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THE DECLINE OF MALES
(originally published in The Westchester Psychiatrist and reproduced with permission)
by Edward M. Stephens, M.D.
Chair, Committee on Men's Issues
The Psychiatric Society of Westchester
(a district branch of The American Psychiatric Association)
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President, NCFM, Greater New York Chapter
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“Gender, not geography will determine the direction of world resource use in the 21st Century.”
In my recent dinner with Professor Lionel Tiger, the talk was all about sex. Not the stuff you have in bed but its __expression in the more abstract, less sticky and infinitely more complex question of gender.
Lionel, the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and the author of The Decline of Males, had become the strange bedfellow of a psychiatrist out of a shared concern for the declining prospects for males. Our dinner conversation was about the prospect of creating a Department for International Men’s Studies at a major university and the ground breaking formation of The Committee on Men’s Issues of The Psychiatric Society of Westchester (PSW).
As psychiatrists, gender is not usually high on our list of causative factors for diagnostic concern. That 20th century perspective changes when we begin to understand that gender is destiny in the 21st century and it is not just the women’s movement that is affecting our world view. Tiger opines that a basic change has occurred in our relation as men and women. Through the shift in the control of reproduction, women are now able to manage their reproductive function with the Pill with no one but themselves knowing whether it is their time or not. Men are out of the loop for the first time in the history of our species.
Learning from Primates
Austin, the stump tail monkey, found this out in the ’70s study of progesterone when it was given sequentially to his three active sex partners in the primate troop. He lost interest in his favorite mate when she was on birth control and regained it when the progesterone effect wore off. When all three of his mates were on the stuff, Austin became nervous, irritable and began to masturbate, refusing sex with all three of his sexual partners. Austin’s story is relevant to us since he and his partners are our closest primate relatives.
Although Austin was confused when his partners signaled pheromonally that they were artificially pregnant with a birth control substance, his mates didn’t compound the problem by changing life roles. Austin’s mates, released from their sexual obligations, didn’t take up 60% of undergraduate places in college or 75% of graduate spots. They didn’t get pregnant outside of marriage as women all over the industrialized world are doing. They didn’t create single parent families. They didn’t divorce Austin. They didn’t change the nature of the workforce, displacing Austin. They did demonstrate that primate sexual responses are radically altered by chemical birth control without signs being posted and they make us wonder about the profound and unexplored effects on our species of change in reproductive responsibility.
Austin got cranky and aggressive when a major change was made in the fundamental nature of his relationship to his gender-mates. What is happening to us as men and women in the midst of the changes we so glibly characterize as “women’s liberation”? What is happening to one half of our patient population who are sometimes characterized as alexithymic and whose needs have become socially invisible as the male gender is increasingly characterized as “the problem”? Today’s men seem as surprised as Austin that they are living in a different world, over which they have very little control.
Men’s Issues?
When I went into The Committee on Women’s Issues at the national meeting of the APA, asking for help to set up a corresponding Committee for men, I received some interesting responses. By and large, I think that the Committee members thought I was far fetching until some hard core sentiment emerged from one of the members: “The whole organization of the APA is about men’s issues.”
Fortunately, that’s not the response I got from the leadership of PSW and many of the female psychiatrists to whom I presented the concept, so that PSW has the first Committee on Men’s Issues (COMI) in the APA. COMI has invited Lionel Tiger to speak to us in person and describe the crisis in men’s lives not just in Western societies but also on a worldwide basis. (Editor’s note: This special event was attended by members of NCFM, GNY, and a report on it was featured in The Male Voice e-newsletter.)
The Canary in the Coal Mine
For many years, we have been appalled as a society about what is happening to our men of color. In some communities, there are unemployment rates of up to 50%. Murder rates by men of men in these communities are as startling as are rates of drug and alcohol addiction and incarceration. Alarmingly, “all the indices that were commonly thought to be confined to the African-American community are in fact rising more quickly in white communities. The prevailing African-American situation is part of the American system, and its characteristics are shared in other countries,” according to Prof. Tiger. While the illustration appears to create race as a significant element, it is actually “a spurious and imprecise category that has nothing to do with biogenetic competence.” We know this because when men of all colors are allowed to perform on a level playing field, as in the armed services, men of all backgrounds perform equally well. “Race is skin deep, but sex is implicated in many fundamental human systems.”
Until we begin to appreciate the sea changes taking place in the world of employment, we are out of touch with the world of these men. Each year in the United States there are one million fewer jobs created for men than for women; men, unlike women, are not culturized to the concept of “part time work.” The net effect for our office practice is that we have a cohort of depressed men who are having what we might euphemistically call an “adjustment reaction of adult life” for whom we may have no adequate counsel because we are unaware of the major economic shifts taking place as a result of the new alignments of gender in the workplace. Then, even when they might be candidates for antidepressants, we hesitate to interfere with their already fragile maleness because we don’t want to depress their sex lives.
In the Committee on Men’s Issues, we are looking for some answers. What may be more important for us as psychiatrists will be the new set of questions that come up for us about our men and boys, brothers and fathers, husbands and sons, our patients and ourselves.
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The Psychiatric Society of Westchester’s Committee on Men’s Issues was founded by Dr. Stephens and is the first-ever such committee within a district branch of the APA. Dr. Stephens can be contacted in care of NCFM, GNY via e-mail at ncfmgny@themalevoice.org or by leaving a telephonic message at (516) 482-6378.
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The Psychiatric Society of Westchester has formed the first Committee on Men’s Issues within a branch of the American Psychiatric Association.