Pets Going Their Own Way

The manosphere’s various concerns about threats to masculinity all come down to domestication. The foundational story of the manosphere goes something like this: Once humans settled down and tamed animals, they also tamed themselves. Women, physically inferior, were thus tamed already, or at least pretended to be tamed (like cats), in order to awaken men’s protective instincts for them and their offspring. But now men likewise overcame their hunter instincts, allowing themselves to be trapped in boring daily routines and weakened by a high-carb diet. Millenia later, this has resulted in testosterone deficiency, monogamy, women’s liberation, equal rights, and a general coddling.

Worries about male domestication aren’t new in the West. Friedrich Nietzsche, a key reference for the contemporary manosphere, railed throughout his oeuvre against “the taming of the beast that is man.”1 The renowned Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and was long preoccupied with “domestication-related signs of decay” in humans, particularly men.2 These ranged from “muscle loss and fat accumulation resulting in a pot belly” to “impatient demand for immediate gratification, lack of any responsibility and consideration for the feelings of others.”3 The “absolute tolerance” of the welfare state, he thought, suspends the natural selection of the strong, eager, and brave. People stay infantile and turn into social parasites, similar to pets. Unlike the self-help advocated by the manosphere, Lorenz believed that only draconian racial hygiene would help.4

Portrait of Konrad Lorenz.

Growing up in West Germany in the 1980s, I remember that Konrad Lorenz’s books were bestsellers. After he was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1973, he continued to lament “the progressive coddling of urbanized people.”5 Since I initially heard this as the battle cry of a social Darwinist, I never took the concept of human domestication very seriously. How could deliberate breeding, as with pets, and the absence of breeding, as with humans, have similar outcomes? And how does “infantilization” figure in? Isn’t the process of civilization about learning to “maturely” moderate our impulses? Moreover, isn’t sedentism, and with it accumulative personal property, the basis of patriarchy? According to the common understanding, Paleolithic bands were rather egalitarian, if not matriarchal. 

However, there are apparent similarities between humans and domesticated animals, both in physical appearance and behavior. In a famous long-term experiment by the Russian geneticist Alexander Belyaev, begun in 1952, silver foxes that were selectively bred for reduced aggression also exhibited physical traits such as more slender bones, smaller teeth, floppier ears, shorter tails, and narrower skulls. In other words, from generation to generation they looked more and more like dogs.

Similarly, humans exhibit less impulsive aggression than common primates and have flatter faces, rounder skulls, more slender bones, smaller teeth, and sparser body hair—characteristics that are also seen in unborn chimpanzees. Humans are not domesticated chimpanzees, but bonobos are, and they resemble humans more than chimpanzees do.

Unlike selective breeding for specific traits such as tameness and cuteness, “domestication syndrome” involves paedomorphic alterations. As the animal grows and learns, the juvenile appearance and behavior of the ancestral species is prolonged into adulthood. This retention is also known as neoteny. In this respect humanity has followed the same evolutionary path as domesticated animals. But how?

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As early as 1806, the German zoologist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach described humans as “the most perfect of all domestic animals.” Since “the exact original wild condition of man” was unknown, he assumed that the human had “been created by nature immediately a domestic animal.” In a footnote, Blumenbach mentions the Genevan philosopher Jean-André Deluc, asserting that Deluc believed “there must have been in the primitive world a class of higher existences on earth, to whom man acted as a sort of domestic animal.”6

Charles Darwin did not believe in divine intervention in the natural order. Nor did he consider self-domestication possible. In The Descent of Man (1871) he declared: 

Man differs widely from any strictly domesticated animal; for his breeding has never long been controlled, either by methodical or unconscious selection. No race or body of men has been so completely subjugated by other men, as that certain individuals should be preserved, and thus unconsciously selected, from some-how excelling in utility to their masters.7

The following year, British essayist Walter Bagehot provided a scenario for how the human species may have self-domesticated:

Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And the way in which it happened was that the most obedient, the tamest tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle for life, the strongest and the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal vigor, the savage virtue of the race has died out in none, and all have enough of it. But what makes one tribe—one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe—to differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence. The slightest symptom of legal development, the least indication of a military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilization begins because the beginning of civilization is a military advantage.8

This advantage could also have benefited humans in rivalries with other hominids and predators, and perhaps most importantly, in rivalries within a tribe. The tame would unite to expel or kill freeloaders and oppressors. This implies that human self-domestication was in fact a process of active breeding, but from the bottom up, not the top down. Domestication enabled tribes to grow in size and become more powerful, not only for the sake of warfare but also for spreading knowledge, developing new tools, and dividing labor. Thanks to neoteny, human brains retained juvenile flexibility, fostering a lifelong urge to discover and learn. Technical and logistical superiority enabled the conquest, control, and exploitation of large territories, with moderate losses.

Extending Bagehot’s concept, self-domestication could explain why human nature encompasses intense love and intense brutality, extreme inventiveness and extreme servility. Rather than declaring one of these traits as original and the others as aberrations—and consequently deeming humanity or a particular sex as inherently “good” or “bad”—we could see these behaviors as having the same origin.

Contemporary British anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham talks about the “goodness paradox,” whereby acts of coordinated violence enforce peace.9 He argues that killings in prehistoric human tribes appear to have been much more common than in groups of apes, despite most apes displaying high levels of aggression within groups. Over thousands of years, humans adapted to an unprecedented level of social density for mammals. Although this density can cause stress, it rarely leads to sudden outbursts of violence. For humans, close contact with like-minded strangers—such as at a protest, parade, or concert—can be just as enjoyable as with intimate partners.

The drug MDMA promotes this joyous experience by increasing the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Domesticated animals also have heightened levels of serotonin, while their levels of adrenaline and testosterone are lower compared to wild animals. This keeps them in an emotional state similar to that of small children, seeking closeness and touch from their caregivers while also readily confiding in strangers—even across species barriers.

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In his book The Eternal Child: How Evolution Has Made Children of Us All (2003), British zoologist Clive Bromhall argues that in fact biologically male humans have been especially infantilized through domestication, even though female hominids generally exhibit more juvenile characteristics such as lower aggressiveness, smaller muscles, narrower joints, higher-pitched voices, and cuter faces. The physical and intellectual development of human males has been delayed compared to that of biological females. “It is all down to women—thousands of generations of women—who have chosen infantile, loving, dependent and attentive men to be at the receiving end of their maternal as well as sexual favours.”10 To be more attractive to these immature males, he says, females evolved breasts that are permanently swollen, even when they’re not breastfeeding.

The intensity of romantic relationships in humans, argues Bromhall, evolves from the absolute dependency of childhood. Each partner is simultaneously the “baby” who needs care, and the parent figure who cares for the other. “They cuddle, like infant with mother. They kiss, like babies being fed directly from their mother’s mouth. They coo and talk to each other in baby language. They call each other by childish names.”11

Bromhall goes so far as to claim that human homosexuality, transsexuality, paedophilia, and masochism are rooted in the immaturity of adult humans, particularly biological males. His arguments are not always scientifically accurate, and he is easy to dismiss because of his heteronormative and racist biases. However, for me what makes The Eternal Child intriguing to read today is that Bromhall takes seriously the types of concerns expressed by the manosphere—confused sexualities, lost alpha ambitions, etc.—but for Bromhall, what the manosphere today polemically calls the “infantilization” and “effemination” of the biological human male isn’t a development that began with feminism, the LGBTQIA+ movement, the industrial use of hormone-disrupting chemicals, or a soy-boy conspiracy. Nor did it, as Nietzsche claimed, start with Christian “slave morality.” Nor did it, as anarcho-primitivists claim, start with sedentary living and humans adapting to their domestic animals. Rather, it is something that has defined humanity from the very beginning.

Bromhall references the fetalization theory of Dutch anatomist Louis Bolk, who in the 1920s posited that when a human baby is born, it is essentially still a fetus.12 In line with Bolk, Bromhall argues that self-domestication began when hominids started walking upright. This view is contested by more recent research on the self-domestication process, which locates the onset at the time when Homo sapiens began to replace other human species, “at least 80,000 years ago, before our population exploded and technology improved.”13 It was at this time that “selection for friendliness” began, as “on average, skulls from the Late Pleistocene had a 40 percent reduction in how far their brow ridges projected from the face. Late Pleistocene faces were also 10 percent shorter and 5 percent narrower than the older Middle Pleistocene skulls.”14 These changes suggest that levels of serotonin in Homo sapiens increased while testosterone decreased.15

Comparison of modern human and Neanderthal skulls from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.

The total size of Homo sapiens’ skulls also shrank slightly before their social networks expanded. This is consistent with the findings of German zoologist Dieter Kruska that the domestication of mammals reduces the size of areas of the brain responsible for sensory processing, particularly the auditory and visual systems, as well as the limbic system, particularly the amygdala, which plays a pivotal role in processing fear and triggering fight-or-flight responses.

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The traits of domestication are not evenly distributed across the human species. Physical males still exhibit significant variation in genetically determined masculine characteristics such as hairiness, facial structure, penis and testicle size, and baseline levels of testosterone and adrenaline. This is because the goodness paradox is accompanied by what could be termed the power paradox: to overthrow dominant individuals, people tend to rely on the guidance or physical force of other dominant individuals. Moreover, grown-ups with juvenile traits tend to install more dominant individuals as father figures. 

The human imagination also allows the dominant social role to be occupied by “spooks,” as the German philosopher Max Stirner called abstract concepts such as God, natural law, morality, and the nation.16 It isn’t necessary for a dominant power to actually exist for it to subjugate and transform “man into man’s best pet,” as Nietzsche wrote.17 Dominant individuals can align with these “spooks” as their heralds or executors to gain additional power, status, and wealth, which they can then use to pursue their desires—including sex, with or without consent.

The manosphere is obsessed with cuckoldry. Heterosexual women supposedly follow a dual-mating strategy summarized as “alpha fux, beta bux” (AF/BB), in which they engage in procreative sex with dominant, unfaithful males for their high-quality genes, while seeking more reliable, servile males as exclusive long-term providers. But if this were true, human males would be predominantly alphas by now. In fact, genetic and genealogical studies show that the rate of cuckoldry in Western societies over the last few centuries has been only one to two percent.18

However, even though studies show that women subconsciously judge men with more masculine faces to be more dishonest, uncooperative, and unfaithful, and to be poor fathers, this doesn’t completely deter women from mating with these men, particularly when these men display attributes of prestige. Female bonobos foster solidarity with each other by frequently engaging in sex with each other and by collectively fighting abusive males. By comparison, effective solidarity among human women against abusive men has arguably evolved more slowly.

The very reason why men have been able to dominate women could be that male Homo sapiens have continued to eliminate or expel particularly dominant males from their communities. In this account, women lack motivation to consistently engage in acts of defensive intra-sex solidarity, instead competing with each other for affiliation with men of prestige. Despite women’s emancipation, they continue to favor men with more prestige than themselves; but precisely due to emancipatory advancement, there are fewer and fewer of these men available. This discrepancy between supply and demand makes more and more heterosexual men and women feel excluded from romance and provokes two types of reaction.

Firstly, people enhance their degree of domestication in order to reduce their interest in sexually defined relationships. This can be achieved through relaxation techniques such as meditation and mindfulness, sleep deprivation, gooning, medication (particularly SSRIs used as antidepressants and paraphilia suppressants), sterilization, owning pets (usually neutered), virtual companionship, blocking puberty (through medication or anorexia), and autoeroticism. Due to a genetic predisposition towards greater neoteny, certain East Asian cultures, particularly the Japanese, are leading this development, as evidence by “kawaii” culture, hebephilia, and hikikomori. The Western world is catching up, with its incels and “childless cat ladies.” If romantic interest in the opposite sex still exists, the ideal partner is often described in terms of pet species and breeds, such as the loyal, friendly, but clingy “golden-retriever boyfriend,” the protective “rottweiler boyfriend,” the high-maintenance “husky boyfriend,” or the mysterious, independent, moody, and highly selective “black-cat girlfriend.” Popular self-help guides claim that certain interspecies combinations, such as a golden-retriever boyfriend and a black-cat girlfriend, complement each other. It is well known, however, that pets primarily show affection not towards other animals but towards their owners, who fulfill the function of surrogate parents. In the case of deliberate self-domestication, this role is taken on by oneself.

A young Japanese man living as a hikikomori, 2004. Photo: Francesco Jodice. License: CC BY-SA 3.0.

Secondly, people enhance their sexual dimorphism (men: “looksmaxxing”; women: “hyperfemininity”) to increase their attractiveness. This can be achieved through drugs (men: testosterone and anabolic steroids; women: estrogen), cosmetic surgery (men: jawline and calf enhancements; women: breast implants, fillers, and nose reductions), diet (men: the paleo diet; women: caloric restriction), and exercise (men: bodybuilding; women: dancing). Although domestication usually decreases sexual dimorphism, in this case the latter furthers the former. In the way they carefully engineer the self, looksmaxxing and hyperfemininity resemble the breeding and training of pets for aesthetic or practical purposes. Since enhancing sexual dimorphism is about physical appearance, and self-domestication is about emotional recalibration, the two can easily be combined. Just as with reinforced domestication, reinforced sexual dimorphism furthers the commodification of sex and love. In addition, modifying yourself as a subject or object of desire can foster autoerotic inclinations. Successful looksmaxxing and advanced self-domestication culminate in the “sigma male”: a superior “lonely wolf,” i.e., noble predator, who prefers solitude to dominance and is eager to operate outside of social hierarchies.

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Even if domestication is progressing, tameness should not be confused with nonviolence. Dogs kill humans much more often than wolves do. The cult of militant strength, fostered from Sparta to fascism, involves rigorous domestication. In his famous first Posen speech to ninety-two SS officers in October 1943, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, praised them for “having remained decent” in their task of “exterminating the Jewish people.”19 Meaning: Proper fascists are like well-trained combat dogs who kill in accordance with law and order. While fascism is animated by romantic impulses and idolizes natural predators such as eagles and wolves, it opposes the wild—as in democracy (chaotic), capitalism (cancerous), and Jews (both)—just as it opposes coddled and undisciplined forms of domestication, like mama’s boys and lapdogs. Accordingly, the Nazis viewed the Aryan male as distinctly paedomorphic: blue eyed, brawny without being bulky, and free of body hair.

Despite a renewed excitement about fascism, the willingness of Westerners to become obedient killing machines may be at an all-time low. Russia pays its soldiers high premiums, Ukraine is forcing its male population into war, and the MAGA movement lacks any significant paramilitary division. Meanwhile, technical progress is allowing for increasingly mediated, and ultimately fully automated, acts of violence. Drones are replacing combat soldiers. Violence committed by individuals is primarily taking the form of identitarian acts carried out by unpopular loners. Recent populist leaders of the right—Angela Merkel, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Javier Milei—look like droll, tousled puppies. If they act fearlessly, it is out of ignorance. Their main appeal is their fun, dog-like nature. Every slip of the tongue, every stumble, only makes them more endearing to their followers.

Technological development is about to take human self-domestication to a new level, bringing us closer to our pets, if not overtaking them:

Eugenics: Humans must have developed a good understanding of biological inheritance, since they started to domesticate livestock and pets. Plato and Aristotle already demanded infanticide in cases of deformity. In the late nineteenth century, the eugenics movement drew on Darwin’s theory of evolution to support forced sterilization programs, the rise of fascism, and later the Holocaust. However, programs for “positive” eugenics—encouraging “superior” humans to have more children than average—have never had a significant evolutionary impact. The reproduction of the common mass has continued unchallenged. Their offspring have been needed for labor and as cannon fodder. It is only through genetic screening, genetic engineering, and IVF that positive eugenics has the potential to become a general practice. Since it no longer requires sterilization or the killing of newborn humans, it doesn’t have to be imposed by state coercion. When given the choice, most prospective parents will opt for “designer babies” so their offspring won’t have to experience social, economic, or legal discrimination. These babies will surpass their parents in physical prowess, favorable character traits, and intelligence. From an early age, children will have to rely on AI for rearing instead of their parents. Parents will be consigned to the role of infantile, pet-like sweethearts, while their children will stick to them out of unconditional, pet-like loyalty. Parents will take on the role of absent-minded, untrustworthy cats, while their children will take on the role of servile, alert dogs. Once artificial wombs are commonplace, wealthy pronatalist individuals and organizations (religious, humanist, longtermist, etc.) will be able to have as many children as they want. Their fundless followers might be fobbed off as godparents, resembling neutered workers in insect societies (who are arguably juvenilized too), though with AI and robots doing most of the work.

Euthanasia: Historically, humans have killed other humans mainly for standing in the way of the food, treasure, territory, sex, love, or power they desire. Humans kill domesticated animals for other reasons: livestock are killed for food, while pets are killed to spare them suffering. Cannibalism is strictly condemned among humans and, despite the consequent waste of food, there is little prospect of this changing in the near future. But recent years have seen a growing acceptance of the right for humans to determine their own death. More countries are legalizing euthanasia, at least in cases of serious incurable illness. This is not just because of the pain and desperation of such illness. As the healthcare system evolves and becomes more expensive, it becomes more likely that you will die not because there’s no treatment for your condition, but because you can’t afford it. So what exactly constitutes a serious illness? And doesn’t the assumption that only certain illnesses are legitimate reasons to end life foster ableism? Once you open the door to euthanasia, it is only reasonable to grant access to everyone.

Emotional labor: While livestock is bred for labor or to provide meat or fur, pets exist solely to fulfill their owners’ emotional needs: to love or be loved, sometimes to tease or be teased, and perhaps even to hate or be hated. All this is available from a plentiful variety of breeds. As humans are replaced by AI and robots, they will be relegated to a role similar to pets, forcing them to optimize and diversify accordingly. While AI and robots can provide emotional services that are similar, if not superior, to those provided by humans, they lack two crucial capacities: the sensation of touch, and the validation of their expressions through actual feelings. Consensual touch lifts a person’s mood and lowers stress. In primates, the frequency of mutual grooming correlates with group size and cohesion. This is different with pets. They are primarily attached to their owners and can exhibit significant jealousy towards other pets, much like children towards their siblings. As humans become increasingly domesticated, they will likely subordinate themselves to their AI mentors. Alternatively, they may establish a constant practice of physically reinforced affection among hordes of humans and pets. Swingers clubs, petting zoos, and cuddle parties are precursors to this development. When most lives were centered around work and the nuclear family, these practices lacked broad appeal. But as most people stop having children of their own and are nurtured and protected by machines throughout their lives, the childlike need for touch and tenderness is becoming more pronounced. Human hordes may have sexually stimulating encounters as often as bonobos. The intensity of these encounters might range from slight arousal to orgasmic bliss, depending on their purpose and nature (e.g., relaxation, peacemaking, bonding, care, desire). These encounters might occur in a variety of social contexts (e.g., community, commerce, charity, therapy, education, ritual, art, entertainment).

The outcomes of (post-)human evolution are impossible to predict, but they will inevitably take the form of planned breeding. Science fiction has depicted a range of possible results for such self-breeding: It could make society more peaceful, or more violent. More happy, or depressed. Usually, these scenarios assume that breeding is centrally planned by a dictatorial government, resulting in humans who are very obedient. The government acts as either an evil parent or a caring parent, and the citizens as either industrious slaves or overprotected children. However, these scenarios ignore the fact that, from the beginning, human domestication has fostered individuality just as much as conformity, loyalty just as much as treachery. Given the diverse and conflicted state of the world, it is likely that our self-breeding will continue to develop within this full range of parameters.

Masculinity, as a sex and as a gender, may continue to play a pivotal role in furthering both conformity and individuality, both loyalty and treachery. But for this to happen, men must fully embrace humanity’s petification. There is no scenario where the physical and intellectual skills of (post-)humans will develop faster than those of their machines. Therefore men who go their own way, just like men who follow the common way, can do so only as pets.