What We’re “Wired for”…
Two weeks ago I posted an infographic that suggests what I believe is a promising way forward from where men are today to a new place of service, purpose and fulfillment that takes advantage of the ineffable qualities of maleness. It proposes the establishment of Equal Parenting Opportunity Commissions — largely aimed at tapping the immense, largely devalued, poorly recognized, oft-disparaged potential of fatherhood and male parenting — what we might call child-centered masculinity — in advanced nations around the world.
That post generated two Comments (here and here) and three Likes, about average for the kinds of ideas I offer. Both commenters disagreed with my way of looking forward; they were more in favor of burnishing the old ways of men’s traditional work. As we know, “It’s good work if you can get it.”
The Gender Genie is not going back into its bottle, no matter how much some people long for the “good old days when men were men and women were women.” The only question is whether the male Genie will escape his confines as fully as women’s Genie has escaped hers.
Old systems of sex-based specialization are increasingly obsolete. True, women doing this and men doing that worked well for millennia. Eking every bit of efficiency out of the ways men and women differ and are better at some things than others got us out of “the jungle out there” and into this thing called Civilization. Civilization is and always will be a work in progress. We can keep the advantages of sex-based specialization where they remain advantageous and we can adapt and move beyond them where they are more trouble than they’re worth.
We often hear talk of what humans, especially in our sex roles, are “wired for.” And there is much truth in what biological and psychological anthropology teaches about what it has learned… from the past. But it is time for us to see and consider new options in our new realities.
The one thing we humans are most “wired for” is adaptation. We adapt more creatively than any other species.
It has become clear that women can do things that previously only men did and men can do things previously only women did. But that is an adaptation humans are executing very poorly, very selectively, much to the disadvantage of men, maleness and masculinity. Women seize new opportunities for themselves. Lacking terribly in confidence and overwhelmed by fear, shame and being seen as losers, many men do not consider opportunities for which they might be exquisitely well-suited.
The women’s movement made a big mistake by belittling and criticizing women who knew what changes worked best for them and their families and who didn’t feel compelled to follow the mandated wiring diagram of feminism. But the women’s movement also did an undeniably good thing by making that new diagram available for women freely to choose it.
Having observed the needless turmoil feminism pushed into many women’s lives, the men’s movement knows not to make the same mistake of insisting that every man must follow a new script. But the men’s movement also knows that men can, and should if they wish, reinvent themselves — adapt and take advantage of new opportunities to fill old and increasingly critical needs in new ways that take advantage of and build upon our current, tried-and-true male wiring.
We know that men are suffering from feelings of worthlessness, that masculinity has been rendered obsolete in the minds of many women — and some men, too. So now a very good strategy of adaptation may be for us to open up spaces for men to add more of the ways of maleness and masculinity to the culture of raising children.
It is often asserted by women’s activists and by men who are ashamed of being male that if women were more fully involved in running the world there would be no wars. We should take that bet, on the condition that men get to demonstrate how much happier and healthier children would be if child-centered masculinity were fully wired into our homes and families for those fathers who feel and believe they can do much more for humanity than men have been valued for doing so far.
What kind of man would want to do that?
Maybe many more men than some people would have us believe. Maybe many more than some people would want.
In a book about bonding between mothers and infants, noted pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton quoted anthropologist Margaret Mead as saying:
“No developing society that needs men to leave home and do their ‘thing’ for the society ever allows young men in to handle or touch their newborns. There’s always a taboo against it. For they know somewhere that, if they did, the new fathers would become so ‘hooked’ that they would never get out and do their ‘thing’ properly.”1
We are not so much a “developing society” any more. Should we feel any sense of shame or failure or unmanliness or impropriety for establishing male structures and systems across advanced frontiers?
As males of the species we adapted from hunters to farmers.
From Africa, humans adapted to Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia.
In an increasingly materialistic society that demanded “providing” from us, we adapted to working in shops, factories and offices, which often deadened our souls.
Now in our anxious/neurotic society, children have the need and we have the opportunity to provide a much greater, decidedly male measure of order, confidence and calm.
Not every man will want to do this, especially not right now, not until they have exhausted every other possibility.
But any man who wants to for himself, or who sees it as the best option for his family should have every opportunity to take it and make the most of it.
Even if some people think the new wiring is only for women.
Marshall H. Klaus, M.D. and John H. Kennell, M.D. (eds.). Maternal-Infant Bonding: The Impact of Early Separation or Loss on Family Development. (St. Louis: Mosby Press. 1976). page 44.
