Gutmann, Matthew. Are Men Animals?: How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short. New York: Basic Books, 2019, 320 pages

The 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. In order to diminish the widely accepted understanding of masculinity in biological terms, Gutmann employs two strategies. First, using his own fieldwork, Gutmann follows the established anthropological practice of comparison to show how gender and sexuality are not only culturally specific but also historically contingent. He shows how, despite the fact that human biology has remained relatively unchanged over the past tens of thousands of years, there is a vast array of cultural and historical articulations of gender. For example, in Chapter 8, “Reverting to Natural Genders in China,” he describes how masculinity and femininity shift under different social and political pressures. Second, the book looks at pseudo-scientific or folk-scientific claims that gender, especially masculinity, is biological. It examines how confirmation bias, the failure to identify cultural biases in scientific observations, and the impact of shifting political contexts impact scientific claims. In my view, it is this second strategy that is the most compelling and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the one that left me wanting more detail. For example, Gutmann explores how behaviour perceived as masculine, such as rape, aggression, violence, war, infidelity/promiscuity, and neglectful fatherhood are characterized as determined by masculine biological agents, particularly testosterone. This essentialized understanding of masculinity is best encapsulated by the saying “boys will be boys.” Although Gutmann refers to these claims as “folk science,” the danger is that there are credentialed scientists who make, support and promote these claims—particularly in fields such as evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. In Chapter 3, “Monkeys See, Humans Do,” Gutmann uses examples from nature to confirm preconceived notions of masculinity and femininity to illustrate how scientists and the public alike fall into a cycle of confirmation bias. Despite the fact that “animals are good to think with,” the cultural construction of men as promiscuous predators and women as shy prey is in fact not a universal feature of any animal, including humans. Rather, he documents how scientists often use culturally and human-specific terms to refer to animal behaviour, which in turn confirms that behaviour in humans. For example, there are “hummingbird prostitutes, baboon harems, and mallard gang rapes” (79). Regarding the latter, although “forced copulation” …