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.

The shift in the leadership class in Europe from one dominated by the warrior class, to one made up primarily by those in the merchant class brought a profound change over time that has been disastrous for men. It is important for us to understand what happened. “It’s about the economy, stupid” has never been more true. This word, “economy” comes from the Greek οἰκονομία — oikonomia — meaning “the management of a household or family” [ref. Liddell & Scott]. The economy was primarily part of the private world of women who ran and took care of the affairs of the household. Up until the time of industrialization, the “household” was the basic unit of social organization. Each household was managed by a patriarch and a matriarch. The domain of patriarch was the public facing role. He did much of the physical work. The private side of the household, its internal affairs, was the domain of the matriarch. She managed the “economy” of the household.

With the coming of industrialization, many of the roles of the household were taken from women. Her portion of the work of the family business. The managing of household affairs. The education of the young. The nursing of the sick and the care for the aged. There was also a political dimension to this behind the scene: the matriarch using the patriarch as her proxy to fight her battles in the public realm. All this was smashed as production was moved into the factories. Soon schooling was taken from them. Then the care of the sick and the aged. They became little more than nannies for the young and housekeepers. Jobs that used to be done by servants in the more prosperous households, even among commoners.

Women eventually found things to do to replace their old role as the household matriarchs. They organized women’s societies to advocate for social issues. They began lobbying for the vote. They agitated for entry into the universities and the workforce. And once there, discovered that they were quite suited, often better suited than men, for the kinds of roles that the new industrial economy — there is that word — demanded. Abstract, impersonal forms of evaluation like grades and IQ tests that allowed you to evaluate people without direct confrontation and create an environment of “fairness” are particularly suited to women as opposed to the direct win or lose male contests. Sure, these “objective standards” were used to break the back of the sclerotic hereditary elite. But once broken, they were also used by women to impose “fairness” more broadly in the workplace, allowing women to reclaim for themselves the οἰκονομία that was taken from them by industrialization. The management of the economy was traditionally the realm of the women. Women entering the industrialized world of technical management was largely a long exercise in them taking back the role that was stolen from them by industrialization. And because the political and economic world of business can be understood as a making public of the once private world of women, the dominant female presence across our society will remain as long our economic and political activity remain structured the way they are, in large part because a woman’s role in the home is, as currently constructed, too impoverished.

This is a real problem for men. This thing that we have come to call “the longhouse” is a real phenomenon. But we have structured our entire political and economic life around it. A man cannot enter this world, cannot join the feminine world of the administrative state writ large — in all of its manifestations in business, government and non-profits — without emasculating himself in some form. This is not the same for a woman. Women may play the role of the “girl boss” but they do not have to shed any of their feminine characteristics to do so. Even when taking on more masculine behaviours, they still have the panoply of female characteristics and traits available to them.

The differences between men and women are manifold. Female discourse typically tries to pull an audience in and attempts to woo them to her point through indirection. The man, on the other hand, will risk attack from the outset by stating a position, taking a stand, and then daring the audience to knock him over. It can be both playful and combative. Male discourse is generally geared toward public speaking and rhetoric, while female discourse is biased towards private conversations which allows for feedback on provisional statements and a coming together of opinions.

Men, are, as we noted, outward facing. Women tend to embrace the private life of the household.

“The received symbol for women, Venus’ mirror, adopted by feminists apparently everywhere, signifies self-possession, gazing at one’s self as projected out onto the outside world or environment and reflected back into the self from there, whole.”

Whereas,

“The received symbol for men, Mars’ spear, signifies conflict, change, stress, dissection, division.”

Men, thus, tend to break things down and analyze them. Men engage in the activity of “field breaking.” Whereas women on the other hand are inclined to deal with wholes and wholeness, and are thus drawn to ecology, environmentalism and psychology. For young men, play involves bodily contact and rough housing. Men like to fight. For young women, play tends to avoid contact and what contact there is, it tends to be much more gentle than that of the males. Men tend to fight only other men. If a boy wishes to be a man, he must test himself against other men. Fighting a woman is repulsive to a male. In the world of business and politics, women will subconsciously, or consciously, use this to their advantage.

Throughout the book, Ong continues to add new layers to themes that he has familiarized you with at an earlier point. When talking about the process of male bonding, we are brought back to that fundamental male drive to separate, beginning with separation from his mother. But this drive for separation carries forward to all his relationships, especially with other men. The process of male bonding is one that simultaneously both draws together and creates separation, often at the same time. With male bonding there is often banter, ribbing, name calling, pushing, shoving, wrestling, arguing. You are at once friend and at arms length at the same time.

“The male values a companion whom he can stand up against and whom can stand against him.”

This kind of friendly aggression is foreign to the female experience. A woman will often begin a debate with a man. The man will think he is bonding and so accepts the challenge. But at some point the woman will feel attacked and hurt, leaving the man confused because the rules of the engagement changed mid stream. She began the discussion using male coded behaviors and then switched mid-stream to female rules of communication, resulting in hurt and confusion. This confusion in dealing with women is a significant part of male bonding, for the one adversary they all share is that of the woman.

“In male clubrooms and bars around the world the most casual companions can often establish immediate bonding by recalling the one hardship that all men share, namely, the threat that women pose to men.”

Not only does male bonding occur in the push and pull of joshing with each other, but more so over shared hardship. This is true even of combat with an enemy. A man can become a deep friend with a man he is trying to kill, if he has respect for that man as a man. A worthy adversary is deserving of one’s affection even in death. You do not have to hate someone as a man to kill them. To most women that is just messed up. But it makes perfect sense to a man. You can hit a man hard enough on the sports field to injure him and then immediately offer the hand of friendship to pull him to his feet.

Matriarchal societies are just not a thing. All societies are primarily led by men. They are all patriarchies. That said, a history of a people that is only one of politics and war, that treats those as the primary forces of history really only tells half of the story. While it is men that drive a society forward, it is women that bind it and hold it together, says Ong.

“In the long run the female component outweighs and outperforms the male component in holding society together.”

In some ways, argues Ong, it the female element of society that expends the energy of the male for the long term survival and wellbeing of the people.

“The male’s usefulness, biologically grounded, for effecting distance and divergence and change ultimately wastes the male.”

This push, pull, adversative nature of what it means to be a man begins early. And many of the problems we encounter today in men come back to this transition from boy to man. Across time and around the world, in society after society, it is necessary for men to face a challenge whether physical or mental or both and overcome this challenge as a right of passage from boyhood into manhood. There is often a ceremony, a ritual involved, through which the boy must pass, changing him into a man, definitively and visibly. This process is designed to create distance between him and his mother and the world of women that she represents, and allows him to enter the world of the man. This is not something his mother can do. This cannot be a process of besting his mother. You do not engage in contests, physical or mental, with your mother.

A woman, as we have said, just “is.”

“I want to be me, to realize what is in me.”

Whereas a man can never find himself just by “being.” A man needs an opponent against which he can struggle.

“I want an adversary to keep at bay so as to give me confidence in what I can do.”

The male faces the world alone, always battling, always struggling. Even when bonding, he is always establishing distance and territory, maintaining or increasing his place in the hierarchy of dominance and submission.

“The male loner pattern contrasts with the female fear of being alone, of abandonment, of being left.”

Because of this dynamic beginning in the womb and then affirmed in the transition from boyhood to manhood, one becomes a man by separating from the female. Men typically organize themselves into all male groupings. Being a man means definitively separating from the female. Thus, all male groups. Men need these groupings. They have no interest, really, in joining female groups. Because women naturally bond to one another, there is no real need for organized female societies. Men, on the other hand, need these formal structures in order to bond. The destruction, for political, ideological, purposes — the seeking of the myth of equality — all male clubs, societies and educational institutions has has a devastating effect on men across our society. Men need these all male spaces to maintain the secrets of manhood.

In contrast, the woman, argues Ong, is herself a mystery.

“In a profound sense, by contrast to man, woman is interiority, self-possession. She relates to herself interiorly, and others relate to her interiority — her lovers, her children. The virgin is permanently a symbol and realization of this interiority and self-possession and its tremendous power: the inviolate secret interior, self-possessed, which the virgin knows and draws strength from in full possession.”

The bonded male group has its secrets, too, but they are weak and even ludicrous by comparison. But the man is thus more in need of his secrets, held as they are not within him, but rather in the society of men. Once these societies are taken from the man, men as a collective lose the knowledge of how to be men. They are cut adrift, lost, loner boys with no idea how to be or become men. Women must be kept away from male affairs so that the often ridiculous nature of the secrets of men are not revealed. In contrast, the man cannot take from the woman her secrets, for example, the deep mystery of childbirth.

Masculinity never just “is.” It is always in a constant state of being earned. You must demonstrate constantly that you are a man, prove it, to yourself and to the world. For this reason,

“There are no female Don Quixotes.”

This need to prove one’s self as a man generates the sad figure:

“A woman tilting at windmills or driven by impossible dreams is not a poignant figure. All women have more sense. Not all real men do. Masculinity has something futile about it…fighters doomed to die.”

Even though the man must constantly take up the challenge, put himself at risk, even sacrifice himself, it does not mean that women are not capable of sacrifice, only that it is different from the sacrifice of a man.

“Her quintessential and typical sacrifice is truly heroic: creative self-giving at the death of a lover or a son…Michelangelo's Pieta grips us by presenting a woman who in confronting death has become full and overwhelmingly a symbol of life, in a way a man can never be.”

Michelangelo’s Mary is the woman who sacrifices herself by letting her Son go to do what he needs to do as a man. He lays dead on her open arms. Even in death she does not clutch him to herself. She lets him go. Female protectiveness and possessiveness towards a man, especially her sons, is enormously destructive. It is the archetype of the “devouring mother.” This clutching protectiveness, never letting go, prevents him from becoming the man he could be for to become a man he must leave her behind and face the struggle, the challenge that all men face. In reaction, the devouring mother creates not a man, but the vengeful son, who, denied manhood, takes his anger out on not just his mother, but all women. While a father can mourn the loss of a child, there can be no male Pieta.

“Self-giving, and possible loss, comes to the male at a different angle, in questing, yearning for combat, courting stress situations for other’s sake, pursuing the impossible dream to his death.”

While the threat to the male from the female is symbolized by the smothering, over-protective devouring mother archetype, the threat from the father, other than abandonment, neglect and withdrawal — effectively condemning him to lean on the female as his model — is something all together different:

“The typical threat of death from a father is not clutching or swallowing, but brutal dominance. The father destroys by violent blocking or by delivering a direct blow. The masculine drive is to strike outwards — the spear of Mars — to change things, to alter the environment and thus to counter the constant restless male insecurity; the feminine urge is to harbor, to incorporate, to keep (the analogy to sexual intercourse is evident and common place).”

The woman must let her son go, to leave her so that he can join the world of men. It is the role of other men, his father included, but not exclusively or even primarily, to teach him the ways of men and prepare him for the test, the right of passage, that will allow him to earn his place among the men. The boy must prove that he is not a woman. The test often involves some real danger. A hunt. A feat of daring. Some act of physical prowess that can only be done by a man. With the achievement comes the right to brag about one’s accomplishment. Bragging is a natural male activity.

In contrast, the praising of men is a distinctly female role. Ephesians 5:33 …

“… and the wife must respect her husband.”

The man engages in not just combat, but in the taking of risks, the making of sacrifices, the facing of challenges. Part of the role of the woman is to praise men for their prowess. Again, it comes back to the fundamental insecurity of man. He can never rest. A man can never just “be.” He must constantly prove to himself and to the world that he is, in fact, a man. It is the woman’s role to praise him for his manhood, to celebrate it.

Men must be in the public eye to engage in open agonistic behavior. The public space, the street, the arena, these are the male places in society. Spending too much time inside renders one’s masculinity suspect. The man must always feel like he is in charge. This may grate on women, they may find it ridiculous, but it is an essential component of the male psyche. The man will assert his prowess and brag about it. And this bragging will seem seem silly to the woman who always just “is.” It will strike her as nonsense. And it often is. And even though it can evoke anger or amusement in women, the man needs the woman to celebrate with him, to embrace his braggadocio.

“The haunting male insecurity: born of a woman, how can I be sure that I am not what I came from, that I am not a woman too? I have to do something difficult, something only a man can do, to prove that I am not.”

This need for men to prove themselves, to break free, out from under their mother’s skirts, to be out there in public, creating space, taking charge, embracing risk, positions them well to lead and to reap the rewards of public leadership. With all that we have said thus far, it makes sense that God has entrusted public leadership to men. It is a role suited to their disposition. It is understandable that women would envy and be desirous of the rewards, accolades and recognition that comes with this leadership. They generally do not look at the price men pay for this role, the insecurity, the constant testing, the danger, the risk of failure and so forth.

“A feeling that males are better off than females generates the common and normal wish for a girl at a certain age of development to be a boy. This is the tomboy stage. With maturity, the girl becomes aware that she is much more than a defective male, that there are other ways to transcendence than to imitate a man. Among these ways childbearing is paramount. A mature woman can produce a male, which is more than any male can do.”

This highlights the unique dilemma in which we find ourselves today. Women, because of industrialization and other factors entered higher education, the workforce and politics in significant numbers, discovering that the technical systems that men had built were particularly suited for the female disposition, based as they were on the indirect power of policy and the institutional framework. Arriving in spaces once dominated by men, the tomboy impulse took hold and women wanted to imitate men, believing that they could do and be anything a man could do and be. They set about to smash the power of men’s only organizations, seeing them as a seat of power that excluded women from the men’s world. But in doing so, they destroyed institution after institution that existed to provided boys with ways to mark the path to manhood within men’s only spaces and men’s only rituals. This has had the disastrous effect of infantilizing and emasculating great numbers of men, forcing them into a context which is characterized by the overprotective devouring mother. Men must pretend to be women to succeed. Meanwhile, the tomboy has been elevated to a near mythical status in the form of the superhero girl boss. Aided by chemical birth control and abortion, women pretend to be men, denying to themselves the one thing that definitively makes them women, the role of childbirth.

So many of the customs, rituals, structures and institutions that provided markers and meaning for men especially have been swept away and forgotten. Much of what we imagine they were are now in many ways caricatures and simulacrum of the real thing. There are pockets where these things are still remembered. The churches, unfortunately, have largely given themselves over to the feminine, even when they maintain the outward forms of male leadership. There is little if any spirituality or spiritual practice that is geared to men. When we rejected the mystical and the monastic during the Reformation while embracing the rational, we opened a pathway where the seemingly natural way to compensate for over-rationalization was to embrace emotion, the heart. This has been disastrous in that it both feminized the church and opened the door for the undermining of Christian moral practice. When you correct an over emphasis on theology with emotion, you end up doing not what is right but what makes you feel good.

There is long road ahead, but first we have more to learn. Up next we will be talking specifically about men and education.