Deepening the History of Masculinity and the Sexes

John Pettegrew

Robert S. McElvaine. Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. viii + 453 pp. Notes and index. $27.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

The turn of the twenty-first century has brought a tentative yet potentially seismic shift in feminist studies towards re-integrating biology into critical understanding of the behavioral differences between women and men. ¹ Until Robert S. McElvaine's book, this movement has barely registered among historians of women and gender. For at least the last thirty-five years, academic historians have made a sharp, principled distinction between sex as a physiological designation and gender as the contingent mental traits, behaviors, social conventions, and institutions that have formed around sex difference. A few important historical works do consider the issue of whether biology influences more than primary sexual characteristics: Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) maintains that the initial division of labor between women and men emerged from different roles in sexual reproduction; Carl Degler's In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (1991) provides a valuable analysis of the recent social scientific scholarship that finds innate psychological and behavioral differences between the sexes; and David Courtwright's Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (1996) explains the exceptional levels of American violence through the "sociobiological impulses" of the nation's inordinately large number of un-married men. But, as its title suggests, McElvaine's Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History re-synthesizes the full sweep of human history around the concept of sexual difference; it also offers a timely account of what historians risk in continuing to ignore advances in evolutionary biology. Through its attempt to apply "biohistory" to twentieth-century U.S. masculinity, Eve's Seed may presage a second-wave of men's historiography. While I have considerable misgivings about some of the book's particulars, it should be appreciated as an imaginatively written and highly interpretive polemic. It's revisionist history in grand form. [End Page 135]

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. [End Page 137]

This is an unusual work for an academic historian. Based on McElvaine's wide-ranging reading in anthropology, religion studies, evolutionary psychology, and gender studies, as well as on his considerable absorption of twentieth- and early-twenty-first- century Hollywood films, pop music, and middle-brow fiction, Eve's Seed can be seen as an elaborate exercise in cultural criticism—and a rather accomplished one at that. McElvaine lays out accessible definitions and discussions of big complex ideas and processes with apparent ease. Of course there's nothing easy about it. Considerable effort went into this book, including many years of a male historian finding and breaking down the assumptions that support his sex. The result is a study written from an unabashedly feminist perspective. McElvaine's closing chapter formally suggests steps to end the subordination of women, although the real payoff of Eve's Seed are its mid-level generalizations and insights distilled from feminist scholarship and his own very active thinking. One critical refrain is that, in contrast to such popular works as John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), the sexes are not opposite or even that different, and what differences there are do not mean and should not bring inequality. "Men are from New York; Women are from Philadelphia" is how McElvaine introduces this argument, which also undermines the dualistic, "notawoman" sensibility inherent in hypermasculinity (p. 52). McElvaine devotes a whole chapter to the expression "Fuck you!," which he takes to be a linguistic act of metaphorical mounting. McElvaine notes that among sheep, certain primates, and some other mammals, dominant males symbolize their superiority over subordinate males by simulating intercourse and thereby treating them like females. The profane epithet between men works much the same way. McElvaine translates it to mean: "(I see my position relative to yours as being such that you are like a woman and I am a man, so I could) fuck you (if I had any desire to do so)!" (p. 295). A rare historical study indeed.

Less impressive is McElvaine's treatment of the meta-critical issue of whether biology causes psychological and behavioral differences between men and women. In one sense, given historians' indifference to biology, he should be commended for his engagement with evolutionary theory. McElvaine's qualifications to his own acceptance of evolutionary psychology produce a solid critique of the genetic determinism underlying sociobiology. Even though evolutionary psychologists routinely urge attention to both biology and culture, as McElvaine points out, they ignore the latter in schematically explaining particular aspects of current society through natural selection tens of thousands of years ago. Moreover, in opposition to the conservative impulse of evolutionary social science, which seeks to legitimate sexual and racial difference in biology, McElvaine wants to determine the content of "human nature" in order to "devise ways to guide our innate proclivities into channels that we choose, on the basis of our moral decisions" [End Page 138] (p. 6). The problem, though, is the weakness of McElvaine's brief on human nature and its putative effect on history.

In telling fashion, McElvaine devotes the most space on this matter not to supporting the existence of human nature but to criticizing social and cultural constructionism: the view, traced back to John Locke's tabula rasa, that humans are blank slates at birth, shaped exclusively by experience and learning. Culture isn't enough for McElvaine. He argues that we should believe in human nature because, without it, nothing binds the species together; liberal humane values—the very ideological orientation of most constructionists—depend on human nature. "If culture were the only thing that determined what people are," McElvaine asks, "what reason would those entirely formed by one culture have for cooperating with those 'created' by another?" (p. 27). Human rights also require human nature: "If cultures determine everything, there can be no human rights, since there would then be little meaning to the term human," only separate cultures with their distinct and incommensurate rules and interests (p. 28). But the modifier human in "human rights" designates the genotype (in comparison to, say, "chimpanzee rights") and does not refer to species-specific psychological tendencies or behavioral dispositions. In struggling to devise human nature, McEvaine ignores the possibility (a matter of faith for constructionists) that such values and conventions as love, tolerance, and empathy are proudly the products of the human imagination—totally contingent yet extremely dynamic and long-lasting through their purposeful transmission within and across generations. Human rights don't need metaphysical or biological grounding to be effective. Culture is enough.

While underrating the ideational effectiveness of culture, McElvaine also overstates historians' commitment to constructionism. In presenting similar material to academic audiences, I have found a consistent willingness to consider some sort of biological influence on the human sexes' mental and behavioral differences. Historians don't actively ascribe to the blank slate theory of the mind. To the extent that academic history rests on any sort of cognitive theory, it's probably the "thick" meaning of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz. The predominant position has been one of inattention. Even historians of women and gender have focused on social and cultural sources of male power for more pragmatic reasons than an epistemological commitment to Locke's tabula rasa. This matters because, as McElvaine understands, moving historians towards biology depends on unsettling the assumptions behind current scholarship—a difficult task when so little thought has been given to the subject. In any event, his dichotomy between human nature's biogram and Lockean constructionism misses the mark.

The biggest gap in McElvaine's application of evolutionary theory is his failure to consider human instinct and emotions and their role in determining [End Page 139] sexual difference. Instinct is an old-fashioned concept, but it is at the center of evolutionary psychology and McElvaine's argument that women and men are influenced by sexually specific mental traits inherited from distant ancestors. McElvaine comes close to using instinct. "Innate" is a key word in his study—he couples it routinely with "characteristic," "tendency," "proclivity, " and "predisposition." "Biogram"—"the mixed constellation of motivations that give human beings predispositions to respond in certain ways to certain circumstances and to desire particular situations of living"—serves, for all practical purposes, as a synonym for instinct (pp. 6-7). McElvaine includes a couple of general paragraphs on neurobiological understanding of the "differences between the sexes in brain operation and structure," but nowhere does he support the controversial assumption that the human brain houses an "innate motivational system" and that that system differs according to sex (p. 61, 86). And yet the cause of sexually specific temperament and behavior is the crux of the whole historical issue over biological determinism: does, say, a man's propensity to violence after discovering his wife's sexual infidelity stem from a built-in brain module adapted from the particularly male need for paternity certainty or does it result from a tightly woven masculine honor system, including the desperate concern for avoiding shame and the long-standing masculine property interests in female sexuality? A favorite example of evolutionary psychologists, male jealousy can be seen as a biologically derived tool for reproductive success, while, as Barbara H. Rosenwein has written recently, historians now approach emotions as cultural creations. ⁵ The distance could hardly be greater; Eve's Seed does little to close the breach.

The question of motivation also goes to the book's notawoman argument. "Hell hath no fury like a man devalued"(p. 1): McElvaine's opening sentence is repeated throughout the study and this explanation of male power-taking does have inventive appeal. But it also tends to dissolve attention to malice and avarice: how men have gained materially from the control and strategic use of force. To emphasize, McElvaine did not come up with the idea. Among other feminists, Gerda Lerner mentions the "psychological argument" as one of many causes of patriarchy: "The ego formation of the individual male, which must have taken place within a context of fear, awe, and possibly dread of the female, must have led men to create social institutions to bolster their egos, strengthen their self-confidence, and validate their self-worth." ⁶

I wonder, though, if the argument loses credence when used by a man as a singular explanation for male dominance? It is uncharacteristically un-ironic and self-serving for McElvaine to rely on a psychoanalytic interpretation of sexual envy (he presents little historical evidence of the dynamic), especially when set next to leading feminist accounts of masculine power, such as anthropologist Gayle Rubin's dissection of men's purposeful control of female sexuality through the "traffic in women." ⁷ [End Page 140]

And what about patriarchy? While some women's historians today have reservations about its value, the concept does have the virtue of focusing on masculine intent to dominate through the creation of law, the military, marriage, family, and other institutions. Patriarchy maintains that "male dominance," in Lerner's words, "is a historic phenomenon," an "enforced structure over time." ⁸ When coupled with homosociality—another concept missing from McElvaine's book—patriarchy leads to the social intricacy of male power-taking: how masculine aggressiveness and violence, for instance, sustains racial, economic, and sexual differences between men as well as the sex's dominance over women.

"Humans are animals and the mind evolved"—so said the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in 1997 in "support[ing] the quest for an evolutionary psychology." But Gould saw two major flaws in the movement's current form. First, the "panadaptationist claim": the speculative, "just-so storytelling" practice of accounting for the existence of a prominent behavioral pattern in modern history by creating (not finding) a selective value or function of that behavior in "prehistoric times"—what Gould called "pure guesswork." Second, modularity: the division of complex human behavior and psychology into discreet "atomize[d]" units, "subjectively defined," without neurobiological basis. ⁹ Someday, true interdisciplinary synthesis between neurobiology, cognitive science, and intellectual and cultural history may explain the seemingly universal differences in male and female emotional expression and temperament towards such things as nurturing and violence. Meanwhile, McElvaine has given historians further reason to question the boundary between gender and sexual difference, between cultural and biological determination. After all, biology is a historical science. It must have something to tell us about how the brain developed and how the mind works. Consilience between evolutionary biology and academic history is a long way off, though, with few if any good models from which to work. Scholarly attention to the other discipline is a necessary starting point, and that may stand as the most valuable contribution of Eve's Seed.

 

John Pettegrew, Department of History, Lehigh University, is currently completing Brutes in Suits: The De-Evolutionary Origins of American Masculinity.

Notes

1. See the work of feminist biologists Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000); Barbara Smuts, "The Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy," Human Nature 6 (1995): 1-32; and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (1999).

2. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), 12.

3. This is a stock account in evolutionary psychology, most fully expressed in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (1992). [End Page 141]

4. Karen Horney, "The Flight from Womanhood," The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 7 (1926).

5. Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Worrying about Emotions in History," American Historical Review 107 (June 2002): 821-45. This otherwise valuable essay is a perfect example of historians seemingly willful obliviousness to evolutionary biology: it describes the hydraulic theory of emotions as "debunked," even though that theory has taken on quite dynamic form in evolutionary psychology.

6. Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy, 45.

7. Gayle Rubin, "Traffic in Women," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Rapp Reiter (1978).

8. Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy, 42. Emphasis in original.

9. Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism," New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997, pp. 50-1.

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