The (false) alphabet of males – 03/04/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

Every single day another jerico idea about masculinity appears on social networks (which are increasingly in need of being renamed “sociopathic”). It’s a bestiary littered with weird terminology using the Greek alphabet (“alpha male”, “sigma male”) or English acronyms (“incel”, “MGTOW”). It sounds confusing, but the advantage is that you can sum it all up with a few simple sentences: it was really good when a man ruled over a woman; man who is a man hits the table and doesn’t clean the house, tells his wife to clean it.

It’s common for the unwary or assholes who end up memorizing this Greek alphabet to use some variation of the “it’s always been like this” argument. Human nature would have been forged by evolution so that men would become dominant, strong, masculine, while women would have been made for sweetness, modesty and the gifts of the home (as my great-grandfather would say). Turning this natural order of things upside down would almost be a crime against humanity.

It turns out, as Luke Skywalker would say, every single word in the above sentences is wrong. In the great drama of human evolution, everything indicates that this bossy male thing is a relatively recent invention — which, incidentally, has given our species a lot of headaches.

By “recent”, I mean “from 10,000 years ago”, which may seem like a long time if we don’t consider that Homo sapiens is already 300,000 years old. The 10,000 years before the present corresponds, roughly speaking, to the time when members of our species began to depend mainly on agriculture and animal husbandry for their subsistence.

For the entire previous immense period, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. And if everything we know about the hunter-gatherers that still exist today is applicable to what we were like in the past — that’s what most experts believe — then we have bad news for the machos.

Today’s hunter-gatherers are tremendously averse to any form of hierarchy—so much so that even “chiefs” with limited political powers do not exist among them. Group decisions are made by consensus, usually with the participation of all adults of both sexes. Some form of monogamy prevails—rare are men with more than one partner.

What strikes me as even more curious, however, is that hunter-gatherers abhor any kind of arrogance or bossiness. Every guy who captures a large prey is expected to self-deprecate — saying something like “look, I found this tapir kind of skinny, I was lucky to hit the arrow”— and share the meat with the whole group, even keeping a smaller portion for Your self.

Those who do not follow this ideal of humility, boasting, trying to rule the lives of others or being violent tend to be ridiculed or even abandoned by the group when the others leave in search of a new camp. In extreme cases, such as homicides, the group can opt for a kind of collective male execution, with arrows shot by several people at the same time.

In the last ten millennia, this ancestral pattern ended up being left aside because agriculture and animal husbandry made it possible for some men to accumulate wealth and power — precisely, in general, the bullies who would be ostracized among hunters. -collectors. There is nothing “natural” about being a scrotum male, therefore: it is a consequence of an economic and political context that can and should change over time. And with benefits for all of us.

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