The Vanishing Male?

THE VANISHING MALE? ALLEN B. WEISSE* There it was in black and white: another nail in the coffin of our once much vaunted masculinity. My recent issue of Science featured a report demonstrating that in the breeding of a certain kind of wasp there were bacteria involved that killed off only the male eggs of the species. The deadly courting behavior of the black widow spider is common knowledge, of course, and I recently learned that the praying mantis female also disposes of her mate in the act of procreation. I have no doubt that, if we search long enough and hard enough, we will find literally thousands of species of insects in which, if not outrightly killed in the act of creation, the males are, at the very least, severely ostracized thereafter—much like the drones who are driven out of the beehive after they have served their purpose. As one ascends the evolutionary ladder, things don't improve very much for the males of the species. Among birds, although there are instances oflifelong pairing, more often than not, during mating season, the male simply "struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." A nature film addict, I recall the contortions of a perfecdy splendid bird of paradise who did everything but the ornithological equivalent of standing on his head (he hung upside down from a branch) in a futile attempt to attract a potential mate. After she waltzed off with a rival, there he was in his magnificent plumage, all dressed up and "no place to go." The rutting of elk and the competition of rams seem to be favorites of the television nature photographer, and there are endless encounters of mature male elk wrestling with their horns locked in deadly embrace and rams whose ear-shattering head bashings set the very walls of my living room reverberating. Some of these males will wind up with harems, but my sympathy invariably goes to the losers who must wind up»University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Jersey Medical School, 185 South Orange Avenue, Newark, New Jersey 07103.© 1988 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/88/3104-0587$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 31, 4 ¦ Summer 1988 \ 507 with what can only be described as a terrible headache with nary an aspirin in sight for relief. A recent arctic sequence featured the mating of polar bears, among the largest and most majestic carnivores on earth. Soon after being impregnated , the female tunnels into the ground for a winter of gestation, finally emerging in the spring with two or three adorable little snowwhite cubs to keep her company. Meanwhile, Papa Bear has been banished to wander alone in the dark and frigid arctic wasteland. In Joy Adamson's book, Born Free, I was impressed that it was the lioness who took the initiative in the mating game and not the so-called King of the Beasts who, like the polar bear, was, at least for some time after the birth of the cubs, excluded from the family hearth. My fascination with mating habits extends to humans where, strangely enough, we seem to be actively contradicting the practices so common to other mammals. There is a primitive tribe where, when the mother goes into labor, the father mimics all the responses to the painful process, screaming and writhing on the ground, while the mother, hidden off somewhere in the bush, quietly delivers "the goods." But even modern man, with the approval and sometimes instigation of his spouse, comes awfully close to this. With jointly practiced birth exercises during the pregnancy and his active participation as a one-man cheering squad during delivery, he is getting closer and closer to the act. Bringing up baby is also becoming a joint effort, and, with two wage earners in the home an increasing trend, this is all to the good. But how about the rest of the human male condition? The biological fragility of man, when compared to woman, is a fact of life. We are more subject to accidental death, coronary disease, and other life-threatening catastrophes. The life...