Rory Sutherland has narrated this article for you to listen to.
I am a proud father. Both my daughters got good degrees. But better still, they smoke, go to pubs and drink Guinness. I suspect they may sometimes drink rosé or prosecco behind my back, but I soldier on. You see, if you are the lone man in an otherwise all-female family, it’s important to make sure overall testosterone levels don’t decline too far. Kanye West found much the same thing when he lived with the Kardashians.
It is a man’s ‘job’ to be stupid – to take rapid, risky decisions with high variance outcomes in the hope that they pay off
And at least neither of my daughters likes Taylor Swift. So that’s another small win for the Y chromosome. Is it just me, or is there something odd with the culture when the world’s most successful musician has absolutely no appeal to men whatsoever? It’s not as though my own musical tastes are aggressively heterosexual: I love a good Bonnie Tyler power ballad, and I consider Abba’s ‘The Day Before You Came’ one of the greatest songs ever written (even though the timeline in the lyrics doesn’t quite stack up).
A conservative take on this topic is to be found on YouTube, where at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C. last month Helen Andrews gave a talk entitled ‘Overcoming the Feminisation of Culture’. Watch it and it’s hard to deny that she has a point. As women continue their long sashay through the institutions, and given the curse of the double-income trap which means it is impossible in many places to own or even rent a home on a single salary, we should be alert to unintended consequences of overly feminised domains. For instance, Andrews points out that men no longer read fiction – which may be connected to the fact that 80 per cent of people working in publishing are women. HR as a discipline is a complete matriarchy.
Nonetheless, I think Andrews might have branded this wrongly. The thing to fear may not be feminisation, but emasculation: the loss of traditionally male qualities which cannot survive below a certain threshold. You might expect me here to cite honour or bravery or parallel parking or something. No. In evolutionary terms, two of the most essential male qualities are stupidity and the ability to behave with a complete lack of empathy, even to the point of taking delight in the misfortunes of your own friends.
In reproductive terms, men are disposable. It is their ‘job’, in a wider evolutionary sense, to be stupid – to take rapid, risky decisions with high variance outcomes in the hope that they pay off.
In certain settings, it is also vital to achieve a complete suspension of empathy. Lucy Letby’s solicitor recently said of the nurse’s trial that it was upsetting to the victims’ families to question the verdict. What?
If you want to know what it once meant to be a man, consider someone who worked for my grandfather in Tredegar in the 1930s. He had spent several years in the trenches on the Western Front in the first world war. As a hardened group of fighting men, they were put under the command of an overzealous young officer. Eager to prove himself, this lieutenant climbed to the top of a trench ladder and ordered them to advance, gesturing forwards with his right arm. At this precise moment, his shoulder was hit by shrapnel, causing his arm to detach completely from his body. With the forward momentum of his gesture, it continued flying forward still clad in its sleeve, landing in the mud six feet away, its hand still clutching the service revolver.
They all fell about laughing.
Just to be clear, I don’t want to live in a world where dismemberment is a regular source of amusement. But compared with spending your life treading on eggshells in case something you say makes someone sad, it has its advantages.
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