Kathleen Parker: Guys & Gals

[James Brody]

“I’ve found that ground beef is the quickest route to male equanimity. There’s not much in a healthy boy’s world that a burger and a milkshake won’t fix.” (Parker, 2008, xii)

Words to that effect woke me up in mid June. A female voice, interviewed by Bill Bennett, explained her secret to rearing sons and why it is bad that males take so many drubbings from females. Who IS this woman????

She’s Kathleen Parker, a twice-a-week columnist in 200 papers and on TownHall.com. (She is also a regular with Chris Matthews but I haven’t watched television for almost 30 years and only heard of Chris Matthews the time he got a thrill up his leg from Obama.) She’s also a grit female, I think from South Carolina, with a sense of honor and a pride in sons who are not only smart with their books but who also fight not only with smarts but also with conviction.

Her Book
Save the Males: Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care. NY: Random House, 2008). In seven chapters and 215 pages Parker lists the details of current male humiliations in academia, marriage, divorce, and parental rights.

I most want to say “hooray” for her chapter “Sex, Lies, and Bunker Blunders” wherein she documents the lethal effects on our guys when women are in combat units. Jessica Lynch (to be captured by enemy forces and rescued by Special Ops) put her arms around her shoulders and shut her eyes when her Humvee was crippled. Donald Miller, a mechanic who failed marksmanship, used a defective rifle to kill seven of the enemy before he was captured in the same ambush that captured Lynch. He got a Silver Star; she got a million dollar book deal. Variation on the same theme: “Peter Jennings reported in a pre-Memorial Day story about the civil war that ‘more than 600,000 men and women died before the war was over.’” Truth? According to Parker, about sixty of them were women. In the military, academics, or business: measuring equality of opportunity by equality of achievement breeds lots of cheats and free riders. And proclaiming false equalities makes liars and opportunists of everyone.

Her point that connects all seven chapters, her preface, and conclusions: “When women say, ‘No honey, you stay in bed. I’ll go see what the noise is.’ I’ll reconsider.” Her vision is clear, she describes it well, and I laud her motives and talents. There is also nobility: “When women no longer care about children, and men no longer care about women, we will have accomplished what millions of radical jihadists could only dream about: cultural suicide and an unraveling of the civilizing forces that millions of men perished to preserve.” (190) Perhaps not only for jihadists but also for our twenty million illegal guests from Mexico!

On the other hand, she has no clear explanation for the mess that we both see or for its timing. I offer—all in a page or two—the following: conduct and the shape of your gonads do not match perfectly; women have invaded male clubs for at least two million years; and the dominance of males and females is related to environmental turbulence. There are also notions from from the peculiar events of “genomic imprinting” and some hints about what we suspect of the right and left cerebral cortex:

Hints from Biology

a) Life changes by duplication with variation and contests. Thus, women and men will be similar, they will also be different. Whether you argue from biology (Raff, 1996) or from physics (Kuramoto, 1984/2003), synchrony between players is a function of similarity and mutual influence (Strogatz, 2003). In stable societies the surprise would be if many females did not act like males and many males did not act like females. After all, the shape of gonads does not always predict mating behavior. Female engineers, for example, often reproduce later and less often and, before birth, may have been exposed to higher levels of circulating testosterone. Further, the default setting for a developing brain—whether in mice, monkeys, or New York liberals—is female: maleness depends upon prenatal supplies of testosterone.

b) “Dinichism” refers to the fact that males and females—of any species occupy two different niches (Coss & Moore, 2002; Coss & Charles, 2004). Further, males often work closer to chaos, turning it into stability that can be exploited by females. This has gone on for a long time. Fossilized legs from two million years ago suggest that females remained in the trees long after males came to the ground. The behavior relics that we still carry from those days is that little girls tend to climb higher on monkey bars than little boys and, in computer simulations, respond to danger by going up trees. Little boys look for rocks to climb and holes to run into. Bottom line: guys explore and die earlier, girls are more timid and live longer (Brody, 2008).

c) Unsettled environments call for early reproduction, lots of offspring, and offspring that hit the ground running (MacArthur & Wilson). In stable environments, fewer children are produced but are larger, slower to mature, and rely more on instruction from parents. One outcome is that males of any age face the same challenges from the women around them: are the guys bright enough to make a living, popular enough to have allies, and kind enough to share what they have. Mothers pay pediatricians, psychologists, teachers, and counselors to correct the most extreme guys who otherwise head for jail, lose jobs, or beat their wives and children. The magic that changes behavior so quickly as environment change seems to occur prenatally. That is, the same parents—depending on the turbulence around them—may be able to produce a hellion or a cleric or even a cleric who leads armies!

d) A peculiar thing, genomic imprinting, allows the effects of a gene to depend on the sex of the parent who supplied it. That is, imprinted genes from mothers tend to limit placental and fetal size, protect mother from fetal control of her blood pressure and blood sugar, and favor development of the cerebral cortex. Imprinted genes from fathers lead to larger fetuses and placentas, greater access to mother's physical assets, stronger dental enamel, a smaller cerebral cortex, and, sometimes, greater deposits of high-energy brown fats. And in the most subtle irony: imprinted genes from grandfathers that are carried by mothers result in mother’s greater willingness to make nests, retrieve pups, and nurse them (Burt & Trivers, 2006).

Of course this is all about mice but the DNA in mice is as similar to humans as that of chimps. (We also share a lot of structural genes with flies. Get used to it!) A genomic imprint that gives beautiful women bright teeth and big breasts and wide hips might show up in ads for sports cars, motorcycles, and football teams. Likewise, such women - often found below the Mason-Dixon Line - may take pride in rearing scrappy sons, not metrosexuals, sons who understand religion and will die for a friend or for honor. These outcomes may be derivatives from the paternal imprints that favor nesting, pup retrieval, and nursing by mother rats and mice. And our expensive brighter teeth might be false advertising that our daughter is a better mother than she appeared to be before her dental work.

Implication: the “feminization” of males may be somewhat attributable to the more settled economic and military conditions after the Second World War. Expect us guys also to have more “white guilt,” not as a reaction against slavery as Steele (2006/2007) argues but as one spun by Mother Nature in peacetime and affluence. (For example, Faludi, 1996, found a “betrayal” of the American male since the Second World War.) Irony: Schwarzenegger’s stereotypes about “girly men” may have some justification and he governs a state that may be filled with them!

d) The Nobel-winner, Roger Sperry, remarked on the war in our culture against the right cortex. That war, of course, is waged by the left cortex! According to the neuropsychologist, Elkohon Goldberg, the left cerebral cortex in humans is not only the home for language but also for routines and rules. The right frontal areas, more prominent in males than females, may be associated with finding new patterns in external events and passing whatever order is found to the left side. The left side, in women and in feminized males may become more powerful in stable cultures. It also tends to become more dominant as men and women age. Further, neural activity, with age, tends to move from the frontal areas to the rear (Goldberg, 2001, 2006). Expect the oldest to be the most stubborn of us, a stubbornness that is not always wise. And expect “feminine” contributions, whether pre- or postnatal, to be the most bound up in rules.

The Disaster: A Matter of Timing
The problem for women, their teachers, their advocates, and their estrogenized sons is that certain male abilities occur with far less frequency in females than in males (Murray, 2003). These are results less from instruction but more from talent. Guarantees of equal outcomes, as in Title 9 and sports, may lead not to more girls succeeding but to the cancellation of opportunities for males (Sommers, 2008; Finn,2008). Such would be lethal for our culture if Title 9, as is now considered, were to be applied to math and to the sciences.

The problem is even more subtle: given that talents vary systematically between average females and average males, there will be females who agree with each other than some “rule” is violated that accounts for why there are more males with degrees in the sciences. High-verbal males in academic settings will be apt to agree with them! Thus, the blind move in sync with the blind and, thanks to similarity, recruit every larger swarms of the blind.

Further, if equal successes are to be guaranteed for men and women, so must equal failures. That is, there is to be an equal number of women arrested, fined, and jailed. An equal number must die in childbirth, have developmental disabilities, and trigger allergic reactions in their mothers. Of course, sexual equality also means drastic adjustments in property settlements and child custody!

The outcome of these many possibilities is that of rule-bound culture that stabilizes the match between a stable environment and its occupants. Shake up the environment or have an invasion and murder goes up, suicide goes down, and nastier guys tend to produce sons. And even in peaceful times, engineers and abusers tend to have sons while nurses tend to have daughters. In such conditions, ritual is more important than romance and spontaneity in such things as medicine, the law, and teaching...all areas where our daughters best our sons. I, like Ulysses, appreciate the girls who look for a hero and the guys who have to be one, even if only in their videogames...

There.

I didn’t mention the possible contributions of soy (a source of estrogen) or agricultural hormones to the feminization of males. I also didn't mention the couple who, this early Sunday morning, came out of Macy's and past me. I'm sixty-six, balding, male, and seated while working on this essay. She's attractive, very early 30s, tall, and about twenty feet in front of him. She makes eye contact with me, she halts, and extends her left hand backward. He moves forward, takes her left hand in his right, and the two of them pass beyond me. I've seen other couples do a similar thing when they enter the mall. I've also seen groups of ducks do likewise: the female is in front unless something unusual happens. This is an old game: Eve teased Adam, lost Eden for the two of them, and now follows him endlessly unless he doesn't provide enough excitement.

As for Parker’s concerns about the balkanization of our culture because of the relativism of our values: jihad may eventually settle down for the same reasons that we settled down but a century after the Muslim transformation of Europe and, possibly the United States (Steyn, 2006).

Kathleen: Thanks for your fine book, your wisdom, and, most of all, for your grit. I’m scared, too.

References:
Brody J (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Especially , Chapter 6: Evolved Common Sense.
Burt A & Trivers R (2006) Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard. (Advanced text. For the purposes of this essay, Chapter 4 is where you need to be.)
Coss RG & Charles EP (2004) The role of evolutionary hypotheses in psychological research: Instincts, affordances, and relic sex differences. Ecological Psychology, 16(3): 199–236.
Coss RG & Moore M (2002) Precocious knowledge of trees as antipredator refuge in preschool children: An examination of aesthetics, attributive judgments, and relic sexual dinichism. Ecological Psychology. 14(4): 181–222.
Faludi S (1999) Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. NY: Harper Collins.
Finn C (2008) Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Goldberg E (2001) The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. NY: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg E (2006) The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Brain Can Grow Stronger As You Grow Older. NY: Gotham.
Kuramoto Y (1984/2003) Chemical Oscillations, Waves, and Turbulence. Orig: Springer. Reprint - NY: Dover. See demo by Bryan Daniels at http://physics.owu.edu/StudentResear.../kuramoto.html
Levine S (1966) Sex differences in the brain. Scientific American. 214(4): 84–90.
Murray C (2003) Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts & Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. NY: Harper Collins.
MacArthur R & Wilson EO (1967/2001) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Raff R (1996) The Shape of Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Steele S (2006/2007) White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. NY: Harper Collins.
Strogatz, S. (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. NY: Hyperion.
Sommers, CH (2008) “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” The American: A Magazine of Ideas. March/April. www.American.com.
Steyn M (2006) America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Washington DC: Regnery.

[James Brody]

Natan Sharansky (2008) argues that without identity, there is to be no future. And Mark Steyn (2006) argues that demographic trends predict that soon there will be no Italians, not even in fashion design!

Men's fashion gets a feminine touch at Paris shows. He, Mark Steyn, and perhaps Kathleen Parker would see YSL's show as another expression of the very determined who want to rule by eliminating old loyalties to countries, skills, training, or sex.

JimB

"Men's Fashion Gets a Feminine Touch at Paris Shows"

June 29, 2008

"The notion of wardrobe androgyny was the fitting theme of Yves Saint-Laurent's men's collection, the house that kicked off the just-ended Paris men's shows where men's fashion won a feminine touch.

"At YSL, designer Stefano Pilati used quotations from Plato to explain why he combined female detailing with a masculine silhouette.

"'The original human nature was not like the present ... the sexes were not two as they are now.'

Pilati underscored the union of genders with a line for men made in fabrics normally worn by women -- crepe de chine, organza, shantung and silk voile, all fabrics which float rather than fall."

More at: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

References:
Sharansky N (2008) Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy. Philadelphia: PublicAffairs/Perseus.
Steyn M (2006) America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Washington DC: Regnery.