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Are all the menfolk dead already?

Last Updated 24 July 2015, 18:27 IST
Science scare stories like to remind men that they are all but obsolete. Could this, however, just be a reflection of the age that we are living in, wonders Chris Moss.
 
You don’t have to look very far to find useless men. Any high street on a Saturday will turn up isolated males standing outside women’s fashion stores and hanging around the frilly fringes of lingerie departments. Or go along to the community centre to watch the antenatal classes; should he really be there? Does he want to be?

In evolutionary biology, the notion of the redundant male is taken quite seriously. In his influential 2003 book Y: The Descent of Men, Professor Steve Jones calls the Y chromosome – the one that contains the gene that leads to the development of testes – “the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot”. Because it is produced throughout life, sperm accumulates mutations that are passed on from generation to generation, making the present-day Y chromosome a shadow of its former self.

“Men are wilting away,” writes Steve, expanding on his brief. “From sperm count to social status and from fertilisation to death, as civilisation advances, those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline.” Steve is not the only scientist to question the usefulness of males, pointing to examples in nature where only females are needed to further the species, such as the whiptail lizard and – on some occasions – komodo dragons and hammerhead sharks.

The heady myth

The recent announcement, in the science journal Nature, that men’s primary function may be to provide sexual competition for mates and keep the population healthy is cold comfort. Researchers led by Professor Matt Gage, of the University of East Anglia School of Biological Sciences, demonstrated that when 90 flour beetles had to compete for the affections of just 10 females – over a period of seven years, or 50 generations – the males who had competed the most for females were fitter and more resistant to disease and inbreeding. In contrast, beetles without sexual selection became extinct after 10 generations.
 
Fascinating, but what can or should we human males do with this information? The notion of the male as a being of primarily sexual usefulness feeds all the usual prejudices. It’s easy to make the mental leap from beetles to blokes and assume males win females by being flashier, stronger, cleverer – or at least more wily – and perhaps also by being generally aggressive, even a little bit ruthless, and by occasionally stamping firmly on the heads of other members of our sex.

Feminists have long fantasised about the idea of a male-free world. In her 1915 novel Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman – reflecting the then current interest in eugenics – projects a woman-dominated utopia that breeds out weak and bad characters by actively selecting only the wisest and most virtuous women for procreation.

Other novels have constructed worlds around parthenogenesis, or diseases that wipe men out, or technologies that replace men, in order to show sisters doing it for themselves. These are, of course, all variations on the Classical story of the Amazons and the heady myth of a nation of all-female warriors.

This gives feminists yet more handy material for regarding us as little more than bullying beetles and, perhaps, advancing an alternative route to a healthy population that doesn’t call for the presence of men – and their ragged Y chromosome. Given that time decays the latter, and there’s more than enough reproductive material currently available in the seven billion testicles that are walking around the planet today, why not bank a stockpile of sperm belonging to athletic geniuses for posterity and have done with us?

But science is not some pure, unadulterated pursuit of absolute truth. Like science fiction and, indeed, art in general, it reflects the passions and prejudices of its times. Just as the Y chromosome debate prompted unlikely (and, ultimately, unscientific) visions of a male-less world, so the relegation of males to the role of competitive flour beetle plays into current fears and beliefs among many men and women.

What we’re living through right now is a fascinating time for men – and women. Gender inequality is being undermined, and long-established gender differences are being questioned. What we men are all struggling with is the matter of where to go for advice, for information, for revelation. A lot of the comments that pour into this website whenever feminism or men’s role is being discussed give the strong impression that we’re all at sea.
 
Science, it is clear, is the last place we should look for inspiration. The academic journals only promote the stories that they know can be simplified and turned into tendentious headlines.

Beetles don’t dance, don’t tell jokes, don’t dress up as girls for stag nights – and they don’t hang around outside women's fashion shops in the name of love. For us sophisticated, complex, hyper-evolved human males, usefulness is an art form – and has nothing to do with offspring or even sex.

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(Published 24 July 2015, 16:49 IST)

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