by Laura Zigman
ALLELOMIMETIC BEHAVIOR
This is a little known but crucial concept for the understanding of human male behavior. Allelomimetic behavior refers to the curious phenomenon observed when animals inexplicably behave in exactly the same way—that is, mutual mimicking: One group member does something, which leads another to do the same thing, and because others are now doing what the first one started doing, that first one continues. Birds in a flock fly together; fish in a school swim together; sheep and cattle in a herd follow one another; etc. The prevailing assumption at work here is that some intuitive and innate impulse produces the particular behavior in the first group member, and the allelomimetic impulse induces the others to follow suit.
In human males this principle is manifested quite often—most clearly in courtship and wooing methods used to attract females, as well as fleeing and abandoning strategies used to dispose of them. In fact, allelomimetic behavior is so frequent and obvious in males that many females experienced in the ways of men have come to know that such a principle is at work, even if they are unaware of the scientific name for it.
At present writing there too is no set cure for allelomimetic behavior in either animals or humans, though again my institute is working quite diligently in this pursuit.
THE MYTH OF MALE SHYNESS
I feel I must also comment on the very interesting and common myth of shyness in the male species, as it is one that has fascinated me, and many of my colleagues, I might add, for quite some time.
It is a rather curious phenomenon that usually manifests itself at the onset of a romantic relationship, when the male exhibits a series of convincing behaviors suggesting that he is, in layman’s terms, shy. The behaviors in question are quite common ones—awkwardness, trepidation, disbelief that the female has taken an interest in him—that do-I-dare-to-eat-a-peach demeanor, as T. S. Eliot so accurately described it, though it must be acknowledged that he was a notorious narcissist himself.
I have studied many such cases in the course of my research, and in each one a similar pattern has emerged: At the beginning of the romance the male is shy; at the end of the romance the male is not shy. In fact, if I may digress for just a moment, I observed this rather curious personality transformation firsthand once, many years ago, when I began my research. I was being pursued by a young chimp who seemed at the time (as I was not trained to recognize and diagnose the behavior as I am now) to be genuinely shy. The courtship progressed, as it were, and once he was assured of my continued presence, he quite suddenly—and unshyly, I might add—displayed that he no longer wished to see me.
Naturally I was absolutely confounded by the abrupt change in his behavior, though luckily, of course, I was in the wild, where I had immediate and unlimited access to a large group of chimpanzees in whom I observed this rather subtle phenomenon time and time again. And it was this incident that compelled me to embark on the course of my life’s work: observation and prevention.
And so, yes, while the male does indeed seem shy—or, to be more precise, insecure—he is actually a narcissist in monkey’s clothing, because this apparent shyness belies the much more serious and deeply rooted feelings of unworthiness, low self-esteem, and fear of rejection. And these are the feelings that motivate the narcissistic male—this is what causes him to crave love and this is what compels him to seek attention from New Cow after New Cow ad nauseam et infinitum.
Now that the article was finally finished, I applied myself to my day job.
I pursued Kevin Costner’s agent and team of publicists with renewed vigor—actually preparing and sending the pitch packet I had described to Eddie.
I ignored Ray, even when he would sit down in my office and try to be funny (“Do you think Diane had her chin done in St. Bart’s?” “Do you think she’s forty-two or sixty-two?”) or cop a few warm and fuzzy feels (“Remember Wellfleet? Do you still have that bar of lobster soap I bought you?”). I had gotten wise to his seeping attention-extracting ploys that never led anywhere and refused to acknowledge them—except in my notebook:
R displayed “conciliatory” behavior by referencing past romantic interludes. Monkey scientist showed no external reaction and felt great pride at her emotional progress.
Or:
Fecal verbal trail left behind by R was not followed by dupable female monkey patsy.
And I resumed watching Eddie again, though since I’d read about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—the theory that an observer can have an inadvertent effect on the observed—I tried to be less intrusive and to keep my questions to a minimum.
At the end of the week, just when I was about to call Joan at the office to tell her about yet another variation of egregious dumping by Eddie (the default dump—dumping by nonresponse), the phone rang before I had even dialed it.
“I had to call you,” Joan said breathlessly. “The article sparked such a debate at the office all week that we’re running it early. Ben killed a piece on the new monogamy, and we’re rushing Dr. Goodall into the April issue. Isn’t that fabulous?”
I sat down on my bed. April was right around the corner, and I hadn’t even dealt with the reality of the article being published in the first place.
“The timing couldn’t be better. It’ll be on stands practically on the first day of spring,” she said. “We’ll show those pathological romantics who fucking rules.”
EDDIE’S NEW-COW–OLD-PIG STORY
In a recent study, Dr. Patricia Pliner, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, found that women who eat less are considered more feminine by both men and women, regardless of the woman’s body weight. A man’s masculinity was unaffected by how much he ate.
“Food is used as an impression management technique,” Dr. Pliner said. “If a woman wants to appear feminine, if she is in the presence of an attractive male she will eat less than if she is in the presence of an unattractive male or another female.”
The New York Times, March 2, 1994
NOTES TO E FILE:
Case wife: #379
In re: Twenty-one-year-old Barnard senior underage victim du jour.
Status: Dumped.
Cause of Subject E’s behavior: Nonspecific feelings of anxiety and repulsion.
“So what was it this time?” I asked. “Too beautiful? Too smart? Too rich? Too almost-perfect?” It was a Sunday night about a week after I’d finished the article, and Eddie had just returned from another weekend in the country with his new wife. At least by now I’d seen her—when she came by on Friday evening to pick him up—though I didn’t feel the urge to know her name since, given Eddie’s track record, I knew she wouldn’t be around long. Needless to say, she was beautiful.
Eddie pretended to ignore me, but I could tell he was as perplexed by the latest cessation of his husbandly feelings as I was. So I sat down on the couch and watched him pace, preparing to open my direct examination.
“You went to a movie,” I stated.
“Correct.”
“Then you went back to the house.”
“Correct.”
“And …?” I said leadingly.
Eddie lit a cigarette and paced evasively. At first I couldn’t understand why he submitted to these postmortems, which were always unpleasant for him, not to mention disappointing, since they underscored his growing suspicion that he would never find a perfect wife to replace Rebecca. But as my expertise in the field of pathological narcissism grew, the answer became perfectly clear: Eddie participated in these discussions because they were about Eddie. This particular postmortem was especially disappointing, he told me, since he’d really thought she might be The One.
“And, we went into the kitchen to get something to drink. We’d had dinner after the movie, but she was still hungry. She’s always hungry, it seems.”
Always hungry. I folded my arms across my chest. I remembered her standing in the living room with her car keys in her hand: tall, thick dark hair, definitely a mesomorph.
Check.
/> Check.
Check.
Oh, fuck the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
“Is that bad?” I asked. “Women who eat? I mean, she’s not fat.”
“No, she isn’t fat,” he said, perplexed. He continued to pace.
“Okay, so you’re in the kitchen. And she’s hungry—again. Then what happens?”
Eddie exhaled loudly. “Well, we were standing there, and she opened the refrigerator and took out a pint of Häagen-Dazs. And she started eating it out of the container. And, I don’t know, there was just something about it that made me think things weren’t going to work.”
I stared at him. “Was the refrigerator door open?”
He looked bewildered. “Why?”
“Was the refrigerator door open or closed?” I repeated, trying to keep my voice from rising into hysteria. “Just answer the question.”
Eddie stared at his cigarette. “It was open, I think.”
I crossed my legs underneath me and sat up straight on the couch. “Would it have made a difference if the door was shut? Would that have made the act of a not-fat woman eating ice cream out of the container a little less revolting?”
Eddie looked at me like I was insane.
“Would it have made a difference if she hadn’t just eaten dinner? If she had instead been legitimately hungry when she shoved her face into the trough of Häagen-Dazs? Would it have repulsed you less if she’d put the ice cream into a dish?”
Eddie stubbed his cigarette out midway and went into his room. I leapt off the couch and chased after him to ask what flavor the ice cream was, but it was too late. He slammed the door in my face.
“Good night, you psycho,” I heard him say jeeringly through the door.
“Good night, you neophiliac,” I said back.
I went to sleep that night satisfied that we were both, finally, properly diagnosed.
DR. MARIE GOODALL:
MAD MAGAZINE MONKEY SCIENTIST
A terrified calf bolted from a delivery truck and ran roughshod over a Bronx neighborhood yesterday morning before Emergency Services cops lassoed her and returned her to a nearby live-poultry market.
Within hours, USDA inspectors and ASPCA enforcement officers returned to The Bronx’s Live Chicken Market to seize … the calf.…
“The truck pulled up and … the cow tore off in the other direction,” said Officer Glenn Dowd of the 47th Precinct. “I guess she knew where she was and she didn’t want to go inside.”
The New York Post, May 22, 1997
Dateline: February 15. New York City.
Joan and I sat in her office, beaming at an early copy of Men’s Times.
“Look at this,” she said, flipping the pages. “The art department really outdid themselves. Look at this great picture they found of cows grazing. And look how well Dr. Marie Goodall came out.” She pointed to the contributor’s page where there was a little-bigger-than-postage-stamp-sized Dr. Goodall, peering out kindly, but wisely, from her obituary pose.
We read the article silently from start to finish, and then we looked at each other.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Copies would be on newsstands nationwide by the end of the week.
Dateline: February 22.
The following week, a few minutes before I had to go into a meeting with Diane, Joan called.
“Are you sitting down?”
“No, I’m just on my way into—”
“Sit,” she said.
So I sat.
“The phone has been ringing off the hook all day. We’ve gotten three hundred letters, mostly from women, and we haven’t even seen today’s mail or E-mail from our Web site. Everyone wants Dr. Goodall.”
“What do you mean ‘wants’?”
Joan lit a cigarette and rustled through the papers on her desk. “Oprah called. The Today Show called. Good Morning America called. Larry King. Geraldo. CNBC. CNN.” She rustled some more and continued. “USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, L.A. Times. Everyone wants an interview. Not to mention book publishers and literary agents. They’re calling this the Nuclear War of the Sexes.”
Diane poked her head into my office, but I rolled my eyes and mouthed the words Kevin Costner’s publicist. She nodded excitedly and disappeared. I closed the door and swiveled my chair toward the window.
“Fuck!” I whispered. “This wasn’t part of the plan.”
“I know,” Joan said. “I mean, I knew we’d get some letters, and USA Today calls about everything, but I never thought we’d be deluged like this.”
“Fuck!” I whispered again. “What are we going to do?”
“There’s nothing we can do. Obviously Dr. Goodall is ‘unavailable for interviews.’ That’s what I keep telling our PR department every time they buzz me. ‘She’s shy,’ I say. ‘She’s reclusive.’ ‘She’s in Vienna.’ ‘She’s in Paris.’ ‘She’s at a conference in Tangiers.’ ”
“Tangiers?”
“Hey, these talk-show Nazis will go almost anywhere to track down someone they want. You should know that.”
Diane poked her head in again, and I told Joan I had to go. Then I raced down the hallway to the greenroom and sat next to Eddie and across from Ray and Evelyn, who were sharing a legal pad and agenda because he had forgotten his.
What an idiot he was.
Diane looked at me expectantly. “So what’s the word on our Kevin?”
I looked down at the one word on my pad and shook my head sadly. “We just missed him.” I sighed. “He’s in, um, Tangiers.”
“I shouldn’t have used up Tangiers on fucking Kevin Costner,” I told Joan the next day. It was after five, and I was tired and cranky. My nerves were frazzled. The pressure was getting to me.
Joan laughed.
“Hey, this isn’t funny! Diane spent the entire meeting reading passages from my article, saying how accurate everything was, going by her own ‘research’ with men. She kept repeating ‘Get me this New-Cow doctor! Get me this New-Cow doctor!’ over and over, and then she sent Eddie back to his office to start digging.”
I heard Joan’s other line ring, and she told me to hold.
“It’s Don Juan de Eddie, sniffing around about Dr. Marie,” she said, breathless. “This is going to be fun. I’ll call you back.”
An hour later, at six, I put my coat on and swung by Eddie’s office to see what, if anything, he’d found.
“Any luck with Dr. What’s-her-name?” I asked.
Eddie looked up from his cigarette-butt-covered desk and rubbed his eyes. “No, not yet. I spoke to your friend Joan today, though, and she’s messengering over a bio and photo. Maybe that’ll give me some leads to follow.”
I sat down in his guest chair and tried to appear disinterested. It wasn’t easy.
“I called Joan too. But she said this ‘doctor’ never gives interviews. Spends all her time researching. And besides, she’s based in Europe.”
Eddie turned off his computer and picked up his pack of cigarettes and bag as we left his office. “I hope this doesn’t turn into another Kevin Costner thing.”
Luckily for me after a few days, Dr. Marie Goodall was already starting to be old news to people in the business. Diane gave up the chase, albeit reluctantly, along with everyone else in the media. At Friday’s meeting Eddie was taken off Dr. Goodall’s scent. Joan, however, was not so lucky. Ben was tormenting her in and out of the office. He simply could not believe that Joan was unable to get Dr. Goodall into even one interview. How could she not find her star columnist? They were missing an opportunity to sell even more magazines. When would her next six columns be ready? Joan placated him by holding out the promise of an America Online chat session with Dr. Goodall. She wasn’t sure how long she could stall Ben, but this seemed to be working for now.
Ray and I left the greenroom together and walked down the hallway without speaking, but when we got to my office, he lingered in the doorway for a while and started talking about Diane.
/> “So I guess she’ll live,” Ray said. “It’s a good thing she has such a short attention span.”
“But she has the memory of an elephant,” I said. I sat down in my chair, and Ray sat down too, and then I slid the copy of Men’s Times across my desk. I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask him for a man’s opinion of Dr. Goodall’s article.
“It’s pretty interesting,” he said. “I think she’s right about some things.”
“Which things?”
He shifted in his chair and held his clipboard against his chest like a little Lucite shield. “That men are driven by insecurity and low self-esteem.”
“I would agree.”
“But it’s not intentional. I think we act out of the fog of our own confusion. It’s like we spend our lives stumbling around in the dark, and sometimes we find the light switch and sometimes we don’t.” I raised an eyebrow, and he smiled guiltily. “And the few times someone takes us by the hand and shows us where the light switch is and even turns it on for us, it’s too big of a shock. It’s too wonderful and scary and unknown, and for some reason the darkness seems safer. It’s what we’re used to. There’s no risk of getting hurt.”
Just what I thought he’d say.
Bull-shit.
After lunch Joan called.
“Have you seen the Times?”
I hadn’t. It had been a hectic morning, which had been made even more hectic by the fact that Carla had called in sick and therefore was unable to catch my overflow calls. I told Joan to hold on, and then I rummaged through a pile of mail and newspapers that had been delivered that morning and dumped on Carla’s desk. I found the Times, went back to my office, and picked up on Joan.
“Turn to the Op-Ed page,” Joan said, and when I did, I gasped. There was a huge piece by an ad hoc collective of feminists, decrying Dr. Goodall’s findings as intrinsically sexist and arguing that females were just as polygamous as males.
“Fuck!” I whispered.
