Men in Bonds

It is, clearly, a man's world. Who speaks of foremothers or alderwomen?

There may have been a few lady generals, messiahs or tribal chieftains, but history neglects their exploits. Israel's Golda Meir and India's Indira Gandhi are rare exceptions to masculine domination in politics. The human species itself is called man.

Why have most women failed to find the key to dominance? The traditional male rationale is that females are physically and intellectually inferior, an argument without much basis in fact. In certain physical characteristics -- toler ance of cold and pain, digital dexterity, longevity -- women are superior to men.' In a new book, Men in Groups (Random House; $6.95), Sociologist Lionel Tiger of Rutgers University proposes an other explanation for male cultural domination. The survival of society, he argues, depends more crucially on man's affinity for man than on his reproductive affinity for women.

Relegated to the Hearth. Tiger calls this particular kind of masculine affinity "bonding": the forging of strong emo tional ties between men that have noth ing to do with women. He contends that these male bonds go back to the origins of human society, owe much to man's animal genesis and are probably genetically determined. They must first have been formed, Tiger speculates, when man turned hunter -- an event that occurred anywhere from 2,000,000 to 26 million years ago and that forever after relegated man's female companion to the responsibilities of the hearth.

The values demanded in the hunt, such as endurance and camaraderie, writes Tiger, "widened the gap between the behavior of males and females. Not only were there organic changes in perception, brain size, posture, hand formation, and locomotion, but there were also social structural changes." Limited by her procreative and maternal responsibilities, woman became shaped evolutionally to play a passive role. Man, the muscular and footloose pursuer of game, evolved in a far more self-assertive direction.

Confusion of Identities. The aggressiveness of the aboriginal hunter proved useful in the development of human civilization. It not only produced bold suppliers of meat but brawny and self-assured males whose belligerence enforced order in the group, insulated its frailer members against outside enemies, and imperiously cornered the most desirable females. Man who possessed these traits, says Tiger, guaranteed their own succession and the improvement of the species by eliminating the weaker, less assertive males.

From this hypothesis, Sociologist Tiger leaps nimbly--perhaps too nimbly --to some contemporary conclusions. The hunter is still in command; only the hunt has changed. "When a community deals with its most vital problems," Tiger writes, "when statements of internal and external importance are made, when--particularly in warfare --decisive actions must be taken, at these times, females do not participate. The public forum is a male forum."

Tiger draws certain analogies between male bonds and sexual attraction. To him, initiation into all-male groups like fraternities resembles courtship: neophytes are wooed and chosen with the same meticulous care as mates. Investiture into a masculine order--an army unit or the Masons--is like marriage, which explains in part the thread that binds the warrior to his buddy. At its least edifying, says Tiger, the male bond unites homosexuals--men whose "eagerness to attract other males may as clearly betray a craving for male bonds as a confusion about sexual identity and the desire to be female."

A mild-mannered, happily married man who belongs to no all-male societies himself, Tiger does not provide any tidy answers to some large questions raised by his book. Why have bonds between females, a sociological fact that he acknowledges, been so weak and so much less of a cultural force than male affinity? And in a war-torn world where nonaggressive, peace-loving women outnumber men, why has the female instinct for serenity not determined the political climate? Tiger, who holds that the male instinct for dominance is today as much a menace as a blessing, suggests that it may be time for the hunter to disarm himself by throwing his weight around in places where no one gets hurt. He has one small but eminently practical suggestion for housing developers and city planners: Incorporate "men only" havens into their designs. "Men 'need' some haunts and/or occasions which exclude females," Tiger writes. "There remains no place which is defined as specifically and exclusively male, and which is not only exclusively male but anti-female."

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