Boys Will Be Boys: Facing the Contest

Men today are lost because the technological and administrative world in which they find themselves gives them no markers to tell them they are men. In fact, to survive, they must become like women.

This is part two of an ongoing series which takes an extensive look at Walter Ong’s “Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness.” You can find part one here:

What Is a Man? Introducing the Idea of "Contest"

72. Boys Will Be Boys: Facing the Contest

Both men and women engage in adversative behaviours. That said, adversarial characteristics are expressed far more frequently among men and make up a much greater part of their lives when compared to women. This is true not just for people, but generally it holds true among animals as well. The higher the order of creature, the more male adversative traits and behaviours you will encounter.

“When human consciousness appears, both sexes contribute to its growth, but the male contribution is effected largely through a kind of ritual contest.”

Men contribute to “the human” through their engagement in contests. There is something essential, Ong argues, in contest that makes men what they are.

“Women can be competitive, but their competitiveness seldom, if ever, shows in the all-out, one-to-one, ritual or ceremonial contest found among conspecific males.”

Even though adversativeness can be found in all societies and cultures, we should note at the outset that there is no such thing as an abstract male just as there is no abstract pure form of Christianity. All male adversative behavior is conditioned by their own culture. Much of what is going to be said here particularly applies to the western man, even if there are similar traits to be found in other cultures and people groups. Male agonism, as we will be discussing it here, has been shaped and formed by the historical and culture conditions unique to the western context. That said, everywhere you look, everywhere where you find boys and men, there are certain shared characteristics you will find whenever you study male human beings.

“Boys will be boys.”

Many of the behaviours that we see in boys, adolescents and men are driven by male biology. It comes down to genetics. Simply put, male hormones produce combative behaviors. It is just how we are wired. How we were created, even.

There is a harsh set of realities that men must face, but often do not want to acknowledge. Men are the “useless” sex. Well not entirely. But this deep knowledge is but one of the anxieties that drives the make psyche. All species can endure the loss of one male better than the loss of one female. We see this evidenced in the way that a man is built. He is stronger. More aggressive. Has better endurance. He is built to fight and to protect. Protect what? Women and children. It is they who are more vital for the continuation of the family, the people, the clan. The reality is that a woman who mates with a large number of males, does not produce more offspring than less promiscuous women.

This leads some to argue that there is an “evolutionary” or even a “design” bias towards polygamy, that is, one man with multiple wives or mating partners. A man, unlike a female, can copulate with a large number of women and produce many, many offspring. Mating with more than one woman means fighting off other men. It does not mean killing them, just merely excluding them from mating. Because of this dynamic, genetically, most males do not count. But the ones who do count matter greatly. In this sense, masculinity is a winner take all proposition. High risk, all or nothing. Men can be, and often are, set as fighters, protectors, hunters, exposed to danger, pitted in competition against each other to determine who will mate with the females. In contrast, femininity is stable. Almost all females mate. Not all males do. Males are at once the expendable sex, yet it is through the process of male contest and struggle that the gene pool is influenced and altered.

Once we start to bore into the nature of male competition and contest, we find that a lot of the agonistic behaviours are not generally to the death. Deaths do happen. Wars are fought. But when we look at the broader phenomenon, we find that much of the agonistic activity involves formalized, ritualized behaviours. These types of dominance contests are not fought to the death. Even if the man is not necessary for the continuance of the tribe, he is needed to fight for the tribe, the clan, if necessary. The winner of the contest gains the dominant position and the loser will display submissive behaviours. They will generally give space to the dominant male. This spacing out activity between family and tribal groups ensures that there will be enough food and resources for each group. Spacing manages scarcity.

Women will engage in activities that establish dominance hierarchies, but they are often subtle, indirect, informal and non-ritualized. Female conflict is generally less agonistic than the male version.

“Females, of course, including human females, are aggressive, in some ways more so than males, but the patterns of aggression are different. Rough bodily contact is far less common, and the human females are likely to use intermediaries (girls will get a powerful adult to intervene for them), verbal slings and arrows, and subtle interpersonal rejection, frequently masked as solicitous caring.”

Female conflict is fundamentally different from that of male conflict. There is also the phenomenon of the woman who engages in combat for defensive reasons — the last line of defense in the protection of home and children — and here women are quite capable of engaging in all out vicious physical violence. The difference is that women’s violence is a last resort. They do not initiate it. They are not aggressive. The do not enter and invade the space of others to establish territory.

This difference in men and women, men being the expendable or unnecessary sex, leads to a fundamental approach to risk and reward. Because success and dominance brings with it the best women, or in some societies and eras, the most women, there is a lot of pressure on men to engage in high risk behaviours which have the potential for high rewards. The winners really do get it all.

“Men see risk as loss or gain; winning or losing; danger or opportunity” … while women … “see risk as entirely negative. It is loss, danger, injury, ruin or hurt.”

Psychologically, this is the great game of being a man. A life of continual high risk, high reward contests to prove one’s self.

“Women often have little sense of the game being played, of a temporary adoption of a different style for reasons of self-interest. It is all for real.”

When faced with risk, a woman is often focused on what she can lose. Whereas a man is focused on what there is to gain. The prize for the man is all. To a man, all contests have a certain inter-replaceability. The more serious and dangerous contests are still, at heart, contests, a challenge to be faced, a prize to win.

“The ancient Greeks called off their wars for the Olympic Games and resumed them immediately afterwards: psychologically, the wars and the Games were somewhat equivalent.”

So what is a man, and how does one become a man? This is where things get interesting, especially in light of the modern context. Being male begins in the womb. It is more than simple genetics. During pregnancy, when the baby is a male, the womb is flooded in testosterone to differentiate the gestating boy from his mother biologically. It also raises the potential danger of the presence of any artificial female hormones that might upset that balance before birth. Right from the beginning, a male is engaged in a struggle, a battle for self-identification as a male. His mother’s own natural hormonal makeup posses a threat to his development. He must differentiate himself, even in the womb, from his mother. A female unborn baby, on the other hand, has no need to battle the maternal hormones. Even in the womb, a woman just “is.” From the very beginning, a pattern is set. Being a male means differentiation.

Once born, a human male is under the care of his mother. His initial identification is with the female. He spends his first five or so years almost exclusively under her primary care. As this boy then reaches the stage where he moves towards manhood, he does so by growing away from the feminine. Failure to separate from the mother, argues Ong, is a cause of transvestism. The man, insufficiently detached from his mother, develops the fantasy of re-embracing the mother figure, often with sexual overtones, by becoming the female, by becoming his mother, so to speak, but in a sexualized way. A man becomes a man by becoming “not my mother.” The male is in a adversative relationship with the female just to maintain his sense of what it means to be a man. He is not a woman.

This male adversativeness has effects. It changes how men use language. Women tend to use more correct grammar and fewer hostile verbs. Humour is more often used by men to relieve stress and diffuse hostility. The figure of the clown is almost universally a male. The clown is the disabled father figure. Women cannot be mocked, especially their womb and their role in childbirth. On the other hand, the male phallus is often a subject of mockery. Because of this basic adversativeness at the root of being a man, males tend to be more insecure about themselves as men. A man is in constant conflict with his environment. He is not allowed to be settled and at rest. As a result, throughout their lives, beginning as boys, they tend to refuse to obey others more often than do girls. They get into more fights than girls. They refuse to learn more often than do girls. Because of this insecure nature of maleness, always having that question mark over one’s head, men tend to push themselves to take the kinds of risks that will result in that euphoric feeling of invulnerability. Men are, as a result, criminal at a rate of 10:1 when compared to women. The exception to this is shoplifting, which is committed almost 80% by women. This is not to say that women are not involved in crime. They are. But they use men as their proxies to commit their crimes for them or on their behalf. But because of all this, men are more likely to be change agents because they are constantly restless and dissatisfied.

Maleness, says Ong, is established through a series of tests which demonstrate that he is not a woman. This begins in the womb, and then after an initial period of care by his mother, the male begins the quest to establish himself fully and completely as “not a woman.” The boy needs clear tests that will allow him to prove his manhood. He needs to demonstrate to himself and to the world that he is no longer boy under the skirts of his mother. He has passed the test and become a man. Without such a clear test to mark the transition to manhood, this results in a crisis of the masculine. This crisis in the masculine also has a deleterious effect on the feminine as well. Women just “are.” They are always “there” as a woman. From in the womb, to their early years, they are simply what their mother is, a woman. There is no crisis of identity for a woman. A woman does not have to prove that she is a woman. But a man, on the other hand, must prove that he is a man. He must establish it and demonstrate it. A man becomes a man by facing a risky situation and overcoming it. He thus gains the assurance that he can overcome anything, whether it be physical, mental or a thing of discourse and argumentation.

What happens in society when all the prestige roles are better suited to a female disposition? Men are forced to feminize themselves to survive. The world of technique is primarily one that is built around feminine values and priorities.