Guys have this weird thing that happens to them. It has to do with testosterone. This is what makes them fundamentally different from women. It’s that thing that keeps them from ever asking directions when they’re lost. It’s what prevents them from putting the lid back on the tube of toothpaste, and gives them an irrational fear of the vacuum cleaner. It makes them, ultimately, the more brutish and primitive of the sexes. Ok, I’m just kidding. Women are just as brutish and primitive, we just know how to hide it better. I think it’s the testosterone that also gives them a massive competitive physical drive, something held over from the cro-magnon days that fuels a man’s need to prove his physical prowess and dominance.
I was in a club with my boyfriend Jake, a girlfriend of mine, and her date for the evening. We were having a couple of beers and discussing the awkward people flailing on the dance floor. Beer tends to draw the cave man out of the cave, and before long the words “arm wrestle” were grunted. Oh brother. Here we go. Let the testosterone festival begin. My girlfriend and I just rolled our eyes at eachother, mutually disgusted by our mates’ need to do the whole alpha-male dominance order thing.
We cleared an area on the table and the boys went at it. They both started out moderately, trying to gauge the other’s strength. Their hands wavered back and forth but remained, for the most part, in the middle. Then suddenly I could see them turn on the juice. Muscles in both their arms tensed and the veins bulged. Their fists shook with determination and their faces screwed up tight. They stared intently into eachother’s eyes, teeth bared in primate attack mode. Their clasped hands moved towards the table, Jake’s hand on top. His competitor held him for a few moments longer but he was too far down to come back. Jake slammed his hand down on the table, unsettling some of the beer glasses. It was a gratuitous gesture of dominance. And in a moment it was all over, and they were once again friendly and wholly nonaggressive, the alpha-male having been established. And lo and behold, the winner was my little monkey boy. Now here’s the thing that kind of freaked me out. When the whole test fest was over, I found myself excited by the experience. Not in a get-me-wet kind of sexual way, although...
Just like Jake’s drive to compete was linked to an age old biological need to ascertain supremacy and territorial boundaries, some primitive cave-woman instinct in me was switched on, and I thrilled at his “dominance”. I was glad he won. I was proud of him, and I felt the need to validate and praise my dominant male. I even think the words “My hero!” escaped my lips, I am somewhat ashamed to say. Yet this pride was tempered by the notion that what I was feeling was ridiculous and incongruent with my typically feminist views. This conflict prompted me to search for the origins of my surprising reaction.
I traced it back to an age old biological need of women to be “protected” by a man, a revelation which was, at first, rather disconcerting to me. In the wild, the female of the species typically seeks out two things in a potential mate: signs that he will be a nurturing father, and signs that he will be able to protect his mate and brood from harm. Often the latter translates into brute physical strength. While this is not so much the case with humans, there was a time not so long ago when it was. As a modern woman with modern sensibilities, I was disgusted by the display of, as well as the male ‘need’ to participate in, the pecking order competition. But as a creature responding to thousands of years of genetic history, I was thrilled by it.
I’m not going to say that genetic predisposition (not to mention social conditioning) makes the ceremony for dominance and my reaction to it acceptable, though it would be an easy case to make. 100 years of progressive thinking can’t undo thousands of years of biological history, right? And why not make the case? A scenario like this, in the grand scheme of things, is wholly unimportant. But the way we view this story has broad implications. Men often use these same biological theories to rationalize being crude, chauvanistic, aggressive, even violent. If I give in and say that it’s OK for my boyfriend to throw his manhood around, and it’s OK for me to feel giddily “protected” by this display - because there’s a biological push for us to feel this way - then I am also giving license to those fellows out there to go ahead and act like uncivilized pigs, to treat me differently because I’m a woman, and to be aggressive and perhaps violent, because biologically they can’t help it. Why not then say it’s OK for my boyfriend to beat up every man that looks at me, forbid me to leave the house without his accompaniment, drag me around by my hair; OK for me to feel that I can’t do anything for myself and need a big strong man to take care of me since I’m just a weak, helpless little woman? The jump from one to the other is not so wide. How, then, do I reconcile the conflict between the conscious feminism and the instinctual genetic history that both reside in me? Neither side can be denied. The trick is in learning how to live with both the modern and the monkey woman. Recognizing that these types of feelings are a holdover from more primitive times is important in itself. But we need to then further realize that we are also evolving beyond that past, and that social evolution is a conscious effort.
Copyright 1998 Jennifer Chung
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