The Professor in the Cage Quotes

“At my local big-box bookstore, the gun nut, muscle head, and martial arts magazines are all shelved together in what I call the “masculine anxiety” section.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“Battle rappers having an insult contest. Men and boys compete in ritualized insult wars all around the world. Earlier we saw how the instinctive choreography of a standard human fight has been elaborated into the world’s various formal dueling systems. The same goes for the monkey dance of the banter fight, which always involves the same basic moves and rules. Two men take turns hurling boasts and insults. The contests draw spectators, who laugh and hoot as the men derogate each other’s masculinity, while also leveling hilariously vile attacks on relatives (especially mothers). All around the world, the verbal duel is a pure monkey dance for the mind, in which men compete in verbal artistry, wit, and the ability to take a rhetorical punch. Like other forms of the monkey dance, scholars have wondered why boys and men are drawn to verbal duels, and girls and women generally aren’t. This strikes me as a very male sort of question to ask. It’s sort of like a dung beetle wondering why humans don’t find feces delicious. Women avoid verbal duels not because they’ve been told it’s unladylike, but because trading the vilest attacks conceivable while vying in braggadocio just isn’t most women’s idea of a good time. Why don’t people eat feces? Because coprophagy isn’t in our nature. Why don’t women like to duel verbally? Because it’s not in theirs.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“The duel faded away because the culture of honor faded away. And the culture of honor faded away because Leviathan started doing the honor culture’s job. In centuries past, men ferociously defended their honor because they were, in reality, defending their lives, families, and property. But when Leviathan started guaranteeing retaliation for crimes against everyone’s life and property, the deterrent value of personal honor declined, and risking everything over a slight just wasn’t worth it. Leviathan stood up in all its power, allowing individual men to stand down.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“Quick. Don’t think about it. Imagine an English professor in your head. No, a male English professor. What do you see? Tweeds? Elbow patches? A high pale forehead with thinning hair combed over? Eyeglasses with designer frames? Oh God, do you see a cravat? His fingernails are clean and white. His palms are silky and uncalloused. If you grip him by his upper arm, your fingers plunge to the bone. He prefers wine to beer. But when he drinks beer, he favors pretentious microbrews that he sniffs and swirls, while waxing on about oaky hints and lemony essences. You are imagining a man, yes, but one whose masculinity is so refined, so sanded down and smoothed away, that it’s hard to see how it differs from femininity. It has been said that the humanities have been feminized. In English departments, where the demographics of professors and students now skew strongly female, this is literally so. But English departments have also been feminized in spirit. There’s a sense in which if you are a guy who wants to be a literature professor, it’s wise to actively suppress all of the offensive cues that you are actually a guy. Or at least that’s how it has always seemed to me. And I think that’s how it seems to most people. In the public mind, teaching English is about as manly as styling hair.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“For example, the ancient Japanese had onna-zumo (women’s wrestling), but as the sports historian Allen Guttmann writes, “The debased motivation for this activity is suggested by the names of the wrestlers: ‘Big Boobs,’ ‘Deep Crevice,’ and ‘Holder of the Balls.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“When I told people I was writing this book instead of my usual stuff for English lit nerds, they looked at me differently. And when I showed up at an academic conference with a purple hammock of blood sagging under one eye, I found that somehow, in some very elemental dimension, I outranked all the other men present. And now and then a woman looked at me in the way—or so I’ve imagined—women look at men who are dashing.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“So young men bulk up on the weights for many reasons. They want to look good. They may want to improve in sports. But they are also building up an arsenal of deterrence. Muscle is a bold advertisement: I am not a rabbit. I am not food.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“They often seem ridiculous and sometimes end in tragedy. But they serve a vital function: they help men work out conflicts and thrash out hierarchies while minimizing carnage and social chaos. Without the restraining codes of the monkey dance, the world would be a much bleaker and more violent place.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“I wanted to fight, I suppose, for one of the main reasons men have always fought: to discover if I was a coward.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch