WAR AND ABSURDITY: CATCH-22 IS REALITY

 

Catch-22 is the most serious funny book ever written.

It is a completely serious account of what combat is like, and the reactions of war-fighters (in this case bomber crews) to being repeatedly sent out expecting they will eventually be killed. It is also an accurate, if satirically exaggerated, account of the black market economy and evasion of bureaucratic rules that happens in prolonged periods of stalemate on remote military bases.

 

It is hilariously funny describing self-contradicting loops, endlessly repeating, while everyone knows that's what they are doing. The seriousness and the funny-ness blend together because that is the psychological reaction of troops under that kind of inescapable stress-- plunging into absurdity as a necessary form of gallows humour. Mark de Rond's Doctors at War is a serious description of the same dilemma at a forward military hospital during the Afghanistan war. Catch-22 carries it to the point of hallucination.

 

Other funny books are nowhere near this kind of seriousness. P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are loveably silly. Evelyn Waugh has real-life prototypes but their absurdities and personal atrocities are relieved by picturesquely outrageous characters and turns of plot. Action-adventure movies of the Indiana Jones type use a steady stream of humor so that what would be real-life sadism and carnage are just slapstick. Tristram Shandy is about loveable eccentrics, told by an endlessly digressive narrator, a nice version of Catch-22. Don Quixote is a bitter-sweet satire, but nothing really horrible happens. Lots of serious novels are enlivened by social satire or the author's sarcastic tone, but one seldom laughs out loud reading Thackeray, Trollope, or Hemingway. Catch-22 makes laugh-out-loud scenes out of the worst realities.

 

The plot, to the extent it has one, is that the Colonel in charge of a bomber group keeps raising the number of missions that his men must fly before they are eligible to be sent home. At first it's 25 missions, than 30, then 40, then 50, 55, 60. Yossarian, a Captain whose job is bombadier-- he sits in the nose of the plane, steers it to its target, and drops the bombs-- meets each required number of missions, only to find that he now has to fly more. Eventually he realizes that his glory-seeking commanding officer will never let him reach the quota, and that he going to die like other men he has seen killed around him.

 

The book starts out plunged into the absurdities that Yossarian protests against and engages in to get out of flying more missions, like staying in the hospital wearing a bathrobe. It is well into the middle of the book before we find out what Yossarian has been going through on his bombing missions. The book jumps back-and-forth in time, like Proust's  À la recherche de temps perdu, another novel more concerned with psychology than sequence -- but in this case obsessed with the horrific effects of memory and anticipation. 

 

         "Heavy flack was everywhere! He had been lulled, lured and trapped, and there was nothing he could do but sit there like an idiot and watch the ugly black puffs smashing up to kill him. There was nothing he could do until the bombs dropped but look into the bomsight, where the fine cross-hairs were glued magnetically over the target exactly where he had placed them. He was trembing steadily as the plane crept ahead. He could hear the hollow boom-boom-boom-boom of the flak pounding all around him in over-lapping measures of four, the sharp, piercing crack! of a single shell exploding very close by. His head was bursting with a thousand dissonant impulses as he prayed for the bombs to drop. He wanted to sob. The engines droned on monotonously like a fat, lazy fly. At last the indices on the bombsight crossed, tripping away the eight 500-pounders one after the other. The plan lurched upward buoyantly with the lightened load. Yossarian bent away from the bombsight crookedly to watch the indicator on his left. When the pointer touched zero, he closed the bomb bay doors, and, over the intercom, at the very top of his voice, shrieked:

         'Turn right hard!'

         McWatt responded instantly. With a grinding howl of engines, he flipped the plan over on one wing and wrung it around remorselessly in a screaming turn away from the twin spires of flak Yossarian had spied stabbing toward them. Then Yossarian had McWatt climb and keep climbing higher and higher until they tore free finally into a calm, diamond-blue sky that was sunny and pure everywhere and laced in the distance with long white veils of tenuous fluff. The wind strummed soothingly against the cylindrical panes of the windows, and he relaxed exultantly only until they picked up speed again and then turned McWatt left and plunged him right back down, noticing with a transitory spasm of elation mushrooming clusters of flak leaping open high above him and back over his shoulder to the right, exactly where he could have been if he had not turned left and dived...

         "The plane zoomed upward again in a climb that was swift and straining, until he leveled it out with another harsh shout at McWatt and wrenched it around once more in a roaring, merciless forty-five-degree turn that sucked his insides out in one enervating sniff and left him floating fleshless in mid-air until he leveled McWatt out again just long enough to hurl him back to the right and then down into a screeching dive. Through endless blobs of ghostly black smoke he sped, the hanging smut wafting against the smooth plexiglass nose of the ship like an evil, damp, sooty vapor against his cheeks. His heart was hammering again in arching terror as he hurtled upward and downward through the blind gangs of flak charging murderously into the sky at him, then sagging inertly. Sweat gushed from his neck in torrents and poured down over his chest and waist with the feeling of warm slime. He was vaguely aware for an instant that the planes in his formation were no longer there, and then he was aware only of himself. His throat hurt with a raw slash from the strangling intensity with which he shrieked each command to McWatt. The engines rose to a deafening, agonized, undulating bellow each time McWatt changed direction. And far out in front the bursts of flak were still swarming into the sky from new batteries of guns poking around for accurate altitude as they waited sadistically for him to fly into range.

         The plane was slammed again with another loud, jarring explosion that almost rocked it over on its back, and the nose filled immediately with sweet clouds of blue smoke. Something was on fire! ...  and suddenly, miraculously, they were out of range. The flak ended. The guns stopped booming at them. And they were alive.

         Behind him, men were dying. Strung out for miles in a stricken, tortuous, squirming line, the other flights of planes were making the same hazardous journey over the target, threading their swift way through the swollen masses of new and old bursts of flak like rats racing in a pack through their own droppings. One was on fire, and flapped lamely off by itself, billowing gigantically like a monstrous blood-red star. As Yossarian watched, the burning plane floated over on its side and began spiraling down slowly in wide, tremulous, narrowing circles, its huge flaming burden blazing orange and flaring out in back like a long, swirling cape of fire and smoke. There were parachutes, one, two, three... four, and then the plane gyrated into a spin and fell the rest of the way to the ground, fluttering insensibly inside its vivid pyre like a shred of colored tissue paper. One whole flight of planes from another squadron had been blasted apart.

         Yossarian sighed barrenly, his day's work done. He was listless and sticky..."  [168-73]

 

Another hundred pages along, Yossarian is standing naked in a formation to receive a Distinguished Flying Cross medal from the commanding general.

 

         "'Why isn't he wearing clothes?' General Dreedle demanded of Colonel Cathcart.

         'Why isn't he wearing clothes?' Colonel Cathcart demanded of Colonel Korn.

         'Why isn't he wearing clothes?' Colonel Korn demanded of Captain Wren.

         'A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all over him,' Captain Wren replied. 'He swears he's never going to wear a uniform again.'

         'A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all over him,' Colonel Korn reported directly to General Dreedle. 'His uniform hasn't come back from the laundry yet.'

         'Where are his other uniforms?'

         'They're in the laundry too.'

         'What about his underwear?' General Dreedle demanded.

         'All his underwear's in the laundry, too,' answered Colonel Korn.

         'That sounds like a lot of crap to me,' General Dreedle declared.

         'It is a lot of crap,' Yossarian said."  [250-51]

        

The style is like the joke about a man with a banana in his ear. Another man says, "You have a banana in your ear."

         "What?"

         "You have a banana in your ear!"

         "What?"

         "YOU HAVE A BANANA IN YOUR EAR!!"

         "You'll have to speak louder. I have a banana in my ear."

 

Each chapter title is the name of an officer (e.g. LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF). It begins with a character sketch that morphs into a conundrum.  MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR is about a man from a family named Major who named him Major Major Major. When he enlisted in the air force, this made trouble because he seemly outranked the officers who were in charge of training. This was serious because Catch-22 says you always must obey your superior officer, no matter what. The answer to the conundrum, higher-ups decided, was to give him the rank of Major. As Major Major Major Major, he was given an office but nothing in particular to do. Outranking his subordinates, all their reports to higher up went through him for his signature. Bored, he started signing official documents 'Washington Irving', which got them rejected higher up and sent back for additional signatures along the chain. Out of sheer embarrassment, Major Major ordered his sergeant to tell everyone who wanted to see him that he was not seeing anyone while he was in except when he was out. "I want to see Major Major." "You can't see him now." "When can I see him?' "When he's not here."

 

Two other characters who frequently reappear are involved in running the black market economy. Major _____ de Coverly (no one knows his first name), is a white-haired old patriarch with a craggy face who everyone defers to, and no one knows exactly what his duties are. Major _____ de Coverly is always flying around renting apartments in liberated cities like Rome for rest leave, separate quarters for officers and enlisted men in the rank-segregated structure of the military. These quarters are well-stocked with food and drink, and are brothels, staffed by money-seeking Italian women, often accompanied by their penurious families. This leads to further banana-in-ear conundrums, like the young officer who falls in love with a prostitute and tells her he wants to marry her. She refuses because no one would marry her, since she a fallen woman.

 

Milo Minderbinder is the officer in charge of mess hall. He is always flying around the Mediterranean, buying and selling food, licquor, and anything else that is for sale. He buys eggs in Malta at 7 cents each, and sells them to squadron mess halls for 4 cents. After many mentions of this paradox, we find that Milo Minderbinder is repeatedly buying things, selling them to someone else, then buying them back. Why make it so complicated? Because Milo makes money as a middle-man, taking a cut out of each transaction, the more transactions the better. He offers a deal to the officers in charge of the air bases, getting carte blanche for his operations. "Everyone gets a cut," he assures them confidentially.

 

The extent of Milo Minderbinder's and Major _____ de Coverly's operations is a fantasy extreme. But there are many realistic accounts of  backstage dealings in war zones. One example is James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, by a college professor assigned to paper-work duties by the Navy in 1942-43, traveling all over the islands that were staging areas for brief, intense battles but mostly consisted of waiting for something to happen. A cleaned-up version became the Broadway musical and film, South Pacific. The patterns are the same: Right at the outset, we meet Bloody Mary, a native woman who sells souvenirs for the sailors to send back home; and Luther Billis, a fast-talking sailor who bends the rules, supplies luxuries and can provide anything for a price. Off duty, officers and enlisted men are segregated; and since the only women available on base are nurses, they are made off limits by giving them officer rank. Early on in the musical, we get this number, "There is Nothin' Like a Dame"

 

         We got sunlight on the sands,

         We got moonlight on the sea,

         We got mangoes and bananas

         You can pick right off a tree,

         We got volleyball and ping-pong

         And a lot of dandy games--

         What ain't we got?

         We ain't got dames!

 

         We feel restless, we feel blue,

         We feel lonely and, in brief,

         We feel every king of feelin'

         But the feelin' of relief.

         We feel hungry as the wolf felt

         When he met Red Riding Hood--

         What don't we feel?

         We don't feel good!

 

         There are no books like a dame

         And nothin' looks like a dame.

         There are no drinks like a dame,

         Nothin' thinks like a dame

         Or attracts like a dame,

         There ain't a thing that's wrong with

                  any man here,

         That can't be cured by puttin' him near

         A girly, womanly, female, feminine dame!

 

This plays out guardedly in the plot. All the women, wives and daughters of the French settlers, have been sent to a nearby island, which is off limits to anyone but officers. Lt. Cable, the young romantic hero, is talked into requisitioning a boat by Billis to go to Bali Hai, where he falls in love with a beautiful young native girl. Why are the women sent away? Michener gives the answer: the horny atmosphere of the naval base is rife with rape. The other love story of the musical, between Nurse Nelly and a handsome French planter, is much more sinister in Michener: a nurse out driving in a jeep is liable to get ambushed, dragged into the bushes, and raped by low-ranking sailors. There is a class war going on between the ranks; strongly apparent in other eyewitness accounts such as Norman Mailer's WWII novel The Naked and the Dead; and James Jones' From Here to Eternity (which also includes a soldier falling in love with a prostitute.) Class war reached its peak in the Vietnam War, when unpopular officers were getting "fragged" by grenades thrown into their tents by their own men. (James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam.)

 

In Catch-22, sexual privilege and rank-hostility are more over-the-top:

 

         "General Dreedle is always accompanied by his nurse, who was as delectable a piece of ass as anyone who saw her had ever laid eyes on... 'You should see her naked,' General Dreedle chortled with croup relish, while his nurse stood smiling proudly right at his shoulder. "Back at Wing she's got a uniform in my room made of purple silk that's so tight her nipples stand out like bing cherries. Milo got me the fabric.' ...

          A few pages later, we find General Dreedle and nurse in the briefing room when a major goes on monotonously describing for the assembled airmen what batteries of flak they will encounter over Avignon. Yossarian

"... moaned in deep despair that he might never see again this lovely woman to whom he had never spoken a word and whom he now loved so pathetically. He licked his parched, thirsting lips with a sticky tongue and moaned in misery, loudly enough this time to attract the startled, searching glances of the men sitting around him on the rows of crude wooden benches in their chocolate-coloured coveralls and stiched white parachute harnesses...

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Yossarian moaned a fourth time, this time loudly enough for everyone to hear him distinctly.

         'Are you crazy?' Nately hissed vehemently. 'You'll get into trouble.'

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Dunbar answered Yossarian from the opposite end of the room.

         Nately recognized Dunbar's voice. The situation was getting out of control, and he turned away with a small moan. 'Ooh.'

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Dunbar moaned back at them.

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Nately moaned out loud in exasperation when he realized he had just moaned.

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Dunbar moaned back at him again.

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' someone entirely new chimed in from another section of the room, and Nately's hair stood on end.

         Yossarian and Dunbar both replied while Nately cringed and hunted about furtively for some hole in which to hide and take Yossarian with him. A sprinkling of people were smothering laughter. An elfin impulse possessed Nately and he moaned intentionally the next time there was a lull. Another new voice answered. The flavor of disobedience was tittilating. An eerie hubbub of voices was rising. Feet were scuffled, and things began to drop from people's fingers-- pencils, computers, map cases, clattering steel flak helmets. A number of men who were not moaning were now giggling openly, and there was no telling how far the unorganized insurrection of moaning might have gone if General Dreedle himself had not come forward to quell it...

         'That will be all, men,' he ordered tersely, his eyes glaring with disapproval and his square jaw firm, and that's all there was. 'I run a fighting outfit,' he told them sternly, when the room had grown absolutely quiet and the men on the benches were cowering sheepishly, 'and there'll be no more moaning in this group as long as I'm in command. Is that clear?'

         It was clear to everybody but Major Danby, who was still concentrating on his wrist watch and counting down the seconds aloud '...four...three...two...one...time!' called out Major Danby, and raised his eyes triumphantly to discover that no one had been listening to him and that he would have to begin all over again. 'Ooooh,' he moaned in frustration.

         'What was that?' roared General Dreedle incredulously, and whirled around in a murderous rage upon Major Danby, who staggered back in terrified confusion and began to quail and perspire. 'Who is this man?'

         'M-major Danby, sir,' Colonel Cathcart stammered. 'My group operations officer.'

         'Take him out and shoot him,' ordered General Dreedle.

         'S-sir?'

         "I said take him out and shoot him. Can't you hear?'

         'Yes, sir!' Colonel Cathcart responded smartly, swallowing hard, and turned in a brisk manner to his chauffeur and meterologist. 'Take Major Danby out and shoot him.'

         'S-sir?' his chauffer and meterologist stammered. 'I said take Major Danby out and shoot him,' Colonel Cathcart snapped. 'Can't you hear?'

         The two young lieutenants nodded lumpishly and gaped at each other in stunned and flaccid reluctance, each waiting for the other to initiate the procedure of taking Major Danby outside and shooting him. Neither had ever taken Major Danby out and shot him before."

 

It turns out nobody in the room full of air force personnel carries a gun, and General Dreedle finally calms down: "You mean I can't shoot anyone I want to?"  [252-55]  It is not hard to recognize a parody of General Patton, who had gotten in trouble in the Sicily campaign by slapping a soldier who was crying in a hospital.

 

There are other parodies in the book. Captain Black, furious that Colonel Cathcart has appointed Major Major squadron commander instead of himself, spreads the rumor that Major Major is a Communist, since no one knows anything about him. Captain Black starts a loyalty oath campaign, requiring everyone who wants to draw their combat equipment must sign a loyalty oath, or even to get food in the mess hall. Rival officers join in a contest over who can demand the most loyalty oaths, esclating to huge piles of documents. The loyalty oath campaign finally collapses when crusty old Major___ de Coverly bluntly crushes it. (Senator Joe McCarthy vs. President Eisenhower)

 

Reading Catch-22 gets you into the habit of digressing. Going back to military zone black markets, there is a similarity between the Italian campaign and the South Pacific war described by Michener-- and for that matter, the Vietnam war, where the black market was so bad that South Vietnamese (ARVN) troops sold off massive amounts of American armaments and foreign aid to the Viet Cong guerrillas. (Subject of two exposé novels: Graham Greene's The Quiet American, and Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's The Ugly American.) The common denominator is that these were war zones with massive logistics and administrative areas far from the front, where progress of the war felt stagnant and military discipline shattered. 

 

Italy was the sideshow, the forgotten front of the Second World War. Upstaged by the blitzkreig and Churchill; Rommel and Montgomery in North Africa, Stalingrad, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge; Pearl Harbor, MacArthur in the Philipines, the marines on Iwo Jima, the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Patton's successful campaign in Sicily in 1943, the landing on the mainland turned into a long, stalemated winter front until Rome was liberated in June 1944; and another long slog northward, while the air force bombed German logistics, never breaking through into the heavily populated Po Valley until April 1945, when the war was all but over in Berlin. It is during this period that the author of Catch-22, Joseph Heller, was a bombadier. The repeated references in the book to the deadly anti-aircraft defenses of Bologna date it as taking place during the last 12 months of the war. It must have seemed especially debilitating when breakthroughs were taking place everywhere but here.

 

Rear-area black markets have remained part of the military through the present. The so-called "Fat Leonard" scandal made a stir in California naval bases in the mid-2020s, about a procurement manager for the Pacific Fleet supplying shore leaves and officers' clubs, including with prostitutes. (I omit consideration here of military procurement scandals in Ukraine during its long stalemated war with Russia.)

 

Looming above it all, remains the ultimate real life Catch-22.  War is full of absurdities. But wars seems inescapable, even if only defending against aggressors, evil regimes, and nuclear threat. And inescapably symmetrical, since the other side sees us the other way around. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

 

THREE GENDER PREDICTIONS

 

Prediction No. 1.  Women can do anything men can do. Everything can be learned. Women can become like men in almost every respect (except childbearing). Male and female will blend into a single culture: whether traditional-up-til-now male culture; or some new variant.

 

OR Prediction No.2.  Women are different from men: nicer, more nurturant, more sympathetic; more monogamous, less sexual drive, more family-oriented; more cautious, less risk-taking. Individual women range on a continuum of these qualities, and some women are not at all like this; but statistically, these are strongly marked differences from men (who also range on a continuum). These statistical differences will continue in the future.

 

OR Prediction No. 3.  It is possible to combine both positions: male and female behavior will converge so that women will fill all male jobs and social positions, but everyone will become like the ideal-type nurturant, risk-averse female.

 

Evidence for each prediction:

 

[1]  The proportion of women has gone up in almost all occupations since mid-20th century. In some jobs, it now exceeds men. There are substantial number of women in the elite professions and in high level management; if not yet equally with men, demonstrating that women have the ability to do it. Women have become prominent in high government positions; in some countries including the president or prime minister. It seems inevitable that this trend will continue upwards.

 

Even in the macho or muscle roles, there have been women in military combat, policing, and fire-fighting. There are token women as coaches and referees in male sports; and a proliferation of women's teams and stars.

 

If the job shapes the behavior and values of its incumbent, this supports the prediction that women are becoming more like men. This is apparent in women's sports like soccer and basketball, where rough and aggressive players are prominent.

 

[2a] Supportive and sympathetic vs. aggressive and competitive. A clue is trends in crime and violence. Males continue to be the majority of perpetrators in homicides, assault and battery, armed robbery, and sexual assault; though the proportion of females has increased, and is substantial in child abuse. Street gangs are almost exclusively male, although they may have female supporters (who contribute by carrying concealed weapons); so are drug smuggling and sex trafficking. Organized crime by all indications  is exclusively male. Violence against oneself is highly gendered; although females consider suicide as often as males, most methods of suicide fail (e.g. drug overdoses), while successful suicide methods-- guns and jumping from heights-- are heavily male.

 

In the USA, violent crime rates have fallen since their peak in the 1990s. One could argue that this shows the spread of female values among males. An alternative explanation is that the biggest declines are where police forces have adopted electronic street surveillance and mobile crime squads. [Jeffrey Lane, The Digital Street, 2019] In some respects, young women have become more like their male counterparts; as in the growth of violent hazing rituals in high school sororities and clubs, paralleling the potlatch-destruction of fraternity parties.

 

Women are more prominent in non-violent crimes, especially embezzlement, where women have many opportunities in financial and clerical positions, as well as protective cover by their reputation as supportive and trustworthy. It is not clear whether embezzlement by women has historically increased. Viviana Zelizer [The Social Meaning of Money, 1994] notes that women in the era of high gender segregation of work often stole money from their husbands by going through their pockets.

 

Electronic media have increased opportunities for non-violent crime. But hacking appears to be highly gendered. Virtually all known perpetrators of schemes for ransomware, political hacking, and just plain malicious hacking are males. To some extent this mirrors the continuing propensity for males to dominate in STEM skills. The spread of AI and image-generating tools has greatly increased opportunities for both malicious and gainful attacks. Substantial portions of students use AI to cheat on school assignments and exams. Is this a spread of male aggressiveness and non-conformity to females as well---  yet another contemporary arena where women share the male style? Gender proportions in cheating have not yet been well documented.

 

The social media era is dividing people into distinctive cultural spheres:  the stay-at-home, always on-line social butterflies at-a-distance, where males share a female pattern; the party animals and carousers who venture out to night-life districts where macho values set the tone for both sexes; on-line criminals, as well as real-life criminals, both predominantly male. Both male and female cultures are spreading to the opposite sex, but in different arenas.

 

[2b]  Sexual drive, monogamy, and family.  Sex surveys from the 1940s through the present show that men have more frequent sex than women, with more partners; males report more sexual desire, and view more pornography. Disparity in number of heterosexual partners is made up by a small number of women who are prostitutes or have many partners. Among homosexuals, gay men have more partners and more frequent sex than lesbian women; and compared to heterosexual partners, gay men are more sexually active in both respects; while lesbian couples are less sexually active than heterosexuals. Which is to say sexual preference does not override gender patterns; gay couples consist of two men and thus multiply their sexual frequency; lesbians couples intensify the female pattern. [Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, American Couples, 1983]

 

But sexual behavior may have changed between the pre-COVID era, and the generation that grew up with the unibiquitous presence of social media in their daily lives. In this demographic cohort, both young males and females have become less sexually active, less likely to drive a car, less likely to gather socially. It appears that life on the social media is more permeated by female values: a convergence towards the female pattern of high sociability.

 

Traditionally, women have been more family-oriented than men: more likely to keep up contact with relatives; taking the lead in organizing family gatherings; spending more time on family gossip. Women have generally reported giving higher value to caring for children and home than to career success; whereas men, especially in the higher professions, give highest priority to career. This gender difference has apparently weakened in the vogue of  life/career balance; men have increased time in child care and home-making, but still lagging their female partners.

 

Trending in the other direction, propensity to marry or cohabit has declined; and the birth rate among women in the US and most modernized countries has fallen to below-replacement level. This is evidence for a decline in familistic orientation; as is a larger proportion of young people living alone-- a convergence towards the male pattern or a weakening in female culture.

 

[2c] Cautious and conformist vs. risk-taking and norm-breaking.  Gender differences in violent crime, as well as deaths from accidents, are consistent with male propensity for risk-taking and female avoidance of it. We also see this in career patterns. Women tend to follow regularized bureaucratic careers, stay in school longer, and seek degrees rather than dropping out. Men continue to be more likely to pursue careers that are physically dangerous as well as risky: military, combat sports, policing, and criminal enterprises like drug dealing or smuggling.

 

Especially striking is the gulf between men and women in high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. The digital revolution of the 1990s, along with the huge growth of financial speculation and ease of investment via the Internet, created opportunities for rapidly building huge fortunes. Almost all high-tech entrepreneurs have been men; many of them starting their businesses while students, and dropping out of school in order to seize the opportunity. Not to say that success was guaranteed; the large number of competitors ensured many would fail, or have their start-ups taken over by the more aggressive players. The same risk-taking and aggressiveness is found in the earlier generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, as in the generation of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Their formula for success combines cutting-edge technological ventures, flamboyant public relations, and aggressive financing.

 

Call this techno/financial macho. They boastfully announce their intention of transforming industries and everyday life, staging spectacular product launches, whipping up consumer enthusiasm and attracting investors. The big financial payoffs eventually come on a roaring bull market; but the main tactic is to operate through  personal networks, rather than traditional banking and investment firms. Their milieu is an unregulated world of frenemies, making and breaking alliances, driving each other out and inviting them back in; skirting the legal edges of new forms of banking, bill-paying, and finance. They steal each other's technologies and poach their technical talents. They work secretively but continue to hang around together, looking for an opportunity or a deal. It is, so to speak, an "old boys" network, except instead of the traditionalism of old families and school graduates, it is a hyper-macho world of financial and technological risk-takers.

 

A similar style of predatory entrepreneurship existed before the digital era.  Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot [From Predators to Ikons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero, 2009] analyze the tactics by which the largest fortunes were made in consumer products (IKEA, Walmart,  LVMH, etc.):  driving out weak competitors like traditional furniture stores by assemble-it-yourself chains, or mom-and-pop markets by warehouse-style bulk sales. (A similar tactic was used by Bezos in launching Amazon, driving out independent bookstores.) They stalk successful competitors, offering to finance them when in difficulties, then taking ownership. Again we see the strategy of network-building, monitoring one's rivals, pretending friendship until the moment comes to swallow them up. Villette notes that virtually all the successful empire-builders went through hard-ball lawsuits, stone-walling financially weaker opponents and wearing them down.

 

Like the American high-tech entrepreneurs, Villette's empire-builders started in business when young, rather than pursuing educational credentials. All were from entrepreneurial families, rather than parents in bureaucratic careers. Successful enterprises can become large and more bureaucratic; but aggressive entrepreneurs like Jobs, Musk, and Bezos preferred to run them hands-on, and push their employees to keep up a high-pressure atmosphere of extreme competitiveness.

 

To be clear, hyper-masculine behavior is not characteristic of all men. The majority of men today, and in the past, have followed routine lives, whether in bureaucracies or in small-market businesses or professions. Men, like women, are distributed across a continuum; both sexes are represented among the "female" qualities of caution, supportiveness, and family orientation; just as some women are aggressive and risk-taking. Male and female distributions overlap, though their central concentration differs. I estimate about 10% of males are at the extreme end of the distribution of high risk-taking and aggressiveness. [This is my conclusion about various kinds of violence: Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, 2008. The literature on entrepreneurship, although not statistical, gives the impression of a similar distribution:  Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 2011; Elon Musk, 2023. Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of Silicon Valley. 2025]

 

[3] Will male and female converge on a shared culture?  What we see is a mixture of trends. Women are in virtually all jobs and positions, in some exceeding men. The biggest exceptions are violent crime; electronic hacking; and entrepreneurial empire-building -- areas heavily dominated by men. The recent on-line generation shows convergence towards female sociability and diminished sexual activity; but family orientation is challenged by the declining birth rate and living alone. Women's values dominate increasingly in the bureaucratic arena, while traditional male patterns continue for the risky, violent, and action-oriented arenas.

 

Trends can shift, sometimes quite abruptly. Merely charting the statistics across the years does not reveal the underlying causes. Here I will focus on a meta-cause: efforts to socially engineer the direction of change. Efforts to change the culture of both males and females can be made by political action, laws, ideologies taught in schools and by compulsory re-education in work places.  This is the result of social movements.

 

Research in the sociology of social movements has uncovered many of their mechanisms: mobilizing activists through networks, getting material resources to keep their organization going, generating waves of public emotion through protest demonstrations and  mass communication. What has not yet been established are the conditions that make a movement succeed or fail in its goals; including the struggle between movements and counter-movements.

 

In general, the most successful social movements are those that have made a multi-pronged attack: combining public demonstrations, with a violent fringe to convey their seriousness, together with political campaigns, elections, passing laws, getting favorable court decisions, and institutionalizing the new doctrine in the culture of schools and the mass media. At the same time, these multiple arenas can be places where counter-movements find their issues around which they mobilize.

 

The MAGA movement draws on a number of counter-movements over the decades: against affirmative action in hiring and school admission (seen as reverse discrimination); against perceived denigation of people who are religious, small-town, pro-natalist, patriotic, or heterosexual; against "language police" who enforce terminology in pronouns and identities; against "political correctness" in what is permissible to say or joke about, the breach of which can cause a scandal that gets one banned from jobs and public life. Trump's electoral victory in 2024 was helped by a counter-mobilization to bring out young males against political correctness-- the macho, frat-boy, carousing, aggressive culture celebrated in cage fights.

 

Do sociologists have any way of predicting which movement or counter-movement will be successful, and on what issues? I will focus on one point: whether statistical equality in jobs can be achieved by the pressure of social movements or by laws requiring the hiring of a particular target of women, non-whites, homosexuals, etc. Such rules are possible in bureaucratic   organizations: those that have well-established job categories, pay scales, and promotions. But not for illicit organizations, which operate informally or clandestinely: street gangs, cartels, and mafias are generally all-male and ethnically exclusive, and it is unlikely this segment of the economy (where lower-class social mobility takes place) could be pressured to engage in affirmative action.

 

The most important bulwark of male dominance is pathways into the upper class. Today these are entrepreneurial start-ups, put together by young men in networks of tech-savvy peers, who aggressively gobble up opportunities for world-transforming inventions; expanding their nets into the slew of financial operators with speculative money in their hands. One could complain retrospectively about the lack of women in Peter Thiel's networks, or Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, but there is no way to enforce a gender quota in a volatile sector where moving as fast as possible determines whether you will be in the tiny fragment that makes a great fortune. You can enforce rules of gender equality (or any other criterion) in an organization that already exists; it is impossible to enforce it until it comes into existence. Given the huge wealth, power and prestige of successful entrepreneurs in today's financial mega-markets, it is unlikely that a social movement will be able to enforce identity quotas on the upper class.

 

Some gender equality happens later on. Wives and daughters of the mega-rich share in the money, if not in the dynamics that generates the wealth.

 

The only way I can envision the male upper class will become feminized, would be if they stop being entrepreneurial. Which is not out of the question, if the entire capitalist system collapses. Perhaps we will see in a few decades, when and if AI destroys human work as we know it.