High-status Men Research Articles

The Marriage Habitus of Remarried Israeli War and Terror Widows and the Reproduction of Male Symbolic Capital

This article demonstrates social mechanisms that contribute to the expropriation of remarried war widows' symbolic capital in Israeli society. Its main arguments are based on an interpretation of the marriage habitus of remarried Israeli war widows. Twenty-eight people (15 war widows, 12 husbands, and one matchmaker who “specializes’ in helping widows remarry) were interviewed. Using Bourdieusian analytical theory, I analyze the marriage habitus of the remarried war widows. These women manage to convert their symbolic capital into social capital and remarry high-status never-married men. This marriage habitus constitutes a major mechanism that deflects their symbolic capital and facilitates its transmission to their second husbands. Once a widow has remarried, she loses a large part of the symbolic capital because of the accepted notion that remarriage contributes significantly to her family's rehabilitation. This article provides some insights into the gender norms that contribute to the expropriation of the widow's symbolic capital and preserving gender inequalities through the reproduction of male symbolic capital in the Zionist state.

An evolutionary approach to change of status–fertility relationship in human fertility transition

The change in benefits of high socioeconomic status to fertility in humans during the demographic transition from high to low fertility has interested both demographers and evolutionary biologists. Evolutionary analyses add to demographic analyses by considering also males and status-related differential in male mating success, but they have been limited to time cross-sections and have not linked this differential to differentials in other determinants of male fertility. We use life-history records of males (n = 3791) entering marriage market before (1810s–1880s) and during (1890s–1960s) the Finnish fertility transition to investigate associations between socioeconomic status and chance and timing of marriage, choice for spouse, and lifetime fertility. Low status invariantly brought a lower marriage chance throughout these 160 years, which partly explained why ever-married high-status men lost advantage at early marriage when the system of achieving a high status shifted from inheritance to self-effort. The loss, coupled with assortative mating by age, promoted disappearance of differential in wife’s age at marriage and thus, disappearance of differential in fertility between ever-married high- and low-status men in the Finnish fertility transition. Consequently, among all men (married and unmarried), status-related differential in lifetime fertility—not selection coefficient—declined over the transition. This study is among the first to show the interrelated dynamics of status-related differentials in male mating and reproductive traits; by doing so, it contributes to an evolutionary understanding of change of status–fertility relationship in human fertility transition and confirms continuing phenotypic selection on male status/wealth in modern societies.

Leisure-Time Physical Activity in Midlife Is Related to Old Age Frailty

There are scarce studies of the long-term associations between leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) in midlife and phenotypic frailty in old age. We studied healthy Caucasian men of high socioeconomic status (N = 514), who had participated in health checkups during the 1960s (the Helsinki Businessmen Study, Finland). In 1974, they were examined with questionnaires and clinical examinations, and LTPA was collapsed into three categories: low (n = 87), moderate (n = 256), and high (n = 171). In 2000, at mean age of 74, survivors were assessed for physical activity and frailty phenotype using the modified Fried criteria validated in our cohort. Four criteria were used: (a) weight loss > 5% from midlife or current body mass index < 21kg/m(2), (b) physical inactivity, (c) low vitality, and (d) physical weakness. Responders with 3-4, 1-2, and zero criteria were classified as frail, prefrail, and nonfrail, respectively. The prevalence of frailty was 16.1%, 10.2%, and 4.7% in the low, moderate, and high LTPA groups, respectively. Higher midlife LTPA was significantly related to lower prevalence of both frailty and prefrailty in old age. After adjusting for baseline age, smoking, body mass index, blood pressure, and alcohol, the risk of frailty was 80% lower in the high LTPA group compared with the low LTPA group (odds ratio = 0.20; 95% confidence interval 0.07-0.55). This finding was supported by the relationships between the change of physical activity and frailty in old age. In this socioeconomically homogenous male cohort, higher physical activity since midlife was strongly associated with less frailty in old age.

The Effects of Trade Liberalization on Fertility and Child Health Outcomes in India

This paper shows that trade policy can have significant intergenerational distributional effects across gender and social strata. We compare women and births in rural Indian districts more or less exposed to tariff cuts. For low socioeconomic status women, tariff cuts increase the likelihood of a female birth and these daughters are less likely to die during infancy and childhood. On the contrary, high-status women are less likely to give birth to girls and their daughters have higher mortality rates when more exposed to tariff declines. Consistent with the fertility-sex ratio trade-off in high son preference societies, fertility increases for low-status women and decreases for high-status women. An exploration of the mechanisms suggests that the labor market returns for low-status women (relative to men) and high-status men (relative to women) have increased in response to trade liberalization. Thus, altered expectations about future returns from daughters relative to sons seem to have caused families to change the sex-composition of and health investments in their children.

Four Hundred Years of Freemasonry in Scotland

Scotland has the oldest masonic lodges and the oldest masonic records in the world, predating their English counterparts by over a century. Yet freemasonry is usually neglected by social and cultural historians, partly, it may be, through ignorance and negative stereotypes of the movement and partly through the excessive secrecy of freemasons in the past. It is the purpose of this paper to survey the movement's development and indicate the many aspects of ‘the Craft’ that could prove rich subjects for research. Scottish lodges began as organisations of stonemasons but, at first slowly, began to admit men from other crafts and men of higher social status. This process accelerated fast after the foundation of a Grand Lodge in London in 1717: freemasonry became fashionable. But though many lodges came to be dominated by men of high status, many others remained – and remain – skilled working class in membership.

Interpersonal trust and market value moderates the bias in women’s preferences away from attractive high-status men

Women appear to exhibit a subtle reluctance to engage in long-term relationships with physically attractive, high-status men. We propose that this bias away from men of very high market value is based on fear that these males may desert a relationship and also on the comparative self-perceived market value of the women. Therefore, interpersonal trust and perceived market value should moderate the extent of this counterintuitive bias. To test this proposal, we asked women with varying levels of interpersonal trust and self-perceived desirability to consider physically-attractive and physically-average men of high, medium and low socioeconomic status and rate each in terms of attractiveness as a long-term partner. Results showed that women’s perceptions of their own desirability and their level of trust predicted their ratings of men with high-value in the mating market, and that women with high levels of both desirability and trust were less likely to show a bias away from high-value men. Interpersonal trust and desirability moderate the degree to which women find physically attractive men attractive as potential partners.

Why do men seek status? Fitness payoffs to dominance and prestige

In many human societies, high male social status associates with higher fertility, but the means by which status increases lifetime fitness have not been systematically investigated. We analyse the pathways by which male status begets reproductive success in a small-scale, Amerindian society. Men who are more likely to win a dyadic physical confrontation, i.e. dominant men, have higher intra-marital fertility for their age, and men with more community-wide influence, i.e. prestigious men, exhibit both higher intra-marital fertility and lower offspring mortality. Both forms of status elicit support from allies and deference from competitors, but high status men are not provisioned more than their peers. Prestigious but not dominant men marry wives who first give birth at earlier ages, which multivariate analysis suggests is the strongest pathway between status and fitness in this population. Furthermore, men are motivated to pursue status because of fitness gains both within and outside of marital unions: dominant and prestigious men have more in-pair surviving offspring as well as more extra-marital affairs.

Getting Off and Getting Intimate

Social scientists implicate high-status men as sexually objectifying women. Yet, few have investigated these men’s perceptions and accounts of their own experiences. Racial variation in gender relations in college has also received little scholarly attention. Analyzing 30 in-depth, individual interviews and surveys and two focus group interviews from Black and White men at a large university, we find racial differences in approaches toward women. More specifically, Black men exhibit more romantic approaches, whereas White men exhibit more sexual approaches. However, these differences are not solely related to race. Instead, ‘‘normative institutional arrangements’’ (e.g., community size and living arrangements) structure these approaches. We discuss the broader theoretical mechanisms regarding masculine performances, gender attitudes and behaviors, and race. In doing so, this study highlights the importance of ‘‘normative institutional arrangements’’ for understanding how the performances of masculinities are legitimized across racial- and status-group categories of men.

“Just So Stories:” Richardson Against Evolutionary Psychology

Why do men find young women more attractive than older women? Why do women find high status men more attractive? The answer from recent evolutionary psychologists is that younger women are more likely to be fertile and healthy, and their progeny are more likely to survive. Thus, natural selection, acting primarily on our Pleistocene huntergatherer forebears, has led men’s preferences to be driven by genetic makeup to optimize the chances of their genes being preserved. Women’s preferences, by contrast, have been selected by the need to insure long-term care for offspring. The book at hand is a critique of such explanations, written by a philosopher of science, and directed at the weakness of evidence that such arguments display. The arguments, says Richardson, are “just so” stories, perhaps plausible but lacking in the kind of evidence required by biological accounts of evolution by natural selection. Evolutionary psychology is poor science, by the standards of evolutionary biology. Richardson is not the first philosopher of science to undertake a critique of evolutionary psychology. Starting with Phillip Kitcher’s (1985) attack on sociobiology through David Buller’s (2005) attack from the standpoint of psychology, philosophers of science have been withering in their criticism of evolutionary psychology. Richardson joins this literature using the standards of biological explanation as the ground for his attack. He brings to the task a wide knowledge of biology and a critical eye for the kinds of accounts that can count as explanation supported by empirical evidence. What’s wrong with evolutionary psychology’s explanation of men’s and women’s preferences? The short answer, according to Richardson, is that the kinds of evidence needed to test the claim are absent and that alternative explanations are not given sufficient weight. Thus, “if men preferred older women, that could be ‘explained’ by pointing out that older women are ‘proven’ as mothers” (p. 143). Further, evolutionary psychology is criticized for being excessively adaptationist, ignoring “spandrels,” developmental alternatives, and other, non-selectionist, mechanisms. Instead, the presence of complexity in human behavior, cognition, and language is assumed to be the result of evolution by natural selection, usually with reference to selection factors that operated in the Pleistocene. Richardson does not deny that natural selection is important (as he makes clear in the Introduction and throughout the book), nor that all human characteristics are ultimately the product of evolution. Still, he claims that an adaptationism results from the exclusive focus on just one mechanism of evolution (see especially pp. 53–59). Adaptationism is a bias because it rules out explanations based upon, for example, the emergence of complexity from the dynamics of simpler processes played out in developmental time. For example, rules of inference could be based on natural selection of “cheater detection” modules, as Cosmides and Tooby claim, but they could also arise as a byproduct of early learning, which could establish social rules for reasoning about social contracts. Cosmides and Tooby have not ruled out the alternative explanation, according to Richardson. The adaptationist bias is, in turn, accompanied by characteristically weak evidence provided in support of a natural selection account. For example, differential mate preferences among men and women are assumed to have resulted from selection as the only available explanation. But, says Richardson, there has been a failure to specify what the presumed adaptations are adaptations for, nor are Evo Edu Outreach (2008) 1:340–341 DOI 10.1007/s12052-008-0059-2

High Status Men (but Not Women) Capture the Eye of the Beholder

Two studies tested the hypothesis that people attend preferentially to high status men (but not women). Participants overestimated the frequency of high status men in rapidly presented arrays (Experiment 1) and fixated their visual attention on high status men in an eye-tracking study (Experiment 2). Neither study showed any evidence of preferential attention to high status women, but there was evidence that physically attractive women captured attention. The results from both studies support evolutionary theories regarding differential prioritization of social status and physical attractiveness in men versus women. These findings illustrate how examination of early-in-the-stream social cognition can provide useful insights into the adapted mind.

Sex differences in asking for counselling and psychological support from a therapeutic center (A.P.P.A.C.)

Conclusions More specifically, results indicated that women tend to seek counselling mostly for themselves and secondary for a family member: women aged 25-35 want to deal with personal problems, women aged 35-45 seek for counselling (mostly relationship-based), while women aged 4565 mainly wish to resolve problems with their children. On the other hand, men aged 30-50 years usually require counselling when their symptoms seem to disable them to successfully function in their workplace. Men over 50 years old ask for counselling in order to resolve a problem concerning their children. These men usually end their sessions when symptoms become less severe, while women are found to be more consistent towards therapy. Finally, as far as their socioeconomic status is concerned research results indicated that men of high socioeconomic status do not easily accept that they need counselling, while women of high socioeconomic status are more receptive towards counselling. from International Society on Brain and Behaviour: 3rd International Congress on Brain and Behaviour Thessaloniki, Greece. 28 November – 2 December 2007

Driving a hard bargain: sex ratio and male marriage success in a historical US population

Evolutionary psychologists have documented a widespread female preference for men of high status and resources, and evidence from several populations suggests that this preference has real effects on marriage success. Here, we show that in the US population of 1910, socioeconomic status (SES) had a positive effect on men's chances of marrying. We also test a further prediction from the biological markets theory, namely that where the local sex ratio produces an oversupply of men, women will be able to drive a harder bargain. As the sex ratio of the states increases, the effect of SES on marriage success becomes stronger, indicating increased competition between men and an increased ability to choose on the part of women.

Revolution and Women's Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Reviewed by: Revolution and Women’s Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France Deborah Jenson Hart, Kathleen. Revolution and Women’s Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004. Pp. 196ISBN 90-420-1701-5. Kathleen Hart's Revolution and Women's Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France is, according to the back cover, the first book "devoted exclusively to the topic of women's autobiography in nineteenth-century France." Hart not only shows the importance of this genre in nineteenth-century women's writing, she also demonstrates that dialogue with utopian socialist theories created surprising sub-groupings of women's writing outside of the boundaries of conventionally defined literary movements. It therefore adds to the emerging corpus of critical works such as Margaret Cohen's The Sentimental Education of the Novel (unfortunately not cited by Hart), that directly or indirectly challenge epistemological frameworks of nineteenth-century literary history on the basis of gender. One of the most intriguing insights of the book is that if, by the terms of numerous psychological and psychoanalytic theories of gender, women's constructs of self are more "other-related" than those conventionally found in men's autobiographies, then "the liberation of women's autobiographical writing would require new myths of origins. . . . [that] would call for a dynamic as opposed to a static conception of human existence." The French Revolution, Hart affirms, "contributed to the birth of such myths." Hart convincingly traces new "harmonious" and "passionate" ideas of civilization and feminine selfhood in the work of socialist utopian thinkers including Fourier, Leroux, and the Saint-Simonians. She then proposes that the socialist woman autobiographer – as studied here in the cases of Flora Tristan, George Sand, and Louise Michel – developed "new life scripts," writing to participate "in the great historical process which her very text would serve to shape and influence." Hart's book is a valuable addition to theories of post-Revolutionary selfhood and nineteenth-century gender development, as well as to the enormous corpus of scholarship on autobiography (which she efficiently encapsulates in an introduction that serves in effect as a brief feminist history of the genre). Although Revolution and Women's Autobiography does not necessarily make Tristan's Peregrinations of a Pariah, Sand's Story of My life, and Michel's Memoirs more compelling to the reader as literary [End Page 415] texts, it reveals new valences of Sand's observation "'I am no wiser than my century,'" and in so doing, opens up new terrain for study of the woman writer as an enfant du siècle. Some of the biographical similarities among the writers that she presents, such as the fact that all three were the offspring of unions of women of low social status and men of high social status, and that all grew up haunted by questions of disinheritance, illegitimacy, or maternal banishment, are of renewed cultural interest in relation to socialist theories that "humanity could only advance when all individuals adopted traditionally 'feminine' faculties." Such theories allowed these writers to valorize their life stories "without repressing the 'feminine' or matrilinear trace in their texts," and to explore their personal crises in relation to society's perceived failure to realize a more complete human identity. Hart closes with a cogent consideration of modern autobiographical discourses as "an exercise in 'impression management,'" in which different discourses battle to privilege varying subjects and forms of representation of individual and social being. The discourses analyzed in Revolution and Women's Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France illuminate the role of the French Revolution as a hidden ancestor in modern French women's life stories. Deborah Jenson University of Wisconsin-Madison Copyright © 2006 The University of Nebraska Press

Is Power Sexy?

Using a set of network data from a large number of naturally occurring groups, this study seeks to determine whether powerful people are more likely to be seen as sexy by others than are persons without power. In particular, this study disentangles two aspects of power that are often confused, namely power as a dyadic relationship and power as an individual characteristic or position (which the author calls “status”). Most sociological theories that predict a relationship between power and sexiness argue that the connection will involve men of high status being sexier—or at least more attractive as partners—to women than will men of low status. While this study finds that there is indeed a connection between sexiness and power, it is instead women whose high status increases their sexiness (to men), while it is the interpersonal power of men that makes them sexy, both to men and to women.

An Empirical Test of a Possible Solution to “the Central Theoretical Problem of Human Sociobiology”

KANAZAWA (2004) suggests that there is a negative association between social class and reproduction because lower-class individuals, who tend to have lower general intelligence, have greater difficulty employing evolutionarily-novel modern contraception. I derive three hypotheses from KANAZAWA's theory: 1) There are no class differences in the number of desired children; 2) The effect of sexual activity on reproduction is weaker among the more intelligent; and 3) The interaction between sexual activity and intelligence is stronger among men. The analyses of the U.S. General Social Surveys support all three hypotheses. Modern evolutionary psychology predicts that, because women prefer to mate with men with greater resources and higher status, such men attain greater reproductive success (BUSS 1994). Throughout human history, wealthy and powerful men of high status have had a greater number of mates and produced more children than poor and powerless men of low status (BETZIG 1986). In ancient civilizations, kings, emperors and sultans maintained large harems, consisting of hundreds and thousands of virgins, and local chiefs and noblemen kept several wives or concubines, while countless poor men in the countryside died mateless and childless (BETZIG 1993). And these wealthy and powerful men of high status often left a large number of descendants. In contrast, a strong positive correlation between social class and reproduction does not exist in the contemporary society. Marriage and successful reproduction are no longer the privilege of the wealthy and powerful only, and men's reproductive success is not related to social class. If anything, the correlation appears negative; in contemporary industrial societies like the United States, poor families tend to have more children than wealthy families. This is in contradiction to the prediction of evolutionary psychology.

Parental Status and Differential Investment in Sons and Daughters: Trivers-Willard Revisited

According to the Trivers-Willard (T-W) hypothesis there is an interaction between individual status and investment in offspring such that high-status individuals invest more in boys, and low-status individuals invest more in girls. Parental investment may be both physiological and affect the sex ratio of offspring, or it may be psychological and affect resource allocation to offspring. I test both components of the hypothesis using cumulative U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) data and find results that support T-W. Using years of education attained as an indirect measure of parental investment, I find that sons of high-status fathers attain more education than daughters and that the daughters of low-status fathers attain more education than sons. Supporting the sex ratio component of T-W, I find that high-status men have more sons.

Alcohol consumption, 29-y total mortality, and quality of life in men in old age

The negative effects of excessive alcohol consumption are well known, but moderate alcohol consumption is advocated for health reasons. We compared 29-y total mortality and quality of life in old age by alcohol consumption in midlife. Cardiovascular disease risk factors and alcohol consumption were assessed in 1974 in 1808 men (aged 40-55 y) of high socioeconomic status. At baseline, the men were without signs of chronic diseases. Baseline alcohol consumption was divided as zero (n = 116), moderate (1-349 g/wk; n = 1519), and high (>349 g/wk; n = 173). Quality of life was surveyed in 2000 with the RAND-36 (SF-36) health survey (n = 1216). Mortality was retrieved from registers during the 29-y follow-up. Median alcohol consumption in 1974 and in 2000 was 123 (interquartile range: 56-238) and 84 (28-168) g/wk, respectively, and was significantly correlated. Values of cardiovascular disease risk factors measured in 1974 increased with increasing alcohol consumption. During the 29-y follow-up, 499 men (27.6%) died; mortality was significantly higher among men with the highest alcohol consumption (37.6%) than in abstainers (25.0%) or in men with moderate (26.7%) consumption. Quality of life was not significantly associated with baseline alcohol consumption in responding survivors but was worst in men with high consumption when deaths during follow-up were accounted for. In this male cohort of high socioeconomic status, only the highest alcohol consumption (>3 drinks/d) affected mortality, and it was associated with worse quality of life in old age. Moderate alcohol consumption in middle age offered no special benefits compared with abstinence over the long term.

Why beautiful people are more intelligent

Empirical studies demonstrate that individuals perceive physically attractive others to be more intelligent than physically unattractive others. While most researchers dismiss this perception as a “bias” or “stereotype,” we contend that individuals have this perception because beautiful people indeed are more intelligent. The conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent follows from four assumptions. (1) Men who are more intelligent are more likely to attain higher status than men who are less intelligent. (2) Higher-status men are more likely to mate with more beautiful women than lower-status men. (3) Intelligence is heritable. (4) Beauty is heritable. If all four assumptions are empirically true, then the conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent is logically true, making it a proven theorem. We present empirical evidence for each of the four assumptions. While we concentrate on the relationship between beauty and intelligence in this paper, our evolutionary psychological explanation can account for a correlation between physical attractiveness and any other heritable trait that helps men attain higher status (such as aggression and social skills).

Results of an explorative empirical study on human mating in Germany: Handsome men, not high-status men, succeed in courtship

Recent research on human mating depicts men as searching for physical attractiveness (PA) and women as searching for status. To identify the mechanisms which lead to universal, biologically interpretable structures in social processes, we focused on the proximate causes for inter- and intrasexual differences in human mating preferences, attraction, and tactics. We collected data on 180 young singles (mean age 26.9 years) without a steady relationship. A questionnaire and a video sequence (20-30 seconds) of each subject was taken. Next, each video sequence was rated by approximately 20 individuals of the opposite sex, who also participated in this study. Surprisingly, the answers given by male and female subjects regarding sociosexual behaviour and mating preferences are predominantly congruent. Sex differences among preferences for good looking and high-status partners were small or even insignificant. Lower educated subjects had considerably higher status preferences than higher educated individuals. In both sexes, PA was much more preferred in a potential partner than status. For both sexes, physical appearance was decisive for the subject's dating attractiveness. Male, but not female dating attractiveness also correlates with a kind and charismatic appearance. Furthermore, there was a positive linear relationship between men's PA and their number of sexual partners within the last year. Men with more than four sexual partners were all above-average in PA, while the most attractive women had a medium number of sexual partners. However, in this respect, status had no influence. The results show that sex differences in mating are more complex than hitherto assumed.

階層研究における「文化」の位置

Why is that many sociologists say that the theory of cultural reproduction coined by Bourdieu has no applicability to Japan? I have shown that there is a structural mechanism that conceals cultural reproduction in Japanese society. Most high status men become cultural omnivores who are familiar with both popular culture and high culture, but overall men are not major consumers of high culture. Because the public field is occupied mainly by men, their patterns of cultural consumption are taken to stand for the Japanese pattern as a whole and thus Japanese culture is seen as popular and equalitarian. High culture and its reproduction receives little attention because it is largely concealed in private domains dominated by women.