Is There Hope for Men?
Me hanging with my son Mac, who was born in 1993.
HOBOKEN, JULY 23, 2024. I’ve been looking for good news, and I just found it in the form of a new book: Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
Hrdy is one of my favorite anthropologists. Her 2009 book Mothers and Others, which I cite in The End of War, helped me see that war and patriarchy have common roots. I read Father Time after hearing Hrdy talk about it in May at the American Museum of Natural History.
Hrdy’s lecture inspired me, her book even more so. Oh, what a feast of observations, insights and conjectures about the myriad manifestations of fatherhood! And all in the service of a hopeful hypothesis, which I’m bolding because it’s so important:
If a man spends lots of time hanging with a baby--feeding, washing, cuddling, comforting, cooing, dandling, goofing--good things happen: good for the baby, for the baby’s mother, for the man, for all of us. And it doesn’t even have to be the man’s kid!
This thesis represents a turnaround in Hrdy’s view of dads. When she gave birth to her first child in 1977, scientists and non-scientists alike assumed that caring for babies is the mom’s job. Period. Hrdy was a postdoc at Harvard then, and her mentor, evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, said she should spend less time on her research and more on her daughter. (Trivers is a trip, see my profile of him here.)
Hrdy feared Trivers was right. She accepted the “standard Darwinian script,” that “while females were nurturing babies, males were otherwise occupied, mostly competing for status and mates, often violently or coercively.” Even anthropologist Margaret Mead, renowned for challenging gender stereotypes, asserted that “motherhood is a biological necessity, but fatherhood a cultural invention.”
Hrdy herself established in her 1977 book The Langurs of Abu that sexual competition compels male langur monkeys to kill other males’ offspring; this sort of infanticide has now been observed in many primates. “Statistically speaking,” Hrdy writes in Father Time, “male great apes are more nearly existential threats to new babies than reliable caregivers.”
Hrdy began questioning her assumptions about fathers in 2014 while observing her son-in-law David doting on his infant son. David is one of a growing number of modern men--married and single, straight and gay—devoted to childcare. The time American fathers spend with their kids nearly tripled between 1965 and 2011, from 2.5 to 7.3 hours per week, according to one study.
Hrdy was “astounded” and caught “off guard” by this trend, and she set out to investigate it. Is male caregiving entirely cultural, or does it have biological underpinnings? The latter, it turns out. Research reveals that men caring for babies undergo hormonal changes; they have lower levels of testosterone, associated with aggression, and higher levels of oxytocin, which promotes emotional bonding.
These findings apply to gay as well as heterosexual dads and even to men dandling others’ kids. Men in close proximity to babies, Hrdy writes, undergo hormonal changes that “resemble those of mothers.” Hrdy’s experiments on her own male family members—which involved collecting saliva samples for analysis—corroborate the emerging scientific consensus.
Another striking finding: brain-imaging studies reveal that infant-care activates neural circuits within the limbic systems of men as well as women. These neural circuits, Hrdy says, are ancient, dating “back to the first mammals, and even further, to their early vertebrate precursors.”
Biological changes in men like her son-in-law, Hrdy concludes, are not entirely the product of recent hominid evolution. After all, male caregiving is rare among other primates and especially in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. In fact, paws-on fatherhood is rare among mammals as a whole.
These facts push Hrdy toward a bold conjecture: modern men’s parental potential stems at least in part from adaptations that predate mammals. Male caregiving, she points out, has been observed among many species of birds and fish, whose lineages are older than mammals’. Consider the seahorse, which inseminates his mate and brings her fertilized eggs to term in his belly.
Nature is “frugal,” Hrdy says, preserving old adaptations for possible repurposing. Hence long-dormant genes and neural circuits can be activated under the right circumstances—for example, when modern men, nudged by feminism and other cultural transformations, spend more time with babes.
I often rant about biodeterminism, which explains what we do in biological terms. Biodeterminism suggests that social blights such as racial and sexual inequality and war have genetic roots and hence will be hard to eradicate. Hard-core biodeterminists deny that we have free will, the power to choose a different collective course.
That’s bad biodeterminism. Hrdy promotes good biodeterminism. She shows that our biology gives us options, choices, the power to improve our lot. In its scope and ambition, Father Time reminds me of the 2021 bestseller The Dawn of Everything, in which anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow contend that our ancestors were surprisingly creative, experimental and varied in their social arrangements.
But Graeber and Wengrow left me thinking, So what? What should we do to make the world a better place? Hrdy, in contrast, offers a straightforward answer: to make the world a better place—less patriarchal and militaristic and more egalitarian—we just need to help dads, and men in general, spend more time with kids.
Anthropologists have long known that societies in which men hang out with mothers and children tend to be less violent and warlike. Moreover, men “exposed to cues from babies tend to be more other-regarding and generous,” Hrdy notes. Even capitalists have embraced the idea of quality dad-time! Hrdy reports that corporations are giving male employees paid paternity leave because this policy benefits businesses’ bottom line.
Unfortunately, powerful cultural forces, religious and political, oppose the idea that men should be as nurturing as women. Listen, for example, to how anti-woke bros Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk talk about gender in this video. Donald Trump, role-model-in-chief for millions of men, once bragged that he never changed a diaper because it’s his wife’s job to “take care of the kids.” He has supported paid family leave for mothers but not fathers.
Fortunately, younger, cooler men reject Trump’s cartoonishly retro stance. Hrdy named her book after the song Father Time, in which rapper Kendrick Lamar repudiates macho masculinity and embraces a more nurturing version of manhood—and fatherhood.
So to answer the question posed by my headline: Yes, there is hope for men, and for all of us, as long as we don’t backslide towards an atavistic, destructive version of manhood.
Postscript, 11/29.24: Science writer Cynthia Fox just alerted me to a JAMA Psychiatry article that corroborates Hrdy’s thesis: “How the Paternal Brain Is Wired by Pregnancy.”
Further Reading:
Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!
Judith Butler on Nonviolence: A Critique
Dear Student Protesters, Please Oppose All War
I Am One of Those Evil Woke Professors
Is Killing Children Ever Justified?
Free Will and the Sapolsky Paradox