On every defining measure of “new” fatherhood, then, we modern men have proven to be deadbeat dads. Despite our national fatherhood institutes, parenting programs, dads’ clubs, and birthing classes, we’ve been out-fathered by a bunch of forest dads who couldn’t even read a “Prepared for Pregnancy” pamphlet, let alone Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood. At this point, however, the humiliated “new father” might well protest that the comparison is unfair. Fathering these days presents special challenges, he would argue, ones of which the Aka could never have dreamed. What about those innovations the “new father” has dreamed up to meet those challenges, such as his embrace of stepfathering? Or being present at his child’s birth? Or bringing his kids up without any discipline (a favorite complaint of right-wing radio shock jocks)? How could the Aka possibly match the Western “new father” in those, since he, presumably, invented them?
Well, let’s see.
Stepfathering, it’s true, is often considered a speciality of modern families in the post-sexual-revolution era. Yet our self-proclaimed skills in inclusive parenting seem to evaporate whenever the census-taker comes around: in 2004 less than 6 percent of American children lived with their mother and a stepfather, as opposed to almost 25 percent who resided with just their single mother.19 What’s more, outcomes for children living with those stepdads are sometimes less than best. Research carried out by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly in the 1980s showed that stepfathers were responsible for higher rates of (and more severe) child assault and murder than biological fathers.20 Direct maltreatment is, thankfully, rare even among stepfathers, but neglect in favor of one’s biological children, unfortunately, isn’t. Another study of American stepfathers showed that on four measures of investment in children—financial support from birth, time spent with them, children’s university attendance, and financial support while studying—they lavished fewer resources on their stepchildren than on their own kids.21 The distinction held even when a man’s stepchildren were living in the same family as his biological kids. While most modern stepdads make genuine efforts to love their stepchildren just as much as their own, it seems they’re simply not particularly good at doing so.
The Aka, by contrast, seem to manage better. Stepfathering is, for a start, much more common in Aka society than among Western “new fathers.” Due to the early age at which Aka parents die, and their surprisingly high divorce rate, over 40 percent of Aka children live with at least one stepparent by the age of sixteen. Every stepchild Hewlett interviewed said their stepfather had treated them well, sometimes even better than their own father had. True, Hewlett notes that stepfathers didn’t seem to provide as much direct care as biological dads did, but he also cautioned that his data was too limited from which to draw valid conclusions. In Aka society there certainly seems to be some benefit in having a stepfather—Hewlett states that almost every child in his survey who had lost a father also died within months, unless their mother remarried. This is probably due to the dangerous conditions in the Aka’s jungle home, coupled with the loss of the father’s substantial contribution to child care. Other tribal societies in jungle habitats proved even more skilled at sharing custody and stepfathering. Some, indeed, extended their sharing to the mother herself. Men of the South American Bari, Canela, Mundurucu, and the Mehinaku Indian tribes believed that it took the semen of several men to make a child, and that each then carried the responsibilities of a father. Remarkably, kids lucky enough to score such multiple dads had better survival rates than children with a single father.22 (Although we must not, of course, idealize all ancient tribal fathering: Aché Indians of Paraguay, for example, actually killed children whose fathers either died or left the group.23) The Western “new father,” by comparison, seems rather selfish—a study done in 2004 showed we tend to save our best fathering efforts for those children who physically resemble us.24
If our stepfathering boasts have proven mere bombast, then, what about our presence at our children’s births? This is certainly a new development—fifty years ago husbands weren’t even allowed inside many U.S. maternity wards during their child’s birth; these days more than 90 percent attend.25 It’s also something Aka fathers don’t do, so it seems we’ve finally scored at least one victory over those smug, super-paternal show-offs. Aka fathers don’t have particular taboos against fathers attending childbirth (Hewlett records at least one father who did assist when his wife went into labor alone in the forest). Most other ancient tribal societies, though, did. The fluids associated with childbirth were often considered so polluting that fathers avoided a woman’s labor on pain of death. That doesn’t mean, however, that they played no part in their child’s birth. Some tribal males were required to build a special hut for their wife to give birth in. Others had to observe extensive restrictions, such as the Mehinaku of Brazil, whose fathers had to abstain from sex, isolate themselves in a secluded hut, and avoid certain foods (such as fish) for months after the birth. Among the Garifuna people of Honduras, this period could last three years.26 Some tribal fathers, on the other hand, did attend their child’s birth. Their activities there, however, weren’t limited to holding their wife’s hand and uttering the occasional “Push!” Among the Aka’s pygmy neighbors, the Mbuti, fathers were (and still are) required to strip naked and expose their penis (try doing that in the maternity ward and see how far you get). Among precolonial Burmese mountain people, not just the father but all the men of the tribe stripped off and assumed a variety of obscene postures, supposedly to scare off evil spirits. Even more extreme, however, were those societies that practiced couvade, “sympathetic pregnancy,” rituals. Some of these simply mimicked the wife’s pregnancy, as in the case of those South American Indians among whom, according to anthropologist Yves d’Evreux:
He [the husband] lies-in instead of his wife who works as usual; then all the women of the village come to see and visit him in his bed, consoling him for the trouble and pain he had in producing his child; he is treated as if he were sick and very tired without leaving his bed.27
Others, however, involved the sadistic infliction of pain on the father to make him empathize with his wife’s suffering. Some ancient Brazilian tribes, for example, slashed the father all over his body with the teeth of an agouti (a rodent with teeth so sharp they pierce Brazil nuts) and poured tobacco juice mixed with pepper into the cuts. An even more directly empathic experience, though, was required of the Mexican Huichol Indian father in the olden days, who:
During traditional childbirth…sits above his laboring wife on the roof of their hut. Ropes are tied around his testicles and…each time she feels a painful contraction, she tugs on the ropes so that her husband will share some of the pain of their child’s entrance into the world.28
Now if that doesn’t make any “new father” slink off to discard his “empathy belly” in shame, he’ll have to add self-delusion to his list of shortcomings.29
It seems cruel to continue, but for the sake of the exercise, what about our supposed invention of noncorporal discipline of children? The past few decades have, it’s true, seen a march away from physical discipline. Corporal punishment is now illegal in all European schools and most European homes, schools in three Australian states, and schools in twenty-three American ones. This is certainly an improvement from the barbarism of earlier times. As late as the 1820s Alfred Lord Tennyson was flogged so severely for forgetting his lines while reciting a school text that he was confined to bed for six weeks. And medieval punishments, of course, had been even worse, as when disrespectful Saxon children in early England were fastened to walls with the joug (“metal collar”) for passersby to pelt and abuse.30 Yet not all ancient and tribal societies have been as cruel as ours. It’s probable that the Aka Pygmies, for example, have never used such brutal punishments. Pygmy fathers today rarely hit their children; Hewlett says he only witnessed it once in fifteen years of research among the Aka. (In fact, in Aka culture hitting children can constitute grounds for divorce.) Aka fathers don’t even a
ttack their children verbally; Hewlett records that he almost never heard a Pygmy father, or mother, say the word “no” to a misbehaving child. (They generally just shift them away from the object of misbehavior.) Nor do Aka dads demand an overly high level of respect from their children. Hewlett reports with some amusement the words of an outraged villager of the Ngandu (a neighboring people who treat their children more strictly than the Aka):
Young pygmies have no respect for their parents; they regard their fathers as their friends…they always use their first names. Once I was in a pygmy camp…and a son said to his father, “Etobe your balls are hanging out of your loincloth” and everyone started laughing. No respect, none, none, none…31
I may be misjudging him, but I’d wager many a “new father” would be tempted to foreswear his noncorporal punishment principles when Timmy comes out with that little number!
* * *
Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
We often brag that our children receive the most enlightened sex education of any children in history, in contrast to the dark ignorance of medieval and Victorian times. Teachers in most American states (those that haven’t gone the “abstinence only” route) provide what they call “comprehensive” sex education, but it might well astonish those educators to find that sex ed in the ancient world was sometimes so comprehensive it even included on-the-job training. On the island of Tongareva, for example, a boy’s first growth of pubic hair:
…marked his introduction to copulation: a mature woman was appointed by his father to press back his foreskin over the glans and to instruct him, by actual demonstration, how to copulate. After that the boy began for the first time to wear a loincloth (i.e., to conceal his genitals) and was deemed…ready for actual (in contrast to playful) copulation…32
This sounds almost like abuse, to our ears, but it is worth remembering that attitudes to children’s bodies could be very different in ancient societies. Manchu mothers of ancient northern China, to give one of numerous examples, might often be seen in public sucking their infant son’s penis (for pacification), though they would never dream of kissing his cheek—an explicitly erotic gesture in Manchu culture.
* * *
Why should we modern fathers be so much worse than the Aka, despite our fantastic riches in resources and self-help books? In our defense, it isn’t entirely our fault. Anthropological studies of good fathering (defined as intimate and emotionally warm) have found that it is far more common in hunter-gatherer societies. The studies have also identified the conditions that seem to inhibit this approach in other cultures. One of those, as mentioned, is the patrilineal-descent system, but there are others. Researchers have discovered, for example, that the most distant fathering tends to take place in pastoral, or herding, societies. This is mostly because such societies allow the accumulation of enormous private wealth. This in turn encourages men to adopt promiscuous mating strategies like polygamy in which their number of offspring goes up, since they can now support them, but their investment in each goes down. There’s also the problem that herding takes a man away—often a long way away—from his family and thus removes him from the fathering scene. It’s also the case, finally, that herding societies tend to be quite violent ones. The fact that so much wealth is tied up in a mobile, easily stolen resource means herders often have to employ extreme violence as a deterrent. The drawback, of course, is that such aggression is not conducive to warm and empathic fathering (see, the “Spare the rod” box for sobering evidence of this).
It is immediately obvious, too, that our society—that of the “new father”—satisfies at least two of these conditions. True, we no longer have to resort to hyperaggression to deter our foes (the justice system now does that for us), but we are still very much like a pastoralist society in that our workplaces usually take us away—again, often far away—from our homes and any opportunity for sustained fathering. We are also quite an acquisitive society, which, as we have seen, encourages promiscuity and inhibits paternal investment. (True, we don’t always father the huge broods that those polygamist pastoral fathers do, but it’s not just the extra children that dilute those fathers’ paternal investment. It’s also the weakened attachment to any particular woman that results from having multiple sexual partners—which high-status males in our society also report.) Similarly, the fact that employed fathers who take “the daddy track”—forgoing work time to care for their children—suffer worse career outcomes, and are considered less conscientious employees by their employers, demonstrates that there is a cost placed on paternal investment in our society.33
Clearly our fathering fundamentals need some attention.
Remarkably, though, even the superpaternal Aka also have their fathers who don’t dig the daddy track. The Aka don’t have many high-status positions to strive for, but they do have some, among them the posts of kombeti, “headman,” nganga, “healer,” and tuma, “elephant hunter.” Hewlett found that men who had held those positions generally showed less intimate fatherly care than those who had not. Just like their Western counterparts, this was probably because they devoted most of their effort to status-seeking activities, rather than fathering.34
But these men are the exception, rather than the rule, and a small one at that. For most Aka men, their unique culture allows them to nourish their fathering instincts free of such poisonous influences. What conditions allow this? Hewlett identifies three, the first of which is equality between men and women. Aka husbands, Hewlett writes, spend a lot of time with their wives, enjoy their company, and have such a high level of respect for women’s work that they see nothing demeaning in helping them perform it. This leads directly into the second condition Hewlett identifies: the fact that men and women work together in activities such as net hunting and caterpillar gathering, putting the father at child-care ground zero all day, every day. This in turns leads into the third condition: the high level of father-child bonding. Aka fathers grow so emotionally close to their young children because they are physically close to them throughout their entire childhoods.
This, Hewlett says, has strong implications for our own society. Not only does it mean that we must find ways to bring fathers’ workplaces closer to their homes, be it through workplace child care or flexible paternity leave. It also means that our current focus on ensuring quality time for dads with their kids may be misguided. Quality time, Hewlett says, simply cannot substitute for quantity time.
That is the real lesson of the Aka. Following their example may well help us improve in future, but right now we are once more in desperate trouble. Homo masculinus modernus has come in second-best, yet again, in a fight over the last possible quality that makes a man worthy of the name: his skill as a dad. On top of our previous failures—see BRAWN, BRAVADO, BATTLE, BALLS, BARDS, and BEAUTY—it is a bitter blow. But since all these aspects of masculinity—strength, courage, beauty, sporting, and literary skill—have proven to be simple ploys in the age-old struggle to mate, and thereby save ourselves from genetic oblivion, our mediocre efforts beg the question: just how well do we do, then, with the ladies? How good are we in the arts of Venus, especially in comparison to those ancient men who have so soundly thrashed us elsewhere?
Certainly, we are, once again, not short on boasts about it—recall Wilt Chamberlain’s unbelievable claim of twenty thousand lovers. Then there are the claims of the “seduction community,” immortalized in books such as Neil Strauss’s The Game and TV shows like The Pickup Artist, that they have brought the art of seducing women to heights exceeding even those of the legendary Casanova. Seduction “gurus” in the community insist they can get a woman to sleep with them within seven hours, to pay them for sex, and to have orgasms on vocal command. This last, admittedly, is difficult to believe, but it’s merely a more extreme version of our supreme confidence in our ability to satisfy women sexually as never before in history. Who, after all, discovered the clitoris and the female orgasm, complete with their excitingly updated cousins, the G-sp
ot and female ejaculation? What man in history has ever employed the sophisticated techniques we have to induce the same? Who has ever been as sexually liberated, had more adulterous affairs, consumed such explicit pornography, or even been as gay as us?
There’s only one way to find out. Strap yourselves in, ladies and gentlemen, as we embark on a tour through sex-toy manufacture in the European Palaeolithic; Hawaiian pili (“touched by the wand”) swingers’ parties; and Andean Moche ceramic kettles so pornographic they’d have Larry Flynt firing up his kiln for a piece of the action. Oh, and don’t forget to bring some tissues—not for the fluids, but the tears.
Which I have a very strong suspicion it’s all going to end in.
Babes
Is it conceivable that Wilt Chamberlain really slept with twenty thousand women in the course of his womanizing career? To those unfamiliar with the life of the 7'1" “Wilt the Stilt” (he hated the name, apparently), here is a quick biography: Chamberlain was born in 1936 in Philadelphia, where he took up basketball at Overbrook High School before progressing to a professional career with the Harlem Globetrotters, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the San Diego Conquistadors, eventually retiring in 1974. Chamberlain so dominated basketball in his time that he still holds seventy-two NBA records, such as being the only player to score one hundred points in a game, or to average over fifty points a game for an entire season. What of his score in the bedroom, though? True, certain facts about Chamberlain seem to lend credence to his extraordinary claim. The fabulous pad he built in Bel Air, Los Angeles, during his years with the Lakers was known as the venue of Playboy-style parties, and Chamberlain is documented as once sleeping with twenty-three women in ten days.1 Given these appetites, and the fact that a total of twenty thousand would merely require Chamberlain to sleep with an average of one woman per day for fifty years (between the ages of thirteen and his death at sixty-three), the figure seems difficult but perhaps possible. But look a little closer and doubts arise.
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