* * *
Prehistoric periodontistry
Modern men are clearly almost as obsessed with the appearance of their teeth as women: a survey by the British Association of Cosmetic Dentists found that over 40 percent of all cosmetic dental procedures are now done on males. Though whitening and capping are the most common, many men now also go for more extreme options such as implants and gum contouring. Even these intrusive procedures, however, pale beside those used by ancient and tribal males to modify their teeth.
Some Southeast Asian tribesmen of precolonial times, for example, actually blackened their teeth, supposedly to distance themselves from dogs, which they considered to be white-toothed but unclean animals. The McKenzie River Eskimos apparently filed their canines down for exactly the same reason. Some tribal males, on the other hand, did just the opposite, filing their incisors to points to beautify themselves (though it also seems to reduce cavities). Even the extravagant jewelled “grill” mouthpieces beloved of modern rappers such as Paul Wall, Nelly, and Kanye West would have looked distinctly second-rate in the company of Mayan males: high-born Mayan men not only inlaid their teeth with jade and jewels, they also etched beautiful, convoluted designs directly onto their teeth’s surface.
* * *
With even these last-ditch defenses breached it should be clear that we modern metrosexuals—and our standard-bearer, Becks—have definitively lost the fight. We are not the most narcissistic, beauty-obsessed males of our species; that honor goes to the Wodaabe, the Tuareg, the Maya, the maccaronis—and every other prehistoric or tribal male who ever touched up his face with ochre and animal fat by the light of a burning brush torch and the reflection of a still pond. The astute reader, however, will notice that while we modern men are proven wannabes in the beautification stakes, we haven’t yet said much about actual, natural beauty. What are we physically like—stripped of all cosmetics, mutilations, surgical interventions, hairdos, jewels, and costumes—compared to ancient men? True, even on strict physical grounds, David Beckham wouldn’t get a look-in at gerewol (he’s too short, not red-skinned enough, and his nose is nowhere sufficient in length to satisfy the Wodaabe aesthetic), but their standards are too culturally governed to be reliable. In fact, the state of affairs with our natural, physical beauty is even more galling than our failures as metrosexuals. Beauty-wise modern males have had advantages no prehistoric man could have dreamed of, yet we still managed to blow it and wind up looking like the ugly stepbrothers. What women find beautiful in men is surprisingly easy to predict based on the visual markers of both the male body and the male face. (Physical beauty might well lie in the eye of the beholder, but if it does then every female human eye has damned similar tastes.) And on both counts Homo masculinus modernus scores a big fat zero, despite receiving a couple of enormous helping hands.
Body-wise, for example, one of the strongest markers of what women find beautiful is height. Tall men universally report having more lovers, more marriages, and more children than their vertically challenged brothers. On the face of it that should leave us laughing—Western men are, after all, 5 to 10 percent taller today than their European forefathers of two to three centuries ago. (Though, as the impressive stature of Stephen Webb’s T8 Australian Aboriginal runner shows, very early Homo sapiens males, not to mention even earlier giants such as Homo heidelbergensis, frequently towered over us.) Yet a quirk of female mate preferences and our own couch-potato habits have conspired to erase this hard-won advantage. It turns out that women’s preference for tall men is conditional: attractive men still have to fall within an ideal VHI, or volume-to-height index—in layman’s terms, how tubby you are.26 (Interestingly, there are some exceptions to this rule for ancient men—see below.) Grow too fat, as roughly 30 percent of we Western males now have,27 and it doesn’t matter how tall you are: you’ll still be sitting at home with a blow-up love doll and a meal of canned spaghetti on Saturday night. Your romantic target meanwhile would, if she could, be dancing the night away with her shorter, but leaner and sexier, date—a prehistoric Australian Aboriginal, Amerindian, African, or even Inuit man.
* * *
When fat was the new black
Dieting is undeniably a modern-male obsession; some medical journals report that 10 percent of eating disorder cases from the 1990s onward have been young males. Yet we can’t by any means claim to have invented the obsession—Polynesian men were dieting fanatically more than 350 years ago. In their case, however, their obsession was not with losing weight, but with gaining it—as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
Early Spanish explorers reported that groups of Tahitian youths would occasionally retire to a large canoe shed, there to lie motionless on a carpet of fern-leaves soaked in coconut oil. For the period of their stay they moved as little as possible, all the while being fed vast quantities of extremely fattening food.
When they finally emerged, their first action was to exhibit themselves naked for their tribesmen, who commented approvingly on their now gloriously fat bodies. Usually their period of indolence lasted a month, though some firstborn youths were made to laze and gorge their whole adolescence away as “cherished children.” Envious modern couch potatoes can take some comfort, however; life as a “cherished child” wasn’t all roses. They often had to be beaten to make them eat more. Even a spot of bulimic purging didn’t save them; the Spanish reported that unwilling gorgers were forced to eat their own vomit, too.
* * *
The second set of visual markers used by women to determine male beauty are facial characteristics, one of the most important of which is symmetry. Women have evolved to value symmetry in male faces, the theory goes, because it is a good marker of the strength of a man’s immune system and health—he is able to maintain symmetrical growth despite obstacles such as disease and parasites, which tend to visibly disrupt the process. Again, we modern men have incredible advantages over our prehistoric counterparts: our medicine and nutrition are now so good that we hardly suffer any insults to our facial symmetry at all. But here, once again, we’ve managed to fritter away our advantage. Women also value exaggerated facial features such as a large, robust jaw, a wide mouth, prominent cheekbones, and a broad face with wide-set eyes.28 The growth of all of these is governed by testosterone levels, which, strangely enough, seem to be dropping (for some as yet unknown reason) across the Western world.29 Although I’m unaware of any research into the area, this possibly means the facial features women find most attractive in men are growing less pronounced. Since these apparently hardwired female preferences will not disappear anytime soon, it seems we modern males are on track to finding yet one more way to leave our womenfolk disappointed—with our physical beauty. Or lack thereof.
Strictly speaking, though, the situation may not turn out to be quite so grim. After all, judgments of beauty are relative, and luckily for us our elders and betters aren’t around for women to compare us to. To get the girl, we moderns simply have to convince her we’re better than the next schlub, not some genuinely swashbuckling he-man from 10,000 BCE. Just to be on the safe side, however, it may be wise to make one last effort to find something, anything, positive we have to throw onto the reproductive and desirability scales. Might it not, for example, be time to summon up the last, desperate hope of all those jostling to avoid being the last one standing at the masculine matrimonial ball—our skill as fathers? Such skill has, after all, saved many a sub-optimal man from the genetic oblivion of not breeding, as this joke from comedian Larry Wilde illustrates:
DOCTOR: Mrs. Smith, I don’t like the looks of your husband.
MRS. SMITH: Neither do I, doc, but he’s good with the kids.
And modern fathers would, as a group, seem to be eminently qualified. The past two decades have seen the rise of the so-called “new father”—the dad who’s more sharing, loving, and giving, and who spends more time both with his children and caring for them, than any of our own fathers and grandfathers would have thought possible, d
esirable, or even sane. Yet how does the “new father” compare, I wonder, with another group of super-dads who made the news recently for their phenomenal parenting abilities: the ancient but still surviving Aka Pygmies of the Western Congo Basin.
I can hardly bear to look.
Babies
Who is this “new father” who is suddenly all over the talk shows and pages of pop-culture mags, supposedly rehabilitating the reputation of modern males with his new-found paternal skills? Where did he come from? According to authors Karen Hansen and Anita Garey in their book Families in the U.S., he’s the lineal descendant of several ancestral fathers. Way back in the Middle Ages, when the church ruled supreme, lived “Dad the moral guardian”: the father who assumed the main burden of shaping, usually by brute force, the moral character of his offspring. Then, with the advent of industrialization and the rise of the middle class, came “Dad the distant breadwinner”: the classic, aloof Western paterfamilias of the 1930s and 1940s. Many harassed modern dads might think that’s where developments should have stopped, but this glorious escape from responsibility in fact proved temporary. The influx of women into employment in the post-war era prompted entirely reasonable complaints that men weren’t pulling their weight domestically—reasonable to everybody except men, that is, who by that time had forgotten they were supposed to be pulling at all. There were also concerns, sparked by the spread of psychoanalytic sex-role theory around the same time, that the absence of men was turning a generation of boys into sissies. Thus was born the “involved father,” typified by the Father Knows Best sitcom dad, Jim Anderson, who played with his kids, attended recitals and baseball games, and was always available to dispense allowances or paternal advice.
The “involved father,” however, tended to limit his involvement to his older children; infant care in general, and diaper changing in particular, were left to the wife and mother. That sufficed for a while, until the women’s movement—and its wannabe masculine little brother, the men’s movement—finally forced the reluctant hand of the “involved father” into the diaper bucket, too. Thus was born today’s model: the “new father,” the dad who spent time with his kids, was involved with them during infancy (not just later childhood), was available for actual child-care (not just play), and was as equally involved with his daughters as his sons.1 The trademark of the “new father” is his determination to share in every aspect of parenthood, bar none. Some “new fathers,” for example, go so far as to wear an “empathy belly”—a device that not only simulates a thirty-three-pound weight around the midriff, but also features a rib-belt to constrict the lungs, mobile lead weights that simulate foetal movement, a warm-water pouch to emulate the heat of pregnancy, and a specially positioned weight that mimics a fetal head pressing into the wearer’s bladder.
Somewhat less exotic specimens of fatherhood are the Aka Pygmies, who still live in the rainforests of the Western Congo Basin, much as they have done for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years. These tribal peoples are genuine Pygmies, in that their males average less than 5' in height (compared to our 5'10"). Like their neighbors, the Mbuti Pygmies, they probably get their short stature from a mutation making them resistant to human growth hormones. Their bands of around one hundred people make their living by gathering edible forest plants and insects, and hunting small to medium-sized animal prey in communal “net hunts”—although Aka men, again like the Mbuti, also bring down elephants and wild boar with the spear. The Aka crop up in any discussion of fatherhood thanks to the pioneering fieldwork of Professor Barry Hewlett, from Washington State University, on Aka fathering. After researching the Aka for fifteen years and living with them for some months, Hewlett submitted a Ph.D. thesis that called their men “the best fathers in the world.”2 Aka men, Hewlett reported, not only spent large amounts of time with their children every day, much of that time was in direct physical contact with them, skin-on-skin. They treated their daughters exactly the same as their sons. They also took genuine interest in their infant children, sharing their care substantially with the child’s mother, rather than just playing with them. So dedicated to infant care were Aka men, Hewlett reported, that they even, at times, suckled their babies. (The skeptical reader, of course, will at this point raise the sensible question of how Aka men could suckle infants when they don’t have breasts. Or the ability to lactate. Incredibly, however, it turns out that a substantial minority of Aka Pygmy men do grow them. That’s all I’ll say about that right here, though; if this flash of male cleavage isn’t enough and you can’t wait for a full explanation, I suggest you leaf forward.)
It’s immediately obvious that these characteristics make the Aka the perfect foil against which to test the claims of the Western “new father.” Aka Pygmy men have substantial achievements in all four areas of prowess claimed by the Western “new father”: they spend time with their kids, they are involved with them during infancy, they are available for child care and not just play, and they seem to treat their daughters the same way they treat their sons. Thanks to Hewlett’s work, we also have precise figures to compare, since he meticulously recorded everything from the percentage of time Aka fathers spent within three feet of their children to how often Aka infants crawled to their dads around the campfire. All we have to do, then, is find comparable figures for the Western “new father” (we’ll substitute the TV for the campfire) and we can transport him to a clearing in the Congo rainforest for a “dad-off” with these diminutive super-fathers. True, such an exercise might lay us open to the charge of running an unsavory, exploitative freak show. All I can say, however, is that I will do my best to ensure the Western “new father” is treated with the dignity he deserves and isn’t forced to model his “empathy belly” or “man-wrap” baby carrier for amused Aka gawkers too often.
To kick off proceedings, then, just how much time does the much-improved Western “new father” spend with his children? And how does that compare to his female partner’s efforts? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), American men still lag considerably behind their women.3 A married, employed father, for example, spends an average 1.21 hours a day engaged in child-care activities, while his employed wife spends 1.97. The discrepancy between unemployed dads and moms is even more pronounced—1.75 hours compared to 3.21, or almost double. True, these figures are a vast improvement on those of the past forty years: a miserable 17 minutes a day in 1965, 26 minutes in 1985 and 51 minutes in 1998. Yet the true difference between a husband’s and wife’s time with the kids may remain even greater than those figures suggest. The BLS stats also reveal that a wife still does four times as much housework (which generally is child-care in any house peopled with anklebiters) as her husband. It seems, in fact, that the preferred childcare activity of the modern “new father” is simply being there. Statistics from another study record that dads these days are within eyesight or earshot of their kids for an average 3.56 hours a day, most of this being on weekends.
Given that numerous other studies show father-presence is an essential element of children’s wellbeing, this is an undeniable improvement on the “distant breadwinner” dad of old. In Aka society, however, it would probably be considered child abuse by neglect. Aka Pygmy dads, Hewlett records, are available to their children for an average twelve hours a day, every day of the week.4 That’s not just within earshot, either—Aka dads stick within arm’s length of their offspring for that entire time. How on earth do they do it? Partly it’s through actually holding their kids, which Aka dads do for almost a quarter of their time while in camp. They also sleep with their kids, along with their wives, on incredibly narrow beds (about eighteen inches in width), until well into the kids’ early teens. Aka dads also take their children with them just about everywhere. Hewlett reported that he often witnessed drinking parties where Aka fathers downed palm wine (a naturally occurring alcohol) with their children perched in their laps or on their hips.
Outraged Western “new fathers,” of course, might
justifiably protest that they’re not allowed to take their kids to bars anyway. They would also probably take refuge in the claim that the Aka are freaks—one-off exceptions to the no-doubt poor efforts of other ancient and tribal dads. While it is true that the Aka are in a class of their own among hunter-gathers (Hewlett records that Aka men hold their kids for five times as long as the men of any other culture), they are by no means the only doting fathers of the tribal world. While figures as meticulous as Hewlett’s are rarely available, the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski nonetheless reported that Papuan Trobriand Island men were extremely devoted fathers, carrying their children around for hours at a time.5 Melanesian Lesu men of New Ireland, similarly, were known for playing with their children daily, often spending hours at a time with them and taking them along when they gathered socially with other men. After hearing this, the Western “new father” might even be tempted into a perverse sulk, stating that if he can’t be the best in time spent with his progeny then, by God, he’ll be the worst. Even that honor (such as it were), however, would be denied him. The men of numerous ancient and tribal groups outdid us in neglect, too. One example will do: the Rwala Bedouin tribesmen of Saudi Arabia and Syria a century ago spent so little time with their children that a Rwala boy could easily reach adolescence without having spoken to his father more than once or twice.6
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