Rights, Fights, and Sex Difference

Finding the upside of "male insecurity"

Walter J. Ong’s Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981) outlines the biological and historical roots of men’s love of combat, which Ong calls agon.

Arguments about the role of biology seem passé in a society that believes your sex is what you say it is. That view is the core of the transgender craze. Biology still matters, however. Combat is in male DNA, and combat refers to more than boxing or other martial arts. The Greek agonia also refers to assembly for debate. Ong’s arguments about the biological basis of certain human behavior—e.g., that of men in combat—are useful to every man who stands up for men, not only to men who fight. When you speak up for men, you are in contested territory.

Unlike most intellectuals today, Ong had many good things to say about men (he was writing four decades ago). One of his positive points, strange though it might seem, is that insecurity is built into male biology. He saw insecurity as the price we pay for being male. Most people today will assume that a statement about men and insecurity is only another derogatory comment of the kind feminists gaily toss off, another put-down that establishes female superiority. We are used to this. Men are the servants, women the served. He proposes, she disposes.

Given this stark divide, it seems appropriate sex difference itself—what is man, what is woman, i.e., who attends to whom—has become detached from biology. Sex difference is now a speech act. Just by saying “I am a man” or “I am a woman,” according to some people, you become one. When Katanji Brown Jackson, the justice recently named to the Supreme Court, was asked if she could define what a woman was, she said that, “in this context,” she could not. Jackson pointed ou that she was not a biologist, meaning that she would need scientific evidence to distinguish one sex from another. If she were a biologist, she would know.

But what context did she have in mind? She knows what a woman is in some contexts, apparently, but not in others. “Context” has become a weasle word. It was the word that Claudine Gay, then president of Harvard University, made famous when she used it to excuse rampant antisemitism at the school. For Gay, racisim in one context is acceptable as resistance in another. For Jackson, perhaps, binarism in one context is understood as fluidity in another.

At least the new justice (who should switch to woke, Gay-grade frames) believes that sex depends on biology, but you can only tell what one’s sex is if you have a good microscope. Good eyeglasses are not enough. I think her meaning is that, in other contexts, you can say “I am a woman” and become one. Your DNA is what it is, as far as the biologist is concerned, but only that far.

The woke, peering out from their weighty frames, believe that DNA is less important than what we choose to think and say. Ong argued that biology was a force that, along with culture, shapes behavior. That view, to the woke, is obnoxious as well as untenable.

The woke position is indebted to “speech act theory,” which was developed by linguists about fifty years ago. This theory asserted that speech did not only describe things but also made things happen. In a book called How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin parsed speech and its effects in novel ways. In speech-act terms, when a biological male says “I am a woman,” what he is doing (as opposed to what he is saying) is making a request that he hopes will be honored.

In speech-act terms, his statement cannot be regarded as true (which it is not) or false (which it is). Instead it must be treated as a felicitous request (treat me as if I were a woman) so that, when honored, it will change some aspect of the speaker’s future, which is to say that thereafter he will be treated as if he were a woman. Once accepted as a felicitous request, the speaker’s intention is validated. Requests made by those who are seen as victims (e.g., the sexually diasporic) are always honored by the woke, who are eager to grant such requests, if the right people make them.

That, in a nutshell, is the theory that operates behind the transgender movement. Of course, to flesh out, as it were, the physical side of the speech act, such things as injections, pills, hormones, surgery, clamps, padding, and other interventions are required, but we must not make too much of them. Transgendering is not only a big business but is also a sacred cause. If trans people say something is true, then true it is. Speech that expresses your desire to be a man or a woman can turn you into either one, so long as those around you assent to your request, and only a sexist homophobe would fail to do that—or a biologist, if you make the mistake of asking one.

Despite this wishful thinking, biology cannot be escaped, which is why the pills and surgeries and clamps and padding are necessary.

Sociobiology

Saying it does not make it so. Ong would regard that proposition as self-evident. His ideas about biology reflect those of Edmund O. Wilson, whose book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, appeared in 1975. Wilson argued that human behavior, although shaped by culture, has a biological foundation that we share with the animal world. His title refers to a synthesis of biology and sociology that grounds his view of human history. Wilson defined sociobiology as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior,” primarily of animals, but also of early man and of those “in the more primitive contemporary human societies” (pp. 3-4). In 1989 the international Animal Behavior Society named Sociobiology “the most important book on animal behavior of all time,” ahead of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, no less (p. vi).

Scholars who favored “nurture” over “nature,” including social scientists and psychologists, were outraged to be told that biology influenced human consciousness. Nonetheless, Sociobiology made its mark. When the book was published in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2000, Wilson revived his arguments in a new preface. There Wilson briefly recounts the controversy that was created by just 30 of his book’s 575 pages. His first section argues that “emotional control centers” of the brain “evolved by natural selection.”

Sociobiologists believe that males of almost any given species are conditioned by biology to fight. Most men do not climb into the ring, but they are inclined to fight anyway. They spar verbally, jest, and give other men a hard time. Enthusiasm for fighting isn’t, as feminists claim, a defect in men that can be modified (i.e., eliminated) by political re-education. It is, instead, a strength and is part of the hereditary nature of males. It is an instinct for contest that forms a continuous link between men today and their ancient ancestors.

Wilson was at pains to balance nature and culture, but his critics accused him of disregarding culture entirely and falsely claimed that he thought human nature developed only from our genes. Wilson’s opponents, including Marxist thinkers like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin (the latter quoted in Wilson’s book, p. 6), argued that the brain at birth is empty, blank. They wanted a tabula rasa, as Wilson pointed out in 2000, a new, unburdened being who would be ready to receive ideas leading to a socialist utopia, to “the ideal political economy.” Critics also charged Wilson with supporting a hereditary mechanism that served the interests of dominant classes and races by perpetuating their hold on the gene pool (p. vi).

Wilson was not deterred. His preface of 2000 claimed that “the hereditary framework of human nature seems permanently secure.” Maybe. Today hardly anybody thinks of basing arguments about human behavior on biology. Sociology prevails, not biology.

Not everybody has been persuaded by Wilson’s critics. Ryan T. Anderson emphasized that hormones and surgery cannot alter DNA. That means that sex reassignment surgery “doesn’t actually reassign sex.” Hormone treatment and cosmetic surgery “don’t change the deeper biological reality, which begins with our DNA and fetal development, unfolding in every bodily system” (When Harry Became Sally, 2019, p. 99). The view that anybody can become a woman is a “denigration of all women,” Christine Rosen argued (“New Misogyny,” 2022).

Sexual reassignment surgery sets up what Abigail Schrier and Anderson describe as a life-long battle between what the body knows (biology) and what it is being chemically (and culturally) induced to do. To no one’s surprise, Schrier’s Irreversible Damage (2020) and Ryan’s book were banned by Amazon. Amazon sells Wilson’s Sociobiology and his many of other books, however. I wonder if the woke watchdogs know what is in them?

Until recently, human behavior was understood to be conditioned by both biology and history, by the familiar pairing of “nature” and “nurture.” Natural biology is now being pushed out of the discussion. Witness the attempt to ignore the biology of boys in Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (2000). Authors Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson maintain that “whatever role biology plays” in sex differences is “by no means clear.” They dismiss “boy biology” and hope that men will redefine masculinity and remove the realities of challenge and struggle from boyhood. That will make boyhood more like girlhood, and, ultimately, make men better, which is to say, more like women. That’s the way of sociology and sociologists.

For these writers, it seems that boys, in and of themselves, bring nothing to their futures. We know this is not true. Countless studies differentiate the biological traits of boys and girls at birth. Kindlon and Thompson argue that “nature and nurture cannot be separated.” But even they distinguish innate “developmental readiness,” which is “an early neurological advantage,” from “cultural encouragement” (pp. 31-32). The “early neurological advantage” exists prior to “cultural encouragement.” They claim that the difference is “by no means clear,” an absurd assertion, since they make it clear themselves.

As Wilson shows, the male’s biological history matters to his behavior as both boy and man. His biology is one of readiness for struggle and preparedness for combat. Boys are ready to fight. To the horror of their mostly-female cadres of teachers, boys enjoy it. They also need it. Fighting helps boys discover who they are. For their teachers, all the “bad” things that boys are—boisterous, independent, active—are defects that can be traced to the boys’ exposure to adult toxic masculinity.

Ong’s view of male insecurity

Parents and teachers need to understand that insecurity is built into male biology. It is the price we pay for being male. Males “are insecure because they are in more constant and complex conflict with their environments than are females,” Ong writes, adding that clinical data show this is “most likely true from birth” (p. 68). Feminists think of only one meaning for insecurity, that being lack of confidence or uncertainty. The dictionaries remind us that insecurity also means being open to danger or threat. Men have been exposed to threat and danger—because they are men—for millennia. That’s what Ong means when he writes that men are “in more constant and complex conflict with their environments” than females (p. 68). Men have to be ready to protect others and themselves.

Feminists deride male shows of strength as compensation for feelings of inferiority. Women are stronger, smarter, and better than men. Men supposedly know this and, perceiving themselves as weak and secondary, resort to bravado to reassure themselves that they are in charge. Boxing, of course, fits into this scheme in which men fight to prove to each other that they are men, two cocks in the ring.

That’s the modern feminist understanding of men and masculinity. For these people, there is little difference between boxing and cockfighting. Two cocks fight because it is in their DNA to compete for space and dominance. That is a biological reality. Boxing and cockfighting are not the same, obviously, since one is a human activity conditioned by a culture of cherished rituals, and the other is not. Nonetheless, the instincts driving boxing, other martial arts, and cockfighting derive from the same male biology. Males of most species have always fought for the space and dominance their societies demanded. (Ong compares boxing and Balinese cockfighting, p. 94).

Ong argues that “males are readier risk takers for a species because they have been so programmed evolutionarily, as the more expendable sex” (p. 69). Every culture needs and benefits from risk-takers. Risk-takers are in danger. That is acceptable because the facts of biological life of male and female mammals show that males are disposable: one man has many sperm, one woman few eggs. The act of fertilization is part of the burden. “The stress situation for the male,” Ong writes, “comes to a peak in the mature male with sexual intercourse.” Sex is a "test of the male’s, not the female’s, physical ability to perform” (p. 67). In his view, masculinity even today is “a high-risk condition, all or nothing.” It’s not sexual satisfaction of the male that is important; it’s his potency, his ability to fertilize. After conception, the embryo is attached to the female and its development is remote from the male (p. 175).

Men's inescapable stress and sense of conflict surface in humor and boisterousness as well as in fighting. This potentially disruptive behavior, Ong writes, is "sexually determined": male hormones produce combative behavior (p. 52). That turns out to be productive for society. In the animal world, "almost all females have offspring, almost all males do not" (p. 56). The strongest males in the animal kingdom breed the most offspring and have the greatest influence on the gene pool, using their strength to fight off other males. They become the strongest through combat and contest, not by saying that they are the greatest.

The upside of “male insecurity”

Biology burdens men but also gives them significant advantages. The male is larger than the female, has a different muscle structure, a different metabolism, and different responses to stimuli. Males are faster and stronger.

As with action, so with speech. Men are also louder. Ong notes that oratory was once exclusively the man’s responsibility, requiring vocal force. The man’s world was public; the woman’s world private. He had to prove himself in public; she did not. This distinction has been eliminated by technology, a subject never far from Ong’s arguments. The public realm required more energy than the private, and still does, but mass media mean that speakers no longer need physical force or strong voices in order to be heard.

Men still need to be heard, however. If you box, speak up for boxing. Boxing is a public world. As a man, you are at home in it, and you have good cause to bring what you learn as a boxer into other areas of your life. Contest is a factor. When you train as a boxer, you will probably like the company you find. That’s because, as men meet their biological responsibilities, they gain status and earn the respect of other men.

Ong comments on men’s relationships, which work well as descriptions of boxers’ relationships. “The male values a companion whom he can stand up against and who can stand up against him,” Ong writes, so that “each receives assurance from the other’s decently adversative stance.” Men need each other but men also keep their friends “at arm’s length—an admiring arm's length.” Men need strong men around them, not back-patters.

In a group of men, this distance creates “a kind of diffuse communal narcissism.” That is a good description of the respect athletes have for each other, a reward that has to be earned. Men and women differ in their understanding of this comradeship. Women see agonistic, combative behavior as “truly hostile in intent,” whereas men understand it as “intense friendly aggression,” something, Ong says, that is “foreign to most women’s experience” (p. 81). I think of friends who can’t wait to get into the ring to spar. I think of how I feel when I head into six rounds with my coach. Friendly aggression keeps us on our toes, alert and responsive. It leads to “communal narcissism,” and that is the best of brotherhoods.

Where to go from here

Ong writes persuasively about the benefits of contest and conflict. These benefits are especially important because they build men up men as men. I see three, each one part of the public sphere in which men are tested every day.

First is self-reliance. In ritual contests such as boxing, the fighter is alone, as he is in wrestling and Mixed Martial Arts, forms of combat between two people, not two teams. Team sports are thrilling, but they are not personal in the way wrestling and boxing are personal. In ritual contest, Ong says, the warrior is alone.

Second is confidence, which flows from self-reliance. In a feminized culture that either belittles men or blames them, confidence is crucial. Some men are bad actors. So are some women. Don’t fuel the feminist fire by being a bad actor yourself. Stand up as a strong, independent man with qualities and accomplishments the critics can’t demean. Have something to show for yourself. Then, if you want, you can ask the critics what they have accomplished.

Third is authority. Men who are self-reliant and confident speak with authority—authority about masculinity, among other things. That means you should speak as a man who knows how to engage adversaries in friendly contest, especially with women who teach your children. Ong was writing before the feminist domination of intellectual life that we see today. But he saw the ground shifting even as he wrote. Women are now in charge of education at all levels. They are dismantling the adversarial tradition in schooling that, as Ong shows, was for millennia the very root of thought and learning (pp. 28-29 and elsewhere). Today women in power do not want debate and contest. They pursue dominance by suppressing independent thought.

In response to this strategy of domination, men should stand up. Women can don fatigues, fire rifles, and pull on boxing gloves, but they are never going to fight like men. True, they can launch a missile by pressing a button, but technology, not biology, does the work. Ong noted that women have “taken” from masculinity in the way they once “took” a man’s name in marriage (pp. 71-73). Masculine styling for women is chic; feminine styling for men is drag, a form of parody and exaggeration—indeed, a performance, a pose. If a woman hears that she fights “like a man,” she knows she’s been complimented. When a man hears that he fights like a woman, or, more probably, a girl, he knows he’s been insulted.

What to do?

Educate teachers, for starters. Teachers should understand that boxing and other forms of martial art offer boys a rich and rewarding path for growth. Teachers also need to learn what fighting is, where it comes from, what it costs, and why society needs it—that is, why they need it. Fighting grows out of genetic insecurity, as Ong points out, and it has made the world stronger and safer.

It’s not only teachers who need to think about boys. Teachers would be more inclined to understand boy biology if fathers and mothers spoke up for their sons as often as they do for the daughters the teachers already admire.

Finally, though, it is up to men.

If you want the benefits of combat, compete, first with yourself, and then with other men. And then talk about it. Does that sound like bragging rights? Maybe. But you will have earned those rights. Better still, you will be raising the bar for other men, and that’s a benefit of competition for all of us

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