Men And High Status

Here’s an interesting article about men and our need to achieve high status in society.

June 16 issue – Genghis Khan was not one to
agonize over gender roles. He was into sex and power, and he didn’t
mind saying so. “The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his
enemies and drive them before him,” the emperor once thundered, “to
ride their horses and take away their possessions!”

Genghis
Khan conquered two thirds of the known world during the early 13th
century, amassing an empire that stretched from Eastern Europe to
Korea. And he may have set an all-time record for what biologists call
reproductive success. An account written 33 years after his death
credited him with 20,000 descendants. Today researchers believe that 8
percent of the people living in the former empire may bear the leader’s
genes.

Men’s manners have improved
markedly since Genghis Khan’s day. Harems went out of style centuries
ago, and even despots now disavow pillage and oppression as ideals. At
heart, though, we’re the same animals we were 800 years ago. Which is
to say we are status seekers. We may talk of equality and fraternity.
We may strive for classless societies. But we go right on building
hierarchies, and jockeying for status within them. Can we abandon the
tendency? Probably not. For as scientists are now discovering, status
seeking is not just a habit or a cultural tradition. It’s a design
feature of the male psyche—a biological drive that is rooted in the
nervous system and regulated by hormones and brain chemicals. The drive
for dominance skews our perceptions, colors our friendships, shapes our
moods and affects our health. But we’re not always worse off for it.
Hierarchies can produce harmony as well as strife and injustice. And
even if we can’t level them, there is no question we can make them more
benign.

Males are not the only ones who
crave status (remember Tonya Harding?), but we pursue it more doggedly
than females at every stage of life. Studies suggest that boys are more
assertive than girls at 13 months, more aggressive as toddlers and more
competitive at almost any age. While schoolgirls engage in cooperative
play, boys as young as 6 establish dominance hierarchies and maintain
them through rough-and-tumble games. As adolescents, we boast, threaten
and joust more than girls do. As adults, we’re less bothered by social
disparities, more supportive of military spending and less likely to
share intimate feelings with friends of the same sex. “Men’s
relationships are more like alliances,” Durham University psychologist
Anne Campbell observes in her recent book “A Mind of Her Own.” “They
support one another and share their interests and activities, but
always with wariness.”

How do we know this
relentless one-upmanship is a biological endowment? If the tendency
showed up only in certain societies, it would be easier to dismiss as
something we learn. But anthropologists find the same pattern virtually
everywhere they look—and so do zoologists. Male competition is fierce
among crickets, crayfish and elephants, and it’s ubiquitous among
higher primates. “Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive
for dominance,” says Frans de Waal, a behavioral scientist at Emory
University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. “They’re
constantly jockeying for position.” Like human males, chimps will
bluff, scheme and sometimes murder to maintain or usurp rank. And, like
human males, they respond physically as well as emotionally to advances
and setbacks. When men prepare for a fight, or even a chess match,
their bodies produce a surge of testosterone, a hormone known for
boosting body mass and aggressiveness. “The testosterone level peaks
during the contest,” says Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham.
“Afterward it stays high in the winner but declines in the loser.” In
other words, our glands are set to push us into winnable conflicts and
to discourage foolish ambitions. Coincidence?

Evolutionists
don’t think so. From their perspective, life is essentially a race to
reproduce, and natural selection is bound to favor different strategies
in different organisms. Why should males be more primed than females to
jockey for dominant status? In reproductive terms, they have vastly
more to gain from it. A female can’t flood the gene pool by
commandeering extra mates; no matter how much sperm she attracts, she
is unlikely to produce more than a dozen viable offspring. But as
Genghis Khan’s exploits make clear, males can profit enormously by out
mating their peers. “If 10 percent of men can have a monopoly on 50
percent of the female population,” Campbell observes, “other men are
faced with the possibility of going to their graves childless unless
they fight for their share of the reproductive opportunity.” It’s not
hard to see how that dynamic, played out over millions of years, would
leave modern men fretting over status. We’re built from the genes that
the most determined competitors passed down.

Fortunately,
we don’t aspire to families of 800. As monogamy and contraceptives may
have leveled the reproductive playfield, power has become its own
psychological reward. “It’s part of the male identity,” says University
of Connecticut psychologist James O’Neil. “We strive for success and
upward mobility.” But those who achieve high status still enjoy more
sex with more partners than the rest of us, and the reason is no
mystery. Researchers have gathered voluminous data on women’s mating
preferences over the past half century. They have studied primitive
societies, conducted international surveys, run lab experiments—even
analyzed personals ads—and they have consistently found that women
favor signs of “earning capacity” over good looks. For sheer sex
appeal, a doughy bald guy in a blue blazer and a Rolex will outscore a
stud in a Burger King uniform almost every time. Power, it seems,
really is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

By the
same token, powerlessness can be toxic. Scores of studies have linked
male depression to problems with success, power and competition. A
sudden loss of employment can be especially devastating, says
University of Texas psychologist David Buss, costing men their
marriages as well as their self-esteem. The stress of subordination may
even cause physical illness. “Low socioeconomic status carries with it
an enormously increased risk of a broad range of diseases,” says
Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky, “and this gradient cannot be fully
explained by factors such as health-care access.” Animal studies
suggest that low status can raise blood pressure, suppress the immune
system and damage the heart. The effects on human health are less
clear, but Sapolsky predicts that scientists will uncover the same
connections.

Is there any hope for peace,
justice or widespread happiness in a world so ineluctably stratified?
The prospects aren’t nearly as grim as all these findings suggest. Men
may be obsessed with rank, but we’re not always in conflict over it. In
fact, once we work out who’s higher and lower, we often relax and get
along quite well. “If resources are divvied up unevenly,” says
Sapolsky, “you can fight it out tooth and claw for everything, or you
can have a stable dominance system that gets you the same result
without having to go through the battle every time. It’s a conservative
way of avoiding fighting.” True, life at the bottom of the heap can be
awful, but the top is not the only place to find fulfillment. “People
often think that social rank is about everybody trying to get high
rank,” says University of Derby psychologist Paul Gilbert. “There’s an
important difference between pursuing high rank and avoiding low rank.”
Middle management can be a good deal if the boss is not a tyrant. And
even if you land at the bottom of one hierarchy, it’s often possible to
distinguish yourself in another one. Janitor by day, martial-arts
master by night.

That’s not to say things
always work out for the best. The world is full of would-be despots,
and “take more than your share” is still the alpha-male motto. Berkeley
psychologist Dacher Keltner notes that America’s top CEOs now average
$37.5 million in annual earnings—more than 1,000 times the salary of an
average worker. Genghis Khan would approve. The good news is that
status doesn’t survive by power alone. Even among nonhuman primates,
the most durable leaders are those who kiss babies, flatter allies and
share their bounty—in short, the ones who govern by consent. They may
have testosterone to spare, but it is matched and balanced by
serotonin, a neurotransmitter critical for controlling impulses. And
though quick to confront potential challengers, they employ more bluff
than force. “If you have to abuse your power,” says Sapolsky, “you’re
probably in the process of losing it.” Men will surely continue to
learn that lesson the hard way. But we’ve come a fair distance already,
and the millennium is young.