What is the biggest challenge to improving the wellbeing of men and boys?
[This blog was the winning entry to our competition for a free ticket to Saturday of the Male Psychology Conference 2019. We posed the question ‘What do you see as the biggest challenge to improving the wellbeing of men and boys?’ and this was the winning response].
What is the biggest challenge to improving the wellbeing of men and boys? In a word, gynocentrism: the innate predisposition towards the protection and preservation of women and girls, the limiting and unique source of our species’ biological success.
Men are essential and equally unique, but vastly less limited as seed for the source. This renders them less valuable to the point that they are more readily disposable. When humans make their Sophie’s Choice, they save their daughters. Under the conditions of competing priorities, we are encoded with an algorithm that defaults to the preservation of the female or, under intense environmental pressure, perish.
This is amply illustrated in Asimov’s backstory to I Robot, where the maverick male cop was saved in statistical preference to a young girl by a non-human not programmed to make an evolutionary-scale calculation, but an immediate one. Without such a deep-running programme, Bowie’s Saviour Machine might send an equal number of men and women into the abyss to defend the tribe from predacious chaos, but with that ancient, instinctual, visceral wisdom factored in, it would only be strong young men sent to risk damage and death; its logic incontrovertible. And it has been this way for at least six million years, if not twenty or more.
Behind the apparent patriarchy lies another force. In one of the largest mammals on Earth, killer whales, this matriarchy is observable as the post-menopausal female, in the three dimensions of the deep, high and to the rear of the whale pod, navigating and supervising. In the centre swim the pups surrounded by their young mothers, and around them their parents with the males towards the edges. Front and centre, and darting all around, are the childless and virile young males, scarred from barracuda attack.
If one removes the abstract human notions of power, money and ownership, humans have a dual bi-sexual hierarchy, each hemisphere with its own modus operandi and specialization necessarily and inextricable bound together to drive the whole helix forward through time. Our nursing homes are full of elderly widows, the remaining survivors of their cohort.
The data are clear that it is testosterone in its many manifestations that shortens male life expectancy through a proclivity for high-risk, high reward, lower agreeableness strategies as juxtaposed against the risk-averse, higher-agreeableness, maternal, female strategy. The secondary relative value of male wellbeing is the stumbling block to improving it. Resources are finite; need is irrefutable; perceived need is infinite; there’s always room for improvement. In cases of acute illness and trauma, it demands a strict protocol ensuring the objective assessment of clinical need to determine which patient is a priority over which other. With chronic, sub-clinical need and lower-impact malaise, the vital signs are not so clear and are more subject to cultural, including political, pressure.
I spent some time with an ambulance operator, the survivor of a suicide attempt. He taught me that when you attend the scene of a multi-vehicle incident on a motorway, don’t pay immediate attention to those screaming for help. Instead, seek out the quiet ones slowly turning white. They are the ones in real trouble. And an acoustics engineer taught me that the brain compresses sound for processing by attenuating to the loudest sound at any given moment. On average, women experience more psychological distress and discomfort than men, and complain about it more verbally. The foundation of all social health and care policy, and of the predominate culture, therefore, is to attend more to the female scream. In competition for human, financial, healthcare and emotional support resources, women win.
This genetic preference expressed both personally and politically lies so deep it includes many males’ intrinsic sense of relative worthlessness, particularly without work, family or religion. It is embedded in the training centres of our social care, social science, and education and media institutions, and is fundamental to many our guiding myths and metanarratives.
This is not about apportioning blame, but an attempt to describe and explain. Until we learn to fully apply abstract human constructs like equality, fairness and equal value to the disbursement of our finite resources, empathies towards, and support efforts for, the male of the species, gynocentrism will remain the biggest challenge to improving the wellbeing of men and boys.
This article was first published on the Male Psychology Network website in 2019
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Disclaimer: This article is for information purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy, legal advice, or other professional opinion. Never disregard such advice because of this article or anything else you have read from the Centre for Male Psychology. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of, or are endorsed by, The Centre for Male Psychology, and we cannot be held responsible for these views. Read our full disclaimer here.
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After an earlier career in engineering, Richard Elliott switched to psychology in the late 1980s graduating with a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and Sociology from Uni. of Bath in 1992 with a dissertation on research conducted in a forensic setting. From there he moved to Avon Probation, then NACRO, the NHS and local government where he worked as a clinical auditor and commission manager. Having taken an MA in Professional Writing with Uni of Falmouth, he is soon to embark on an MSc in Biological Anthropology at Canterbury. He’s long taken a keen interest in men’s issues and was the UK promoter of Cassie Jaye’s Red Pill documentary, funding the premiere in London and 7 other cinema screenings around the country.