Are Men Animals

T he nature-nurture debate is perhaps one of the most enduring debates within anthropology and one of anthropology's greatest contributions to public understanding of human behaviour.Most famously, Boas and his students championed cultural relativism while successfully critiquing scientific racists and eugenicists who worked to naturalize racialized categories.These same anthropologists, most notably Margaret Mead, also critiqued the biological determinism of gender, sex and sexuality.In Are Men Animals?How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short, anthropologist Matthew Gutmann challenges us to ask why "racialized ideas about biological capacities" have been largely rejected (except of course within white supremacy) "but beliefs about men's biological capacities and animal urges" have not (2019: 229).Drawing on research in the natural and social sciences, including his own multi-sited ethnographic research on masculinity in China, Mexico and the United States, Gutmann argues that the entrenchment of gendered behaviour, specifically toxic masculinity, as biological, is the result of social processes including cultural perceptions of gender and sexuality, confirmation bias and folk science.In the spirit of anthropology's contribution to public understanding of gender and sex, this book is written for a public audience rather than an academic one, and this has some advantages and costs.The book is very accessible and excerpts would make a great addition to undergraduate courses on the anthropology of gender.However, more specialized researchers may be left longing for more concrete examples of recent research that challenges the myth of testosterone and other biological agents of gender

Masculinity · Sociology · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies