Boys Don’t Cry

An op-ed on the destructive power of conditioned mainstream masculinity

When I was in school, I remember being taught that chimpanzees were the closest living relative to our species. As it turns out, this is yet something else from school that is not quite the whole story.

The bonobo, a distinct species within the ape family lineage, is in fact much closer to the homo sapien than any other species. Sadly, bonobos are more well-known for being more social chimps with “very liberal” sexual tendencies (some groups use sex as a type of greeting). But there’s more to our relation with this species than fun facts in support of polygamy.

They have longer legs than chimpanzees; a fundamental development for human-type bipedal walking. They’re described as gentler than their animalistic brothers-in-genus, sometimes even as graceful. Their lips come in a shade of pink that MAC definitely sells, and they’re even known to carry a hair parting. Alongside these traits, however, they differ from chimpanzees in one often overlooked yet vitally important way: bonobo societies are structured as matriarchies.

In a bonobo society, relationships matter far more than strength. As mothers are the root of all one’s relationships, an alpha female (or a coalition of females in some cases) is generally established as the top of the pecking order. She is the equivalent of the beloved wise grandmother in a mafioso family, and this entails certain control over how the society is run.

The key to making this work is that this alpha female is not only held above other females, but above the alpha male of the pack as well. She is the most caring, empathic, and respected member of any tribe — and that is the root of her power. It is her ability to make relationships that awards her this political status. That is to say, the others respect her not due to her capacity to generate fear, but due to her capacity to generate love. Eat that, Machiavelli.

As a result, predominantly-female values and beliefs come to determine what behaviours are accepted, who can be trusted, and how justice is served when norms are defied. With bonobos, small coalitions of females act as a check and balance of power against rogue alpha males. This is the jungle after all — strength will always have value.

Somehow my history class never seemed to drive home the core point of this difference well enough, so here it follows as plainly as I can put it.

In the jungle, it can make a lot of sense to have a strength-dominated society as the chimps do. A strong alpha male brings preserves peace, stability and hunting prowess. Biologically, this results in a type of ‘natural patriarchy’ that works to secure the chimpanzee genus despite its other evolutionary disadvantages.

But chimpanzees are not our closest ancestors — bonobos are. And bonobos didn’t thrive, let alone live, in a strength-dominated society. Their evolution as a social species was built on an understanding the higher power of soft skills such as empathy, trust, and mutual respect. As humans, that is where we truly come from: a society that naturally organises itself around its ability to champion relationships. A society that put women’s values — mothers’ values — at its core so its inhabitants could be nurtured and grown.

It is from this point of origin that I believe our society has diverged too far.

We struggle with the way we’ve built our society because we’re still hardwired to organise ourselves the way bonobos had for thousands of years before our evolutionary parting. It remains in our nature to empathise just as much as it is to crave sex, safety, and status. Part of the reason for that is exactly because we are, biologically speaking, more rooted in bonobo societies than those of any other mammalian lineage.

So why do we still uphold the values of a society that goes against the evolution nature seems to have intended for us?

Despite the lack of any serious progress in gender equality, gender roles and expectations for females have largely liberalised within mainstream society since the 1960s. It helps that the bar was set so low to begin with, but there has been visible change in how society views the female gender since they let it loose after World War II. Since then, it’s gradually become the norm for women to wear jeans (even if they are called “boyfriend cut”), be given (lesser-paid) positions of employment, and have other rights considered trivial to men such as, you know, voting.

But as a “straight-acting” closeted pansexual for over ten years, one thing continues to bother me: the problem began with, and remains with, the mainstream man. Isn’t it so?

Broadly speaking, we should focus more on reconstructing a status quo in which most men cannot openly and publicly embrace their inner femininity, and such an effort remains difficult mostly among mainstream heterosexual men.

That is to say, while most women would find it quite progressive of me to wear a skirt and leggings while doing my groceries, other heterosexual men definitely would not. And they’d give me trouble. Not the physical kind of trouble, but the emotional kind — corner giggles, odd looks, the social status of a weirdo. If I’m gay, that may well be acceptable, but anything else — god forbid just a regular man — well, then I must be a closet gay. Which is to say, not someone that would fit into their peer group.

Harry Styles’ take on grandma chic and Jaden Smith’s gender-bending wardrobe is definitely helping with this, but I’d still argue that about 90% of heterosexual men who just read the first part of this sentence don’t know about either of those headlines. It’s just not in their purview. In part because it’s not quite “allowed” to be.

It starts this trivially, with something simple like fashion choices. But in its essence, I’d argue that what I discuss here isn’t really about sexuality or gender. This is about the personality characteristics that we as men consider to be masculine, and have therefore established as the de facto way you move upward in the world.

In many ways, the dynamic created for a man in society today is still very similar to what the Mad Men cooked up for the meat industry decades ago. In the same way that men have been marketed meat as a “manly” food for decades, we have also been collectively conditioned to consider certain behaviours as being unacceptably queer. Not only is potentially-damaging “manly” behaviour celebrated (eating a steak versus ordering a salad) but those who go against its norms are then chided and excluded from mainstream opportunities as a result.

Maybe it’s just that seeing outward queerness makes them feel insecure about their inability to accept their own innate queerness. How ironic that would be.

We do all someday find our tribe of others just as queer or unqueer as us. But that doesn’t dispell the fact that there is still a fundamental barrier between the privileged heterosexual white male and the rest of society. That barrier isn’t natural either — it was built, constructed by carefully-conditioned codes of behaviour.

Guzzling cheap beer by the pint. Eating red meat and drinking beer with abandon. Opting for the bad boy look as often as possible. Keeping your nails trimmed using your teeth. Reducing a toilet’s sanitary level to that of a kindergarten loo.

We know these; they’re an assortment of typical ‘guy things’ any ex-girlfriend can continue listing for you. But these are just a symptom of the problem. The true nature of the problem is visible when men are among other men. It’s in what we talk about, how we think, how we speak (particularly about women who aren’t our relatives), and ultimately in how we choose who we will put our support behind in professional or political arenas.

Avoiding vulnerable conversations. Being arrogant about your capabilities. Being ego-centrically extroverted in conversation. Believing you keep your pride by not apologising. Treating everything as a competition by default. Verbally or physically abusing others to lower their defenses. Defending your pride no matter the consequences. Putting more value in policing than health and education. Reacting with aggression.

These aren’t the ones you can picture as easily as the beer-guzzling planet-polluter at first, but make no mistake: there is a thread that often connects them*. These personality traits are representative of a mentality; a way of thinking about the world as if it owes you, as if it is something to hold dominion over. This is a viewpoint predominantly held by men, as would be illustrated by anything from how often married men cheat to the ‘Salary Ask Gap’ to the 4x higher rate of psychopathic tendencies among male CEOs.

In a male-dominated world, these supposedly masculine traits are the ones that now actually separate the dominated from those with dominion. And this is where the damage is truly done.

*Side Note: I use these examples because identifying specific characteristics is difficult and subjective; this does not mean I believe that all beer-drinking steak-eater bros are horrible people. It means it is my opinion that their personality characteristics are less-than-desirable for society as a whole.

The saying “nice guys finish last” hasn’t earned its popularity on coincidence — any quiet and intelligent male friend can tell you that. It is a reflection of the world we live in. Being nice doesn’t pay. More poignantly, the society we live in actively penalises those who are quieter, more empathic, or less analytical. Susan Cain touches upon a segment of this in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, but I sometimes feel it should have been named Loud: The Loss of Introverts in a World That Forces You to Shout. These are traits, however, that are generally held by introverts, marginalised groups, and of course: women. What a coincidence.

The systemic insecurities around ego and pride among males, and this simple-minded idea of masculinity being something dominating and rugged. As a pair, these two components of glorified masculinity have constructed a society that penalises anyone who’s not manly enough by this definition. Would anybody peg Donald Trump to be a vegan who helped his kids with their homework? Or picture Ghandi as a steak-loving gambler who beat his wife? Do we think a guy like Jeff Bezos made such a fortune because he was empathic to people’s needs? No, because we know the structure of our power hierarchies rewards those who are arrogant, ruthless, psychopathic, or simply loud enough.

How did we manage to stray so far from those benevolent, ever-boinking bonobo societies that prized compassionate relationship-builders?

Such a system did not arise because little boys and would-be boys have grown up being told that that’s how they should behave — it’s because we, as men, as fathers and brothers and colleagues today, we have placed our value in the misplaced marketing gimmick that is Joe the Marlboro man or any other commercial figure of masculine strength. And now it goes so much deeper than we know. It’s in what we aspire for as men today, in what we deem acceptable to talk about without “getting weird”, and it’s the basis for how we evaluate one another against society at large. We have created spaces among our own conversations that are held in tension by all the pressure it’s taking us to be “men” among each other.

And yet, no — this isn’t a tirade about being in touch with your emotions enough to cry, or being vulnerable enough to reveal your secrets, or even about being explicitly more feminine. In fact, this isn’t about gender at all. I’d argue that the classic gender difference, at its heart, isn’t about gender roles either. It’s about the fucking bonobos; it’s about empathy. Empathy for one’s self, empathy for the likes of other men, empathy for the women who love and torment us, empathy for the people of the world as a collective whole. That means putting values that are harmonious with empathy at the core of our society.

Any of us who’ve worked in a highly-lucrative industry or a powerful political setting know of the term “Old Boys Club”. The very name embodies the core characteristics of its members: antiquated, competitive, and intoxicated with the false belief that they possess some god-given privilege over others. And it is this heartless and arrogant ideology that is now killing the world; that is driving climate change, wars, prison funding, your taxes, and just how much we all hate the f***ing Man.

This is why fraternities are places where deaths from binge drinking and hazing happen multiple times more often than they do in sororities. This is why men fill our jails and other men supply them with the means to do so. This is why corporations are led by the product of young men who’ve ‘failed up’ for decades. This is why male-led nations lead in defense, security and sporting, while women-led nations overwhelmingly invest in healing, educating, and social support spending. It is exactly this offensive of masculinity that’s driving all the world’s defensive spending. It’s also why technology is taking over the world a lot faster than empathy.

Because all of it is built into male-dominated industries by dominant white males, then put into a male-dominated media pipeline to be washed into the minds of young men who will then purport the same false values of masculinity. We will start the same wars, create the same jocks, beat the same boys, and seal the same fate.

And yet we continue.

Somehow we find a way to spend billions on going into space just because little boys who grew up to be billionaires wanted to. This, even when the cost of a single spaceflight would reveal the stars who already shine inside the world’s classrooms.

We have state budgets for weaponry and armadas of soldiers from every generation, but somehow we’ll never invest that same money into the silver bullets of education and healthcare for the next generation.

And even today, somehow patriarchal governments still get to decide what women may or may not do with their genitalia — all the while oggling over it themselves and touching their own.

But this is what patriarchal systems value. It’s what they care about, and it’s what they convinced us to care about. And increasingly, it’s why the world is broken.

That important thing about bonobo societies being matriarchies wasn’t the whole story either. You see, the true difference between a matriarchy and a patriarchy isn’t in the gender of its leader. It is in the values which that society then establishes as central to its development.

There is no peaceful closing here, only a reminder from one man to the other men out there: we must tear down the structures we’ve built in the name of this false masculinity. It’s time we evolved if we expect to survive, both as men and as a species. As men, shifting our values to be more compassionate, empathic and vulnerable as we’re told to do really will help. You’ll still get laid without being an asshole. I promise. We must understand that the Old Boys Club is exactly that; old. Let it die. Birth instead a new club, one that nurtures the values your mother passed down to you. Changing our behaviour in a way that supports the underdogs and the quiet will make us stronger than we can ever be as ruthless CEOs.

We need to stop taking actions like those of the competitive alpha-chasing chimps and return to evolving as collaborative relationship-building bonobos. We need to allow the definition of ‘man’ to become so fluid it meets the other end of the spectrum, and that means letting go of everything we were conditioned to believe made us masculine.

Because it isn’t our parts that make us men, it’s our hearts.