I had forgotten the inscription Warren Farrell put in his ground-breaking book, Why Men Are the Way They Are. “September 27, 1986, Dear Jed, to a warm, intense caring man who knows how to offer in writing his intellect and his soul. We share devotions and ambitions.” Both of us, Warren and Jed, have continued to share what we’ve learned about the male/female dynamic on our websites.
Here are some of the most common questions women asked Warren about men:
- Why won’t men listen?
- Why can’t men get in touch with their feelings?
- Why do so many men have so few men friends?
- Why do men seem to have contempt for women on the one hand and put them on a pedestal on the other hand?
- Are men just interested in conquest—is that the real excitement for men?
I offer answers to these and 25 other questions women and men have been asking in my best-selling ebook, Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship From the Irritable Male Syndrome.
We’ve learned a lot in the last thirty-three years. Some of my most important things I’ve learned come from the new science of evolutionary psychology. One of the leaders in the field, Dr. David Buss, author Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind and The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating says “Not everything, but so much in life, boils down to mating.”
Most of us know about Charles Darwin’s famous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection published in 1859, but fewer people know about his 1871 book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. His scientific investigations show that all animals, including humans, must solve two important problems:
- How to survive in competition with others? Addresses natural selection.
- How to find a mate and produce offspring who survive long enough to continue the process? Addresses sexual selection.
We are all descended from an unbroken line of ancestors who did both of these things. Further, our brains were designed to accomplish these two tasks during the 2.5 million years of our human history. We may appear to be modern, but our brains are adapted to the Pleistocene, which accounts for more than 99% of our evolutionary history. Finally, we need to recognize that males and females have faced different evolutionary challenges that shape why we are who we are today.
Understanding our evolutionary past is the key to understanding why men are the way they are and how we can have a better sex and love life as a result.
Dr. Joyce Benenson is a professor of Psychology and a research associate at the Human Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University. In her book Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes, she says, “The world is filled with dangers. Understanding the dangers that faced early humans is critical to understanding the kinds of specific problems that men and women faced and the solutions they needed.”
Our human ancestors not only had to compete with other animals, but also with other human beings. “This problem can best be solved by delegating fighting the enemy to one specific group: young men. Women can then protect themselves and their children. Older men can supervise from a distance.”
She goes on to describe the unique issues facing males. “I find in my own studies,” says Benenson, “and in research reports from diverse cultures, that boys enjoy physical fighting, find enemies captivating, and cannot beat competition for pure entertainment. Most important of all, boys want to engage in these behaviors with other boys.”
What do boys and men fear most?
In a word, enemies. “The enemy is their problem, and it is their responsibility to defeat it. Because the enemy is not always present, boys and men don’t worry all the time. Nonetheless, I believe that confronting the problem of the enemy has allowed human males to evolve a whole suite of instinctive reactions that still exist today.”
This intuitive and deep-seated preoccupation men have with enemies is so strong that when modern men deal with major problems in life, they do so in terms of defending and attacking.
- They fight wars on drugs.
- They battle
- They combat
- They assault
- They assail political beliefs.
Believe me, advertisers and politicians are well aware of our fears and will use them to manipulate us unless we understand these evolutionary-based predilections. Benenson offers an example in our response to the attack on September 11, 2001, which killed about 3,000 people. “In the same year,” she says, “almost 40,000 people died in car accidents, and 16,000 or so died in gun-related incidents inflicted by community members on one another. It’s no accident that the United States has spent more than $1 trillion on efforts to eradicate the enemy.” We see a similar use of male fear in our recent election of Donald Trump who frightened many with his talk about rapists and criminals coming into the U.S. from our southern border.
Understanding this fear of the enemy helps explain a number of things about why men are the way they are. When we perceive “enemies out there,” we don’t listen well, we react from fear rather than exploring other feelings, we distrust other men, we are afraid of women going off with another man and glorify women as well as putting them down, and we get excited about conquering others who might be potential threats.
I offer answers to these and other concerns in my best-selling ebook, Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship From the Irritable Male Syndrome.
Even though these fears have ancient roots, they are not fixed. They can be understood and changed. But it must first start with love and acceptance for who we are. I discuss these issues in great depth in my forthcoming book (Stay tuned for the November release), 12 Rules for Good Men. I look forward to your questions and comments.
