A zoology of male psychology: why understanding men doesn’t have to be a turtle disaster

Dec 2

Jordan Peterson used lobsters to explain hierarchy, Nassim Taleb used a black swan to illustrate unexpected events, and Gad Saad used parasites to explain infectious ideas. So which animals are used to explain male psychology? Well, looking back over the past decade of lectures, workshops and publications, it turns out that cats, rats, turtles, elephants, mice, ducks and rabbits have all made an appearance. Let’s have a look at what these critters have taught us.

Cats, rats and the bubonic plague: the unintended consequences of demonising masculinity

If everyone agrees that something is no good, it makes sense to get rid of it, right?

“In what must have seemed like a good idea at the time, in the year 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued a papal decree that Satan was half-cat and sometimes took the form of a cat. The violent result of this decree was a diminished population of feral cats in Europe. A century later, mice and rats spread the bubonic plague throughout Europe with ease, due to the depletion of their natural predator, the cat” (Perspectives in Male Psychology, pages 255).

This story dramatically illustrates the point that one should be very careful about declaring something to be completely unacceptable, because, as so happens often in life, you only realise the true value of something when you have lost it. The people of medieval Europe demonised cats, but for modern western culture, with the popularity of scornful ideas like ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘hegemonic masculinity’, the issue is even more potentially catastrophic. Traditional masculinity - with values such as being competitive, risk-taking, and stoical - is being talked about as if it’s a bad thing. It might only be when you are in a burning building and can’t find an everyday hero to carry you out of there that you suddenly understand how Pope Gregory IX’s attitude to cats led to an era characterised by despair.

A ‘turtle disaster’ for gender equality
Probably lots of people have seen in the moving documentary showing the great night-time rush of newly-hatched turtles across the moonlit beach towards the sea. But this touching sight is soured by the sight of predators treating this exuberant mass sprint as a massive buffet. In response, in the 1970s conservation biologists, sometimes assisted by schoolchildren, took pre-emptive action to save the baby turtles. They did so…

“…by digging up the eggs before they hatched, incubating them under laboratory conditions until they hatched and had grown enough to be more able to survive,
and then releasing them directly into the sea. This seemed like a good solution,
but the biologists did not realise that the temperature at which the eggs
are incubated influences the sex of the turtle, and that colder conditions favour
the birth of males. It takes about 20 years for the sex of turtles to become
apparent, and in this time the conservationists realised that their incubators
were slightly too cool, so they had flooded the turtle ecosystem with males.
This reduced breeding opportunities, and negatively impacted the size of the
turtle population. So despite their well-meaning efforts, the conservation biologists
were working counter to their goal of helping the turtle population (Mank,
2016)” (Perspectives in Male Psychology, pages 272-3).

Similarly, ‘turning up the heat’ on traditional masculinity in order to improve male behaviour might have unforeseen negative consequences, potentially making some boys more compliant, but others more rebellious, and others more depressed. Similarly, social engineering gender norms might even be having a negative impact on girls: “mental health tends to be worse for girls in more gender-equal countries, possibly because of the greater pressure on them to compete and achieve in traditionally male areas of life” (Perspectives in Male Psychology, page 273). Personally, I believe people should be encouraged to develop in whatever way suits them best, but these days it seems that men are being encouraged to be less masculine and women are encouraged to be more masculine.

How many elephants in the room does it take for a psychologist to change their view of male suicide?
The elephant in the room is the thing that everybody knows is there but nobody seems to want to acknowledge. This elephant has been with male psychology since our earliest days, used first by Martin Seager in lectures and workshops to describe the invisibility of the male gender in discussions of suicide statistics. Everyone recognises that 75% of suicides are male, but almost no professionals ask the obvious question: what is it about being a man that makes you think that killing yourself is preferable to living? When the question does arise, it is often responded to with victim blaming e.g. ‘if men just went to a therapist they wouldn’t kill themselves’. Or even worse, lame attempts to laugh it off, as I had experienced on my undergraduate psychology degree:

“The [seminar] group had spent a lot of time exploring
possible theory-based reasons for female depression (e.g. the female gender role
leading to learned helplessness), but then swiftly glossed over the subject of
high male suicide rates with a “humorous” remark: “men construct more lethal
methods because they are better at DIY”. This raised a few giggles at the seminar,
and the group quickly moved on to the next topic.” (Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health, p.87)

Despite our continuing efforts to raise awareness about men’s mental health, it still remains an elephant in the room in academia and therapy rooms to this day.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC

How six blind men and one elephant can help you get some perspective on men
An ancient Hindu parable tells of how six blind men, who have never seen an elephant before, try to understand what it is like. Upon stumbling across an elephant, each grasps a different part of its body – a leg, the trunk, the tail, and ear etc – in an attempt to know what an elephant is really like. Each man grapples with a different part of the elephant, and each comes away with a different view of what an elephant is. The one who grasps the tail says ‘the elephant is like a rope!’. The one who grasps the leg says “No, the elephant is like a tree!”. To paraphrase the American poet John Godfrey Saxe: each was partly in the right, but all were in the wrong.

For years I have used the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant to describe how there are many different ways to understand human behaviour (e.g. the evolutionary perspective, the social perspective, the biological, etc), but that no single perspective by itself fully captures the multidimensional complexity of human behaviour. In the recent book Perspectives in Male Psychology we echoed the parable of the blind men and the elephant to illustrate that there are various ways that we can understand men:

“…how might different perspectives in psychology explain
one man shouting at another man in the street? The evolutionary perspective
might suggest that in some way his behaviour is aiding his
survival; the social approach might suggest it is part of assertion of his
social group identity; the biological explanation might say low blood sugar
levels are causing an attack of hypoglycaemia-related aggression;
the humanistic approach might say his behaviour is caused by a frustration
of the ability to achieve basic human needs such as a sense of
safety; the psychodynamic approach might suggest that he is displacing
his feeling of anger towards his boss onto a passer by; the behavioural
approach might say the man has found that when he shouts at others h
gets what he wants.” (Perspectives in Male Psychology, page 20).

As can been seen in this example, some of these explanations are more plausible than others, and it usually requires taking at least two perspectives into account in order to understand the complexity of human behaviour. All too often these days men are seen in unidimensional terms (e.g. their behaviour is the result of the influence of antisocial male role models) rather than treating them as full human beings.

Mice prove that things can be very similar and very different at the same time
The idea that ‘there are more similarities between men and women than differences’ has become a monolithic truth in the social sciences. However this idea is based on the assumption that because there are more similarities than differences, that the differences are automatically irrelevant. Martin Seager came up with a compelling way to demonstrate that just because things might be similar in most ways, they still might be very different in other ways:

“… we could say that because mice and
humans share 95% of their genes, the differences between mice and humans
are unimportant” (Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health, p.20).

Examples of this ‘similar but different’ phenomenon came up so often in different contexts that Louise Liddon and I referred to it as “the difference that makes the difference” (Perspectives in Male Psychology, page 275).

Is it a rabbit or a duck? Relax - it’s both.
Sometimes academics vehemently disagree about an issue even though they are basing their opinions on the same set of data. Since childhood I have been fond of optical illusions, and it occurred to me that some academic arguments can be better understood by reference to the classic rabbit/duck optical illusion. In this example, we refer to the historical fact that men in most communities are expected to do the most dangerous – and often dirtiest - jobs:

“Nobody’s life is without suffering, but the suggestion that women have
been oppressed by the patriarchy is at best an untested theory and at worst
a damaging distortion. At best, it is like looking at the famous rabbit/duck
illusion and claiming that there is only a rabbit and no duck, or that the rabbit
is being oppressed by the duck”
(Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health, p.100).

This doesn’t mean that patriarchies have never existed, just that human suffering is a burden shared by men too.

Using animal metaphors in male psychology was never a conscious decision, but a natural result of struggling to find a way to explain something complex in more familiar terms. However now that I am aware of this phenomenon, I am wondering vaguely what the next member of our menagerie is going to be. A goose to explain substance abuse? An otter to demonstrate the biological pathways of testosterone? Who knows, but I hope the above examples show that teaching and learning can be creative and have an element of fun.

If you have enjoyed these examples, please let me know of other examples of animal metaphors you have found interesting. You can use the comments section below so that others can enjoy your suggestions too.

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