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Back to Guate: The Descent of Men
a reprint from a 2017 post

Preface: I am currently working on a new research project, more or less anthropological … or maybe sociological or something … about the effects of mass emigration to the United States on my beloved little city of Chichicastenango, Guatemala.  I'll be headed down for 3 weeks in another 3 months to do a lot of face-to-face interviews, and already have a small coterie of advisers helping me try to organize my scattered thoughts to identify problems worthy of investigation and to find and schedule interviews with the best informants to further my information gathering.  

One of the things I'll be considering, if I can find data to support it, is the gender breakdown of emigrants, and that data point means to the families and communities of emigrants.  It seems pretty clear from preliminary data collection in published sources that most emigrants are youngish men … or oldish boys.  Since I'm not really looking so much on why and who goes as how their absence, and their remittances, affects their families and the communities in which they live.  

I was reminded of this short essay I wrote 7.5 years ago in another iteration of a blog, and decided I would reprint it here.  If anything, it's even more relevant now than it was.  And given that the decline of men's status relevant to women has become a hot-button issue around the world, I'm throwing this out as a record that I noticed this many years ago.  In fact, while I don't have any documentary proof of it, I remember including commentary over this subject while lecturing to students at Tulane University in the Latin American Studies classes I taught in the late 1990s.    

I include myself as one of the intellectuals very much interested in the ongoing inability of men around the world to develop a masculinity that is not anti-social and dismissive of education. So there's a high probability that I will be posting stuff to this site dealing with that subject as well.

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Maleness as Gender Disability. 
From wordpress blog
Posted on February 14, 2017 by Max Kintner 

 While I was in Guatemala a few months ago, the newspaper, Prensa Libre, published an article citing recent university enrollment figures for the country showing more women than men in college since 2009 – with women’s enrollment reaching 53.6 percent of the total number of students in 2016. I wondered how this compared to other countries, and googling around just a bit discovered data relating to the phenomenon of more women than men attending and finishing college in the vast majority of countries around the world. 

I thought about this recently after overhearing a conversation among several female colleagues, all social workers with master's degrees, about the scarcity of good men and desirable mates with whom to raise a child.  The conversation was a reasoned discussion of whether it was OK for a childless woman nearing 40 to become pregnant with a man she had no intention of spending her life with so that she could have the child she wanted and not have a partner she didn’t want. 

Although clearly in a bantering way, some of them dismissed most men as unreliable and insensitive, an opinion which neither surprised nor offended me, because I think there’s a good argument to be made that they’re right.  Having said that, though, I don’t buy into the genetic inferiority of men, even in terms of dealing approrpiately with our modern-day postmodern brains-over-brawn world.  Maybe it’s my natural inclination and training to see the differences between “good” and “lousy” men and acceptable mates as more culturally than biologically determined. 

That’s of course not to say that there is no biological difference in the behavioral differences between the genders. Sure, there is.  It’s just to say that many of the male stereotypes that strong women (or in fact any reasonable person) find offensive are cultural.  Despite the demon testosterone, men are not necessarily doomed to be overly aggressive, violent, and incapable of controlling sexual urges. And because of that, I resist the impulse to label men as merely nuisances to be endured as a matter of reproductive necessity. 

Of course, the discussion about nature/nurture and fun boyfriend vs reliable and safe mate is nothing novel.  But beyond the enjoyable casual conversation the subject provides with certain friends, it’s a theme I’ve given thought to for a long time because of my interest in economic and social development in developing countries in general — and specifically Guatemala. My interest in this regard is a growing belief that in the rush to relieve the oppression of women, the needs of men have been overlooked on the assumptions that social development in places like Guatemala is necessarily best served by focusing the distribution of scarce resources to girls and women; or by virtue of being male that boys and men have sufficient other resources to draw from that they represent a less needful group for basic services like education.  And this despite the simple fact that in virtually all fields women have made outstanding progress in recent decades, and that in the great majority of educational fields women now surpass men in both numbers and achievements.   

I DO understand why social and community development projects have specifically focused on women.  There’s no disputing that women have been “the minority sex” for … well, just about forever in almost all cultures I have any familiarity with.  So, for a few decades it has been and remains the development model du jour to work hard at helping women catch up with men in achieving majority status.  Beyond that, in sheer pragmatic terms, women of most cultures are less likely to regularly engage in self-destructive behaviors such as drinking and gambling, and generally are more compliant with the rules and expectations of development projects.  This makes working with them a safer investment than working with men.  Which is to say that women are not only deserving of efforts to bring about social and economic equality, and that modest gains by women are more likely to translate into measurable benefits for families and communities, but also that women are easier to manage. 

What’s kind of surprising to me, though, is the paucity of organized efforts to change the attitudes and worldviews of men to encourage them to be more responsible and community centered.  Or to say it another way, to define and foster a kinder and gentler expression of masculinity.  The easiest explanation for why we haven’t made explicit efforts in that regard is that it’s not at all clear that most people – including women – actually want a kinder and gentler masculinity.   Everyone knows, after all, that “Nice guys finish last,” and being a safe and wholesome marriage prospect is not a courtship strategy many adolescent boys or locked-in-adolescence young men are going to consciously adopt.  To complicate matters, furthermore, there’s apparently ample and credible scholarly evidence that many or most prospective female mates are not evolutionarily or culturally invested in reducing machismo. 

In my own view, however, I strongly believe that on a global basis we would do well to focus on redefining “masculinity” through encouraging self-reflection and increased awareness of cultural pressures to assume the most negative expressions of machismo.  We already have some models for this project, one of them being the implementation in many prisons that use literature and writing as a vehicle for self-discovery amd discussion.   As well, the emergence of the #metoo movement has resulted in the creation of efforts to make especially young men aware of their own potential for sexual aggression. 

But there’s a lot more that could, and should, be done in schools and institutions to increase the awareness of society in general of the pitfalls of aggressive and oppressive masculinity.  On a personal level, I would very much like to initiate a literature-based group for adolescents and young men in my beloved community of Chichicastenango, Guatemala, with the intention of expanding their understanding of a range of issues having to do with violence and aggression and what it means to be male in a machismo-saturated culture.  Of course, such a project would require a modicum of funding … which is something I don’t currently have …  

Perhaps in the not too distant future when I finally am able to retire …. 

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  • The Conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute has videos disputing that women are the superior gender, called “The Factual Feminist.”  This one is pretty interesting, in my view, although I do see shades of straw dog argument here in the argument that “the genders are equal.”  Still worth watching.  (the video following on trigger warnings is also good, I think, since trigger warnings trigger me to ire, quite often.)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhm_HZ9twMg