Irritable Male Syndrome   Jed Diamond is the internationally best-selling author of eight books including Male Menopause, now translated into 17 foreign languages and his latest book, The The Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression. For over 38 years he has been a leader in the field of men's health. He is a member of the International Scientific Board of the World Congress on Men’s Health and has been on the Board of Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its founding in 1992. His work has been featured in major newspapers throughout the United States including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000 radio and T.V. programs including The View with Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth, Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did a nationally televised special on Male Menopause for PBS. He looks forward to your feedback. E-Mail You can visit his website at www.menalive.com Take The Irritable Male Syndrome quiz. A couple wondering in the wilderness Anger, Sex, Emotional Expression, and Irritable Male Syndrome (IMS) Are Males Are Becoming the New Second Sex? Are Men All That Bad or Are Our Small Gametes to Blame? Are Men an Endangered Species? Are You A Man With IMS? Are You Living with an IMS man? Connecting and Networking Depression Unmasked: His and Hers The Differences Between Male and Female Depression “Hell Hath No Fury like a Man Devalued” A Gene’s Eye View of The Gender Dance. Making Babies: Will My Genes Be Carried On? From Jekyll to Hyde: The Story of Barry and Sharon The Irritable Male Syndrome: A Multi-Dimensional Problem in Life The Irritable Male Syndrome: A Multi-Dimensional Problem in Life Part 2 The Irritable Male Syndrome and Domestic Violence The Irritable Male Syndrome: Same problem, different View The Irritable Male Syndrome: Take the Test The IMS Questionnaire The Irritable Male Syndrome: Up Close and Personal Is Becoming a Man Even Possible? The Evolution of Desire: Are There Two Human Natures? It could be IMS not IBS that is the problem when nice men turn mean Japanese Boys “Act Out” Their Anger and “Act In” Their Pain The Legacy of Depression: My Father’s Story Part I The Legacy of Depression: My Father’s Story Part II The Many Masks of Male Depression Men’s Love and Hate for Women My Own Story of Anger and Violence Suicide is a Predominantly Male Problem What Does It Mean to Be Male? What Have We Done to Our Sons? What is Depression and Why Is It Vital to Understand It? What We Know About Depression and Teen-age Boys When Depression Takes Over and Life Becomes Too Painful Why Male Depression Is Hidden: My Personal Experience Y Am I Like This? Y Am I Like This? Genesis, chapter 5, tells us about "the generations of Adam": Adam begat Seth, Seth begat Enosh, Enosh begat Kenan... down to Noah of the flood. Translated into modern genetic terms, the account could read "Adam passed a copy of his Y chromosome to Seth, Seth passed a copy of his Y chromosome to Enosh, Enosh passed a copy of his Y chromosome to Kenan"... and so on until Noah was born carrying a copy of Adam's Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is paternally inherited; human males have one while females have none. All human cells, other than mature red blood cells, possess a nucleus which contains the genetic material (DNA) arranged into 46 chromosomes, themselves grouped into 23 pairs. In 22 pairs, both members are essentially identical, one deriving from the individual's mother, the other from the father. The 23rd pair is different. While in females this pair has two like chromosomes called "X," in males it comprises one "X" and one "Y," two very dissimilar chromosomes. It is these chromosome differences which determine sex. That’s the good news about the Y chromosome. If we didn’t have it we would all be females. However, the bad news is that the Y is very short compared to the X with which it is paired. Until quite recently it was believed that the Y chromosome was becoming ever shorter and some felt that it might lose function all together. However, a 40-strong team of researchers led by Dr. David Page of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that the Y chromosome is much more important than scientists once believed.[i] As well as having a previously unknown and elaborate back-up system for self-repair, the Y chromosome also carries 78 genes, almost double the previously known tally, the researchers reported. "The Y chromosome is a hall of mirrors," says Page, whose team has for the first time identified the full genetic sequence of a Y chromosome, from an anonymous donor. The team believes the Y has developed an apparently unique way of pairing up with itself. They found that many of its 50 million DNA "letters" occur in sequences known as palindromes. Like their grammatical counterparts, these sequences of letters read the same forward as backward but are arranged in opposite directions - like a mirror image - on both strands of the DNA double helix. This means that a back-up copy of each of the genes they contain occurs at each end of the sequence. When the DNA divides during reproduction, the team believes, it opens an opportunity for genes to be shuffled or swapped and faulty copies to be deleted. Cut this Other chromosomes typically have thousands of genes packed into their DNA. The Y-chromosome, to date, has been found to have only about 20 genes. The XX chromosome that women have helps insure that genetic errors on the X chromosome will be masked by the other X. Although new discoveries show that the Y chromosome can repair itself better than was once thought, men with only one X and a very small matching chromosome, the Y,. are still more susceptible to problems than are females. As a result males suffer more genetic problems than females such as color blindness and muscular dystrophy.[ii] From the moment of conception males are more fragile and vulnerable than females. Male fetuses die more often than female. So do male newborns. So do male infants. So do male adolescents. So do male adults. So do old men.[iii] Part of the explanation is the biology of the male fetus, which is little understood and not widely known. At conception there are more male than female embryos. This may be because the spermatozoa carrying the Y chromosome swim faster than those carrying X. The advantage is, however, immediately challenged. External maternal stress around the time of conception is associated with a reduction in the male to female sex ratio, suggesting that the male embryo is more vulnerable than the female.[iv] The male fetus is at greater risk of death or damage from almost all the obstetric catastrophes that can happen before birth.[v] Perinatal brain damage,[vi] cerebral palsy,[vii] congenital deformities of the genitalia and limbs, premature birth, and stillbirth are commoner in boys,[viii] and by the time a boy is born he is on average developmentally some weeks behind his sister: "A newborn girl is the physiological equivalent of a 4 to 6 week old boy."[ix] At term the excess has fallen from around 120 male conceptions to 105 boys per 100 girls.[x] So we see that right from the moment when that sperm penetrates the egg, males begin to experience problems. Some of us don’t make it. We die off early. Others survive to make it into the world, but are at a greater handicap than our female counterparts. One of the most respected scientists of our times, Ashley Montagu, wrote an entire book aptly titled The Natural Superiority of Women. Written in 1953 and updated a number of times since, he counters sexist claims of female inferiority and offers a host of data from many fields of science to demonstrate that women's biological, genetic, and physical makeup makes her not only man's equal, but his superior in many ways. In looking at male disabilities we must remember that we are talking about averages. More males will suffer brain damage, for instance, than females. If you are one of those males, you probably find it easy to believe that males are at greater risk than females. However, if you’re the mother of a brain damaged daughter, you may feel outraged that we are saying that males are at a disadvantage. As we go through the ways in which men feel endangered and insecure, remember that we aren’t speaking of all men. But we need to recognize the ways in which these underlying issues affect all men’s sense of security. We might think of these things as the foundation of manhood. There are many ways in which the foundation itself is weak beginning with weaknesses based on our genetic makeup and extending to our upbringing and socialization. William S. Pollack, PhD and Ronald F. Levant, EdD have spent a great deal of their professional careers working with males. Dr. Pollack is the co-director of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital and assistant clinical professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Levant is dean and professor of Psychology, Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and founder and former director of the Boston University Fatherhood Project. In their excellent book, New Psychotherapy for Men they describe the behaviors that are often at the core of male susceptibility to later problems in life. Men suffer under a code of masculinity that requires them to be: aggressive dominant achievement-oriented competitive rigidly self-sufficient adventure-seeking willing to take risks emotionally restricted and constituted to avoid all things, actions, and reactions that are potentially “feminine.”[xi] Dr. Pollack also blames many of men's self-destructive ways on the persistent image of the dispassionate, resilient, action-oriented male -- the Marlboro Man who is self sufficient and self absorbed. Although there has been progress in the last 10 years in helping men expand our range of emotions, for most men the training we grew up with still restricts us. Men in our culture, Dr. Pollack says, are pretty much limited to a menu of three strong feelings: rage, triumph, lust. "Anything else and you risk being seen as a sissy," he tells us.[xii] In a number of books, most recently Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood, he proposes that boys "lose their voice, a whole half of their emotional selves," beginning at age 4 or 5. "Their vulnerable, sad feelings and sense of need are suppressed or shamed out of them," he says -- by their peers, parents, the great wide televised fist in their face.[xiii] He added: "If you keep hammering it into a kid that he has to look tough and stop being a crybaby and a mama's boy, the boy will start creating a mask of bravado."[xiv] In his book, The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege, psychologist Herb Goldberg summarizes what many have come to believe about men. “The American an endangered species? he asks. “Absolutely! The male has paid a heavy price for his masculine ‘privilege’ and power. He is out of touch with his emotions and his body. He is playing by the rules of the male game plan and with lemming-like purpose he is destroying himself—emotionally, psychologically and physically.”[xv] [i] Nature 423, 810 - 813 (19 June 2003) [ii] Although it is true that the Y chromosome contributes to men’s genetically related problems, new evidence points to the fact that the Y chromosome is not as dysfunctional as once thought. For current information on these findings see Nature website at www.nature.com/nature/focus/ychromosome/ and Nature Genetics at www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/ng/journal/v35/n3/full/ng1103-195.html [iii] The World’s Women 2000: Trends and Statistics New York: United Nations, 2000. [iv] D. Hanson D, H. Møller H, and J. Olsen. Severe peri-conceptional life events and the sex ratio in offspring: follow up study based on five national registers. BMJ 1999; 319: 548-549. [v] R. Mizuno. The male/female ratio of fetal deaths and births in Japan. Lancet 2000; 356: 738-739. [vi] M.E. Lavoie, P. Robaey, J.E.A. Stauder, J. Glorieux, F. Lefebvre. Extreme prematurity in healthy 5-year-old children: a re-analysis of sex effects on event-related brain activity. Psychophysiology 1998; 35: 679-689. [vii] J.E. Singer, M. Westphal, K.R. Niswander. Sex differences in the incidence of neonatal abnormalities and abnormal performance in early childhood. Child Dev 1968; 39: 103-112. [viii] D.C. Taylor DC. Mechanisms of sex differentiation: evidence from disease. In: Ghesquiere J, Martin RD, Newcombe F, eds. Human sexual dimorphism. London: Taylor & Francis, 1985:169-189. [ix] T. Gualtieri, R. Hicks. An immunoreactive theory of selective male affliction. Behav Brain Sci 1985; 8: 427-441. [x] L. B. Shettles LB. Conception and birth sex ratios. Obstet Gynecol 1961; 18: 122-130. [xi] Ronald F. Levant and William S. Pollock (Eds.). A New Psychology of Men. New York: Basic Books, 1995. [xii] Quoted by Natalie Angier. Why Men Don’t Last: Self Destruction as a Way of Life. February 17, 1999 New York Times on Line http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/menshealth/17angi.html [xiii] Ibid. [xiv] Ibid. [xv] Herb Goldberg. The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege. New York: Nash Publishing, 1976, Dusk jacket quote. Why Male Depression Is Hidden: My Personal Experience In my marriage, I would often get irritable, angry, blaming, and judgmental. I was sure other people, particularly my wife, were doing things that caused me to become irritable and angry. I couldn’t see that the source of the problem was inside. Usually the irritability and anger that is characteristic of the “acting out” variety of the Irritable Male Syndrome (IMS) is obvious, though its cause may not be. There’s another side of the problem that is usually hidden. I describe it as “acting in” IMS. Here our irritability may cover a more severe, yet concealed, problem. For many men, chronic irritability is a symptom of depression. Yet because the classic symptoms of depression don’t include components of irritability, it is often missed in men. This was the case with me. One of the times I noticed it was after our son was born. Although I was ecstatic at his birth, I also felt irritable and edgy. I knew that some women suffered from post-natal depression, but I didn’t think it could occur in men. No one did 34 years ago when my son was born. However, recent studies in England suggest that men also have problems after the birth of their children. Mary Alabaster, the manager of maternal mental health services has developed a program that includes men. Her own research suggests that male postnatal depression exists and is triggered by a wide variety of causes. "It really has to be taken seriously,” she says. "There has been lots of research that shows that fathers actually do suffer from postnatal depression, but people aren't actually doing anything about it.”[i] There have been a number of times in my life I had been concerned that my irritability and anger might be related to depression. As a professional therapist I was well aware of the official symptom list, and periodically I would go over them to see how they applied to me. Here is how it is determined if a person is suffering from depression using the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the main diagnostic reference of Mental Health professionals in the United States of America:[ii] Five (or more) of the following symptoms have been present during the same 2-week period and represent a change from previous functioning; at least one of the symptoms is either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure. (1) Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). Note: In children and adolescents, can be irritable mood. (2) Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day (as indicated by either subjective account or observation made by others). (3) Significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain (e.g., a change of more than 5% of body weight in a month), or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day. (4) Insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day. (5) Psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day. (6) Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day. (7) Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day. (8) Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day. (9) Recurrent thoughts of death, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide. Every time I checked my own feelings and behavior against the criteria for depression listed here, I concluded I was not depressed. I rarely experienced depressed moods as the official manual defined them. I didn’t feel sad or empty or appear tearful. I didn’t feel a markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities. I noted that irritable mood is only an indication of depression in children and adolescents. I always felt like a guy returning from the dentist. I was relieved that they didn’t find any cavities, but concerned that they hadn’t found a cause for my pain and discomfort. However, when the symptom was irritability, it seemed I knew the cause. The cause, I firmly believed, was my wife, or sometimes my children, friends, colleagues, the President of the United States (with his irrational policies), or “this messed up world we have to live in.” If there was a problem, it was clearly their problem. Getting my wife into treatment might help things, I thought. But, I was firmly convinced, my irritability and unhappiness didn’t have anything to do with me. Whenever my wife, or occasionally a close friend, suggested I might want to “see someone,” I could easily brush them off. “Look, I’m a mental health professional. I’ve been in practice for more than 30 years. Don’t you think I would know if I had a problem? And listen, don’t take my word for it. Here, look at this.” I’d remind her that that I wasn’t depressed according to the professionally accepted official manual. I didn’t qualify. Case closed. It took me a long time to believe that there might be something going on with me despite what the official manual said. It took even longer for me to wonder if the official manual might be wrong. As a psychotherapist I saw a lot of people who were depressed, primarily women. The criteria in the DSM-IV seemed to fit the majority of the depressed women I was seeing. However, though it fit some of the men, it seemed to miss a lot of those who I believed were depressed. Furthermore, I couldn’t understand why the DSM-IV would recognize that irritability was a symptom in children and adolescence, but fail to recognize it in adults. For me irritability was one of the prime emotions that I was experiencing and my unhappiness generally expressed itself through worry, anxiety, and hypersensitivity. I also remember my work over the years with people suffering from substance abuse problems. We used to believe that heroin addicts “got well” if they survived to be 40. That was because we didn’t see them showing up in treatment programs after that age. The problem was that they were showing up in alcohol treatment programs. Since the two types of programs didn’t communicate well with each other, we often didn’t notice that the spontaneous cures were anything but that. In fact, most of the addicts who had not fully recovered had simply switched to a different drug. I wondered if a similar thing was happening with depressed men. In my work with men who used and abused alcohol and other drugs, I found a lot of them were depressed. However their depression was rarely recognized or treated because it was covered by their alcohol use. In some ways the men were “self medicating.” Using alcohol was a way many depressed men dealt with their painful feelings. [i] Adam Lusher and Brian Welsh. Men To Get Counselling for “PostNatal Depression.” Accessed August 24, 2003 on the World Wide Web. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/exit.jhtml?exit=http://www.maledepression.com/links/links17.html [ii] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). American Psychiatric Association, Washington D.C., 1994 What We Know About Depression and Teen-age Boys Teen-age boys are much more likely to express their sadness through anger than are girls. Traditional school counseling and therapy are often not best suited for connecting with young males. Finding something to “do” together makes talking much easier. Even though teen-agers, and boys in particular, often act hostile or indifferent to our offers to help, they are hungry to have someone who really wants to understand them. Remember that what seem like “small” slights can seem “huge” when you’re a teenager. Our self-esteem and connection to others is very vulnerable. It doesn’t take much—a negative word, an indifferent stare, a lack of appreciation, a rebuff from a girl we like—to throw us into a tailspin. Being laughed at, teased, or humiliated is one of the most crushing experiences young people go through, particularly males. The resulting experience of shame is at the core of much of the violence we see in young males. “I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, “says James Gilligan, M.D., author of Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and It’s Causes.[i] Sex, success, and self-esteem are very much intertwined for teen-age boys. We need to find ways to reach out to them and discuss these often taboo topics. One of the techniques I used with my teenage son (on separate occasions with my teenage daughter) was to get him in the car to take him somewhere. I would always take the long way around and use the time to talk to him about all the things I wished my father had said to me when I was his age. Usually he was silent or would make disgusted or disgusting sounds. But he couldn’t escape and later as an adult we joked about it and he told me they were even helpful at times. While suggestions of suicide should always be taken seriously, we need to be particularly concerned about young males. They are much less likely to let us know that they are becoming increasingly depressed and much more likely to complete a suicide attempt than are young females. There are a number of researchers and clinicians who work with boys that recognize the different ways boys express their unhappiness. “We see boys who, frightened or saddened by family discord,” say Dr. Dan Kindlon and Dr. Michael Thompson in their book Raising Can: Protecting The Emotional Life of Boys, “experience those feelings only as mounting anger or an irritable wish that everyone would ‘just leave me alone.’ Shamed by school problems or stung by criticism, they lash out or withdraw emotionally.”[ii] “In so many cases, what in the teenage years may look like a bad boy is really a sad boy, whose underground pain may lead him to become extremely dangerous to others, or much more likely, to himself,” says Dr. William S. Pollack, author of Real Boys’ Voices. Tragically, boys rarely ‘attempt’ suicide; when they reach out for a knife, a rope, or a gun, generally they are not crying for help. Rather, they are very much trying to get the job done.”[iii] [i] James Gilligan. Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996, 119. [ii] Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. Raising Cain: Protecting The Emotional Life of Boys. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1999, 3. [iii] William S. Pollack with Todd Shuster. Real Boys’ Voices. New York: Random House, 2000, 148. When Depression Takes Over and Life Becomes Too Painful Recognizing the close relationship between the irritability and anger that is “acted out” and what is “acted in” can be seen in the origin of the word suicide. The word is taken from Latin and means killing of the self. However, the German equivalent Selbstmord, which translates as self-murder speaks directly to the violence that occurs within. Although most people experience the milder forms of “acting in” IMS, it is useful to explore the outer fringes where death is a very real possibility. Seeing IMS in its extremes can better help us understand what most people experience. Suicide is still a fearful and taboo subject, one most people would rather ignore. Yet unless we confront the reality of suicide too many males will continue to die, too many will experience unremitting suffering, and too many families will be destroyed. Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and former director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic. She has written more than a hundred scientific papers about mood disorders, psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and suicide. It’s safe to say, she is one of the best in the field and knows what she is talking about. But, unlike most other professionals who describe the problems of others, Dr. Jamison acknowledges her own battles with life-threatening mood disorders. “Within a month of signing my appointment papers to become an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, I was on my way to madness.” This is how she begins her book, An Unquiet Mind: Memoir of Moods and Madness. “It was 1974,” she says, “and I was twenty-eight years old. Within three months I was manic beyond recognition and just beginning a long, costly personal war against a medication that I would, in a few years’ time, be strongly encouraging others to take. My illness, and my struggles against the drug that ultimately saved my life and restored my sanity, had been years in the making.”[i] Jamison, by her own admission, came very close to death many times in her life. “I was seventeen when, in the midst of my first depression, I became knowledgeable about suicide in something other than an existential, adolescent way. For much of each day during several months of my senior year in high school, I thought about when, whether, where, and how to kill myself. I learned to present to others a face at variance with my mind; ferreted out the location of two or three nearby tall buildings with unprotected stairwells; discovered the fastest flows of morning traffic; and learned how to load my father’s gun.”[ii] Ten years later she found the desire to die overwhelming. “After a damaging and psychotic mania, followed by a particularly prolonged and violent siege of depression, I took a massive overdose of lithium [the most common medication used to treat manic depressive illness]. I unambivalently wanted to die and nearly did. Death from suicide had become a possibility, if not a probability in my life.”[iii] From then on she was on a quest. “As a tiger learns about the minds and moves of his cats, and a pilot about the dynamics of the wind and air, I learned about the illness I had and its possible end point. I learned as best I could, and as much as I could, about the moods of death.”[iv] What she has learned can be a help to us all. The underlying conditions that predispose an individual to kill himself include heredity, severe mental illness, and an impulsive or violent temperament.[v] There are a number of events or circumstances in life that interact with these predisposing vulnerabilities: Romantic failures or upheavals; economic and job setbacks; confrontations with the law; situations that cause or are perceived as causing, great shame, and injudicious use of alcohol or drugs. [vi] Suicide in our young has at least tripled over the past forty-five years.[vii] One in ten college students seriously considered suicide and most had gone so far as to draw up a plan.[viii] One in five high school students had seriously considered suicide and most had drawn up a suicide plan.[ix] [i] Kay Redfield Jamison. An Unquiet Mind: Memoir of Moods and Madness. New York: Vintage books, 1996. [ii] Jamison. Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. New York: Vintage Books, 1999, 5-6. [iii] Ibid., 6. [iv] Ibid., 6-7. [v] Ibid., 19. [vi] Ibid., 19. [vii] Ibid., 21. [viii] Ibid., 21. [ix] Ibid. 22. What Have We Done to Our Sons? If you are a parent, like me, who has a boy you know how difficult it is to raise him. I believe it does take a village to raise a child and most parents aren’t getting much help. In our tribal past everyone in the village celebrated the birth of a child and were responsible for his upbringing. Even when I was growing up most people in the neighborhood knew the kids. If I was doing something I shouldn’t, someone would usually notice and call me over for a little talk. My parents would hear about it before I even got home. In many families there were grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins who lived in the same house or nearby. Now extended families are a rarity. Nuclear families, with a Mom, Dad and kids, are the rule and even they are breaking down. Divorce results in many children being raised by a single parent, usually the mother. Even in “intact” families the economic demands of our modern life-style require both parents to work. Children rarely get the physical, emotional, and spiritual support they need. This is having a devastating impact on children. In the last 10 years there has been a lot of attention paid to the stresses on girls growing up. We are only recently beginning to recognize what is happening to our boys. “Girls, our new myths tell us, have life much worse than boys,” says psychologist Michael Gurian, author of The Wonder of Boys. In-depth research shows that girls and boys each have their own equally painful sufferings. To say girls have it worse than boys is to put on blinders.”[i] Boys who are having trouble now, grow into troubled teens, and become adults who are much more likely to suffer from IMS. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned,” says Dr. Dan Kindlon, of Harvard University and Dr. Michael Thompson, a preeminent child psychologist, “it’s that, unless we give him a viable alternative, today’s angry young man is destined to become tomorrow’s lonely and embittered middle-aged man.”[ii] Understanding what our boys are experiencing can better help us deal with IMS in our teenagers. It can also make us aware of the kinds of stresses many adult males experienced growing up. Understanding our boys can also alert us to the kinds of stresses that will form the character of the men of the future. Schools Are Leaving Our Boys Behind In 1990, psychologist Carol Gilligan announced to the world that America’s adolescent girls were in crisis. “As the river of girl’s life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing.”[iii] A number of other popular books focused on the problems our daughters were experiencing in school. “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence,” said Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia. “Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn.”[iv] These concerns were taken up by women’s groups and organizations concerned about the effect of society on the success of our daughters. As a result money was poured into the schools to make changes that would help the girls. Some researchers feel that the data supporting the view that girl’s are being shortchanged is suspect and that many of the changes that are meant to be “girl friendly” in fact discriminate against boys. Interestingly, it is a woman who has become one of the strongest advocates for boys. Christina Hoff Sommers has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Brandeis University and was formerly a professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. “The research commonly cited to support the claims of male privilege and sinfulness is riddled with errors,” she says. “Almost none of it has been published in professional peer-reviewed journals…A review of the facts shows boys, not girls, on the weak side of an educational gender gap.”[v] I don’t find it helpful to get into a debate of whether females or males have a worse time of it. My experience raising both male and female children is that each sex has unique strengths and unique difficulties. Having worked in the classrooms when my son and daughter were growing up, it seems to me that both girls and boys are getting shortchanged. Here I want to focus on the boys since a great deal of attention is already being focused on girls and educational programs seem to be geared more to the success of our daughters.[vi] Data from the U.S. Department of Education and from several recent university studies show that boys are falling behind in their education. Girls get better grades.[vii] They have higher educational aspirations.[viii] They follow a more rigorous academic program and participate more in the prestigious Advanced Placement (AP) program.[ix] Christina Hoff Sommers notes that “A 1999 Congressional Quarterly Researcher article about male and female academic achievement takes note of a common parental experience; ‘Daughters want to please their teachers by spending extra time on projects, doing extra credit, making homework as neat as possible. Sons rush through homework assignments and run outside to play, unconcerned about how the teacher will regard the sloppy work.’ In the technical language of education experts, girls are academically more ‘engaged.’”[x] She also cites studies that have found that “engagement with school is perhaps the single most important predictor of academic success.”[xi] It should not surprise us then that girls read more books.[xii] They outperform males on tests of artistic and musical ability.[xiii] More girls than boys study abroad.[xiv] Conversely, more boys than girls are suspended from school. More are held back and more drop out.[xv] Boys are three times as likely as girls to be enrolled in special education programs and four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).[xvi] More boys than girls are involved in crime, alcohol, and drugs.[xvii] We discussed in chapter 3 the huge difference in the suicide rate between males and females. Although the difference increases with age, it is significant during the school years. Between the ages of 5 and 24 males kill themselves nearly six times more often than females.[xviii] The Horatio Alger Association is a fifty-year-old organization devoted to promoting and affirming individual initiative and “the American dream.” In 1998 they released a survey that contrasted two groups of students: the highly “successful” (approximately 18 percent of American students) and the “disillusioned” (approximately 15 percent of students. They noted that the students in the successful group work hard, choose challenging classes, make schoolwork a top priority, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, and feel that their teachers and administrators care about them and listen to them. According to the report, the successful group is 63 percent female and 37 percent male. At the other extreme, the disillusioned students are pessimistic about their own futures, get low grades, have minimal contact with their teachers, and believe that there is no one they can turn to for help. We would certainly say the disillusioned group has become demoralized. According to the report, “Nearly seven out of ten are male.”[xix] These are the young men who will suffer from the Irritable Male Syndrome. They will more likely become involved in violent or suicidal behavior, drop out of school, get involved with alcohol and drugs, have difficulty finding good employment opportunities, and have a very chaotic family life when they marry. Although these statistics can just seem like numbers on the paper, they are very real to me. I work at a health clinic where I see the real people behind the statistics. Although we serve both males and females, I am always struck by the numbers of males that I see. I am rarely called to the school for problems with the girls. It is almost always with one of the boys. If you think about it I believe you will recognize real people you know behind many of these statistics. Many of these boys are sinking below the surface and calling out for our help. Will we be there for them? If we pay attention to our young men, they will have a better chance to grow up to be responsible and loving adults. Whether or not we help them, they will grow up and the great majority will find a partner, start a family, and likely pass on their experiences to the next generation of young males. [i] Michael Gurian. The Wonder of Boys. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996, p. xvii. [ii] Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999, p. vii. [iii] Carol Gilligan, “Prologue,” in Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School, ed. Carol Gilligan, Nona Lyons, and Trudy Hammer. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 4. [iv] Mary Pipher. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Putnam, 1994, p. 9. [v] Christina Hoff Sommers. The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. p. 14. [vi] I am indebted to Christina Hoff Sommers for gathering a great deal of the data on the educational system and our boys. [vii] See Carol Dwyer and Linda Johnson. “Grades, Accomplishments, and Correlates,” in Gender and Fair Assessment, ed. Warren Willingham and Nancy Cole. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1997, 127-56. [viii] Higher Education Research Institute. The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1998. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998, pp. 36, 54. [ix] See Hoff Sommers. The War Against Boys., p. 24 and U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics. The Condition of Education, 1998, p. 90. [x] Ibid., p. 28. [xi] Ibid., p. 29. [xii] Higher Education Research Institute. The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1998. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998, pp 39, 57. [xiii] National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP 1997 Arts Report Card. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 1998. [xiv] Of students studying abroad, 65 percent are female, 35 percent male; see chart “Study Abroad by U.S. Students, 1996-1997.” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 1998, p. A71. [xv] For suspension rates, see U.S. Department of Education, Conditions of Education. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1997, p. 158. For data on repeating grades, see U.S. Department of Education, Conditions of Education, 1995, p. 13. For information on dropouts, see U.S. Department of Education, Digest of Educational Statistics 1995. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1995, p. 409. [xvi] For data on special education, see U.S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1994, p. 304. For information on ADHD, see American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Vol. 4. Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 82. According to DSM-IV, the official diagnostic guide for all of us who work in the mental health professions, “The disorder is much more frequent in males than in females, with male-to-female ratio ranging from 4:1 to 9:1, depending on the setting.” [xvii] For statistics on alcohol and drugs, see “National Survey Results on Drug Use,” in National Institute on Drug Abuse, Monitoring the Future Study, 1975-1995, vol. 1, Secondary School Students. Rockville, Md.: National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1996, p. 20. See also U.S. Department of Education. The Conditions of Education. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1997, p. 300, Table 47-3, “Supplementary Tables.” For crime statistics, see U.S. Department of Justice, Female Offenders in the Juvenile Justice System: Statistics Summary. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1996, pp. 28-29. [xviii] The male rate is 47 per 100,000, while the female rate is 8.1 per 100,000. Summarized from R. Anderson, K. Kochanek & S. Murphy. Report of final mortality statistics. Monthly Vital Statistics Report, 45 (11), Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 1997 and from G. Murphy. Why women are less likely than men to commit suicide. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 39, 1998, 165-175. [xix] Horatio Alger Association. State of Our Nation’s Youth 1998-1999. The survey conducted by NFO Research, Inc., was based on two small but carefully selected samples of students (a cross section of 2,250 fourteen- to eighteen-year olds as well as a computer-generated sample of 1,041 students; see p. 4. The researchers are careful to note that this study is not definitive and provides only a “snapshot in time.” What Does It Mean to Be Male? Nothing is closer to our sense of self than our sense of “maleness” and “femaleness.” When our babies first emerge from the womb the mother (and increasingly the father who is in the delivery room) hears “congratulations, it’s a boy,” or “it’s a girl.” Many “parents to be” will say that they would be happy with either a boy or a girl, but none can ignore the fact that boys and girls are not alike. Although we all recognize the differences, there is a great deal of controversy about what differences exist, whether they are inherent or a product of culture, and what these differences mean. In the past differences have often been used to restrict the freedom and opportunities of one group, most often women. Even the consummate scientist, Charles Darwin, believed that men were naturally smarter than women. This superior male intelligence, he proposed, arose because of the unique tasks that men practiced. It was the men that fought to win mates, made tools to hunt, cooperated with other men, and fought wild animals to “bring home the mammoth.” He believed that the need of our male ancestors to compete with each other, created a superior level of intelligence. He assumed an aggressive, intelligent Adam and a gentle, nurturing Eve. This image conformed to what Darwin saw everywhere around him in Victorian England.[i] This sexist view of gender differences was bitterly attacked after World War I. Margaret Mead was among the intellectual leaders of the period who believed that differences were not built in, but were a product of the particular culture in which a person lived. As Mead wrote in 1935, “We may say that many if not all of the personality traits which we have called masculine and feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.”[ii] This view that what makes us male and female is largely determined by our environment has held sway since then. Certainly when I was doing my graduate training in the 1960s that was the view in most academic settings. To suggest that there were inherent differences between males and females was to open oneself to attack as being ignorant and sexist. For some women, and particularly for many academic feminists, there was a fear that acknowledging that there were inherent differences between males and females would lead back to a time when “different” was seen as “inferior.” It was an understandable fear. However, there is an increasing body of evidence that has accumulated over the last 25 years that shows that males and females are different in many ways. Even many feminist academics now recognize these differences and realize that men and women can be different without one being superior to the other. According to Dr. Bobbi S. Low, Professor of Resource Ecology at the University of Michigan, “New research in evolutionary theory, combined with findings from anthropology, psychology, sociology, and economics, supports the perhaps unsettling view that men and women have indeed evolved to behave differently—that, although environmental conditions can exaggerate or minimize these differences in male and female behaviors, under most conditions each sex has been successful as a result of very different behaviors.”[iii] This was certainly my experience raising a boy and a girl. No matter what my wife and I tried to do to raise our children in non-sexist ways, there were certain things that just seemed to be built in. Our boy turned everything into guns, even when we gave him dolls. Our daughter spent lots of time playing house even when we tried to interest her in baseball. “Some societies minimize the difference between the sexes; others—perhaps the majority—exaggerate them,” say David Barash and Judith Lipton authors of Making Sense of Sex: How Genes and Gender Influence Our Relationships. “But the differences are never reversed, and thus evidence mounts in favor of a biological common denominator.”[iv] We will see that a good deal of what leads to the Irritable Male Syndrome can be understood in terms of the ways the biology of being male interacts with the environment we find ourselves in. It isn’t a question of nature versus nurture. Our biological nature influences our environment and our environment can have a profound impact on our biology. In future columns we will take a look at some of these male attributes and see how they can help us understand why men are so vulnerable and subject to stresses and strains that lead to increased irritability. [i] Helen Fisher. Anatomy of Love: The Mysteries of Mating, Marriage and Why We Stray. New York: Fawcett Columbine 1992, p. 190. [ii] Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: William Morrow, 1935, p. 180.. [iii] Bobbi S. Low. Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. xiii. [iv] David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton. Making Sense of Sex: How Genes and Gender Influence our Relationships. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997, p. 5 Suicide is a Predominantly Male Problem Randolph Nesse, M.D. and colleagues at the University of Michigan examined premature deaths among men in 20 countries. They suggest that as many as 375,000 lives could be saved in the US alone if male mortality rates were brought into line with those of women. Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death, the study concluded. "If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer," Nesse says.[i] Nowhere is this more evident than in looking at suicide rates. Each year, about 31,000 Americans commit suicide, making it the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. Almost every American has a relative, friend, or acquaintance who has killed himself. But what is often lost in the statistics and reports of suicide among “Americans,” or our “youth” or “high school” or “college” students is that the vast majority of these deaths occur in males. Once thought to be primarily a white male problem, suicide is increasingly dramatically in the Black community. “The staggering growth in the number of black male suicides over the last 10 years is shocking,” says Susan Burks a writer for the Denver Post. “Suicide is now the third-leading cause of death for African-American males ages 15 through 24. Suicide among black youth, once uncommon, showed a rate increase of 233 percent increase for boys between the ages of 10 and 14. Black teenagers in this country are killing themselves at a rate of 5 per day. Sixty-five percent of them are using firearms to do it.”[ii] Whether Black, Caucasian, or any other racial or ethnic group, the number one risk factor for suicide is being male. In 1999, the suicide death rate was 18.2/100,000 among males, and 4.1 in females. This means that male suicides outnumbered female suicides by a ratio of more than 4 to 1.[iii] The imbalance between the number of males who kill themselves and the number of females who die by their own hand is evident throughout the life-cycle as the following table illustrates: Estimated Annual Suicide Rate per 100,000 by Age and Gender[iv] Age Range Men Women Male:Female 5-14 1.3 0.4 3.25 15-19 18.5 3.7 6.08 20-24 27.2 4.0 7.35 25-64 25.6 6.1 4.20 65-85 49.4 5.1 9.68 85+ 75.0 5.0 15.00 Points of Understanding Even for children between 5 and 14 years of age when suicides are low, males are more than 3 times as likely to kill themselves as females. For teens between 15 and 19 the ratio nearly doubles with males killing themselves 6 times as often as females. During the young adult years, 20-24, the ratio jumps again to over 7 times. In the adult years between 25 and 64, the male rate drops slightly and the female rate increases, but the ratio of male to female suicides is still more than 4 to 1. However, in the retirement years after age between 65 and 85, the ratio more than doubles with more than 9 men killing themselves for every woman. For the “old, old” over 85, the female rate drops slightly while the male rate increases dramatically. For those men who are fortunate to be alive after 85 fifteen times more men kill themselves than women. There seem to be a number of factors that may account for the increased rate as men age. Being socially isolated, divorced, or widowed are important risk factors for men.[v] The male suicide rate is also worrisome outside the United States. Worldwide, suicide claimed the lives of an estimated 815,000 people in 2000, the majority of which were males.[vi] The extent to which males outnumber females in suicide varies by country. For instance, in certain parts of China, where people most often kill themselves using chemical poisons found on rural farms, the numbers are nearly equal. However, in all other countries in the world males outnumber females. The sex disparity is especially high in countries of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Interestingly Puerto Rico has the highest ratio, with males killing themselves at rates more than 10 times that of females.[vii] It is clear that men kill themselves at rates many times that of females in nearly all parts of the world. Yet females attempt suicide much more often. Most studies suggest that females experience depression at rates twice as high as males. Yet, we know that depression is highly associated with suicide. This raises some interesting and important questions. If the studies show that females tend to be more depressed than males, why do males have such high suicide rates? Are females really more depressed than males or are we failing to recognize depression in men? To answer these questions we need to delve more deeply into the world of depression. [i] Being a man is bad for health. BBC News. July 24, 2002. [ii] Susan Burks. Denver Post, January 3, 2003, Accessed on the internet January 12, 2003 at www.denverpost.com/Stories [iii] National Center for Health Statistics: Health, United States, 2002. Hyattsville, MD, Table 30. [iv] Summarized from R. Anderson, K. Kochanek & S. Murphy. Report of final mortality statistics. Monthly Vital Statistics Report, 45 (11), Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 1997 and from G. Murphy. Why women are less likely than men to commit suicide. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 39, 1998, 165-175. Reported in Sam V. Cochran and Fredric E. Rabinowitz. Men and Depression: Clinical and Empirical Perspectives. San Diego, California: Academic Press, 2000, p. 141. [v] Centers for Disease Control: Suicide among Older Persons, United States, 1980-1992. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, January 12, 1996. [vi] E.G. Krug, et al., eds. World report on violence and health. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2002, 185. Is Becoming a Man Even Possible? The Evolution of Desire: Are There Two Human Natures? Though the process is not always conscious, we never choose mates at random. We are all descended from a long and unbroken line of ancestors who competed successfully for desirable mates, attracted mates who were reproductively valuable, retained mates long enough to reproduce, and fended off interested rivals. The way we carry out these vital functions is what evolutionary psychologists call our "reproductive strategy." It is our characteristic way of doing things, our standard operating procedure. It is what draws us to certain people, "the whisperings within," as Evolutionary Psychologist David P. Barash calls them. We don't always follow what we hear, but we must always listen. When the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon asked which females are the most sexually attractive to Yanomamo Indian men of the Amazon rain forest, his male informant replied without hesitation, "females who are moko dude." In referring to the life-giving fruits of the jungle, Chagnon was told, moko dude means that the fruit is perfectly ripe. When referring to a woman, it means that she is post pubescent but has not yet borne her first child, or about fifteen to eighteen years of age. Since women's ability to conceive and bear children decreases with age, youth is a direct indicator of reproductive capacity. “Across all cultures,” say Barash and Lipton, “men consistently express a fondness for youthful women.” Another such indicator is beauty. Psychologist David Buss found that men throughout the world had a similar definition of beauty. "Full lips, clear and smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, and good muscle tone," he says," are universally sought after." Those who believe that beauty is arbitrarily defined in each culture are not aware of the increasingly convincing literature on the evolutionary basis of attraction between the sexes. Attraction to beauty seems to be built into our biological makeup, according to psychologist Judith Langlois and her colleagues. In one study, adults evaluated color slides of white and black female faces for their attractiveness. Then infants of two or three months of age were shown pairs of these faces that differed in their degree of attractiveness. The infants looked longer at the more attractive faces. “This evidence,” says Buss, “challenges the common view that the idea of attractiveness is learned through gradual exposure to current cultural standards.” Based on his research findings, Buss found a host of other differences between men and women and concluded that there are actually two human natures, one male the other female. He believed that both the similarities and the differences could be explained by understanding evolutionary pressures that our ancestors faced over the last five million years. For instance, men's greater jealousy over his mate’s sexual infidelity can be traced, Buss believes, to the uncertainty men have over the paternity of their children. Every woman who gives birth is 100% certain that the child carries her genes. For men, on the other hand, there is always a degree of doubt. In evolutionary terms the consequence of raising a child that may not carry his genes, but those of another man, is the death of his line. Those men who took an easy-going approach to the possibility of his mate being sexual with other men left fewer genes than those men who were sexually jealous. What makes Buss' findings so compelling is the breadth of his research. "If mating desires and other features of human psychology are products of our evolutionary history," says Buss, "they should be found universally, not just in the United States." To test his theories he conducted a five year study working with fifty collaborators from thirty-seven cultures located on six continents and five islands from Australia to Zambia. All major racial groups, religious groups, and ethnic groups were represented. In all, his research team surveyed 10,047 persons worldwide. His findings held up in every culture he surveyed. Becoming a Man: The Big Impossible It isn’t easy being a man today. We have the same evolutionary needs that we always had, but the world has changed in such a way that it is more difficult for many men to meet these needs. As always we must still compete with other males for access to females. If we come out on top in these contests we must then be chosen by the female. Females are becoming choosier. As their power increases in the world, they are less willing to settle for men who don’t meet their standards. In his book Manhood in the Making, anthropologist David Gilmore reports on his cross-cultural exploration of what it means to be a man. In cultures as diverse as hunter-gatherers, horticultural and pastoral tribes, peasants, postindustrial civilizations from the east and west, he found a similar vulnerability in all men. “Among most of the peoples that anthropologists are familiar with,” says Gilmore, “true manhood is a precious and elusive status beyond mere maleness. Everywhere he looked at cultures Gilmore found that masculinity is a much more uncertain concept than that of femininity. As author Norman Mailer recognized “Nobody was born a man; you earned manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough.” He could be speaking about the universal man, not just men in contemporary western cultures. In aboriginal North America, among the Fox tribe for instance, manhood was seen as being “the Big Impossible,” an exclusive status that only the nimble few can achieve. “A man must prove his manhood every day by standing up to challenges and insults,” says write Oscar Lewis, “even though he goes to his death ‘smiling.’”. How many young men do we see in our schools and neighborhoods today who would rather go to their deaths smiling than risk an insult to their manhood? The case is different for females. Although women are pressured to live up to certain standards of femininity in all cultures and are sanctioned and punished if they deviate, they are not threatened with the loss of their womanhood to the degree that is true of men. “Rarely is their right to a gender identity questioned in the same public, dramatic way that it is for men,” says Gilmore. “The very paucity of linguistic labels for females echoing the epithets ‘effete,’ ‘unmanly’ ‘effeminate,’ ‘emasculated,’ and so on, attest to this archetypical difference between sex judgments worldwide.” Who we are as men is shaped, in many ways, by what women find attractive. The reverse is also true. However, the feminine qualities are more solid and secure than are those for the men. There is no “big impossible” for women. Youth is a given for every female who is young. The parallel value for men to be strong and productive is not as easy to develop and maintain. For women, beauty and youth may fade as they age, but there are huge industries whose main function is to make women appear young and attractive through the years. For men the skills and abilities to make a good enough living to attract and keep a woman are not always under a man’s control. There is no makeup or facelift that can create a job. Even if he does everything he can to get the education and develop the skills he needs for success, the economy may shift in ways that keep him from making the kind of living that would be most desirable. What Women Want, Men Are Finding Hard to Provide In Buss' world-wide study, he found that the top three qualities that women look for in men are exactly the same as those things that men look for in women: Intelligence, kindness, and love. Once again we see that, at their core, men and women are the same. But then, what women want diverges from what men want. “Nothing agreeth worse than a lady’s heart and a beggar’s purse,” wrote the English satirist John Heywood in the sixteenth century. Whether in tribal societies like the Aleut Eskimos or the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert, women want to marry “big men,” individuals with rank and status. American women polled in both the 1930s and the 1980s considered a potential mate’s financial prospects about twice as important as men did. This is true world-wide and doesn't seem to depend on whether the women, themselves, are well off. I have found that women doctors, for instance, are drawn to even higher paid male doctors, rather than to male nurses who might share their interests. “Power is the great aphrodisiac,” said Henry Kissinger. Looks are much less important for women than they are for men. From an evolutionary perspective, women wanted men who would provide resources for her and the children. Those who mated with socially powerful men reaped the benefits of her mate’s intelligence and charisma, as well as his ability to protect and provide. In Buss's study, he concluded that the reason women were less concerned about a man's sexual fidelity and more concerned about their mates emotional fidelity was the fear that an emotional attachment was more likely to lead to abandonment and the loss of the man's resources. We see this evolutionary proclivity showing up in the modern dating and mating game. When interviewing the women contestants on the Joe Millionaire program, Time magazine found that the subject the women were most likely to lie about was their age. Male contestants for the show The Bachelorette were most likely to lie about their income. Even in T.V. land men know that women are drawn to men who are well off and men are drawn to female youth and beauty. These desires are often not conscious. Women usually don't say to themselves, "I like that guy because he is willing to commit his resources to me and my children, if I decide to have children." She just says, "I like that guy. I can count on him." She doesn't say, "I want a tall strong man who can protect me from wild animals." She just says, "He turns me on. The chemistry feels right." In the modern world, men are falling farther and farther behind. We begin with many biological disadvantages and are increasingly experiencing social stressors as well. At all stages of life our boys, teens, and adult men are losing out. This is most apparent in the two critical areas of life—production and reproduction. Without good jobs men are having trouble being productive in the world. Men who are not good producers and providers are not chosen by women to develop long-term relationships. A Gene’s Eye View of The Gender Dance. Making Babies: Will My Genes Be Carried On? None of your direct ancestors died childless. Think about that for a moment. It’s obvious that your parents had at least one child. Your mother’s parents and your father’s parents had children. If we could look backward and trace our ancestors as far back as we could go, we would find an unbroken chain of reproductive success. We all know people today who don’t have children. However, that was not the case with any of our direct ancestors. Over a period of 5 million years, not one of our family members dropped the ball. We are a product of their reproductive success and you can bet that what it takes to pass on our genes to the next generation is built into our attitudes, desires, and behaviors. From an evolutionary perspective, whatever contributes to our genetic success makes us feel good. Whatever stands in the way of our evolutionary success makes us feel irritable, angry, and depressed. Although our current research on the genome gives the impression that humans are increasingly in charge of our evolutionary future, it is a valuable exercise to look at humans “through the eyes of the gene.” Richard Dawkins was the first to make this view explicit. In his book The Selfish Gene, he says “No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the gene’s way of preserving the genes unaltered.” From a gene's perspective, it is less important whether we survive to a ripe old age, than whether we reproduce. Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, called this process "sexual selection." The idea that reproduction was the key to understanding why we do what we do was ignored for many years after Darwin's death and has only recently come back into vogue. "Its principal insight," says Matt Ridley, author of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, "is that the goal of an animal is not just to survive but to breed. Indeed, where breeding and survival come into conflict, it is breeding that takes precedence; for example, salmon starve to death while breeding. And breeding, in sexual species, consists of finding an appropriate partner and persuading it to part with a package of genes." The basic reality of sexual selection helps us understand a good deal about men and the Irritable Male Syndrome. We often wonder why it is young men, more often than young women, who take risks that put their lives in danger. An important reality is that during these key reproductive years it is the males who must compete against other males for access to the females. Whether he is a bull moose or a bull headed 20 year-old, he is willing to fight other males or take risks in order to have the best chance of having sex with the most attractive female he can find. At the other end of the age spectrum it helps us understand why older men more often leave their partners or have affairs than do older women. Rarely do these older men hook up with a woman the same age as their wives. It’s almost always with a younger woman. Why? From an evolutionary perspective a person’s success is measured, not by their bank account or the value of their car, but by the number of children they are able to bring into the world and who grow up enough to have children of their own. Have you ever watched Dr. Phil, the psychologist who became famous on Oprah Winfrey’s show? One of his favorite answers to women who ask “why does he do that?” (Usually the “that” has to do with some way in which the man is treating the woman badly.) Dr. Phil’s answer is often an in-her-face “Because he can.” What he usually means is that he does it because she lets him get away with it. In the world of evolution “because he can” means “because he can produce children.” There is a reality that most 50-something couples don’t deal with directly. She is post-menopausal and cannot produce more children. He, on the other hand, has the biological potential to have more kids. If he continues to be stay with his 50 year-old wife, his genetic potential is limited. If, on the other hand, he finds a 35 year-old or a 25 year-old to have sex with him, his genetic success can be increased. Remember, this does not occur on a conscious level. Few men say to themselves, “I’d like to increase the success of my genes, so I think I will leave my 50 year-old wife and date two 25 year-olds with the chance that I might have more children to carry my genes.” More often it expresses itself as “I love my wife, but we just don’t have the old spark we used to. We fight all the time and she just doesn’t like to do the things that I like to do. And, well, there’s this woman who I work with….” Let me be very clear here. I’m not saying that because men have a genetic urge to leave their wives or have affairs with younger women that this is a good thing. I’m not saying that we are prisoners of our genes and that we have no power to decide what is right or wrong. I am saying that our biological urgings to reproduce and pass on the most genes to the next generation is powerful. If we are not aware of the strength of these desires we will have less success controlling them. Remember, too, that for every older man who hooks up with a younger woman, there is a younger woman who wants to connect with an older man. As we will discuss later in the chapter, men have a biological attraction to young, attractive females because they have the best chance of producing children. Women have a biological attraction to successful men with resources available to share with them and their children (These are often older men who have had a chance to become successful in the world). Yet, biology is not destiny. Older men don’t have to leave their wives and have affairs. Younger women don’t have to go after the husbands of those older wives. We all can choose, but the choices aren’t always easy. Are you one of the people like me who has a hard time keeping your weight under control? I do well until I see the candy, cake, pies, or pudding. I can’t resist. Why is it so difficult for us? Evolutionary biology can help us understand our desire for sweets and other strong urges. It tells us that for most of our 5 million year ancestral history, sweets and fats were scarce. Those who learned to find the most and eat what they found were the most successful and passed on their genes to the next generation. The problem today is that we still have the same biology, but now sweets and fats are everywhere. If we followed our biological urgings all of us would be 400 pounds and unable to walk. My point is that we can and do control our evolutionary desires, but it isn’t easy. The knowledge of how difficult it is can help us be more successful. Whether we want to understand why we overeat, why young men take such high risks, why Viagra is the most successful drug of our times, why men stray, or why we are so irritable, we need to understand our evolutionary history and how our genes act on our minds, bodies, and actions. We may not like the ways our genes influence us, but we better pay attention to their pull. “Genes never sleep,” say Drs Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan, two experts on genetic influences and authors of Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food—Taming Our Primal Instincts. “Instead of a blissful ‘they got married and lived happily ever after,’ gene fairy tales end with offspring and more offspring—any way the genes can get them.” “Hell Hath No Fury like a Man Devalued” These are the opening words of the book Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History by Robert S. McElvaine. They could also be the words of the millions of men today experiencing the Irritable Male Syndrome In our computer economy, the blue-collar labor that was usually the province of men is being supplanted by what Peter Drucker calls “knowledge workers.” Drucker believes that those who are smart, educated, and computer literate, the “gold-collar workers, will be able to write their own career tickets. Career advancement has always been a part of men’s feeling of self respect. In the world of the future more and more men will lack the education to compete for the best jobs. Demographers predict that by 2007, 9.2 million American women and only 6.9 million American men will be enrolled in college.” says Fisher. “The contrast is even greater among part-time, adult, and minority students. Women are also gradually closing the education gap in much of the rest of the world.” Women have always been better than men at “people skills.” They tune in to others’ feelings and are more empathic. These skills have enabled women to be good mothers and increasingly in the work place, excellent employees. Surprisingly, it was John D. Rockefeller who said, “The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.” Neuroscientists currently believe that interpersonal sensitivity, a conglomerate of aptitudes they call “executive social skills” or “social cognition,” resides in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain behind the brow. Those with a well-functioning prefrontal cortex are aware of the feelings of others, pick up on emotional expressions and body language, and are adept at maintaining good social relationships with friends, family and co-workers. Neuroscientist David Skuse believes that women are more likely than men to acquire the genetic endowment for developing these vital social skills. The reason, he believes, is that there is a specific gene or cluster of genes on the X chromosome that influences the formation of the prefrontal cortex. He found that this gene or gene cluster is silenced in 100% of men but active in about 50% of women. Hence about half of all women and no men have the brain architecture to excel at perceiving the nuances of social interplay. This doesn’t mean that the other 50% of women and all us men can’t learn these skills. It just means we have to work harder at it. Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cambridge University. He has been researching sex differences for over twenty years. In his recent book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male & Female Brain, he details the latest research in the field. His conclusions are both startling and clear-cut. “The subject of essential sex differences in the mind is clearly very delicate,” he cautions us. But the findings substantiate the fact that males and females are different, in large measure because of the different ways our brains are structured. “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy,” he tells us. “The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.” Emotions Guide Our Direction in Life and Men Have Difficulty Expressing Their Feelings The various mental states we call emotions have evolved through eons of time to help us meet life’s challenges. It is our emotions that let us know when we are on the right path in life. “Negative emotions—fear, sadness, and anger, says psychologist Martin Seligman, “are our first line of defense against external threats, calling us to battle stations. Fear is a signal that danger is lurking, sadness is a signal that loss is impending, and anger signals someone trespassing against us.” Until recently the possible purpose of positive emotions for our survival was not considered. In 1998 psychologist Barbara Fredrickson published a paper titled “What Good Are Positive Emotions. Seligman who is the primary founder of the field of Positive Psychology said, “Fredrickson claims that positive emotions have a grand purpose in evolution. They broaden our abiding intellectual, physical, and social resources, building up reserves we can draw upon when a threat or opportunity presents itself.” It is our emotions that give color to our lives. Feeling our feelings and sharing what is inside us with others creates the bond that is the foundation of love. Yet most men I know are very limited in our ability to experience a range of feelings let alone to put those feelings into words. One of the most common questions a woman will ask a man when she wants to get closer to him is “what are you feeling?” For most men the response is “I don’t know.” Women, on average, are more aware of their emotions, show more empathy, and are more adept interpersonally. Alexithymia is a condition where a person is unable to describe emotion in words. Frequently, alexithymic individuals are unaware of what their feelings are. Dr. Ron Levant, a professor at Harvard University, coined the technical term "no