Dead or in Jail

Boyhood and manhood in a (tournament or pair-bonding) society.

Billionaires - they’re everywhere these days, offering to impregnate pop stars, getting suspiciously fit, suggesting we take shallower breaths, strap computers to our faces, and they’re going to space, or at least planning to, loudly.

It’s an oversized portion of the news. I doubt the stories make anyone feel particularly good, except maybe the billionaires’ parents. But people can’t seem to look away. The reasons seem to be:

• Shit rolls downhill. These are the people whose shit we’ll have to dodge or be flattened by.

• In our advanced global civilization, it’s amazing what’s possible for people who have access to everything - spaceships, possibly elongated lifespans and Epstein Island.

• Despite our pretensions, we actually live in a tournament species and not a pair-bonding one.

Tournament vs. pair-bonding

Most animal species can be described as having children and forming families according to the dynamics of a tournament or according to pair bonding. In a tournament species, only the strongest males breed, and everyone else is out of luck. This is the case with lions and gorillas. In pair-bonding species, two individual creatures get together, have families and stay together. This is the case with singing gibbons, and most birds.

There are two quick ways to distinguish a tournament species from one that pair bonds. In tournament species, females vastly outnumber males, as the men tend to murder each other to climb the pyramid. In pair-bonding species, the populations of the sexes tend to be similar in size. In tournament species, the males tend to be physically much larger than the females, while in pair-bonding species, males and females to be similar in size.

As with any category, the lines get blurred in all kinds of unexpected ways. In a wolfpack, the strongest male and female bond for life, mostly as a way of making sure the other members of the pack don’t have any surviving children. With lions and other tournament species, murdering another male’s children is the state of play.

The king

Killing children is the unmentionable stuff of nightmares. But it is a staple activity of a usurper in a tournament species, and in courtly politics. When taking over a pride, the new lion in charge will usually slaughter the existing offspring of his predecessor.

The same is true of a new king, who must kill anyone with a plausible claim to the throne, no matter how tender their years. This awkwardness is the subject of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Among humans, this zero-sum mortal tournament is typically limited to royal succession and dysfunctional families. But it sure does take up a lot of our attention. In terms of entertainment and news, it’s at least equal to the doings of the collegial, live-and-let-live people we’d like to think we are.

Insistence on pair-bonding

The last twenty years have seen the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. But polygamy remains illegal. It was a major concession demanded of the Mormons when Utah was admitted to the United States. It’s prosecuted actively, and still flares up as a political issue in Utah, which quietly downgraded polygamy to a misdemeanor a few years back.

Quietly is the word to note. There’s not much of a popular uprising afoot to ease the laws around polygamy. It doesn’t take much imagination to see why it’s a domestic arrangement that’s been consistently and historically suppressed in our republic.

Polygamy is the condition of a tournament species. In it, women become property to be accumulated. In it, all other men become at best disposable lieutenants, but always threats to the women that a top-echelon man has accumulated. This highly tenuous status applies to all men (aside from the eunuchs), even the boss-man’s own sons.

Disposable males

I was born a few years after a change to one of the most significant gender laws in the United States. This was, in terms of gender relations, as big as the 1919 law that gave women the right to vote. It was the end of conscription in 1973.