Customer Reviews

The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women

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Over the past century, and especially in the past three decades, the feminist movement has intensively lobbied to secure women's reproductive rights. That battle has been won, but not simply due to political changes. Lionel Tiger argues in "The Decline of Males" that the key reasons were technological: medically safe abortion and contraception (primarily the pill). These technologies allowed women exclusively, and independently of their husbands, to control their reproduction. Contraception controlled pregnancy, and, should it not, women could solely chose whether or not to bring the pregnancy to term.

Although most would agree that these technologies have empowered women by offering them more life options, the larger social and personal effects on men, and on the relations between the sexes, have been largely ill-considered. These reproductive technologies, Tiger argues, have set the sexes on an uncharted, and perhaps dangerous, course. Reproductive power is no longer shared, albeit unconsciously, via the evolved desires and aversions of each sex. Today reproduction is controlled consciously and almost exclusively by women.

So while women were gaining their own reproductive control, men were losing theirs. What reproductive rights do men have left today? Virtually none. Consider the following scenarios. If a man's partner becomes pregnant, and he wishes to have the child, but she doesn't, he has no legal recourse to prevent an abortion. If, on the other hand, he wants her to terminate the pregnancy, he cannot compel her to have an abortion. Further, he will be legally responsible for child support for a child he would not have chosen to have. If she is on the pill, and he wishes to have a child, there is no legal recourse available to him to compel her to stop taking the pill. Divorce courts still favor granting custody of children to mothers and child support payments to fathers. The idea that reproduction and parenting is a decision jointly made by both partners is an outdated romantic illusion. Examined more closely, it is clear that the consent of woman is always a prerequisite. The consent of the man is often superfluous.

In addition, the resources that husbands traditionally have been able to contribute to reproduction and marriage -- financial support, protection, and socialization of their children -- have been supplanted, and sometimes replaced, by what Tiger terms government "bureaugamy" (women's dependency on the government, or the "government-as-husband"). What women historically relied on husbands to provide, now the state often antes up: child care, welfare, education, police protection, affirmative action and divorce laws that that favor women, ambiguous sexual harassment codes that leave the determination of whether an infraction occurred to the interpretation of a particular woman (not necessarily a "reasonable woman"), etc. While medical reproductive technology has had the effect of marginalizing men reproductively, the state's "bureaugamy" has marginalized the importance of men's marital and parental contributions. Women are often encouraged to live independently (as evidenced by the feminist slogan: "A woman needs a man about as much as fish needs a bicycle"). The bureaugamy supports the superfluousness of husbands by assuring a woman that it will provide what historically a husband did -- with government help she can live independently and generally without fear of hunger, lack of shelter, attack, or lack of socialization and education of her children.

The consequences of women's reproductive control, combined with feminist inspired "bureaugamy," may already be felt. Tiger notes that one-third of births in industrialized societies are now to single mothers. The average female income is growing while average male income is declining. The majority of college undergraduates, 55%, are women. While female college enrollment continues to increase, male enrollment is decreasing. Divorce rates are the highest recorded in history.

As the value of male contributions to reproduction, marriage and parenting have diminished, so too has the general level of male status in society. Warren Farrell noted in his book "Why Men Are the Way They Are" that our perception of men has been transformed in a few decades from one in which "Father Knows Best" to "Daddy Molests." The male cultural icons of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s were independent, powerful, and respected men, who were also generally respectful and gentlemanly toward women. Today, the movie of the week is typically about a woman victimized by a male: her boss or father, her current (or ex) boyfriend or husband, or by a maniacial serial rapist or murderer.

The feminist movement has spearheaded the cultural acceptance of the routine disrespect of men. Instead of equitably quashing and discouraging misandry and working toward true mutual understanding and respect between the sexes, the feminist movement has succeeded in cheerleading a misandry that palpably permeates the culture. Jokes, television commercials, magazine advertisements and even greeting cards often put down men in a way that would be condemned as sexist if directed toward women. As men become less needed as fathers and husbands, they are increasingly disrespected by women. Ironically, by reducing men's general status vis a vis women, women find to their disappointment fewer available men who can meet their high expectations for a potential husband and father of her children.

Tiger's concern is that by "fooling Mother Nature" via the reproductive technologies of contraception and abortion we have unwittingly headed into uncharted, and perhaps dangerous, territory. Our species has not evolved psychological adaptations to deal with modern reproductive technology -- what evolutionary psychologists call an "evolutionary mismatch." There is now a disconnect between our ancestral and current environments. As a sexy and technologically smart primate, we have learned to take the goodies (sex) an unlink it from its evolutionary purpose (reproduction and parenting). The long term social and emotional consequences of this mismatch are unknown, but is it clear that one of the effects, the "decline of males," has already begun.

Yet most men today are about as cognizant of their increasing inequality as women in the 1950s were conscious of their limited life choices. Men need some consciousness raising of their own. Unfortunately, they are so predisposed to protect women, and protect what feminists say women's interests are, that men ignore their own interests as a group to their own peril. On a social level, several nascent men's movements have sputtered, and then sadly faded. Apparently men's instincts to protect women (or at least protect their own personal reputation as a protector of women), are generally greater than their inclination to protect themselves.

On a more personal level, when a man finds himself unable to provide more income than a woman can obtain via welfare (or that she can provide through her own career), when he cannot cause or prevent an abortion, when he is ordered to financially support a child that he never wanted (or even one that is not genetically his own), when he is not granted equal custody or parental authority for his children after a divorce, when he loses a job, promotion or a work contract to a less qualified woman due to affirmative action policies, when women of his own socioeconomic class reject him because they prefer a partner who has a higher status, he is feels, at best, confused. He knows something is askance with feminist rhetoric about "equality," but he may have difficulty articulating it. Men today are befuddled -- they don't understand how equality for women came to result in sexual, reproductive, parental and legal inequality and a disrespect for men.

Although Tiger's book contains a great deal of valuable information, it is rather poorly presented. It is written with a prose that awkwardly combines the style of a social commentary with a smattering of too lightly sketched evolutionary psychology theory, personal observations, social history, exemplars from contemporary cultures, and some repetitive statistics. Chapter titles and section headings are nondescriptive. Some of Tiger's assertions are based solely on his opinion -- others have solid scientific backing. But it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. It would have helpful if Tiger had organized the book more as a clear, progressive and logically structured argument.

Most egregiously, Tiger seems to have missed some of the most important works in the men's studies field, such as Warren Farrell's books, including Why Men are the Way they Are, The Myth of Male Power, and Women Can't Hear what Men Don't Say. This is a serious oversight -- not only are Farrell's important works ignored in the text, they are not listed in his chapter notes and references. Many of Tiger's own arguments have previously been p

Ok, so us guys are doomed to fail to reproduce, die early, and perhaps take down many others with us. Others here have said most of what needs to be said about this book, so I'll address what other reviewers have written, in an attempt to clarify.

What the reader from North Carolina misses is that the decline of males *is* the decline of civilized society, since matriarchies are from the era *before* civilization. Civilization was only made possible after patriarchy had been invented, since fatherhood is a social (rather than biological) construct; it's the weak link in the family. Before, during the eons when women were in control, it was called the Stone Age, and life was barbaric, brutish, and short; women were callous creatures rather than ladies (which only became possible w/patriarchy), no matter how much feminism wants to propagandize us about the inherently loving and nurturing nature of females. A return to the biological mother-child "family" is now viewed by the basically braindead as "progessive".

The comment about how men should keep their pants on is so reminiscent of what society told girls and young women 40 or 50 years ago that one almost couldn't come up with a better illustration of the current second class status of males. The problem is not lack of commitment, but a lack of anything for men to commit to which has their interests in mind: marriage no longer confers any rights on men whatsoever, thus depriving even men who really want families of them; at her whim, the woman can split with the kids, the minivan, and the home -- and make him continue to foot the bill for this deprivation, while she's no longer obligated to cook his meals or do his laundry.

The net result of this is that men with talent and resources have stopped pursuing women to a large degree, who then think there's a shortage of quality available men. But if it's "Our Paychecks, Ourselves", why should any man put his life's work at risk for an unreliable female who the state will not hold to the marriage "contract"? This is amply demonstrated by the "I find myself doing a lot of losers" story in the book. Good men are lieing low, waiting for the pendulum to swing back at least a little way in their favor. Perhaps this book will help bring that about.

Ronald should read the dialogue w/Tiger in the June issue of Harper's Magazine, where his concerns are addressed. The Senate is predominantly male because the female voting *majority* knows that chivalrous and paternalistic males are in their interest. Who ever heard of a politician bragging about what he was going to do for *men* -- other than build more prisons to put them in? Government-as-husband w/many men paying taxes for "families" they have no stake in is the result. Nobody's keeping women from running for any office.

CEO's are not despotic rulers (like women are to their young children), but highly paid servants of their customers. And it's women who control 70% of the consumer spending in America. (Just go look around the mall if you're in denial -- the power of money is not in its earning but in its spending.) The idea that men act only to benefit all men is preposterous. One man's personal victory benefits me not at all. Besides, Tiger says he doesn't care about the small percentage of men who are highly successful; his book is about the declining success of the other 99.9%. If men ran GM and Ford the way feminists believe they do, we wouldn't have all these g.d. minivans; sports cars would be more like it. The problem is not with those from families with fathers, but rather those from female-headed households.

Anyway, this is an important book even if not entirely convincing at times. It could have been better written -- sometimes one feels deluged by all sorts of demographic stats in search of an ordering theory. And Tiger is almost too defensive in advance, answering objections before needing to -- probably a result of being stuck around a university crawling with feminists ready to pounce on any errant male -- though this book is nothing compared to what some men really think. It's actually pretty tame. It could have been a little better, though that shouldn't detract from it's many contributions to this field. Men freed women, so it's now roughly 50-50 in the public sphere; will women free men so that the same could be said of the private sphere? Or will women continue to deny men equal reproductive rights?

Lionel Tiger's insightful new book focuses on changes that are influencing virtually every facet of American society. It is no secret that, since the introduction of birth control, elemental patterns of dating, mating and sexuality have undergone a revolution. Gender barriers that seemed insurmountable two generations ago have greatly diminished if not vanished completely (in 1920, who would have thought that roughly half of Ivy League undergraduates would be women?) Not all the consequences of these changes have been expected or understood. Tiger forces us to confront many of them that have escaped previous analysis.

Some people, of course, would rather not think about the facts and issues that now confront us. To see how explosive Tiger's work can be, you need only read the outraged reaction of the Kirkus reviewer. It's not hard to see why highly ideological feminists, with a vested interest in ideas not facts, might be outraged by the book. But for the rest of us, The Decline of Males is must reading.

Lionel Tiger has written an excellent and provocative book--indeed, one that provoked the Kirkus reviewer into a fit of rage. Don't be deterred--he has identified the central social issues of our time and makes you see everyday life in a very different perspective.

I have my students read chapters from this book in my class in Biopolitics. Undergraduate men like it--a Men's Bible so to speak. A lot of passions are aroused in classroom conversations.

The "pill" may be the major technological innovation behind expanding female reproductive autonomy, but there's a lot of other stuff too, a lot of it mentioned in the book. What percentage of otherwise fertile women use the pill? Other methods of contraception? My guess is that it is women's increasing education and better health, parcel of modernization, that is driving increased contraception, and reducing the birth rate, as women facultatively shift from r-strategists to K-strategists. So the fertility rate declines generally, especially among women with more education who tend to marry at a later age.

Tiger wrote before the phenomenon of sexually antagonistic coevolution became widely known, but what he writes about seems to amount to the cultural expression of this phenomenon. Look to the promiscuous fruit flies. There are advantages and disadvantages to both sexes from promiscuity. I suppose for the female fruit fly, she gets sexy sons. But there are costs, including the dangers she suffers from intense male-male competition for mates and problems associated with multiple insemination. Human equivalents? Physical and mental abuse due to male sexual jealousy; risk of STDs. For males, there are also pluses and minuses to short term mating, detailed by Buss (1999). Plural marriages and monogamy also have their advantages and disadvantages for both sexes.

Humans are moderately polygynous. That's clear enough from the degree of sexual dimorphism. Promiscuity has been around, but it's not the main thing, as Murdock pointed out long ago.

In may view, Tiger has hit the nail on the head in terms of identifying increases in female reproductive autonomy as being of enormous social significance. Culture plainly changes more rapidly than human biology, so as he notes we can anticipate a bad fit between the former and the latter. How will it all play out?

Don't know! Some reviewers have commented that men seem befuddled by it all. As Henry Ford once remarked, however, Don't complain, don't explain. Men may continue to believe, perhaps correctly, that women's habits don't change that quickly either, and that in the end they will prefer "tough" guys who will give them "sexy" sons. It would be nice if they had a lot of $$$$ too! If women with a lot of education are disappointed, it may be that they cannot have it all--there just aren't that many men who are both r (real handsome, masculine, and sexy) and K (smart with a ton of $$$$). There it is!

Footnote. Spending some time and observing what goes on in lower class neighborhoods in City of Detroit (daughter lives in one, albeit one of the better ones), the average suburbanite would be startled by it all. Young men urinating in the street. Drug dealers pursuing delinquent accounts at 65+ miles per hour down residential streets. Foreclosed houses with stuff piled on the curb. Teens pushing stolen cars down the street to places where they can safely strip them. High decibel rap music. Random gunfire. Pit bulls pulling on their leashes. Bars on windows and doors. Most adult, married, employed, law abiding men would not put up with it, but unfortunately there are just not a lot of them in this part of the City. And like Iraq, a few thugs have taken charge, and the instinct of self-preservation has taken hold. Is something wrong here? Single parenthood isn't all that great, whatever it's causes.

Enough.

No one need read "The Decline of Males" for instruction in "1,00l Ways To Be Male in the Coming Millennium." Dr. Tiger states flatly, "The new outcome for men is not yet clear." It is, rather, a deeply disturbing book, and means to be. It raises important questions at both the intimate and cultural levels. He proposes I think a thorough reshuffling of the gender deck--using both hands. At the same time hope it lays a foundation for fresh dialogue between the sexes and a lessening of ideologue diatribes.

Having read Tiger's 'Imperial Animal' and 'Men in groups' (which tried to show how difficult it would be for women to fight back against the domination of male-bonded human societies) I was initially amused at this book and the obvious shock and awe Tiger feels now that life has not turned out as he expected.

Unfortunately, Tiger's work has been based largely on baboons and a lack of knowledge about the relationships and behaviors of the sexes throughout the animal kingdom - especially about natural behaviors of females in all species. Though he rightly wants to bring biology into our understanding he actually overlooks the female nature as it really is - eg in no species is it natural for males to decide who their sister or daughter breeds with nor for a female to have only one father for all her children (except if both male and female are monogamous).

For most of our existence as humans males claimed ownership and control of the females and determined who their females would breed with.
Women reproduce in the tribe of their husband where they have little power and are easily controlled and manipulated. To say how females behaved under this system was 'natural' is to miss the fact that the only thing truly natural was the drive to survive ie comply not die.

The illusion was created that humanity was all about men and the groups they belonged to while females were exchanged between groups where their main purpose was to create the new male members. History is all about the interactions and conflicts between male groups. It is the story of male reproductive competition. Access to wombs is the reward.

In the West in recent years women have had the opportunity to be more than bodies that exist to produce sons. And rightly so. I am sure we are in a period of transition and much that Tiger now writes about is of concern to many of us of both sexes.

Tiger's conclusions miss an important aspect of ancestral mothering - the fact that our ancestral mothers probably were NEVER alone with their children. Their days would be spent in communal productive activity with other women and their collective children. Women need adult company and not merely to be with their offspring - and children were raised in public, not in private.

Husbands and wives would have probably had no deeper a relationship than sex and women would have shared their beds with their children rather than their husband.
Women probably did more productive work than men who, apart from hunting, would be spending their time making weapons, playing at or actually fighting and no doubt sitting around politicking.

It would not be bio-logic, as Tiger proposes, to pay men extra to keep women out of production and isolated in the home. The reason women were forced out of production was the increasingly lengthy period of childhood dependency which also put the burden of provisioning of children and women more exclusively on the male - something never chosen or wanted by women. Women never wanted nor enjoyed isolated sububan dependency. The 50s family set-up was about as unnatural for women as you can get in the modern world.

Tiger also misses the fact that evolution is not fixed but is about change and adaptation.

The main problem we have is that women have been deemed to be insignificant too often. A good reason for female involvement in the public world is to have female anthropologists, biologists, primatologists, sociobiologists etc etc to actually look at female nature so that we can avoid the male-bias that exists everywhere and we cannot see because it has always been there.
If we are going to include biology it has to be insight provided by women as well as men. (See Sara Blaffer Hrdy, Barbara Smuts, Marlene Zuk, Meredith Small to name just a few of the women bringing greater and more balanced insight into what female nature might be.)

A greater understanding of our evolution, right back to the evolution of sex and the sexes, is surely necessary. Today we do not have to produce the maximum number of offspring possible as other animals try to do. The sexes need other things to do. This includes other things for males to do than to bond with each other in competition with other males - behaviors that exist for male reproductive success and lead to violence, anti-social behaviour, war etc.

But we are still biologically driven in our behavior. Males still have brains and behaviors that lead them to compete with males and try to control females and worry about paternity while being promiscuous themselves. Females still have brains and behaviors that seek optimum resources for potential offspring and a fear of being 'parasitized' by genes from a male who then seeks to spread his resources to other females.

Of course it is a battle and only when we see the reasons the sexes battle might we be able to work out a new, workable truce that is different from the 'solution' we previously lived with which was that men own women and decide who uses their wombs - creating an overworked, subservient group of humans little more than wombs on legs.

Only men who want to go back to that need to be afraid.

We need to recognize how hard it is for the sexes to trust each other and get along because we have different biological ancestries. We do need to look at our selfish motives and behaviors and try really hard to imagine ourselves with the womb if we are male or without the womb if we are female - to get into each others evolutionary/reproductive perspective. It could strongly be argued that women are in fact much better at this because we are far more likely to care for all our children - men are still selfishly exploiting, abusing, killing, selling etc etc daughters around the world today.

We all have an equal number of male and female ancestors who have passed their genes down to us - genes that make the body behave differently whether it is male or female. We are all in this together. It is naturally the most emotional aspect of our lives but we need to stay rational about it. It is going to be extremely hard - and most of the world is still very oppressive towards women. But we can only keep trying.

But the first step is to stop confusing the way women have been forced to be during human evolution with female nature which is something quite different and a basic error in Tiger's views.

A very interesting aspect of this is the curious fact that men are very much more happy with male 'nature' than women are with female 'nature'. Even in all the anti-women sentiments throughout these reviews there is no male argument against the way male nature has been presumed to be in human history - more simply a desire for women to return to theirs. This strongly suggests that whatever is being presented as female nature is way off the mark and far more likely a constructed femininity that suits the male self-interest above all else.

The author makes some points that validate beliefs I've held for some time. What's interesting is he doesn't say what males ought to do in response. That seems like a consession to political correctness in times when the media is controlled by feminist ideals. Nonetheless, this book is essential for men, especially fathers and grandfathers who are concerned about the world that their sons and grandsons will live in.

Well, I was expecting something a little more from Dr. Tiger. The conclusions he draws are very intellectual/philosophical, but seem to lack much real world experiance. I will concede that popular culture and laws in general are increasingly biased against men, and I personally have witnessed these laws destroy 2 of my now-divorced male friends.

At the expense of being labeled a "dinosaur" and a "misogynist", I must say that this book does gives ammunition for debate to a modern intelligent man who happens to encounter the ridiculous feminist. It allows you to debunk the BS she will throw at you, and based on the fact that she probably has more free time to read than you ever will (as illustrated in this book) its nice to have this little compendium of the male side to easily deflate her arguement. It's amazing how upset a self-righteous feminist can get when she is told she's wrong (its also very fun to watch, and one such episode is easily worth the price of this book).

Gentlemen, if you have had it with the sublime misandry you've got to deal with on a daily basis then by all means buy this book and unleash your newfound knowledge on our "better half" (snicker). It'll give you the facts that you intuitively know, but have found elusive.

Overall, an interesting and thought-provoking read.

Lionel Tiger's c1999 text "The Decline Of Males" is a socioeconomic study of late 20th Century gender roles. The slightly pedantic study is detailed, well referenced and addresses global trends while concentrating on Western society.

Professor Tiger argues that men's aptitudes (hunter/maintainer/heavy lifter) are devalued in post-industrial society. This is true in affluent petroleum-energized society, but men's aptitudes regain value as economic conditions worsen and petroleum prices rise. And senior women (usually) lose physicial stamina earlier than senior men (e.g., osteoporosis). Senior women often need heavy lifters.

Women choosing to live without a long-term male partner might require paid assistance during their senior years, a potentially costly lifestyle decision. And children raised without a male parent's guidance must learn some of life's lessons themselves.