Obstacles to a Good Life for Boys and Men

I love men. Maybe because I’m a tomboy and can get in sync with male energy. Or maybe because I grew up with brothers. Or maybe because I had a special bond with my father.

In any case I am worried about them, especially about boys. Their wellbeing has been noticeably deteriorating for decades. All people are suffering from our life-killing systems, but they harm males more. Boys are disadvantaged from the beginning.

 

Neurobiological Disadvantage

Boy babies have less built-in resilience than girls, and so undercare (a degraded evolved nest) will have greater impact on them than on girls.

 

Physiological Disadvantage

Boys mature more slowly and so they need nurturing for longer. But they usually get less.

Undercare (lack of evolved nest) in early life leads to underdevelopment of many capacities and misdirection of system development.

Undercare enhances primitive survival systems like the stress response, making them easily triggered. Built-in emotion systems of panic, fear, anger, lust get conditioned up, easily activated, which the foundations for controlling them is impaired. These include fear, panic, anger and basic lust. The timing, intensity and duration of undercare, trauma or abuse factor into which kind of damage is done to a rapidly developing brain.

Generally, aspects of right brain development will be missing because it takes immersion in the evolved nest to fully nurture right brain capacities, which grow more rapidly in early life and through evolved nest experiences.

The overall result however, is dysregulation of some sort. Perhaps it is easily flying off the handle, or triggered lust, or panic.

 

Psychological Disadvantage

Social stress impacts young boys more than girls, impairing the trajectory of development.

One’s psyche is damaged by early undercare in one way or another. This represents early toxic stress. Social capacities are underdeveloped and morality, due to easy triggering, can be self-focused protectionism.

 

Cultural Disadvantage

When boys are shut down by being told “Boys don’t cry,” they learn to bottle up current feelings and instead put them somewhere else. Males tend to ‘externalize’ feelings, so that when they feel distressed, ‘it is their fault.’ Lack of self insight makes it easy to blame something/someone else.

 

Rationalizing Narratives

According to brain hemisphere experiments, the left hemisphere is superb at making things up when it has no idea what is going on (e.g., when it is numbed out or the right eye is covered). Humans easily make up reasons for their behavior—rationalizations.

The ‘boys will be boys’ rationalization for male dysregulation and misdevelopment is a common way to relieve guilt in adults. The societies where boys are undercared for are the ones who have the most dysregulated males, men who are easily triggered into anger or aggression or withdrawal—showing a stress response. Do you know any uncommunicative men, or do you have a grumpy uncle?

There are degrees of dysregulation. Fixed mindsets, intellectualizing and staying away from emotions, rigid scripts for social interactions are all signs of some impairment. The most detached, intellectualizing people can be the most dangerous.

 

Educational Disadvantage

Boys mature more slowly (months behind girls in babyhood; after that, two years behind until nearly age 30) but they are put into classrooms with same-age girls. Girls are better able to put up with the deadening experience of most schooling in industrialized nations. Boys tend to get into trouble and then, in the USA, tend to be put on drugs to keep them under control.

So how can elite adult males have so much power over everyone?

If boys and men are doing so badly, how come elite males tend to be in charge of the world? In some cultures, males have been acting like they own the world for some time. A few millennia in hierarchical patriarchal systems got us here (remember our species has been around for around 300,000 years; egalitarian for most of human existence). Today, we’ve got billionaires who have lost their interest in collaboration but want to act like kings.

The domineering orientation is a signal of at least three things:

First, undercare in early life with its toxic stress undermining social and emotional intelligence, fostering a dominance orientation. Their neurobiology is not set up for egalitarianism.

Second, ego inflation can get out of hand for any human being. So much so that those who live in our ancestral context, hunter-gatherer bands, do not put up with big egos. They explain that they are dangerous to everyone else. Psychological studies demonstrate that those with privilege tend to lose empathy for those without. Band members don’t punish ego inflation, they mercilessly tease them away. What has happened, especially with predatory capitalism, is that we have allowed the privileged to hoard power, including manipulating politicians to keep the world safe for them.

Third, it is not normal in our species for males to be isolated with one another, as occurs in many corporations and government structures. Testosterone rises and male rivalry gets out of hand. Species normality is immersion in the evolved nest, where multi-gender and multi-age living is the daily norm. Physical closeness to babies lowers testosterone, in comparison to males who spend time mostly with males (which artificially raises levels, from an evolutionary standpoint).

So the normality we need to return to is the evolved nest and the sociopolitical practices of an intolerance for ego inflation.  We also need to live daily with babies and young children, passing babies around respectfully and sensitively to everyone, arms to arms, and physically actively playing with young children. Both are healing experiences.

 

References

Finnegan, M. (2013). The politics of Eros: ritual dialogue and egalitarianism in three Central African hunter-gatherer societies Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, 697-715. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12060

Gettler LT, Feranil A, McDade TW, Kuzawa CW. 2011. Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males. PNAS 108(29):16194-16199.

Lee, R. B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, women, and work in a foraging community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world (vol. I and II).  London: Perspectiva Press.

Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York: Norton.

Neiman, G. (2023). Rich white men: What it takes to uproot the old boys’ club and transform America. Legacy Lit.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schore, A.N. (2017). All our sons: The developmental neurobiology and neuroendocrinology of boys at risk. Infant Mental Health Journal, 38(1),15-52.  doi: 10.1002/imhj.21616

Schore, A.N. (2019). The development of the unconscious mind. New York: W.W. Norton.