Fragile: Being Male

in a Man’s World

If women didn’t exist, all the money in

the world would have no meaning.

“You girls have no idea how fragile the male ego is,” Evan told us after

reading a rough draft of this book.

“Who isn’t fragile?” we thought, but didn’t say. He was our first male

reader, so we exchanged glances but kept our thoughts to ourselves.

Our thoughts went something like this: Here we girls are, falling in love

perpetually from the onset of menstruation, rejected and heartbroken

through most of our teen years, then as women our looks are held up to

comparison to freak-ish supermodels, while as young professionals we continu-ally fail in the male-dominated workplace. But do we complain? No, we

suck it up and we soldier on. (Okay, so we complain— bitterly—but we

won’t anymore after we marry money when we are young and then move

on with our lives.) Evan didn’t notice the looks we exchanged. He was

focused on his own fragility thing—and in discussing it—we knew he was betraying his male brethren. It was a rare opportunity. Although he is a

successful writer and film director, he was having trouble getting the words

out. We were gentle with him. We reminded ourselves that he has a

fragment of a chromosome. We listened intently as he tried to explain that

it’s not all that easy being a guy, either.

“The male ego,” he said with his head in his hands. He then flung his hands

out in front of him as if to shake us to our senses. “You have no idea.”

Evan seemed basically focused on his luck with girls. He is a 20-something,

so, as sexologist Theresa Crenshaw wrote, “[He’s] as ill-suited for a

relationship as he will ever be.” He doesn’t know this yet. And like

everyone else, he’s had his share of hits and misses. But it’s the misses that

pre-occupy him.

Although he was at a loss for words, we were not. We had done the research

and we’d found out a lot about men. We found that current beauty standards are not only tougher on women, but also

tougher on men. Increasingly, men are resorting to plastic surgery to look

good. In addition, both men and women are unable to escape our Stone Age

preference for men who are tall. And that’s not something easily fixed by

plastic surgery, not even by a reconstructive surgeon from 90210. These

demands on men are clearly out of step with the times. Why in the world

would the modern professional man need to stand over six feet tall, have

big shoulders or, for that matter, nice buns, especially since he’s sitting on

them all the time?

Men are now spending nine and a half billion dollars a year on plastic

surgery [and other cosmetics]...to be competitive in the work place, and I

think, to be sexually competitive.

Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest

Since we humans were built to survive a savage world, studying beasts in

the wild is as good a way as any to help us understand our own biological

impulses. Professor Nancy Etcoff reminds us that the most dominant males in animal herds are those that are more warlike, with the largest antlers, tusks,

muscles, and physical prowess.

“Male beauty in all species has evolved in large part for male appraisal,”

Etcoff wrote. A male in a social group who is dominating other males has

“proven” he has the best genetic material, and he becomes more attractive

to females. Applied to humans, it’s an inescapable fact that the respect men show other men is a major factor in attracting women.

By now we know that men and women differ in the basic structure of our

cells, our bodies, and our brains. Studies show that an eight-week-old male

fetus is already losing brain cells in the centers of communication,52 while

the aggression centers are being super-sized. And while any mom will tell

you that male and female toddlers play well together, the minute they hit

school age, things start to change.

Boys are tough on each other. Ask anyone who went to an all-male

boarding school. He’ll tell you that male ranks form quickly amongst boys

—within hours. Some magical but instantly recognizable combination of

intellect, looks and character (and sometimes wealth) designate dominance.

Usually it’s the best-looking and most athletic boy who becomes the alpha,

while the beta boys fall into rapid formation around him. But if a boy looks

like an alpha and proves himself not to be one, he is treated cruelly and often becomes the

group’s “bitch.”53

It’s no wonder then that men are so fragile.

Boys Will Be Men:

The Enron Phenomenon

Then the boys grow up, passing through the rites of the teen years to

become well-behaved, egalitarian men who believe in meritocracy and treat

everyone fairly. And then we all live happily ever after. Girls, we’ve warned

you about this kind of pixie dust. Before you know it you’ll be snorting it

up your nose through a straw. Let’s take a step back before we all end up in

some kind of rehab for the criminally optimistic. Let’s look at what really

happens when guys write the rules.

Sociologists have observed that in one form or another, men continue to

seek the approval of other men pretty much all their lives.54 How to

impress? Hmmm. Plastic surgery might lengthen the male member, but it

still can’t lengthen the male himself. So just how does a man get another

man’s respect? Answer: accumulate vast fortune and power.

These days anybody with money never seems to have enough. This colossal

greed is a malignant version of the male drive to survive—to look good in other men’s eyes. Perhaps reviewing the

financial excesses of late, we can take the meas-ure of the modern man. It’s

an established fact that some busi-nessmen known as “the barons of

bankruptcy”h made off with some serious loot while their companies like

Enron and Worldcom tanked.

Sure, it’s old news, but it still matters. One only has to look at the recent

explosive events in the mortgage and other financial markets to see where

these barons have led us. We had already been “rocked” by so many

scandals that we could barely manage a shrug—that is until people lost their

homes and watched in horror as their retirement funds dwindled. If we’d

been paying attention to financial misdeeds of a few short years ago, these

events and the unprecedented bailouts wouldn’t have come as such a

surprise.

Now we don’t even remember the names. We’ll try not to bore, but here’s a

quick summary. In 2001 the Enron brand became synonymous with

corporate corruption. And there were many others. But the bottom line was

the top guys knew their Titanics were sinking and arranged for soothing

musical trios to play while their crews lost their shirts, their savings and

their lives. (Sound familiar?) Meanwhile the big boys stuffed their pockets

and scurried to the lifeboats: h So named by The Financial Times

• Enron’s slippery superintendent slithered off with $250

million

• Global Crossing’s oily overseer oozed away with $512

million

• WorldCom’s cheating chief checked out with $50 mil-lion55

For those of us in the middle class (and we count in this category anyone

who is worried about covering their monthly nut ), we scratch our heads in

wonder—why bother lying, cheating and stealing when you already have

millions in the bank? A few insider trades and these head honchos could

still have packed their purses—and their first and second wives’

purses, too. (Don’t kid yourselves—it happens every day.) Sure, it didn’t

work out so well for Martha Stewart, but on the other hand, she doesn’t

have a penis.

In one year alone, Michael Eisner, the

soon-to-be ousted head of Walt Disney, cashed in $517 million in stock

options.

The New Yorker Magazine 56

With the advent of employee stock options, greed simply exploded. “It

became a competitive game to see how much money you could get,” the

former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Paul Volcker was quoted as

saying in The New Yorker.57 Volcker added, “Traditional norms didn’t

exist. You had this whole culture where the only sign of worth was how

much money you made.”

Whoa!

Wait up a minute. A few million bucks are enough for even the greediest

gold-digger. This man-show wasn’t about attracting girls through an

updated, yet still primitive mating ritual. It turned into a ritual of an entirely different sort: pure man-on-man action that brought financial ruin to

thousands of hardworking families.

There’s no getting around it: This Greed Cycle 58 was created by men, for

men. As we’ve noted before, if even a few women are added to a large

group of men, the group’s agenda changes to encompass the whole of

society, including those who can’t speak for themselves. It was, after all, a

woman who blew the whistle on Enron.

Why are we going on about this? In part, it’s proof that the sexes need each

other. If left unchecked, men make the economic world unbalanced. And

this is the world of dollars and cents—the one that determines the survival of both sexes in this modern

age.

Still you may shrug and say, “Who cares if a few peeps got a pay day?”

Well, it matters. It fucks up the economy. The kinds of fortunes these men

made were once reserved for captains of industry and entrepreneurs. These

industrious men were rewarded with outsized fortunes for making outsized

contributions to society. You might recognize some of them: Rock-efeller,

Carnegie, Gates, and Jobs, to name a few. But vast fortunes being handed to

bureaucrats and middle-managers who steer their companies to disaster has

created market distortions that affect all of us. Global Economic Crisis,

anyone?

We don’t mean to be all pie-in-the-sky, but maybe if more women wielded

power at the upper levels there’d be a cultural shift away from the cycle of

greed. But even we think it’s doubtful as long as women have to use the “be

a man strategy” to get ahead. The culture of Boys Nation spurs men to greed, sometimes to the detriment

of society.

Ever wonder how the stock option thing worked? Well, here’s pretty much

all you need to know. The white collar crooks made their money by creating

clandestine schemes worthy of a John Grisham novel. The executives were

given the option (“stock option”) to buy, say, a million shares of their

company stock at perhaps $10 a piece.

This gave the execs serious incentive to drive up the price of their company

stock—by any means necessary. But what if the company was doing

poorly? No problem. Through accounting artifice and downright deceit they

exaggerated income and hid company debts. Successful company hype

might send the stock price soaring to $20 a share and ka-ching—overnight

the exec would cash out with $10 million.

But if the share price didn’t go up, they still got another chance.

They could get the company board to give them the right to buy stock at an

even lower price, let’s say $1.00 a share. So if the price fell to $9 a share,

they could still cash out with $8 million. Not a bad bonus for managerial

incompetence. One expert remarked, “They created their own money

machine . . . a virtual anti-gravity device.”

Good for the boys. Bad for the girls. Unless, well, you know . . .