The Caveman Mystique

Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science

Martha McCaughey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415934756
• eBook ISBN: 9781135952082
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Has evolution made men promiscuous skirt chasers? Pop-Darwinian claims about men's irrepressible heterosexuality have become increasingly common, and increasingly common excuses for men's sexual aggression. The Caveman Mystique traces such claims about the hairier sex through evolutionary science and popular culture. After outlining the social and historical context of the rise of pop-Darwinism's assertions about male sexuality and their appeal to many men, Martha McCaughey shows how evolutionary discourse can get lived out as the biological truth of male sexuality.

Although evolutionary scientists want to use their theories to solve social problems, evolutionary narratives get invoked by men looking for a Darwinian defense of bad-boy behaviors. McCaughey argues that evolution has nearly replaced religion as a moral guide for understanding who we are and what we must overcome to be good people.

Bringing together insights from the fields of science studies, body studies, feminist theory and queer theory, The Caveman Mystique offers a fresh understanding of science, science popularization, and the impact of science on men's identities making a convincing case for deconstructing, rather than defending, the caveman.

1
SPERM WARS, SEX WARS, AND SCIENCE WARS

Downsized Cavemen Going Apeshit

Why would men feel comforted, rather than insulted, by discussions establishing the evolutionary basis for lecherous behaviors like ogling, infidelity, and rape? I want to begin to answer that question by locating the appeal of evolutionary claims about male sexual aggression in a culture of economic downsizing and men’s slipping privilege. The 1990s was a decade in which American men expressed anxiety over lost turf. Of course, men in previous decades also expressed anxiety and had crises—indeed, some scholars suggest that masculinity is never a crisis-free identity.¹ The recent wave of male anxiety is tied to economic changes and women’s complaints of sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination. As women’s demands gained attention, the opportunities for them expanded, but the overall economic gains for male workers telescoped. This meant that many men, especially those without college educations, began to lose their economic footing—particularly relative to women, whose earnings increased during the 1980s.

In her book Stiffed, Susan Faludi shows that men’s frustrations stemmed from not just psychological changes, but economic ones.² An economic recession in the early 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the continued stagnation of real wages earned by men since the 1970s, left American male workers in a compromised position. Overall, women have seen increases in real incomes since 1973 while men have not. Broken down by educational level, men with college educations saw their incomes increase at the same rate as women’s regardless of educational level. Men without a college education were doing worse economically after 1973, while women were doing better.

Both married and unmarried women’s likelihood of working in the paid labor force has increased. Additionally, the wage gap between women and men closed significantly.³ The men with full-time, year-round employment saw their incomes level off between 1981 and 1990, but during that same period, the average incomes of their female counterparts (full-time, year-round employees) increased 16.7 percent.⁴ Men found themselves less likely to earn between $24,000 and $48,000 in 1989 (44.9 percent) than in 1979 (53.4 percent). In contrast, more women (34.9 percent) in 1989 had average earnings in that same “crucial middle” range of incomes than in 1979, when 26.6 percent of women’s incomes fell in that range.⁵

Faludi argues that this economic downturn affecting men in particular left them feeling powerless, hopeless, and angry.⁶ Many men who once had the opportunity to do meaningful work that, however dangerous, helped people or made the world run saw those opportunities slip away and be replaced by low-paying service work. These service-sector men must define themselves differently. The shift from a culture of production to a culture of consumption means that masculinity is now about appearance and scripts—an identity proffered by the capitalist marketplace—rather than the solid, contributing-member-of-society character enjoyed by men of the industrial era.⁷ Service-sector men are supposed to be happy, not with responsibility or the ability to protect, provide, and sacrifice, but with appearance. Being content with your youth, attractiveness, money, posture, and swagger was an attitude American women were sold in the 1950s and eventually rejected as existentially limiting.

I remember being puzzled upon receiving a newsletter from some male college friends who had started a rock band. The newsletter for their fans portrayed the band members as having a lifestyle revolving around booze, easy women, and, of course, rock ‘n’ roll. But I knew these guys: they attended competitive colleges where they studied hard, did not drink often, and respected women. I knew that one had a master’s degree in product packaging, and another worked as the office assistant for an executive (who admittedly hired my friend for his looks).

I later met another man, this one in a honky-tonk band, whose Web site for fans portrayed him in a similarly deceptive way. To the fans, he was a man from a broken home who hit the road driving an 18-wheeler. Yet, in reality he went to college, had happily married parents, and had for years worked smack dab in the middle of the service sector as a bookstore manager. Though such misrepresentations confused and amused me initially, I now understand them to be signals of a changing economy and changing masculinity. My friends were marketing their masculinity as they marketed their music; they knew that what sells to young male fans is not a feminized, service-sector masculinity, but an industrial-era, hands-on man pursuing whiskey, women, and work with reckless abandon. They also understood implicitly that masculinity is a fiction peddled to men in the capitalist marketplace.

Masculinity is now more about appearances and consuming than building, contributing, and producing. It’s hardly that most men today find themselves raising children at home while female partners bring home the bacon, or that men today just started shopping. But, like the 1950s housewife, more men must now find satisfaction despite working below their potential (given that their job skills have lost their position to technology or other labor sources) in a postindustrial service economy that is less rewarding both materially and morally. The contemporary man now has the existential opportunities and social usefulness of the 1950s housewife. As Faludi puts it,

The fifties housewife, stripped of her connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with shopping and the ornamental display of her ultrafemininity, could be said to have morphed into the nineties man, stripped of his connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and a gym-bred display of his ultra-masculinity.⁸

Men today face finding an identity in a culture of ornament.⁹

I suggest that the caveman is just such a masculine identity available to these men in crisis. The caveman is one kind of ornamental display of masculinity, a glamorous expression. The caveman mystique is that sense of one’s manhood as inherently productive, protective, aggressive, and heterosexual. It represents the artifice of identities, and men’s flight from artifice, as unsatisfying. As men confront economic recessions that render them socially impotent, at least by the standards that postwar American culture had promised, the caveman ethos offers them a reassuring identity as virile warriors, manly men.¹⁰

In “The Decline of Patriarchy,” Barbara Ehrenreich explains that fewer and fewer American men rule over wives and children.¹¹ She identifies the drop in male wages as the main reason male-dominated households are beginning to be a thing of the past, but adds several other causes that themselves are hard to separate from the drop in men’s earnings: the rise in dual-income households, the rise in the average age of first marriage, and the rise in female-headed households.¹² The fact that more women have entered the paid labor force in the past few decades has less to do with any change in women’s empowerment or ambition for wage labor and more to do with economic declines among men without college educations, which has made two incomes instead of one necessary for a family to get by.¹³

Moreover, American men’s interest in supporting women and children has weakened, as has the attitude that women need protection. Ehrenreich suggests that since the 1950s we’ve seen a male flight from women, where women are experienced as the entrapping, civilizing forces of a masculinity defined oppositionally as free and adventurous.¹⁴ Showing that the drip-dry shirt and the TV dinner haven’t received their due as the culture-changing technologies they may have been, Ehrenreich argues that the 1950s marked the time when American men no longer had to depend on women for their very survival.

The 1950s also marked the time when consumption became a legitimately masculine activity, symbolized by Hugh Hefner’s playboy ethos and the movie character James Bond, who knew as much about fine wines as he did about women. A sports car or a state-of-the-art home entertainment system could now display successful manhood as well as only an attractive home maintained by a trophy wife could have done a few decades before. Like Faludi, Ehrenreich notes a shift to a consumer model of masculinity. This opened up a socially legitimate space for men to enjoy the fruits of their labor without getting married and having families—as exemplified by the playboy. In Ehrenreich’s terms, the moral climate of America that had “honored, in men, responsibility, self-discipline and a protective commitment to women and children,” now “endorsed[s] irresponsibility, self-indulgence and an isolationist detachment from the claims of others.”¹⁵

Like Faludi and Ehrenreich, sociologist Neal King points to men’s sense of “losing ground” in his analysis of social shifts related to masculinity and, in particular, to explain the logic of violent, male cop-action movies popular among American men in the 1990s. Cop-action movies play into concerns that only straight white men can have, namely “a bitterness toward a world that has betrayed them and called them oppressor, while moving into their occupational turf, challenging their public authority, and abandoning them at home.”¹⁶

As that sense of losing ground makes cop-action movies and their fantasy of masculine, heroic violence pleasurable, so it also makes what Faludi calls “monstrous displays” appealing to men: “As the male role has diminished amid a sea of betrayed promises, many men have found themselves driven to more domineering and some even ‘monstrous’ displays in their frantic quest for a meaningful showdown.”¹⁷ The sense of losing ground can make violent fantasies (as in cop-action movies) appealing, or it can erupt in outright violence, as it did in the case of Shawn Nelson in 1995:

A former serviceman whose career in an army tank unit had gone nowhere, a former plumber who had lost his job and whose tools had been stolen, a former husband whose wife had left him, the thirty-five-year-old Nelson broke into the National Guard armory, commandeered a fifty-seven-ton M-60 army tank, and drove it through the streets of San Diego—flattening fire hydrants, crushing forty cars, downing traffic lights and enough utility poles to cut off electricity to five thousand people. He was at war with the domestic world that he once thought he was meant to build, serve, and defend.¹⁸

The caveman mystique is yet another monstrous display. Like the sexual assailant in New York City mentioned in this volume’s introduction, a man can enact that monstrous display on a woman whom he sees as fair game for his unstoppable animal instincts. In other cases, it can be a fantasy of who one is, or of why other men are the way they are.

Moral Disdain for Men

Another social trend is significant for the emergence of the caveman mystique. Starting with the 1970s feminist movement, but especially through the 1990s, a growing antirape movement took men to task for the problem of sexual violence against women. More state and federal dollars supported efforts to stop such violence, and men increasingly feared complaints and repercussions for those complaints. The rape trials of Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith Jr., the increasingly common school shootings (executed overwhelmingly by boys), the sexual harassment of women by men at the Citadel military college in South Carolina, the media attention given to the notorious Spurr Posse (a gang of guys who sought sex for “points” at almost all costs), the sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas, the White House sex scandals involving President Bill Clinton, and the local sexual assault trials of countless high school and college athletic stars meant more lost ground. Indeed, the 1990s saw relentless—though not necessarily ill-founded— criticism of men’s sexual violence and other forms of aggression. Men’s manhood seemed to take the blame for everything from school shootings to gang violence to date rape while, as Faludi points out, men’s economic and social crisis has remained invisible—even to many men.¹⁹

Right-wing leaders and antifeminist activists were also upset with men. Those opposing abortion rights argued that sexual intercourse without procreation was undermining male responsibility, and those opposing women’s equal-rights legislation argued that women’s liberation would only allow men to relinquish their economic obligations to their families, sending women and children into divorce-induced poverty.²⁰ Considering that critics of men come from the political right and left, and from among men as well as women, it seems fair to say that in turn-of-the-millennium America, moral disdain for men—whatever their age, race, or economic rank—had reached an all-time high.

In response, some men formed their own men’s groups—sometimes to bash women or feminism, sometimes just to emphasize men’s strong suits, and sometimes to claim men’s inner rudeness. Television networks created the rude dude: think of Howard Stern, The Man Show, and the obnoxious men of MTV’s Jackass, and seemingly unending shows about college spring break. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that evolutionary narratives spoke to these intense conversations about both men’s wrongdoings and strengths. Theories from the field of human behavior and evolution (HBE) appeal because they seem to many to provide reasonable, presumably objective, insights into hotly contested political issues.

HBE theorists offered their ideas in part to help society address and remedy the violence and other problems so many have been blaming on men. What HBE theorists didn’t predict is that so many average Joes would take up their ideas for slightly different reasons—namely as a monstrous display, a move to feel domineering in a world squeezing men’s resources and demanding that they be civil. This complex convergence of historical and political factors explains the acceptance, consumption, and popular spread of evolutionary knowledge about men.

The caveman ethos may be experienced as a concrete action or as just a fantasy. It can also be an explanatory narrative. For instance, if economic and social changes have made bachelorhood more appealing (or simply more likely) than the monogamous marriage model, what better than a Darwinian theory of innate male promiscuity to rationalize the revolt against the role of breadwinner? Before considering further the cultural appropriations of scientific HBE discourse, I want to review the basic evolutionary theory of human male sexuality.

Sperm Wars

HBE theorists argue that sexual behavior is worth examining from an evolutionary point of view. They begin by recognizing that Homo sapiens is a sexy species. We are relatively hairless (“naked ape...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• “Welcome Back to the Caveman Times”: An Introduction
• Chapter 1 Sperm Wars, Sex Wars, and Science Wars
• Chapter 2 Homo Resurrectus: The Theory of Evolution as a Moral Answer for Men
• Chapter 3 Homo Habitus: Evolution, Popular Culture, and the Embodied Ethos of Male Sexuality
• Chapter 4 Homo Sexual: Perverting Evolutionary Stories of Male Sexuality
• Chapter 5 Homo Textual: A Missing Link between Science and Culture
• Notes
• Index