Clubbing The Caveman To Death: Exposing the Way Pop Culture Manipulates Facts
I'll be posting links to articles like this one from time to time, in order to skewer the way pop culture distorts history to enable men to act like imbeciles. Hint: it has almost nothing to do with nature, regardless of what lad rags like Men's Health and Maxim tell you, and a lot to do with social conditioning. B-b-b-but pop culture couldn't possibly manipulate science to achieve it's own ends, could it? If you believe that you're rather naive. I hear men I know invoke nature as an excuse to be skirt chasers, since the magazines such as Men's Health, Maxim, and Cosmo push this misogynistic consensus on their readers. Make no mistake, y'all - people really believe this shit. Not to worry, my thinking and skeptic folk - a lady by the name of Martha McCaughey at American Sexuality Magazine exposes the MAN behind the curtain:
"Men, the popular account of evolution tells us, are rampantly heterosexual skirt chasers. (Anyone who's gay serves, at best, as evidence of the supposedly nonadaptive delights in which some humans indulge and, at worst, as evidence of what is unnatural and therefore immoral.) This understanding of male sexuality helps fuel a culture Michael Kimmel recently labeled "guyland," the life stage and social space in which teenage and twenty-something men cultivate a rude-dude attitude, resenting anything intellectual, politically correct, or smacking of either responsibility or women's authority. What better than the caveman narrative to help these guys avoiding the demands of adult life define themselves as, nevertheless, real men?
Learning evolution's significance for male sexuality can enable men to rationalize sexist double standards and wallow in their loutishness, as they do in guyland. Alternatively, it can serve to encourage men to control their caveman natures by becoming self-conscious, enlightened cavemen. But either way, the popular versions of man-as-caveman never question men's putatively natural shortcomings or innate aggressive heterosexuality. The caveman is certainly not the only form of masculine identity in our times. But the emergence of a caveman masculinity tells us much about the authority of science, the flow of scientific ideas in our culture, and the embodiment of those ideas. We live in a culture attached to scientific authority and explication. The popularity of the scientific story of men's evolved desires -- however distorted the science becomes as enthusiasts popularize it -- can tell us something about the appeal and influence of that story.
The influence of the evolutionary story cuts right to men's physically felt dispositions. In his book, Cultural Boundaries of Science, Thomas Gieryn comments on the cultural authority of science, suggesting that "if 'science' says so, we are more often than not inclined to believe it or act on it -- and to prefer it to claims lacking this epistemic seal of approval." To his observation I would add that we are also more likely to live it. Ideas that count as scientific, regardless of their truth value, become lived ideologies. In this way, a heterosexist form of male sexuality is naturalized. In her discussion of naturalizing male power, sociologist Raewyn Connell states:
The physical sense of maleness is not a simple thing. It involves size and shape, habits of posture and movement, particular physical skills and the lack of others, the image of one's own body, the way it is presented to other people and the ways they respond to it, the way it operates at work and in sexual relations. In no sense is all this a consequence of XY chromosomes, or even of the possession on which discussions of masculinity have so lovingly dwelt, the penis. The physical sense of maleness grows through a personal history of social practice, a life-history-in-society. (Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics)
We see and believe that men's power over women is the order of nature because, as Connell puts it, "power is translated not only into mental body-images and fantasies, but into muscle tensions, posture, the feel and texture of the body." The caveman becomes an imaginative projection that is experienced and lived as real biological truth.
We must challenge the convenient innocence with which men invoke science to understand and experience their bodies. The caveman mystique is, after all, a contemporary male counterpart of the feminine mystique so famously described by Betty Friedan in 1963. Women had to challenge the popular idea that they found fulfillment in keeping house and rearing children. It's time now to challenge the idea that men find true self-expression in boorish behaviors, sexual aggression, and chance sexual encounters. Indeed, it's time for men to take a great leap forward to develop a more sociological understanding of both science and their own sexuality."
Gents, stop defending the caveman. Stop buying into bullshit quack science that strips you of all authority of the most important asset you have - yourself - by excusing your from personal responsibility. Don't fool yourselves, either - we didn't evolve into homo sapiens and put intricate systems into place only to continue imitating our ape ancestors. You're only selling yourselves short and passing up any opportunity to have a meaningful relationship or sexual experience. Grow the fuck up and start taking some responsibility or, as it has been said -
MAN UP.
Meanwhile, I'll be thinking and taking responsibility - like a modern man should - because I know the rewards of taking control of myself. Still, it's not easy being surrounded by a bunch of children, so I have to wait for the other "men" to grow up.
Oh well. Nobody said everything would be perfect.
"Men, the popular account of evolution tells us, are rampantly heterosexual skirt chasers. (Anyone who's gay serves, at best, as evidence of the supposedly nonadaptive delights in which some humans indulge and, at worst, as evidence of what is unnatural and therefore immoral.) This understanding of male sexuality helps fuel a culture Michael Kimmel recently labeled "guyland," the life stage and social space in which teenage and twenty-something men cultivate a rude-dude attitude, resenting anything intellectual, politically correct, or smacking of either responsibility or women's authority. What better than the caveman narrative to help these guys avoiding the demands of adult life define themselves as, nevertheless, real men?
Learning evolution's significance for male sexuality can enable men to rationalize sexist double standards and wallow in their loutishness, as they do in guyland. Alternatively, it can serve to encourage men to control their caveman natures by becoming self-conscious, enlightened cavemen. But either way, the popular versions of man-as-caveman never question men's putatively natural shortcomings or innate aggressive heterosexuality. The caveman is certainly not the only form of masculine identity in our times. But the emergence of a caveman masculinity tells us much about the authority of science, the flow of scientific ideas in our culture, and the embodiment of those ideas. We live in a culture attached to scientific authority and explication. The popularity of the scientific story of men's evolved desires -- however distorted the science becomes as enthusiasts popularize it -- can tell us something about the appeal and influence of that story.
The influence of the evolutionary story cuts right to men's physically felt dispositions. In his book, Cultural Boundaries of Science, Thomas Gieryn comments on the cultural authority of science, suggesting that "if 'science' says so, we are more often than not inclined to believe it or act on it -- and to prefer it to claims lacking this epistemic seal of approval." To his observation I would add that we are also more likely to live it. Ideas that count as scientific, regardless of their truth value, become lived ideologies. In this way, a heterosexist form of male sexuality is naturalized. In her discussion of naturalizing male power, sociologist Raewyn Connell states:
The physical sense of maleness is not a simple thing. It involves size and shape, habits of posture and movement, particular physical skills and the lack of others, the image of one's own body, the way it is presented to other people and the ways they respond to it, the way it operates at work and in sexual relations. In no sense is all this a consequence of XY chromosomes, or even of the possession on which discussions of masculinity have so lovingly dwelt, the penis. The physical sense of maleness grows through a personal history of social practice, a life-history-in-society. (Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics)
We see and believe that men's power over women is the order of nature because, as Connell puts it, "power is translated not only into mental body-images and fantasies, but into muscle tensions, posture, the feel and texture of the body." The caveman becomes an imaginative projection that is experienced and lived as real biological truth.
We must challenge the convenient innocence with which men invoke science to understand and experience their bodies. The caveman mystique is, after all, a contemporary male counterpart of the feminine mystique so famously described by Betty Friedan in 1963. Women had to challenge the popular idea that they found fulfillment in keeping house and rearing children. It's time now to challenge the idea that men find true self-expression in boorish behaviors, sexual aggression, and chance sexual encounters. Indeed, it's time for men to take a great leap forward to develop a more sociological understanding of both science and their own sexuality."
Gents, stop defending the caveman. Stop buying into bullshit quack science that strips you of all authority of the most important asset you have - yourself - by excusing your from personal responsibility. Don't fool yourselves, either - we didn't evolve into homo sapiens and put intricate systems into place only to continue imitating our ape ancestors. You're only selling yourselves short and passing up any opportunity to have a meaningful relationship or sexual experience. Grow the fuck up and start taking some responsibility or, as it has been said -
MAN UP.
Meanwhile, I'll be thinking and taking responsibility - like a modern man should - because I know the rewards of taking control of myself. Still, it's not easy being surrounded by a bunch of children, so I have to wait for the other "men" to grow up.
Oh well. Nobody said everything would be perfect.