What Is a Man?

Michael Gurian
June 3, 2005

These extracts from "What Could He Be Thinking?" by Dr Michael Gurian give a glimpse of the fascinating gender differences in mental functioning discussed in his book. We plan to post a short series of such extracts, with the author's permission.
Robert Griffith, Editor.

Understanding the men in your life is a path to power: power in your home, in your workplace, in your family, and on the street. To delve more deeply into this power, let's now ask the fundamental question, "What is a man?" and answer it as only nature can.

The Biology of Male Identity

Have you noticed these things?

• Men will tend to put their pursuit of self-worth and personal power first, intimacy second. It's much more difficult to get a man to put the hands-on care of his family before work at the office that needs to be finished.
• Men tend to relate to others with greater degrees of personal independence than women do. Men tend to expect more independent behavior from children than women do.
• Men tend to search out ways to become wounded, show off their wounds, live by their swords, make games out of giving and getting wounds. They test themselves. They push themselves into physical pain as much as possible, such as playing a sport even when they are injured or avoiding the doctor when they really should go.
• Men do not tend to be as satisfied as their wives often seem to be with making a nest and exploring the relationships within it; they tend to need to leave the nest, even project distant abstract goals through which to experience their own sense of power and worth.
• Men tend to berate each other, cut each other down, negate each other, and generally treat each other in ways women find nasty and mean. Yet the men laugh, jostle, jest, motivate, and seem to feel helped, supported, and loved in the process.
• Men yearn to show bravery and courage, to sacrifice themselves toward the highest possible standards of worth and power, against all odds, seeking the power and status that come from battling the impossible and making it possible. During the Vietnam War, when men sacrificed themselves and lost rather than gained status, they sensed that collective manhood had been betrayed.

Many of these tendencies have been identified in our culture and studied from a social or psychological perspective. Let us deepen our understanding of men by adding the biological perspective. As we understand the core of manhood by means of biological trends, we will be exploring the effect of these elements of biology on male life:

Testosterone, the dominant male hormone, associated with sex and aggression, the search for social power, ambition, and independence.
Vasopressin, a brain chemical males have more of than females, associated with territoriality, hierarchy, competition, and persistence.
Oxytocin, a brain chemical more dominant in females, associated with maternal nurturance, verbal-emotive connection, and empathic bonding.
Differences between men and women in the way their brains gather sensory and sensual information.
The male brain's greater development of cortical areas for spatial thinking and abstract systems.
The role of female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone.
Biopsychological drives to discover and express potency that are hardwired into male reproductive processes.

Men Are On a Quest

Men can be quite confusing - following the rules in some ways, breaking them in others; giving up their lives to save their country, but paying little attention to their own families; searching for self-worth in the long-term accomplishment of goals, but giving up self-worth that they could gain by being more empathic every day. What puzzles men are!

Yet given what we've learned about the nature of a man, there is one thing about men that is not puzzling: Almost every man you know is on a quest. This quest - the outward manifestation of his mental and emotional interaction with his external environment - brings together elements of calling, work, family, identity, emotional life, and moral character. How he makes his quest is the man's ultimate marker of self-worth in the world.

Have you noticed how boys already prepare for their quest from early on in life: testing themselves and each other; looking for new ways of being and thinking; inventing, building, climbing into the world? Have you noticed that human societies all share one primary way of framing and nurturing male development: through the encouragement of the hero's journey? Much of the history of male literature involves heroic quest. Even the video games that companies produce for boys to play are nearly all heroic quests.

Not surprisingly, during the time between puberty and middle age, when testosterone is high, males experiment with heroism, trying on many different masks and costumes of the quest. Always the boy, as he joins the world of men, is looking to fulfill the duties and dreams of his quest for something ever greater. Boys are more likely than girls to pursue life as a heroic quest. Throughout life, men are more likely to test themselves constantly on the quest, seek status and worth in hierarchies and competition. Entrepreneurs of business motivation sell the logic, love, and language of the heroic quest in our competitive business world. "You can be anything you want to be!" "You can make a million dollars by the time you're thirty!" "You hold the keys to your own kingdom - use them!"

When men begin to move through male menopause - which is biologically caused by the drop of testosterone in the brain and bloodstream - they become gradually less interested in constantly testing themselves. But until late middle age (and for some men, not even then), the experience of the heroic quest is central to the male journey. Women want to be heroes, certainly. They are on a quest as well. But even they seem to want men to be heroes. Studies all over the world indicate that women between puberty and middle age select, for romantic relationships and marriage, the men who are on a quest toward achievement and status. Women want men who aspire to be kings, (even if only at a local level), warriors (protectors who make them feel safe), magicians (men who have, even if in a love of gadgets, some magical power that leads to success), lovers (men who make women part of their quest). Women don't want stereotype heroes - cardboard video-game action figures; they want loving, wise, and powerful heroes - men. As nature seems to have planned things, women's heroic expectations not only drive men but can actually add to male fragility, especially to the sense of fragility felt by men who lack physical or mental prowess.

Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and the many psychologists studying the human mind in the past acknowledged the archetypal hero's existence and the hero's quest in our psyches but did not have the scientific proof that we now have for this statement: The hero is biologically wired into men's minds. Testosterone, vasopressin, greater spinal fluid in the brain, less serotonin, less oxytocin, and the way the male-brain system projects life onto an abstract and spatial universe, leads men to see the world in terms of action, heroes, warriors, even lovers who must negotiate landscapes of challenge.

If you are a woman, you may have noticed that your boyfriend or husband may talk in the evening about his accomplishments or inventions or the way he vanquished a business opponent. He is involved in realigning his sense of self-worth with what happened that day along the lines of the heroic intentions that he (or perhaps even you) projected for himself. You may notice it gives him pleasure and pride to review his accomplishments and potentials, whereas you may feel less of a need to review your own with your friends or even with him. As he provides you with details of his potency - his accomplishment and potential - a beautiful and mysterious thing is going on: he is bonding with you through the presentation of himself to you.

If he has done nothing heroic on a given day - or in a given week - he may well feel like a failure, and he might try to overcome this feeling by living vicariously through the accomplishments of his favorite sports star. When a man has a less than heroic job, he may leave the grind behind and seek an activity outside his work or family to achieve transcendence of the mediocre. It will generally involve some kind of competition. Even if he does this in a poker game or by outdrinking a friend, he'll probably feel better, feel that he has, after all, overcome a challenge - acted heroically, with freedom and power.

Perhaps one of the most primal ways men experience their internal wiring for a heroic journey lies in the mainly unspoken envy that men have for warriors - soldiers, policeman, firefighters. It is more obvious in men's love of fantasy landscapes, knights, TV cops, detectives. Men want to fight the good fight. They use these landscapes as imaginative mirrors of their own quest. Boys start from a very young age with the quest and the search for the duties, loyalties, honors, and challenges it will entail. Adolescent boys are initiated into the adult world of male life by healthy family and mentoring systems, and they initiate themselves toward manhood in sports, on the streets, chess matches, debate tournaments, or any number of other external challenge experiences.

The male impulse to be heroic; to be the best; to be conspicuous even if only in one key area of life; to be the one who saves the family, neighborhood, community; to win the girl's attentions; or to conquer the workforce is the impulse not merely to live everyday life but to project himself onto the faces of the heroes and success makers of past and present, thus making life into a risk-filled, success/failure, win/lose quest for worth and power.

Bridge Brains: Exceptions to The Rule

Having explored the hardwiring of the core of manhood as it appears in most men's lives, it is crucial to take time to explore the men who are exceptions to the rule:

• These men may take fewer physical risks.
• They may appear to have less motivation to show potency.
• They may avoid competitive work and careers.
• They may have a lower rather than higher sex drive.
• They may choose empathy nurturance as a dominant relational strategy rather than aggression nurturance.
• They may not care about any of the trappings or stories of the heroic quest.
• They may have no interest in any aggressive sport or video game.
• They may prefer sensuality to principles and abstractions.

Men with three or more of these qualities may be bridge brains, men whose brain systems are lower on the testosterone/vasopressin scale and favor development of cortical areas in ways that lean toward the more female end of the brain spectrum. There will probably be some area in life where the heroic quest still comes into play, for the quest biology is basic to male hormones; but for the bridge-brain male the quest biology may only exist in his love of scifi novels or watching karate movies, not in his daily active life.

Watching the world's reception of these lower-testosterone and bridge-brain men is often painful. The heroic quest is so instinctual to us when we relate to, and as, men that many people look with disdain on the man who is the exception. Fortunately, the last thirty years have been the most welcoming for bridge-brain males.

Women have more control over how we feel about bridge-brain males than they may realize. Men have always and will always make their heroic quest in part to be impressive to women. The drive for heterosexual men to be sexually selected by women is so powerful that men are, in large numbers today, trying to become not only more heroic every day but also better bridge brains (or bridge-brain imitators). Men are trying to fine-tune male/female emotional conversation. They are trying to name and share their feelings. They are trying to be better listeners to women. Men are generally not doing this because men feel they can't personally live without these skills; rather, they want to impress women and have noticed that increasing numbers of women are selecting more emotionally sensitive males. Women have power!

We shall post further extracts from Dr Gurian's book in the coming weeks. You can buy his book on-line at Amazon: just click here

Source

• Michael Gurian. What Could He Be Thinking? : How a Man's Mind Really Works. 1st edition, September 2003. St Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10010

Related Links
Michael Gurian Home Page
Introduction: What Could He Be Thinking?
A Friendly Look at the Male Brain
HRT for Men Is Risky, Too

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