Testosterone, Y Chromosomes, and Other Manly Excuses (with Matthew Gutmann)

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Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, the podcast where we survey the terrain of identity and connection, where we believe culture, not just chromosomes, defines who we are. I'm journalist Blair Hodges, and our guide in this episode is anthropologist Matthew Gutmann.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Okay, we're animals. And so what? What does that actually mean? It could mean that we're all going off instinct and, “Oh, the hell with it. I'll just go along with whatever feels good because I'm an animal, and what are you gonna do?” Why do we still allow that? Or, “Oh, he's a guy. Come on. What do you expect?” It's really not healthy.

BLAIR HODGES: Matthew Gutmann argues that male behavior isn't carved in stone. It's not hardwired into our DNA. Men don't act the way they do just because biology demands it, but because culture shapes it. And to prove this, he went global, studying fatherhood patterns in Mexico City, marriage markets in Shanghai, and college campuses in the United States.

What Matthew found is simple but powerful: masculinity is not fixed. It looks different across different times and places. It looks different even within the same time in the same places. That's why we can't settle for dangerous clichés like “men are animals” or “boys will be boys.” Gutmann reminds us men are more than testosterone and Y chromosomes. They're shaped as much by society as by biology.

Rethinking masculinity this way isn't just about men. It's about building healthier lives for everyone. Gutmann joins us right now to talk about his new book, Are Men Animals?

 

Critiquing Pop Science – 02:07

 

BLAIR HODGES: Matthew Gutmann, welcome to Relationscapes.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: One of the reasons you wrote this book was because we see these headlines pop up. It seems like they come every month, maybe even every week—these pop culture science headlines. There's an example in your book from 2018 in Newsweek. It says, “Men who like jazz music have less testosterone than those who like rock.” What goes through your mind when you see a headline like that?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I want to know where the study comes from. And it turns out that the people doing the research made no such claims. The people doing the research talked to a few people in Japan and decided that that was representative of the few people they talked to in Japan.

But the press got a hold of it, and all of a sudden, these few people at a university in Japan—these few guys—became representative of all men, all places on Earth. And what it did is it fit into stereotypes, the pre-existing stereotypes. And they thought, oh, now we have science to prove our pre-existing stereotypes.

BLAIR HODGES: And you say that people kind of appreciate tidy explanations too, right? It takes a really complicated thing about gender and masculinity and music and hormones and all of this, and ties it up with this nice little bow that says if you like jazz music, maybe you're kind of less manly because rock is rock.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to make fun of people who are looking for simple explanations. I think that's a great thing to do. The problem is whether the simple explanations are accurate or not, or whether they in fact reflect some deep-seated confusion on our part. And getting out of that confusion may be a little more difficult. So if genes can explain something to you in a simple way, you may use genes to explain human behavior in some way.

But let me just give you an example. A hundred years ago, how many people in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives were women? Zero.

BLAIR HODGES: None.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Okay. This was representative of parliaments and governing bodies all over the world. There were a few queens here and there, but basically women were not political leaders. And if you'd asked anybody 100 years ago why this was the case, people would say, “Look, women have a lot of strengths, but they don't make good political leaders. By nature. By nature.” And it would be hard to refute that because for thousands of years you hadn't seen political leaders as women.

Now in the last hundred years, that's changed dramatically. And all of a sudden anybody who runs around saying women don't make political leaders will have to check out the last person who got elected president of Mexico and a bunch of other countries. So that kind of idea—that naturalizing of what exists today, or what you think exists today—is very common, and it takes a while to work it out.

BLAIR HODGES: And for you, I mean, as a scholar, as a researcher, you obviously are drawn to scientific ideas and the scientific method and empirical analysis and all of this. But you also caution against placing unreasonable trust in biological explanations—in particular of male behavior. That's what this book is about.

What is that unreasonable trust coming from, do you think? I mean, that's kind of a speculative question, I know. But when you think about the unreasonable trust, where do you think that comes from?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Look, I think that scientists are not robots. Scientists grow up in and are affected by the prejudices of the age in which they live. They're not immune either. That doesn't mean that we can't trust anything scientists say. But it does mean that we don't automatically accept what scientists say. And it's especially the case when you have scientists disagreeing among themselves over the same evidence. That's great. That just creates more fertile room for discovery and trying to figure things out.

I think the point is that that doesn't let us off the hook. Simply because you heard a scientist say X, Y, or Z doesn't make it automatically true. It doesn't make it false either. I don't want to fall into the people who naysay scientists all over the place. That's crazy and very, very dangerous often. But I'm just saying that if you have science saying—as scientists did run around saying 50 years ago, maybe not as much as 100, but as recently as 50—that women should not be political leaders because when they have their periods, they are out of control or they can be out of control.

This was said, for instance, famously by the doctor of Hubert Humphrey, who was vice president and then presidential candidate. So, you know, this doctor, the man of science, was making these statements that it would be a horror show to have a woman in charge of a company, much less the government.

 

Avoiding Biological Extremism – 07:12

 

BLAIR HODGES: No, you'll still hear people talking about that, like, “We don't want a woman having access to the nuclear codes because, you know, we need a rational man.” As though there's this distinction about rational-brained men and irrational, emotional, hormone-driven women.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Exactly. And I think what I've been trying to look at, especially in this book, is the fact that we have been critiquing and taking apart the biobabble with respect to women and women's bodies—that they automatically determine X, Y, or Z. They don't. But we haven't done the same with men.

And it's very easy still, I think, at least in the United States, Mexico, and many other parts of the world, to toss out the word “testosterone.” Most of us wouldn't know testosterone if we tripped over it. But it's an easy kind of catchphrase. We throw it in.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm told that I'm bald because of it.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Well, see, that might have something to do with it, maybe. [laughter]

But whether you are a pacifist or a very aggressive person won't tell me anything necessarily about your average level of testosterone. But it's very common. If you hear—when Brett Kavanaugh was being nominated for the Supreme Court—all sorts of people were coming out and saying, “Hey, what do you expect? A high school kid has all this testosterone running through him. You know, what high school boy hasn't wanted to rape a girl?”

That, to me, is an incredibly dangerous kind of thinking. First of all, it's false. Most teenage boys do not rape girls. Second of all, testosterone does not automatically cause anyone to rape. What causes people to rape are social factors, not biological ones.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and we'll unpack those a little bit later. But the main point that you're making here is that you want to avoid what you call biological extremism about males—the idea that we can sum up male behavior scientifically according to things like hormones or genes, and that we can explain male behavior based on those things.

And you say it's dangerous because it kind of takes away control. It means, can we really be upset about a teenage boy assaulting someone if their body made them do it? And you say this can be a problem for people who would excuse a Brett Kavanaugh and say, “Well, you know, boys will be boys.”

But it can also be dangerous for people who say all men are predators or that we all need to be afraid of all men. So it can come from multiple angles, right? This biological extremism can both excuse male behavior or make it seem inevitable and press on everybody.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Right. And then what we have to do is control these natural impulses of all males of the species. And that's where the comparison with non-human animals comes in. Because there are obviously males of other species that behave in certain ways. And if we say, “Oh, that's what all males of all species tend to do,” then what we're doing is saying it is the maleness of this particular animal—whether it's human or not—that makes them do various things.

And the fact is that human biology is more flexible than that of any other animal on Earth. So you have a range of behavior, you have a range of emotions, you have a range of all sorts of things that you don't find in any other animals. Not to say that there aren't emotions with other animals. Not to say that there aren't behaviors that look similar. But I would argue that if you see a group of female baboons and a single male baboon, it's wrong to say that group of females is a “harem.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you're using English language.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: A “harem” is a human institution in certain cultures. And most people who talk about harems don’t have a clue what a human harem looks like—except in some male fantasy.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, we'll unpack that more from your chapter, “Monkey See, Human Do,” a little bit later on. But the two main points we're going to be talking about are that the biological extremism about males is sort of nonsense, and also that believing males can't really control themselves is hazardous. We'll address both of those as we go.

 

What Anthropology Can Do – 11:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: But I want to take a moment first to talk about method, because you're coming from the field of anthropology and people might not be familiar with that. So let's talk about that field and the tools you're going to use to answer questions about whether men are just animals.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Anthropology is a broad discipline in the social sciences. It really runs the gamut—from people who are much more scientific and do quantitative kind of research, number crunching, surveys and whatnot, to people at the other extreme. I'm more at the other extreme, and that is we look for stories, human lives, and we try to understand those human lives and portray them in our writings and our teaching.

And so what I end up doing, and what I've ended up doing, is spending thousands of hours with not that many people in various places. I look and I see how representative they might be in various kinds of ways. But I'm not looking to interview a thousand people for half an hour or an hour each. I want to get to know a few people very, very well. This is qualitative research called ethnography. It means you go very, very deep in a particular community or group of people, and you try to see—for instance, I've been looking in Mexico at changes between men and women in what fathers and mothers do with children of various ages and how that's changed over generations of time.

And you do that by spending time with people, not simply by asking them, “How much time do you do this? How much time do you do that?” You actually are there with them—whether they're changing diapers, helping kids with homework, whatever it might be. And I've done a similar thing in other contexts. You end up spending a lot of time talking to people in various kinds of ways. But again, the idea is to go deep rather than superficially broad.

BLAIR HODGES: I love the way you put it. At one point in the book, you say you're asking philosophical questions and you're thinking not just about birth and death, but about conception and funeral. So birth and death, birth and conception, death and funeral. You're looking at the stories around human existence. You're studying patterns of human behavior to understand more about what it means to be human—not just in the nuts and bolts of birth and death, but also in the cultural meaning and experience in conceptions and funerals. That sums it up really well.

 

The Real Gender Confusion – 14:14

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about your first chapter with that in mind. It's about gender confusion. And this is something—a phrase that I've actually heard thrown around to attack trans folks—that they're experiencing gender confusion. You're taking that term back to say, actually the way that we're thinking of gender in these extremely binary and rigid ways is kind of the source of the confusion itself. So talk about how you're using that phrase “gender confusion” and what you're trying to do in this chapter.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Well, first of all, I would say that they stole that phrase from us, the anti-trans people. The fact is, you can go back and look at a very famous play called Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Kushner uses the phrase “gender confusion” in that play when he's talking about things. I've heard other interviews you've done and you identify yourself as a cis hetero male.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I would identify myself similarly. And on the screen I'm looking at, you use he/him. Okay, I do too. But I have a kid who uses they. One of my kids uses they. And that's because they are not comfortable with other kinds of pronouns being used—in this case, because they're not comfortable in a simple “I am a man, I am a woman.” That's not the kind of world that they exist in and want to exist in. So I think a lot of people are challenging old-fashioned notions.

At the same time, you have a huge pushback from the Vatican and from right-wing folks in every country on Earth saying, on the contrary, it's a biological end. In the case of the Vatican, they say it's not only biological, they say it's a God-given fact. There's man, there's woman, and don't go trying to screw things up. But the fact is that people live a different way than just man or woman. Some people do. And either we acknowledge this and appreciate it and respect it and help build a society in which they are comfortable and can thrive as not a man, not a woman, or we are doing tremendous harm to a huge number of people in the population.

So the gender confusion, I think, is real. And the struggles around this, the renegotiation, are also real. The fact is, who would have thought 20 years ago that abortion could be illegal again in the United States? These are powerful forces in the United States pushing in a direction to go back to a situation in which a lot of things are not legal anymore. And I think all sorts of things—like gay marriage is on the line, contraception is on the line. There's all sorts of things that many of us have unfortunately taken too much for granted. So I think it's part of a gender confusion. But it's a heightened period of time in history, as far as I can see, and we need to be vigilant. We need to be really analyzing these things and struggling to advance a broader concept of what gender and sexuality can mean.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm glad you pointed that out because your chapter makes it clear that the direction of change isn't preordained. Societies aren't necessarily moving in the same direction to this more enlightened or accepting or progressive place that we're all going to arrive at. But rather, things go back and forth. And as anthropology as a field has shown in so many studies, human ideas about sex and gender vary over time and across cultures.

So even for people who don't want to maybe open their minds about nonbinary folks or trans folks, the fact is that even what it means to be a man or a woman has greatly varied in history and also across cultures, which you draw out in your book.

 

The Rise of Sociobiology – 18:04

 

BLAIR HODGES: You also mentioned religious and scientific components, and that's important too, because some people might think that it's just old-timey religion or prejudice that would lock into a gender binary—that God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve or whatever, that kind of thing. But you also point out that some scientific-minded folks have locked into rigid ideas. And in your book, you trace the rise of sociobiology in the 20th century that played a huge role in scientifically justifying conservative gender roles. So maybe take a second to talk about sociobiology as a force and what that suggests to you about how we think about gender today.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Well, sociobiology really developed in the 1970s in the United States and it spoke to a population more broadly, including among scientists who wanted to reduce things to genes and chromosomes, evolution, heredity, things like this, and felt very comfortable explaining, for instance, rape—that rape was simply a manifestation of men trying to spread their seed and impregnate as many females as they could in order for their genes to be more powerful in the world.

This, however, never explains sex between men. It doesn't explain rape of girls who are not going to get pregnant or older women who are not going to get pregnant. There are huge and obvious gaps, but nonetheless, there are people who continue to rely on these biological explanations. At the same time, there are other scientists.

Anne Fausto Sterling is one of the great examples of a biologist who's worked very seriously on questions of sex. And she says, look, if you're talking about primary sexual traits like genitalia, that does tend to be a little more binary in terms of the biology. But when you're starting to talk about secondary sexual traits, body hair, things like that, it is all over the map.

So it's very important that we not get locked into some kind of binary thinking, including biologically. It's not just that we don't want to think socially or culturally along those lines. But even biology itself is much more confusing. There are kids who were born with what are called ambiguous genitalia, as well. And the doctors, because they grew up in the same society that you and I did, often feel that they have an obligation to make an arbitrary choice. This will be a female, this will be a male, and they do reconstructive surgery on infants.

BLAIR HODGES: It should be criminalized [actually, I mean outlawed], which, by the way, none of the bills that are fighting trans care for youth are addressing that fact. They're letting that go.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Good point.

BLAIR HODGES: You know, it's locking in the binary.

 

Rooting Masculinity in Biology Alone – 21:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: Now, sociobiology is an important concept because it's trying to read what it means to be human based on biology, based on the body. You talk about these two competing ideas. Number one, that a human body determines what a human person is going to be. So if someone has a penis, they're male. If they have a vulva, they're female. And then you mention intersex folks, which complicates that. There's also chromosomal difference. There are all sorts of differences where even the binary biologically breaks down. Right? But largely sexually dimorphic. Like, the numbers seem to fall around generally male-female biology, with important exceptions. But sociobiology means we wanted to say, if that biology is that way, then human experience and people need to be that way.

So there's that idea that the human body is determinative. Then there's this other idea that society and culture is determinative. So a social construction idea of gender, which is actually what it means to be a man or woman, male or female, doesn't necessarily tie to the physical body as much as the society and culture and the expectations around it.

And these two competing ideas, you say, have held sway at different periods of time. And the chapter is so helpful in showing how sociobiology wanted to identify what it meant to be a man. Started off with genitals—do they have a penis? Right. Bodies.

Then it kind of shifted to hormones—you mentioned testosterone. Then it moved to genes, which is chromosomes. And we still see people today who oppose trans rights and want to challenge trans identities, still trying to find a scientific way to do this, whether it be through bodies, hormones, or genes. The history you lay out there is really helpful in showing how sociobiology has tried to construct what it means to be a man based on physical bodies.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: In every single population that you can talk about, you have people who are very firm: I am a woman. I experience life as a woman. And I have no problem identifying myself as a woman—that may be a gay woman, that may be a heterosexual woman, that may be a trans woman, that may be all sorts of different kinds of women.

At the same time, you may be trans and you say, I don't identify strongly with either male or female, just as you could be heterosexual and not want to identify in these kinds of ways. What strikes me as important here, though, is it's not like biology is fixed, and what changes is culture and society around this fixed biology, because you find biology changing also, and you find our understanding of biology changing.

Two examples. One, pornography. I had an unpleasant experience years ago in an argument with somebody who told me, look, you study gender, and you think a lot of it's cultural difference and not biological. I would go along with you to a certain extent, but the fact is there are some fundamental differences between males and females. For example, visual stimulation. Men are visually stimulated much more than women. Therefore, that's why men look at pornography and women don't.

Important to note that this argument was in 1996, before the Internet had taken off. And the fact is that pornography was still something that you bought in a store that you went to a cinema downtown, a CD cinema downtown, and you didn't watch in the privacy of your own home once it became available.

As everybody now knows, not all women, not all men, but there are millions and millions of women who also watch porn. And it turns out that visual stimulation was not a biological difference. But it was impossible to prove that to some of the scientists then because they said, how could you explain this otherwise? How you explain it is stigma.

The other example has to do with epigenetics, and I'm not a biologist, but the fact is that the field of epigenetics within biology today is booming. And it shows things like environmental factors that can actually change biology. And then there's debate over whether those changed biologies can be inherited by the offspring of those animals, human or otherwise, who've been affected by the environment.

BLAIR HODGES: Like, an example of that might be—and I'm not saying this is exactly true—but going back to the jazz music thing, maybe listening to jazz music has a calming effect. And if you're drawn to that, your levels of testosterone might be affected by things that you do.

Or another example I think, another guest talked about, is taxi drivers have this really huge part of their brain that's bigger than other people's, that kind of deals with directions and stuff. And it's like, oh, did they become taxi drivers because they had these huge pieces of the brain that get directions? Or is the repetition and knowledge of their job in fact affecting their biology and actually changing their bodies?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I think in the case of jazz, I'm not sure that would work there. I think it had a lot more to do with racism and African Americans being associated with jazz and white people being associated with rock.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. And what strength is—that's an important caveat. But that's the idea. And malnutrition can have a direct impact on biology, not only body size and body health, but brain size and brain function. How does poverty affect people, racism, and the corrosive effects on the physical body that it can have? There's a lot of examples of this.

 

Nature Mysticism and Bio-skepticism – 26:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: Now, you cite Joyce Carol Oates here, this idea of nature mysticism, to really drive home why this matters. And it matters because people endow scientific conclusions with moral weight. We want to actually figure out what's right and wrong based on what biology is supposedly telling us.

And so transphobic folks might say, oh, if science tells us this, then it is morally problematic and wrong—not just scientifically wrong to be trans, but actually there's a moral element to this. And so this idea of nature mysticism you borrow from Joyce Carol Oates is really important to point out how we're drawing moral evaluations off of supposed scientific conclusions.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Absolutely. I think, you know, there's one Oxford scientist who writes that Wall Street is the epitome of testosterone because you have to have high testosterone levels to be able to be successful on Wall Street. So to me, this is drawing—and this is a positive thing in his view—there's absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever.

But it fits into a preexisting idea and a moral universe in which making a lot of money is necessarily good. And therefore it makes testosterone and higher levels of testosterone automatically good, because that's what leads you to making more money than other people with lower levels of testosterone, particularly women, but also, you know, lesser men.

BLAIR HODGES: There's a term that you introduced, "bio-skepticism," and I just wanted to find that really quick before we move on to the next chapter. And bio-skepticism is: you're not asking people to be against science or completely skeptical of science or anti-biology or anything like that, or to ignore expert wisdom. What you're inviting people to do with bio-skepticism is to challenge the idea that everything can best be explained by biology without other considerations.

So questions like how sexuality and mating work, questions about violence and aggression, questions about nurturing and fostering of children or other people—you’re saying, let's have some bio-skepticism and not just make the story about how all those things work a story of just biology without other considerations. Is that a fair way to describe bio-skepticism?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Because I think that what we are aiming for, most of us in the social sciences, certainly most researchers, is an integration of biology and culture and society and all these kinds of things. It's not an either/or. It's not that one is a tabula rasa and then everything else can change or not change. But how do these things evolve in concert with each other?

So it's obvious that we are animals. And to me, that was the hardest part of the book. It's sort of like, okay, we're animals. And so what? What does that actually mean for humans to be animals? Well, it could mean that we just have instinct and we're all going off instinct and we really don't have that much will to control what we do, and, “Oh, the hell with it. I'll just go along with whatever feels good.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, gotta live with it.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I'll live with it because I'm an animal. And what are you gonna do? And I think we fought very hard against that kind of notion that, “Oh, she's a woman, that's why she's doing whatever she's doing.” That is regarded as a sexist kind of analysis in many quarters. Why do we still allow that? “Oh, he's a guy, come on. What do you expect?” That to me is—okay, I've done it too. You've done it—

BLAIR HODGES: It's fatalist.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Yeah, but it's really not healthy.

BLAIR HODGES: No, no. Because it can excuse anything or just give us a sense of, like, why try? Why even resist?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Matthew Gutmann, and we're talking about the book Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short.

 

Dangerous Animal Comparisons – 30:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's get into some more specifics here. Now, humans are animals in a sense, and this comparison only increased after Darwin. We see ourselves as descendants of, you know, of the monkey people, some monkey people. And now we've got the common animal comparisons that come up with men. And these are problematic.

And you actually point out that if we look more closely, even at ape ancestors or kind of how the animal kingdom works, even if we wanted that to be a great comparison, it's actually not like there are examples in the animal kingdom that would contradict some of the stereotypes about men.

Maybe if you have an example you can think of of some monkeys that we might look to and say, oh, wow, that does challenge what we think.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: So the classic comparison is done between humans and chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are basically alpha male-led in terms of there tends to be an alpha male who has much more power and control over the rest. There's a lot of fighting that goes on among the males and whatnot.

Well, there are researchers like Frans de Waal, who recently died, who did brilliant research on another group of primates called the bonobos, or sometimes they're called the bonobos. Both pronunciations are fine. And it turns out that we, the chimps, and the bonobos all split from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. Meaning that if you want to do a comparison, we're just as close, evolutionarily speaking, to the bonobos, who are alpha female-led, by and large, and who spend a great deal of time in all sorts of intricate ways having sex with each other and themselves.

And yet we hear about the chimps and, hey, these guys are fighting all the time. Hey, they're led by a male. Hey, that's natural, that's evolution.

BLAIR HODGES: "What do you expect?"

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Why don't we talk about the bonobos? Well, the bonobos come along and, well, they're led by females. Well, they actually have a lot of sex, and especially when there's a conflict, they end up resolving it not through fighting very often, but through having sex. It's a different approach.

But why aren't we? I mean, it's also problematic to say we're like the bonobos. No, this was 6 million years ago and we've all gone through a lot of changes. It's not like the bonobos and the chimps today are the same as our ancient ancestors six million years ago. They've also evolved in different directions.

So there is a lot of danger in doing these close comparisons. Others talk about—there's a scientist who likes to talk about hummingbird prostitutes. Why?

BLAIR HODGES: Using categories from human culture and putting those onto animals.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Because the hummingbird male brings a twig for the nest and the female allows the male to have sex with her. Well, obviously, the people who talk about this have never studied sex workers, prostitution, anything like that. It's a catchy phrase. We remember it.

But it also naturalizes a certain kind of relationship, that males pay females in one way or another for sex, and that females don't want to have sex except when they're paid for it. This kind of thinking, it seems to me, gets us into trouble.

And one of the surprising things in the research for the book was the influence of these animal shows. I don't know about you, but I grew up on Saturday mornings watching Animal Planet or one of these nature shows.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: And when I heard about the male hyena doing X, Y, or Z, I'm thinking, well, I'm a boy, that's what males do. It actually had a deep-seated influence on me and hundreds of millions of other people in the world in a very naive way. But nobody ever bothered to say, you know, the range of behavior among male hyenas is much, much more narrow among human males.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: It's incredibly broad. There's a spectrum that incorporates virtually everything. And that's—so there are some similarities because we're all animals and we sleep and we have sex and we eat and all these kinds of things—but we're not exactly the same. In fact, we're quite different in important ways.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. When you get down to the things that set us apart from animals, there are two things you really emphasize, and you've mentioned one already: the fact that humans show a much larger range of characteristic difference.

So the hyenas have a stronger concentration of violence, whereas with human males there's a much bigger range—from people who aren't violent at all to people who are. And also that humans appear to be more malleable—that there's some change that can happen amongst humans, and we're less likely to see that amongst animals. This idea that animals don't have, you know, anger management classes.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Well, no, but actually speaking of that, it's important. Nine out of ten murderers, to the extent that we know it, are male. So nine out of ten—that's a lot. That is an important statistic. That's an important fact to know, particularly if you're interested and concerned about issues of violence of any kind, including gender-based violence.

At the same time, my hunch, not knowing you, my hunch is you've never murdered anybody. And I can tell you I've never murdered anybody.

BLAIR HODGES: It's a safe bet.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: And we have to explain that too. Why have you, as a male, never murdered? Why haven't I? 

BLAIR HODGES: Because we're not good at it. [laughter]

MATTHEW GUTMANN: And the fraction, the infinitesimal number of males who actually have murdered--

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: At least outside of armies. And that's a whole other issue of the sanctioned murder, of militarization. So we also need to explain why the overwhelming number of men don't murder.

BLAIR HODGES: Most murders are by men and most men aren't murderers.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: And that also needs to be explained. If it's so biological, if men are so aggressive by nature, then why aren't more men murderers? That doesn't make sense.

 

Addressing Rape Culture – 37:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: You also apply this questioning to sexual assault, and you bring up the term “rape culture,” which you have found to be a helpful term because it calls attention to the cultural aspect of rape, rather than just chalking it up to some sort of biological outcome of males just being programmed by nature to be inclined to do this.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: The highest rape rate, I believe today used to be Alaska. I believe it's now Montana in the United States. And you find rates of rape again when we know the… you know.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: When there are as reported. And there's a lot that is not reported. I acknowledge that. But I don't think it's that there are more reported percentage-wise in Montana than in New Jersey. Is it biologically that the men who happen to live in Montana have higher rates of testosterone, are more prone to rape, etc., etc.? That it's a biological difference between Montana men and New Jersey men?

I don't believe that's the case. I believe there are other factors involved in terms of the role of women in society overall, the level of equality in various kinds of places, in the social media overall. And it is not a biological fact, otherwise you'd find much more standard rates.

And if it were biological, you'd find a much higher incidence of murder and rape on the part of the males, as you do among other species where there's a lot more violence. You find generally higher percentages—much higher percentages—across species.

BLAIR HODGES: See, and when we think this way, we can be more deliberate about what we actually do in response to crimes like rape and murder and violence. Because our beliefs about men's propensity to violence affect the policies that we come up with.

And there's a great example you bring up in the book from your research about public transportation in Mexico. This is a really helpful way to think about the stakes involved in the stories we tell. So maybe talk a little bit about public transportation in Mexico and some of the policies they came up with that are shaped by the stories that are told about men and violence.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: As far as I know, in the United States there's no segregation by men and women in public transportation anywhere on subways.

BLAIR HODGES: I think there's some Jewish communities that do it, where they'll keep men--that's the only, like, ultra-Orthodox Jews. It's the only one I could think of.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: All right, but not in public transportation. 

BLAIR HODGES: They self-segregate.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: In Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Mexico City, Bogotá, New Delhi, Cairo, and other cities, you find, particularly at rush hour, separate cars—subway cars—for women and children under 10, and men are not allowed, except in some cases very old men. But basically, it's cars for women and children, cars for men. Women can decide to go into the men's car or the co-ed car, as it were, but they also have the option for the separation.

Most of these are found in the Global South. And so the question arises: is the problem of sexual assault in public transportation a graver problem in the Global South, or are they actually trying to deal with the problem more effectively in these places?

BLAIR HODGES: At the same time, and fascinating to me, feminists in various places have opposed—not all feminists, but some feminists have opposed—the separation. And the thinking has everything to do with what you believe about male biology.

If you think this is just going to happen because boys will be boys, men can't help themselves, or at least a good chunk of men cannot help themselves, if they have the opportunity, they're going to start touching and leering and saying things to women and making women basically put them under assault of one kind or another, psychological or physical, on these crowded subways. And that's just the way it is.

And so we need to separate them, parenthetically, I would say. I think that is where you get the separation. In some of the religious groups, they believe there's a fundamental difference biologically between men and women. In any case, you have feminists coming along saying, look it, you wouldn't do this and say, this subway car is for shoplifters. Everybody else over here. What we need to do is find the men who are assaulting women, stop them, arrest them, punish them. We need to deal with the core issue here.

The fact is men don't do this by nature. They have been allowed to get away with it. There's an impunity involved because people assume men are going to do this, and therefore it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So what we need to do is address the problem of violence, gender-based violence on subway cars and everywhere else in society and take measures to address that problem.

So it's a very different view. Is it going to happen no matter what you do, or is it something we can change? It's not that men do this by nature.

 

Wrong Diagnoses Lead to Wrong Prescriptions – 42:40

 

BLAIR HODGES: The danger in saying it's by nature is we're more likely to excuse it, to wink at it, to come up with solutions that don't identify the roots of the problem, or even come to feel resigned to it and give up the fight against it. You also point out that this kind of segregation—men tend to want to segregate and find male-only spaces for reasons of power, whereas the women who do want that kind of segregation often want it for protection.

So you're also sympathetic to multiple views. I see you saying you understand why some women just want to have their space—they just want to have their train car because they just don't want to have to deal with it. So you're sympathetic to that as well.

But you're also saying there's some negative side effects that can come from that and some beliefs that might be informing it that aren't exactly true.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I think it's similar. You could look at it like affirmative action in the United States because of a history of racism in this country—slavery, genocide, and whatnot. We need to take actual, authoritative action to help populations that have suffered from racism and continue to suffer from racism to have access to education, to employment, and whatnot. Do we think that this needs to be that way forever?

Well, we would hope not. We would hope that society could address these systemic problems seriously enough and effectively enough that in the future, at some point, you wouldn't have to do that kind of thing. Similarly, on the trains in Mexico, most people are in favor of the separation.

At the same time, you need to address the underlying issues of sexual assault. It reminds me of another example, if I could. I did research on something called sexual exploitation and abuse among United Nations peacekeepers. And I went to Haiti and I went to Lebanon, and there were too many incidents in these places and in other peacekeeping missions around the world of soldiers and police and civilians associated with the UN peacekeepers—assaulting girls, women, and sometimes boys, paying them with cookies for sex. Just horrible abuse of their authority in these countries where they were supposedly trying to help people.

So we went in and we interviewed all sorts of folks. And one of the interviews that I did was with a Chilean police commander who said, look it, I have my troops from Chile, three months without sex with a woman. They can do that. Six months. That is about the limit. And I have to send them over to the Dominican Republic. This was in Haiti. I have to send them over to the doctor so they can get a sexual release over there and then they can come back. After six months, they're out of control. I can't control them anymore. That's human nature.

So that the policy implications of believing that men have an absolute biological need to have sex—and not have sex with each other, not have sex with themselves, or whatever—they have this biological need, and therefore it is justified almost if they are raping women and girls in Haiti, because what are you going to do? They haven't had a chance for sexual release in the Dominican Republic in the allotted time.

This kind of public policy, it seems to me, driven by belief about male biology, is really dangerous.

 

Stereotypes About Libido – 46:25

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I mean, your chapter on the male libido really expands on this. And as you mentioned earlier, some of the stereotypes about women's libidos have been challenged over the past few decades.

For example, the idea that women are generally frigid, that they're not into sex—this sort of Victorian view of women not really liking that, that's been debunked in a lot of places. People recognize that some women don't enjoy sex, sure, but others do very much. And so that thinking has started to shift.

But when it comes to the male libido, you say we're still operating on the old stereotypes that men are just driven by sex. They're very sexual, high libidos, even to the point of aggression. So we've changed on views of women in some ways, but we're still thinking that men are horny and not very picky.

These are some of the stereotypes and they have big social repercussions. Right. You talk about how it pertained to studying birth control in Mexico. Let's talk about that example as it pertains to these stereotypes about the male libido.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: So I did a study about vasectomies, male sterilization, and AIDS in southern Mexico, in Oaxaca. I worked in two clinics where they did vasectomies, and I worked in the state-run AIDS clinic. The AIDS patients were overwhelmingly men who had been migrants in the United States and returned home. And then they infected their wives or girlfriends or whatever, but they'd gotten infected as migrants, picking the fruit and vegetables that you and I eat every day here in the U.S.

I had spent a lot of time with what they call "white coat doctors." And time and again they told me about male libido and male sexuality being one way and female sexuality being another way, and that women are picky and men, they'll have sex with anything that they can have sex with, animal or not. And it was, to me, upsetting that there were these kinds of stereotypes.

And then they'd show me these textbooks that have been translated from medical textbooks in the United States, which basically said something similar, so that this was just reinforcing prejudices that they had. But I spent a summer, interestingly enough, in the middle of this research, interviewing indigenous midwives and healers in little villages scattered all over the mountains.

Now, these are people who did not have formal education, but they delivered a lot of babies and they did a lot of healing using medicinal plants and whatnot in their communities. And I asked them about three questions. I asked them about impotence, infertility, and infidelity.

And one of the questions I would ask is, tell me about the differences between male sexuality and female sexuality. Time and again these people would look at me and say, huh, Matt, don't you think it really depends on the individual a lot more? Why are you trying to generalize? For all men are like this sexually, all women are like that sexually?

And I would just shake my head and say, well, that's what some of the white coat doctors keep telling me. And they say, that's not my experience. The fact is there are women like this and men like that, and it really depends much more on the individual.

And I think it probably gets you into trouble making these generalizations, but it's so common among the biomedical doctors and practitioners to do this. And so one of the reasons I wrote the book was to try to challenge some of the language we use too casually to lump men in one category, sexually, aggressively, and all those kinds of things, and base it in supposed biological notions of human behavior.

 

Stereotypes About Male Violence – 50:14

 

BLAIR HODGES: It seems like such a tricky needle to thread because you're not trying to excuse male violence, male predatory behavior. You're also trying to give it a broader context and expand our ideas about what it means to be a man, what masculinity can mean, and to not just, again, just attribute it all to biology in these really simplistic, binary ways.

And so did you feel any anxiety about not coming across as an apologist for male violence, or not? Maybe downplaying it? Like, how did you kind of negotiate that? Because you say, like, yeah, there's plenty of male violence out there. There's plenty. Like, you're not dismissing that. So how did you navigate it?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I said, if you really want to address questions of violence, you cannot attribute it all to biology. That's not going to solve the problem. So that if we really want to address these things more effectively, we have to understand social and cultural kinds of ideas and influences and practices and institutions.

I mean, just to give a basic, basic example, I was born in 1953. So this was eight years after World War II ended. My father was in World War II. My uncle was in the Korean War. I grew up in a family very, very typical of the time in which the males had gone off to war of one kind or another. And I was steeped in the idea of war growing up, and I played war games with my friends. And the idea of "boys do this" was very, very natural.

So the fact is that when I ask my students at the university, how many of you signed up with the Selective Service when you turned 18, guess who raises their hands? Only the boys. None of the girls have to register in the United States, nor in 70 other countries where there is conscription. The exceptions are very, very few worldwide.

But then I say, how many of you challenge this? Why only boys? The fact is that in the United States and many other countries—but let's just take the U.S.—it has been at war of one kind or another for the better part of a hundred years in one place or another. The military in the United States plays a fundamental role. Not only is it the largest employer, but it is stationed in a thousand military bases around the world.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: And the notion that when I get on an airplane, every time they say military personnel have priority for boarding. Okay, so what does that mean? Why is that? Why?

BLAIR HODGES: I think it's our biggest budget line item, too.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Biggest budget line item. But why is the military such an important part of U.S. society in general? And what impact does that have on boys as well as girls growing up in a militarized society?

These are the kinds of questions I would like us to be addressing more carefully and not simply saying, well, boys are aggressive because they have testosterone and a Y chromosome, and this leads to more violence in the world. There's been no evidence that there's a higher rate of testosterone in the United States than in other countries. But this is the country that invades and occupies other countries more than any other in the history of humanity.

BLAIR HODGES: And this is where you were raised.

Do you remember what kind of started cracking the facade for you? What started challenging your ideas about what it would mean to be a boy or to be a man? Do you remember specific things in your life where you thought, maybe it's actually not like that?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Well, I'm not sure. I grew up with a lot of very strong women, and I think that the notion that men are in control, at least at the level of family, never occurred to me because I just didn't see much evidence for that.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Obviously, in the broader society, that may have been true. I think I was awakened politically through Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and early 70s. I think I was radicalized politically through those things.

Later on, I became increasingly aware of questions of gender. But I will say this: I don't think it was until I got to grad school, when I was older and had to pick a topic, that a friend of mine said, "Why is it only women studying gender? Why aren't there some guys?"

I said, that's a really good point. Guys need to be studied, too, in their gendered aspects, and not just take it for granted that when we say gender, that means women. It means men, too. And we don't understand nearly as much. We do take for granted some of the words that we toss out, some of the language about men. Those need to be examined and critiqued a little better.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you've been one of the pioneers here. In producing the show, it has been trickier to find books that focus on masculinity in ways I would find acceptable. There's plenty of books that are pretty stereotypical about men or just lean into all the stereotypes, but there are books like yours that really help expand our thinking in productive ways.

Again, Matthew Gutmann is our guest today, and we're talking about his book Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short. He's a professor emeritus of anthropology at Brown University and has spent over 30 years exploring notions of masculinity across places like the United States, Latin America, and China. He's also been a visiting professor at El Colegio de México and Nanjing University. He's written eight books, and he joins us today from Tiverton, Rhode Island.

 

Stereotypes About Fatherhood – 56:21

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Matt, I want to talk about your fathering chapter. You make a case that the old divisions of men providing and women nurturing just don't hold up. This was actually an attempt to manufacture gender roles, cooked up in the 50s and 60s.

You want people to understand more about men as nurturers because the stereotype that men provide and women nurture excludes men from an important part of relating with children, other men, and women. You bring it home with a photo of a man holding a baby. This is a great image.

Talk about that photo and what you ended up doing with it to learn more about men as nurturing and as fathers.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: In 1988, I was walking through downtown Mexico City, and something caught my eye in a doorway. These were the old days when I still had a film camera without autofocus. I stuck my head into my camera, focused as quickly as I could, and took a picture of a guy holding a baby in a musical instrument store. He was behind the counter, talking to a customer.

I developed the photo and showed it to friends in the U.S., and they said, "That's impossible. You say this is a Mexican guy? No, Mexican men are machos by definition. They don't have anything to do with children. That's women's work." I said, all I know is that I shot it in Mexico City, but I can't tell you more. I kept showing it to people in various places. It was like a Rorschach test because it told me more about the people commenting than the photo itself.

The neighborhood was a squatter settlement where I lived with my family for a year in the early 90s. I’d show the photo around, and the most common response was, "Me, parés normal. It looks normal to me. Why did you take the picture? Do you like mandolins?" because they saw the mandolins hanging on the wall. I said, no, there's nothing remarkable. They said, not really, why did you take it?

I showed it to friends who were more academic. They said, "Impossible. This must be the boss's child. She's making him take care of the baby. Or he must be indigenous. Maybe he has different customs. But men don't carry babies." This was all middle-class people giving that response. Evidence that these guys may have had less to do with children than the mothers in these cases. Long story short, after four years, I went back and found the guy.

BLAIR HODGES: I can't believe this. You found him?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Well, I can't believe it either because I couldn't remember exactly where it was. I was wandering the streets of downtown Mexico City, but I saw some musical instruments on a wall and thought, maybe this is the place. I felt like I was on a cop show. I showed the photograph to a young woman behind the counter and asked, have you seen this man? She yelled out, "Jose, come here."

The guy comes out, and I had to explain how a photo I'd taken surreptitiously years before had controlled my life ever since. The story was that the baby belonged to a neighbor who lived upstairs. When she went out shopping, she would leave the baby with him because it was much easier to shop without a baby to care for.

He said, "I like kids. I got three of my own." What? What's the big deal? Then he looked at me and said, "Gringos. You gringos don't like babies. What's your problem?" He turned the whole thing around on me. Instead of being the macho Mexican, it was like, this is pretty common. What's the big deal here? Why are you making such a fuss over nothing?

I did a study of what men do and don't do and concluded that, at least in the working class, it splits much more. There are some men who have very little to do with children. For others, being very active as a father is their definition of masculinity. The higher you go socially in Mexico, the less men tend to have to do with their children. They have servants who take care of the kids, their wife doesn't work, and the wife has more to do with the kids.

There was a class element here, which reversed what I thought I would find. I thought more upper-class, educated, liberal men would be more involved. It was just the opposite.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. We saw the same in the United States. That idea of the nuclear family with the man in the workforce and the woman staying home for the kids was really a middle- to upper-class fantasy, where many lower-class people weren't living that way. It just wasn't a reality for most Americans. The Leave it to Beaver picture was always the minority. Even during that time, when we look back and think that's how the world worked, it didn't really work that way.

Your chapter on fathering is great because you're arguing persuasively that men aren't naturally providers and women aren't naturally nurturers. These are things culture influences and decisions societies make about how involved men are. We can't use the excuse that men aren't good with kids by nature.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Absolutely. If you look at any agricultural community historically, men would take their little kids to the fields, maybe more boys than girls, but both. The kids would hang out with their father while he worked. When they moved to cities during the 20th-century migrations, men became factory workers, bus drivers, and couldn't take the kids with them. Parenting fell more to women, and men focused on earning money. The division of labor between men and women became much sharper in many households. But historically, it wasn't always the case to nearly the same extent.

 

Social Engineering in China – 01:03:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: Matthew, you’ve explored masculinity in different countries, including China. There's a chapter where you discuss the role culture plays in shaping gender roles and behaviors. You bring up examples of social engineering that backfired, including the Cultural Revolution. Can you give us the basics of that situation and the problems they encountered when trying to mass engineer gender roles?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Let me expand on that. I think there was a lot of top-down engineering attempted. For instance, the notion that "women hold up half the sky." One of the first efforts of the Chinese revolution in the 1950s was toward literacy for women as well as men, and doing away with repressive social stigma around women doing work men could also do. Women could perform the same work as men.

I don’t want to dive fully into the Cultural Revolution, but the fact is, there are many women in China today with PhDs running corporations. The basis for this was laid in decades of social transformation—tumultuous and sometimes horrible—but it led to high literacy rates, which were key to later social transformations.

Today, with the one-child policy and its reversal, there’s a government push for women to marry and have children, rolling back some gains women made in education and employment. For example, there’s an official government term for women 27 or older and unmarried: "leftover women." This is meant to stigmatize women, suggesting they are no longer desirable and need to marry and start having kids.

Another example is the marriage market, or Blind Date Corner, in parks like People’s Park in Shanghai. Parents post flyers with information about their son or daughter seeking a marriage partner. Education levels are highlighted, but women are emphasized for beauty and men for earning power. This reinforces traditional views: a woman’s main selling point is her looks, and a man’s is wealth and stability.

It’s interesting to see the shift. After the Cultural Revolution, women officially held equal roles, dressed similarly to men, and had similar employment and salaries, unlike in the U.S. or most countries. Now, there’s a bifurcation, a re-emphasis on traditional gender roles, yet many educated young women prioritize their careers and resist government pressures. The government tries to enforce norms, but its control is weaker than before, leading to ongoing struggle over what it means to be a man or a woman in contemporary China.

I don’t know whether that makes any sense.

BLAIR HODGES: It does make sense because China is an example of a place where expectations about gender roles have gone back and forth. There have been government efforts, and there are also regular people on the ground trying to make it work or understand gender in different ways.

As you mentioned, it's unlikely that Chinese women are going to turn in their PhDs to get sewing certificates. A lot has changed for some women in China. But you still see a sort of regression to ideas about what women are good for—whether they can reproduce and whether they are attractive. You still see examples of the siloing of people according to gendered expectations that can restrict their options.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I don't know whether it's relevant, but I've been studying suicide and gendered aspects of suicide in China and the U.S. Twenty to thirty years ago, the population with the highest suicide rate was young, newly married women in the countryside. This is very unusual worldwide because three to four times more men than women commit suicide globally, and it’s usually young men. Now it’s older men in cities.

China is undergoing incredible gender changes in a very compressed period of time. The young women in the countryside were often oppressed by their mothers-in-law. Sometimes their young husbands had already migrated to the city. As part of the 200 million-plus migration from the countryside to the city, these young women were able to move to the cities and get away from their mothers-in-law. They may still face difficult circumstances, but it’s not as dire as before.

BLAIR HODGES: And what about the pressures on men? Why are the older men the ones at higher risk now?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: That’s a great question. In the U.S., studies of retired middle-class white men show they sometimes feel they have no reason for living anymore. Their wives continue to find meaning, while the men suddenly have much less. It becomes difficult for them to sit around, feeling useless to their families, wives, and society. There are efforts to find activities for these men. It may be similar in China.

Older men, perhaps less employed, with less purpose, face pressure. Suicide rates now are about 1.5 to 1 for men to women—more men than women, which matches global trends, but not three or four times more as worldwide statistics indicate.

BLAIR HODGES: This speaks to the strength of anthropology. Cross-cultural comparisons allow us to understand what’s happening in other societies and shed light on trends in the United States. Anthropology can open our eyes about what it means to be gendered, what gender is, and what it means to be human.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I depend on people who conduct surveys. I don’t do the surveys myself, but I read them and try to understand how my conversations with 20 people fit into larger trends revealed through surveys.

 

Biology Doesn't Let Men Off the Hook – 01:13:50

 

BLAIR HODGES: One recurring message in your book is that we shouldn’t let men off the hook. Beliefs about biology shouldn’t prevent discussions about how things could be better. Can you give an example of how men are being let off the hook and what you’d like to see happen instead?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: If I comment about a woman doing something because she’s a woman, people are skeptical. If I say the same about a man, people might be less skeptical. It’s still common to assume we know things about men simply because they’re male.

Scholars of masculinities now talk about plural masculinities. There are over a hundred adjectives used to describe masculinity today. But my question is: does everything a person does have to do with masculinity? Is that the only way to describe someone as a human being? Glasses, a shirt, the objects in your background—do they reflect masculinity? We don’t do this to nearly the same extent with women. We reduce men to their bodies in a way that can excuse behavior.

BLAIR HODGES: It happens, but less so for women.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I think it’s been more challenged and correctly so, but it should still be challenged further. Men are let off the hook when everything they do is interpreted as masculinity and that’s considered the only explanation. It can be a helpful concept—I’ve spent my career developing it—but it can also get us into trouble if we think it explains everything.

BLAIR HODGES: Masculinity has been a focus of your work. You’re an expert on identifying it, but you also know it doesn’t need to be the most important thing about a person. You invite us not to essentialize by gender. With non-binary and genderqueer folks, it’s even more important to remember that masculinity is useful as a category but not the only or predominant one. We shouldn’t reduce people to biology; we’re animals, but we’re also humans.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I don’t think we should be afraid of gender, but it’s not a simple concept. It can be useful, but we can overdo it.

BLAIR HODGES: That’s Matthew Gutman, and we’re talking about the book Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:18:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: Matthew, we always like to close with “Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises.” This is an opportunity for you to speak to one, two, or all three of those things. Anything you would change about the book now that it's out, the most challenging thing about writing it, or something that surprised you during the course of writing this book?

MATTHEW GUTMANN: I think the most challenging part was coming to accept that men are animals, women are animals. What did that actually mean? What did it entail? What did it imply? Trying to figure out how to define the animality of men and what that had to do with how society organizes itself was challenging.

I've never written anything—a book or an article—that I haven't later thought, “I wish I’d done this, I wish I’d done that.” I don’t know any writer or speaker who hasn’t had some of those qualms.

At the same time, the book is out. I’m not thrilled about the cover, which, since this is a podcast, you won’t see. I argued about it, but they said, “Oh, it’ll sell more copies.” I’m not convinced, but that’s what the publisher decided.

BLAIR HODGES: It has a bone on it and it’s red.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Yeah, like a dog bone. I think I underestimated the moment of “animal fever” in the world. The trend is really in the opposite direction: finding similarities between humans and non-humans and appreciating that. All but one of my kids is vegetarian, so I’m acutely aware of that.

I don’t know how I could have rewritten the book because I’m taking the opposite stance: yes, we’re animals, but we get into trouble if we make simplistic comparisons between humans and non-humans. It can lead us to believe things that let men off the hook and don’t get to the heart of the matter. I don’t know. If there’s a second edition, I might try to nuance some of that a little better.

BLAIR HODGES: You could handle that in a new preface that says what you just said: “People love thinking about this and there are some interesting similarities, but the point of this book is to introduce bio skepticism. Let’s pause and unpack what we’re talking about.” Or maybe just have millions of people listen to this episode and problem solve.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: There we go. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Well, Matthew, this has been great. Thanks for joining us and talking about the book.

MATTHEW GUTMANN: Thank you very much again for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure.

 

Outro – 01:21:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you, Matthew. And let's send everybody off with some smooth jazz for all my low-T bros listening out there. Thank you for listening to Relationscapes. Testosterone levels are dropping as we speak I know, but that’s why I’m releasing my brand-new supplement, T-Boned. You can get your boost of T all day along with this amazing capsule of manliness. It’s guaranteed to offset all the jazz music you know and love. You can go to my website and buy it right now. Use the promo code BONED for 5% off your first 12-month T-Boned subscription. These statements have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. T-Boned is not a medical product, and it guarantees nothing. It doesn’t actually work.

If you liked this episode or this conversation, you can check out other masculinity episodes on Relationscapes. There’s “Detoxing Masculinity” with Ronald Levant and Shana Pryor, “Black and Beyond the Binary” with KB Brookins, “Masculinity, More Liberated and Free” with Frederick Joseph, or Mike Pope’s episode “Learning about Today’s Masculinity from the Ancient Romans.” Links to those episodes are in the show notes.

And now all of you, please, would you man up in your mancaves and rate and review this manly show on Apple Podcasts? You can also rate it on Spotify.

Mates of State provides our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I’m journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and I’ll see you again right after I get back from the gym.