Men are Men. As they evolved as hunters, chasers, protectors, providers, and problem-solvers, an increasingly muscular and athletic body meant that they’d sacrifice the nutritiously precious fat deposits. The role-playing required men to be able to aim accurately at either edible targets or enemies, who either wanted to steal their food or who threatened their families. Their brains evolved with the visual-spatial area that allowed them successfully hit targets and solve problems. They became more and more adventurous, more cunning, and more cooperative, as also more single-minded and more persistent. Men increasingly roamed abroad in search of prey, taking risks of a kind that no tree-dwelling, the fruit-eating monkey would ever contemplate. While a male and female chimp would seek the same sources of food, men looked for sources that were mobile, distant, and unpredictable…..usually meat. Women looked for sources that were static, close, and predictable…..usually plants. With the settlement of agriculture, hunters stopped chasing after their prey. The meat was ‘captivated’ in the form of penned animals.
From the time they’re boys, males play violently. They fantasize and commit violence, take risks, plan and carry out wars and genocide. Genetic memory is part of our instinctive behavior. Tens of thousands of years sitting in caves, facing outwards to monitor surroundings, defending territories, and solving myriad problems of survival, left quite a mark. Men delight in competition; a kind of precursor to ambition and selfishness. As if their natural and unfortunate birthright, men rival other men, establish dominance, test hierarchies, claim territories, and monopolize toys. Typical boys enjoy wrestling, mock-fighting, and rough play with cars, trucks, swords, guns, and noisy toys. They also tend to threaten others and get into more conflicts and are less likely to share toys and take turns. Men are hard-wired to believe in ‘my-way-or-highway’ and hesitate to be dubbed as ‘pleasers’. Success is measured by results, accomplishments, and the ability to come up with solutions to problems. Men continue to define themselves and their self-worth by problem-solving abilities and achievements. They offer solutions, give advice and see to it as being ‘caring’ and ‘showing love’.
Men possess bottom-line brains. They’re mostly not aware of feelings or emotions. They usually hold expressionless faces, especially in public, because of the evolutionary need to withhold emotion to stave off possible attacks from strangers and to appear to be in control of their emotions. This’s why men look as if they’re statues when they listen. The emotionless mask that men wear, while listening, allows them to feel in control of the situation, but doesn’t mean men don’t experience emotions. Men evolved as lunch-chasers and not communicators. For thousands of years, they went hunting in packs, ran, chased, stalked, and used their spatial skills to catch food. The hunt was conducted with a series of nonverbal signals. Often the hunters would sit for hours silently watching for their prey. Their brains estimated speeds, angles, directions, gear changes and screamed with delight whenever a kill was made. Boys still kick and chase balls; men watch games to fantasize about their hunting shots and scoring points, without saying much.
The main purpose of humor for men is to gain status with other men by having a good repertoire; to allow them to deal with tragic events/consequences and to acknowledge the truth about a topical issue. Male brains have an amazing capacity for remembering and storing jokes. Men tell jokes they heard as preteens, but don’t know the names of their best friends. Their brains fail to connect everything and they’ve very little to say. When they’ve little to say they’re not intentionally hiding what happened; they just don’t think that much about it and as a consequence, they don’t remember much. With 30% fewer connections between the left and right brain hemispheres men are single-minded, focused to become dedicated specialists or experts on one subject. One-thing-at-a-time mentality means if an MRI scan of the male brain is taken off while he’s reading you’ll find he’s virtually deaf. Men take turns speaking because their brains are organized either to speak or to listen. When men talk, it’s about facts—–results, solutions, or answers to questions—-or to trade information about things and processes. They don’t expect other men to talk much and they never insist on having a conversation. They can’t do both. Men that talk non-stop, perhaps, possess extra X-chromosome…….XXY, instead of the normal XY).
Always been driven by their genetically installed ambitions to achieve things, physical exertion, and risk-taking are the two aspects of the primeval hunt that men today still feel impelled to recreate symbolically. Masculinity means strength; a spine-steel, courage and resolve, and the willingness to risk lives to help good triumph over evil, and the moral wit to distinguish between the two. Over the period of million years, men seem to have been brain-wired not to be seen as a failure in feeding their families or that they haven’t been able to do their job properly. Men hate criticism; they’re suspicious, competitive, controlled, defensive, and loners and hide their emotional state to stay in control. Becoming emotional is seen as being out of control. Social conditioning reinforces these behaviors by teaching men to act like a man, put on a brave face…. kind of boys-don’t-cry. The way men work in construction sites, start their jobs early and end them late, risk their lives in war, and work intensely because of their grit, sometimes, so much, that hard-driving and so much of silent internalizing of frustration leads them to death.
The love for gadgets, machines, instruments, and equipment is symbolic of the hunting males who’d rest from the chase, and spend hours cleaning, repairing, caring for, and improving their weapons. Excellent hand-eye coordination accounts for the male obsession with cricket, golf, football, basketball, or any game that involves estimating coordinates and throwing, chasing, or shooting at a target. Video and pinball arcades and skateboard rinks the world over are invariably full of boys. They construct block building from 2D plans, estimate angles accurately, and see whether a flat surface is a level. Men like surf Discovery, National Geography, History Channel, Animal Planet, news and sports channels, and not the soaps. Their own world of heroism in sports, war on the news, and associated discourse of stardom and nationalism could seem important and real to them.