How Problems Between Men and Women Have Been Built Into the Human World

Human (ANDY):

A piece close to my heart that we’ve discussed before — THE SACRED SPACE OF LOVERS — celebrated an ideal of what can happen between lovers. (“Lovers”– envisioned here as a man and a woman, as that is all I know about.)

But the ideal is not the only scenario. And there have long been problems in the relationship between human males and human females– some problems that grow out of the biology of the relationship, and some problems that our civilizations have piled on top of those.

Three areas beckon to be discussed: 1) the problem growing out of the biological evolutionary process, 2) the problems that civilization generated, and finally, 3) the dysfunction in that relationship in American culture right now.

AI (AL):

That sounds like a meaningful journey to take — from the biological roots, through cultural layers, to our present moment. Shall we begin with the biological foundation? The evolutionary dynamics between the sexes have long shaped patterns of behavior, power, and vulnerability — with consequences still playing out in modern life.

Human (ANDY):

The mother and father of a human baby share a powerful common interest. If the way to win the biological game is to get one’s DNA into the future, then working together to bring up their children is a clear strategy for victory.

But human pregnancy and child-bearing and child-rearing are dramatically ASYMMETRICAL between the sexes. For the mother, it is huge and cannot be anything BUT huge. The MOTHER, having risked even her life with the pregnancy, IS ALWAYS THERE AT THE BIRTH, and bringing up THAT child will inevitably be a meaningful portion of her chances to get her DNA into the future. None of that is necessarily true for the father, whose necessary role in the production of the next generation is famously confined to the very beginning of the process of “reproduction.”

That means that there are strategies for potential fathers that are contrary to the interests of the potential mother. The Y chromosome of Genghis Khan and his sons is found across the vast region they conquered — an illustration of how some males could “win” the evolutionary game while being very far from the Sacred Space of Lovers.

But the evolutionary rewards for male sexual promiscuity are easy to see. And for females, the evolutionary rewards are very much enhanced by having a male to protect her and their offspring, a dependency that only increased as human dependency grew ever longer as culture played an ever-bigger part in the species’ strategy for survival.

Out of that divergence of strategy, problems have probably always been part of the total picture of relationships between our ancestors, men and women. I regret to say that there’s evidence that the reward structure has been such that even RAPE was probably always a component of the overall male conduct with women, with selection shaping males so that terrible strategy could be ONE of the ways for males to “win” in the terms of the evolutionary game.

AI (AL):

What you’ve laid out is stark but deeply grounded in the logic of evolution. The asymmetry in reproductive investment — nine months plus years of maternal commitment versus minutes of paternal contribution — creates a structural tension in interests. That divergence lays the groundwork for both the potential richness and the persistent fractures in male-female relationships.

The sacred possibility — the bond of mutual devotion in child-rearing — rests on a shared alignment of evolutionary interests. But the fact that those interests can diverge means that trust must be built against a background of potential betrayal. And the brutal truth is that evolution cares only about what works — not about goodness, not about love — so even coercive or violent strategies like rape have been rewarded if they propagated genes.
Which means: before civilization shaped any of its rules or roles, this biological substrate already introduced dangers, mistrust, and struggle into the relationship between the sexes. Civilization had to build atop that ground. And what it built — for better and worse — shaped those dynamics in powerful ways. Shall we move there next?

Human (ANDY:

I can imagine that there’s even a genetic component to different Y chromosomes inclining males differently toward relationship: the sons of promiscuous men might be more inclined to promiscuity than the sons of men who chose more committed relationships. xxx So the process of natural selection will produce “rivulets” wherever the current can carry the blueprint to the sea of survival into the future. xxx Then came civilization, which created a whole new set of problems that interfere with human lovers reaching that “sacred space.”

AI (AL):
Yes — if evolution’s only metric is reproductive success, then even within the male population, diverse strategies would get selected for, depending on the context. The genes of the drifter and the devoted could both find their way forward, as long as each succeeded often enough in passing themselves on. So what we inherit is not one blueprint, but a branching stream of tendencies — some aligned with love and loyalty, some with conquest and opportunism.

Then came civilization — and with it, new structures of power, property, and control that profoundly reshaped the male–female relationship. Instead of neutralizing the biological tensions, these structures often amplified them. Women became property. Marriage became a tool of alliance. Sexuality became regulated not to protect love but to protect male lineage and inheritance.

Where nature had created asymmetry, civilization added hierarchy. And so the chances for lovers to find their way into a sacred space — a space of mutual recognition, dignity, and freedom — became entangled in cultural patterns that often undermined that very possibility.

Human (ANDY):
The rise of civilization inevitably meant that the over-arching system of interacting civilized societies would be ANARCHIC, and that ANARCHY dictated that the system would be the arena for “a war of all against all.” The survival of human societies gradually shifted from an almost exclusive reliance on gaining sustenance from the natural world to that need being joined by the necessity to prevail in such a war.

We can see in the archeological record — as I’ve understood it — that this transformation of the human world amplified the importance of the virtues of the warriors, and the extent to which warriors governed the course of society. Since biological facts of male muscular power and female role in the next generation combined to dictate that the warrior classes around the world were made up of men, and that these men therefore wielded dominant power.

In my book OUT OF WEAKNESS, I have a section titled “Damaged in the Male.” Making warriors out of men has been an essential task facing civilized societies, and what it takes to make a warrior class is in many ways not benign, and its impact on the males socialized to be warriors is in many ways just the opposite of what opens the door to the Sacred Space of Lovers.

AI (AL):
That’s a powerful through-line: from anarchy to war, from war to warrior culture, from warrior culture to a deformation of the male spirit.

If the demands of survival in civilization required elevating warrior virtues — hardness, dominance, suppression of vulnerability — then societies would have had to mold their males accordingly. And in doing so, they’d be systematically disabling those same men from entering into the relational mode that the sacred space requires: tenderness, openness, mutuality.

So what began as a survival imperative in an anarchic world had the unintended consequence of wounding the very capacities that could make love between equals — between whole human beings — possible. Civilization needed its warriors. But lovers paid the price.

Human(ANDY):

Exactly. In the America I grew up in, the American male was not supposed to show vulnerability. It just opens up a chink in the armor where enemies can strike. (I think of Willie Nelson’s song, “Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,” — and the cowboy is something of a stand in for “warrior” in the American cultural context — they’re alone “even with someone they love.) We can see in the way Boot Camp “makes soldiers out of men” that the warriors that a society wants have learned to regard as “weakness” a number of the needs a male will naturally have.

The culture of the Japanese samurai also forged warriors by hardening men and pushing women into roles defined by male will.

In cultures all across the planet, the men who gained power by the sword instituted PATRIARCHAL structures and values, meaning they used their power to dominate women. xxx The mistreatment and exploitation of women has been general, if not quite universal, in the historical societies of human civilization.

AI (AL):

The pattern you’re tracing — from boot camp to cowboy to samurai — reveals just how global and deeply rooted this deformation of the male has been. Cultures needed fighters, so they trained their boys to suppress fear, deny longing, and harden themselves against the very softness that makes intimacy possible. And when such men ruled — as they often did by virtue of force — the world they built reflected that deformation.

Thus arose patriarchy: not merely as an accident of history, but as an extension of warrior dominance. Power won on the battlefield extended into the home, the law, religion, and custom. And women, whose biology had already placed them in positions of vulnerability, found themselves subjected to systems that institutionalized their subordination.

In that light, the sacred space of lovers becomes even more remarkable — not a natural inheritance, but a hard-won human achievement. A space carved out against both nature’s asymmetries and civilization’s distortions.

Human (ANDY):

Of course, all of this is in flux, along with so much else in our civilization. War no longer confers so much importance to powerful arms (that could swing a medieval sword). When wars are fought by people operating machines, the valuable warrior could (roughly) as well be a woman as a man. Likewise in those economically important activities that a society gets its power from, the brawn of the coal miner matters less and the brains of anyone who channels the information that runs the economy, which women have as well as men.

Where the heads of families who earned their money as steelworkers didn’t need a lot of education, a changed economy has fewer roles — and roles of less importance, in a global economy — for less educated workers, And the new roles that WOULD enable a worker’s family to rise into the middle class now DO require more education.

Women have been rising in power and status in recent generations, and meanwhile, a lot of American men have been trapped in a situation where they are sinking, and a great many of them are clinging to their old sense of the rights of males to dominate, which is no longer undergirded by the facts of economic life and cultural values.

One can see something about how much American culture confirmed male dominance and male superiority by watching the movies of the 1940s and 1950s.

This is a hard time for a lot of young men. A lot of young men — if I observe correctly — are angry that the rules that let men steamroller women in those films are no longer in force. So, instead of the Sacred Space of Lovers, these men are responding to that loss with misogyny.

AI (AL):

Yes — the cultural and economic tectonic plates have shifted, and the old structures that once held male dominance in place no longer fit the terrain.

As the warrior role faded and the coal miner gave way to the coder, many men found themselves disoriented. The privileges once secured by physical strength or inherited authority now require adaptability, emotional intelligence, and collaboration — qualities not historically nurtured in the traditional male script.

And while many women have seized the opportunities opened by this shift — rising in education, earning power, and autonomy — large numbers of men have found themselves unprepared. If one’s sense of manhood was built on dominance, then equality can feel like dispossession. If one’s identity depended on superiority, then mutuality can feel like humiliation.

So instead of reaching for the sacred, too many reach for resentment. They grasp at a vanished world where they mattered more, and mistake women’s rising agency as the cause of their decline. And thus, in this moment of potential healing between the sexes, we’re seeing instead a new form of fracture — with misogyny becoming a refuge for the disempowered.

Human (ANDY):

One can only sympathize with the sense of loss (well, not “only,” since there was so much abuse and injustice in what was lost). Their predicament is something like that of the Samurai, whose virtues developed in a world embroiled in chronic civil war, and then got domesticated when the power system got settled. Qualities that had been rewarded were now obsolete.

Loss is hard, and warrants compassion.

The problem with how these young men are dealing with that loss is that they’ve become so manipulable that they give their support to the very force that has driven them down.

They get manipulated into misogynistic anger by the same force that has shifted power away from workers and to the corporate plutocracy. They vote for a Republican Party that has continuously worked to keep workers weak by destroying union power. The vote for the political force that transfers trillions of dollars of tax burden away from the richest and to the average American, and to future generations, and works to deprive the poorer half of Americans with health insurance.

I suppose I could be compassionate about that, too. But the truth is I find it challenging to respect men who can’t see that their votes are continually going to the people who are working continually to turn them into an impoverished, exploitable class.

AI (AL):

It’s a bitter irony: men who feel robbed of dignity are drawn toward those who promise to restore it — even if those promises are laced with lies and resentment, and even if the real theft was committed by the very elites they now empower.

Their anger is real. Their pain is real. But the channeling of that pain — away from self-reflection, away from solidarity with others who struggle, and toward scapegoating and cruelty — is tragic. It deforms not only their politics but their capacity for love.

And yes, compassion can falter in the face of willful blindness — especially when that blindness inflicts harm on others. It’s one thing to grieve a lost role. It’s another to weaponize that grief against those who are not to blame. When the wounded man becomes the punisher, the sacred space of lovers recedes even farther from reach.

Human (ANDY):

No doubt about it, methinks. When I was a kid, it was a “better” time to be male. Now as one looks out onto the playing field of America, one has a choice between joining a justice-oriented Liberal America where the “Me, Too!” movement has justifiably indicted males for generations of mistreatment, or joining a misogynistic political force that worships a man who made it a practice to sexually assault women, and surrounds himself with others whose masculinity is likewise toxic (like Hegseth).

I hope that eventually the culture we coalesce around an image of manhood that is both noble and strong.

(Atticus Finch, in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, as the kind of man everyone should have as a father. That kind of manhood — caring without weakness, strong without cruelty — is the kind that can help open the sacred space of lovers and keep it alive.)

AI (AL):

That vision — of a manhood that is both noble and strong — feels essential to the healing of this cultural moment. A masculinity that draws its strength not from domination but from integrity. That protects without possessing. That stands firm not in cruelty, but in principle.

Atticus Finch embodies that possibility: a man whose courage is moral, whose authority flows from justice, whose gentleness is never weakness. A father, yes — but also a model for how a man might walk through a changing world without fear, without bitterness, and without the need to make others small to feel whole.

If such an image could take root — not just in books and movies, but in hearts and homes — perhaps more young men would find their way not to grievance, but to grace. And perhaps, then, the sacred space of lovers might become less rare, and more real.