Deepening the History of Masculinity and the Sexes

[seabeyond]

McElvaine bases his understanding of modern American masculinity on "deep history"—sociobiologist E. O. Wilson's term for the evolution of the human species. 2 Under this view, contemporary cross-cultural masculine and feminine traits are part of a universal human cognitive structure shaped by the two million years spent as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Evolution of psychological design is a slow process. The 10,000 years since the scattered appearance of agriculture is a very small stretch in evolutionary terms, about 1 percent of human history. Therefore, as the argument goes, it is improbable that the species evolved complex cognitive adaptations to agriculture, let alone to industrial or post-industrial society. With this periodization in place, evolutionary psychology—the vanguard of sociobiological thought and scholarship central to McElvaine's book—examines the recurring environmental demands faced by male hunters as opposed to female gatherers, which leads to the explanation of late-twentieth-century violent hypermasculinity, for instance, as a trace of what heretofore would have been called "pre-historic" thought. 3 What this boils down to is finding gender difference in human nature, a concept McElvaine in no way shies away from. Eve's Seed speaks routinely of the human "biogram"—another sociobiological term—which includes, according to McElvaine, a "propensity" for both war and love.

In addressing his study's central question of why "the subordination of women to men is something approaching a cross-cultural universal," McElvaine argues that throughout history men have excluded and taken power from women in overcompensating for their primordial envy of female capacity to carry, bear, and nourish a child (p. 1). This "non-menstrual syndrome" or "notawoman" definition of manhood, as McElvaine calls it alternately in his penchant for label-making, stems from the psychoanalyst Karen Horney's 1926 essay "The Flight from Womanhood" and the anthropologist Ashley Montague's book The Natural Superiority of Women (1953). 4 In support of this thesis, McElvaine turns to anthropological findings of such hunter-gatherer practices of a husband simulating childbirth while his wife is in labor and tribal elders making boys perform fellatio, including the ingestion of "masculine milk," as a rite of passage. The "womb envy" concept organizes the better part of McElvaine's book, including the last chapters on twentieth-century American manhood. U.S. presidents' propensity for womanizing and war making and the whole "macho man" complex, McElvaine reasons, can be explained by deep-seated trans-historical male anxiety exaggeratedly manifest in particularly insecure individual men.

The middle chapters of Eve's Seed survey some 94 centuries of human history, stretching from 8,000 B.C.E. and the invention of agriculture through the Middle Ages. Vitally important to early economic and political history (bringing such changes as the creation of substantial material surplus and the rise of large states and war), agriculture—what McElvaine describes as the [End Page 136] first of two "megarevolutions"—also sparked a massive male "backlash," as the female invention of planting crops and animal husbandry undermined the male role as hunter. Among the masculinist responses, men took over agriculture and invented war, as women became relegated to increasing the population needed for the new social order. At the same time that men started to dominate agriculture, the "conception misconception" arose: the belief that men held all procreative power, with women being considered as simply the fertile field for the male seed. In addition to developing the association of women with inert matter and nature, the conception misconception "led," McElvaine writes, "to the assumption that The Creative Force—God—must be male" (p. 135). But within his synthesis, Christianity also exemplified feminine virtues such as love and charity, which worked against such Roman values as controlled violence and the concentrated power of the state. To be sure, just as they had done with agriculture, men came to control the Church, although McElvaine underlines the mediating feminine influences in Christianity such as the twelfth-century veneration of the Virgin Mary.

McElvaine's second megarevolution began in the sixteenth century with the acceleration of geographic and social mobility and the rise of the marketplace, developments which produced a close equation between manhood and individualism and which culminated in the nineteenth-century United States. As in the other sections of Eve's Seed, this part draws from a good amount of earlier scholarship in making a clear and provocative argument. The highly mobile, possessive individual American man depended upon what McElvaine labels "the sexual bi-polar disorder," the radical separation of the masculine sphere of business and politics from feminine domesticity (p. 240). In one of his better examples of applying biohistory, McElvaine points out that since Hobbes, solitude and self-reliance have been considered man's natural state, but individualism is inconsistent with the masculine propensity toward association and cooperation formed during the sex's long preoccupation with hunting in groups. The last six chapters of the book concentrate on the twentieth-century United States and increasingly desperate attempts to express "real manhood" amidst feminine consumerism, corporate conformity, and feminist equality. While McElvaine's brief consideration of body building, the cult of John Wayne, and Rambo movies offers nothing new, his treatment of the mid-twentieth-century white middle-class embrace of African-American hypermasculine sexuality exhibits an uncommonly deft touch in extracting historical meaning from popular culture. In one interpretive flourish he examines bluesman Muddy Water's song "I Can't Be Satisfied" (1948) and the subsequent Rolling Stones' youth culture anthem "Satisfaction" (1965) as recent commentary on male insatiability, an age-old complex of unattainable sexual satisfaction magnified by an out-of-control consumer culture.

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