Witty wordplay therefore proves that a man is largely free from any damaging mutations to his genome that might be passed on to his offspring. It is, as in the case of those testosterone-fueled muscles discussed in BRAWN, an honest and unfakeable sexual signal to a prospective mate. It is even possible that this sexual selection for verbal skill is the original cause of the evolution of human language. Some anthropologists theorize that long before meaningful words were created, female proto-humans were rewarding males with sex for the complexity of their repertoire of meaningless hoots and calls.26
Modern women, of course, might well feel that male language hasn’t grown any more meaningful in the intervening million years or so.
If creative wordplay is a sign of a mutati
on-free male genome, does that mean modern rappers’ second-rate efforts are all down to defective chromosomes? Clearly the answer is no. The polygenic nature of oral poetic creativity means mutant males probably couldn’t produce any wordplay, however mediocre. Once again it is, I think, an ontogenetic phenomenon. Oral poetry has declined drastically in impact, length, and quality because we modern males get so much less practice at speaking. Ancient hunter-gatherer societies were much more steeped in verbal culture. Anthropologist Lorna Marshall, for instance, described the !Kung Bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari desert as:
…the most loquacious people I know. Conversation in a !Kung werf [camp] is a constant sound like the sound of a brook, and as low and lapping, except for shrieks of laughter.27
Individual conversations might last, she reported, for many hours, or even days. She also found that male Bushmen were far more talkative than women. Modern men and boys, on the other hand, frequently spend those long hours with their noses buried in the voiceless worlds of TV, computer games, and Internet pornography. Nor are the misguided efforts of concerned educators to instead get those noses between the pages of a book any better (except for this one, of course). Writing is, it turns out, a major cause of modern males’ decline in verbal poetic skill. It is no coincidence, for example, that the best of the epic poets mentioned here, Homer and the Slavic guslars, were illiterate. In the case of the guslars, in fact, Lord and Parry were actually able to watch the negative effects of writing in action when a few guslars who had received an education began writing, rather than performing, their poetry. The results, the linguists reported, were abysmal: the guslars’ poetry immediately lost its grandeur and became stilted and pedestrian. The problem was the precision that writing allowed, leading poets to forsake memorable, stirring phrases such as, “Once in the days of old, when Sulejman held empire” in favor of prosaic constructions such as, “In the bloody year of 1914, on the 6th day of the month of August, Austria and Germany were greatly worried.”28 Granted, rap is at least partly an oral art form, but it is composed by literate practitioners (very few rappers are truly illiterate, despite the image-making) in a literate environment. It is no wonder, then, that it falls so far short of Homer and the guslar epics.
In any case, the situation for Homo masculinus modernus is definitely growing dire. We can’t, it seems, rely on our Cyrano-esque skills to woo our women; we haven’t got any. Might we not then instead play the part of Christian in Rostand’s play—the beautiful but blockheaded cadet whose good looks cause Roxane to fall hopelessly in love with him? Commentators such as author Mark Simpson, who coined the term “metrosexual,” say we’re already doing so. We modern metrosexual men are, according to these pundits, the most narcissistic, exhibitionist, and beauty-obsessed males in history. A whole industry has sprung up, virtually overnight, to pamper us with lotions, cosmetics, hair-care products, and even plastic surgery. The poster boy of modern metrosexuality is perhaps English footballer David Beckham, who wears more sarongs, nail polish, mascara, and hair product, and shoots more half-naked glam-porn shots, than even his ex-popstar wife, Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham.
Surely he, and by extension we, have the right to call ourselves the most beautiful men ever? Surely no other males in history have oiled, coiffed, perfumed, and surgically altered themselves as much in that quest for beauty as we have?
There’s obviously only one proper, scientific way to find out—a beefcake beauty parade. Remarkably, we don’t even have to contrive one. As it happens, there are men alive in Africa today who maintain an ancient tradition of male beauty contests: the Wodaabe nomads of Niger. For hundreds of years their men have shaved, preened, painted, and ornamented themselves to vie for the title of most beautiful man in their annual gerewol ceremony. It’s a grueling ritual in which tribesmen line up and dance the whole night through for seven days on end, swaying and weaving in time to chanted music, all the while contorting their painted faces to better display their charms to the young female judges. It’s possibly the ultimate test of male beauty. So how, I wonder, would the consummate metrosexual, the icon of modern-male beauty, David Beckham, fare if we entered him?
I’ll just go call his agent.
Beauty
Actually, Becks’s agent says he’ll get back to me.
To tell the truth there seemed to be some confusion—David, I was repeatedly assured, only gives his time to the most major of corporations and charities, neither of which this “science” that I claimed to be representing appeared to be. It didn’t bode well, but let’s get on anyway, while we’re waiting, with introducing this round’s contestants.
Who, for example, are these metrosexuals that Mark Simpson, and everybody else, is going on about? Simpson says he first stumbled across them at a 1994 “style” exhibition held in London called “It’s a Man’s World.”1 There, stalking through the stands of Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Giorgio Armani grooming products, Simpson found a peculiar masculine specimen—metrosexual man. A young male of high income and low commitments, metrosexual man seemed to indulge in some oddly (for the time) feminine pursuits. He bought, and used, moisturizer. He plied his hair with gel, his face with cosmetics, and his brothers with tips on the best shops for hand creams and pedicures. At that time, according to Simpson, metrosexual man usually worked in central London—hence the “metro” half of his handle—but he has since expanded his range worldwide, thanks to the advertising industry and TV shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. We are all, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, metrosexuals now.
But what does that mean exactly? David Coad, a cultural theorist from the University of Valenciennes, France, writes that the conventional definition of male metrosexuality comprises three central characteristics: narcissism, feminization, and eroticization.2 Metrosexual males, it seems, are narcissists in that they are openly obsessed with their own personal beauty. This leads them to embrace a female culture of pampering to enhance that beauty—feminization. It also encourages metrosexual men to exhibit their bodies as objects of sexual desire—eroticization. This exhibitionism is also probably responsible for the synergetic connection, noted by Simpson, between metrosexuals and another group of muscular men for whom self-exhibition is a way of life: sportsmen.
It is this connection that accounts for the iconic status of David Beckham in the annals of metrosexuality. Actually, Becks was not the first sportsman to bare his body in the service of male narcissism; that honor goes to the non-sporting but highly ripped and athletic rapper-turned-actor Mark Wahlberg, who appeared semi-nude in ads for Calvin Klein underwear in the early 1990s. Beckham, though, took the icon of buffed, exhibitionistic, erotically charged sportsman and made it his own. Simpson insists that it was Beckham’s embrace that allowed metrosexuality to go mainstream—it was only the movement’s adoption by a genuine male role model, a real sportsman, that allowed other men to accept it as legitimately masculine. And Beckham is, by anybody’s standards, a true sporting champion. Picked up by champion English soccer team, Manchester United, at the age of fourteen, Beckham has twice been been voted soccer’s “World Player of the Year” runner-up. He is noted for the phenomenal precision of his kicks and his ability to curve the ball massively in flight to defeat defenders.
Beckham has not, however, allowed these deep talents to interfere with his embrace of everything shallow and superficial. Indeed, he virtually personifies all three defining characteristics of metrosexuality, as outlined by Coad. His narcissism, to give an example, is legendary. One Web site devoted to Beckham’s hairstyles, for instance, lists eighty-nine different styles over ten years, eight of them mohawks. Becks seems similarly forward in his embrace of his own feminine side. In one of the three autobiographies he has currently written, Becks himself tells his audience, “I’m not scared of my feminine side and I think quite a lot of the things I do come from that. People have pointed that out as if it’s a criticism, but it doesn’t bother me.”3 “Golden Balls” (as his wife reputedly calls him
) doesn’t fall short in feminine follow-through, either, as his appearance in a sequined tracksuit at the 2002 Commonwealth Games proves. Beckham is also not ashamed of offering himself up as erotic fodder for the public’s lascivious gaze. The frequency of his soft-core appearances on magazine covers led Simpson to observe that Beckham “clearly enjoys getting his tits out for the lads and lasses.”
Presumably, Becks will have precious few philosophical grounds for objecting to our attempt to enter him into the Wodaabe gerewol. But what exactly is this bizarre beauty contest? The gerewol is actually the name of a dance that, along with another called the yaake, has been performed at the yearly gerewol ceremony of the Wodaabe nomads of Niger for hundreds of years—the festival has taken its name from the dance. Both dances are effectively beauty contests (the word gerewol comes from the verb yera: “to line up”) in which young female judges assess the attractiveness of young Wodaabe males. The dances do, though, differ slightly in focus. The gerewol is a straightforward contest of physical beauty; in it male dancers wear the same plain make-up of red ochre mixed with fat, and identical (though admittedly gorgeous) costumes of beads, belts, turbans, jewelry, and ostrich-plume headdresses. The yaake, by contrast, is the contest of charm, in which the dancers contort their bodies into elegant poses, and their faces into fantastic expressions combining wide, fluttering, rolling eyes and teeth-baring grins (a man who can roll one eye while simultaneously holding a grin is considered a paragon of beauty). It is also in the yaake that contestants are free to paint their faces with the gorgeously feminine cosmetic patterns that have made the gerewol festival world famous.
Manthropology Page 17