Success Story: From Frog to Prince : Males Learn Early That Achievement Equals Sex Appeal

“Encore! Encore!” Sixteen thousand people stomping their feet, flood the aisles. Entranced. Enamored. The man focuses the microphone before his powerful lungs. But there is no song. “Here I am, Kathy. The pimple-faced boy who sat behind you in seventh grade . . . . Here I am. Neil--who wasn’t good enough to kiss you after class . . . the class frog . . . . Well, your frog has turned into a Prince, Kathy. Kathy, wherever you are--they’re eating out of my hands, Kathy . . . eat your heart out now, Kathy . . . eat your heart out . . . wherever you are. . . . “ ;

--Neil Diamond in concert, Phoenix, 1976.

Like millions of men, Neil Diamond has learned to perform. Most men spend their lives performing--in sports, at sex, on the job--”proving ourselves” in one form or another. Most women sense how often this masks a deep insecurity. Why is male insecurity so great that men will perform to the point of killing--for money, for status, for “power”?

Why do even men working for a “good cause” become furious if the cause is achieved and they are not the ones credited with the achievement? Why do they become attached to supposedly ideological differences as if their personal identities were at stake--turning both Marxism and religion into holy wars?

Billions of dollars’ worth of advertising is flashed into the prepubescent boy’s unconscious, before his “age of consent,” subliminally building his desire for the 14-to-29-year-old model-type woman--literally advertising her. This creates in his young mind the seeds of a fantasy stronger and more powerful than any other. A primary fantasy.

We employ every means of technological sophistication to plant this in his unconscious. So that by the time he is 14, any girl in his class who looks anything like her feels to him like a movie star, a genetic celebrity next to whom he, a 14-year-old, pimple-faced, bumbling adolescent, feels as nervous as a groupie.

The Teen Feels Unequal

The 14-year-old boy notices something about the genetic celebrities in his ninth-grade class: They are going out with the 11th-grade boys. He does not feel equal to the most attractive girls in his class. He feels unequal to his peers. Unless he stands out as a performer.

The genetic celebrities might be willing to go out with him if he earns his way to their attention by performing as a football player or class president. He feels desperate. Why?

The girls he has been socialized to desire have beauty power before he has performance power. This socialization is so powerful that the genetic celebrities in his class can influence boys like a drug. He becomes addicted to an image; anything less feels like an inferior fix.

How does the male adolescent avoid being a genetic groupie? By success on the playing field. A few years later, when he is successful at work, he can afford ski trips and theater tickets, dinners, drinks and rental cars. A few drinks after dinner and a day of skiing tend to reduce his risk of rejection.

Success increases the likelihood that an attractive woman will be interested in him. It seems like a panacea.

Success Becomes a Panacea

In each way that success is a panacea (it pays for the dinners and makes him more “interesting”), it is also a defense against female rejection. And a compensation for his feelings of powerlessness (“Why can’t she want me without my paying?”).

And if a man gets too much female rejection despite his success (or is not interested in women to begin with), success serves as the perfect alternative. He can fall in love with success. It has its own rewards, but inherently and externally.

And it can be a cover-up. If a man is successful enough, few people question him about anything--from women to gayness.

Marc, a member of one of the men’s groups I conduct, married Marge, who wasn’t his fantasy woman, but she loved him. Some men like Marc team up with women like Marge in the hope that they’ll “make it”--only to face a male mid-life crisis if they do make it and a male mid-life crisis if they don’t.

The more he makes it, the more attractive he becomes to another woman, the more he is tempted away from Marge.

During the mid-life crisis, even happily married men often feel that now that they’ve made it to the point where they’re successful enough to attract the woman in the ads, they’re married to a woman who doesn’t fit the image.

Frogs as Class Princes

Few marriages are strong enough or long enough to withstand the Kathys who once rejected the Neil Diamonds when they were the class frog, but now that the men are class princes, are eyeing them.

The more Marc is tempted away from Marge, the more he feels guilty about betraying the woman who supported him, so he would become, ironically, more attractive to “other women.”

If he does find a younger woman, often he’s never quite sure whether she loves him for who he is or for what he has. (I’ve seen few men secure enough to give up their success or refuse to spend their savings to find out.) So he still feels empty inside. He loses if he wins, and he loses if he loses. Now that he has “power,” he loses if he uses it.

Men also fear losing their wives if they’re not successful. Men who drop out of officer training, for example, also find the women who love them dropping out of their lives.

I live near Camp Pendleton, one of the largest military bases in the United States, just north of San Diego. One man after another has told me that there is “no way personality is as important to a lady as my rank.”

They identify with the man in “An Officer and a Gentleman,” who lost the love of his life the moment he followed his integrity and dropped out of officer training.

Put It Another Way

Sam, a salesman in a Chicago men’s group, put it this way: “When I was selling, my wife complained. ‘I’d like you to be home earlier, to be more sensitive, to develop some of the creativity I know you have.’ So I went into part-time sales and set up a studio in our home. We both agreed I have lots of potential as an artist. But my sales income is one-third. And my art barely breaks even. Our marriage suddenly started deteriorating even though I was acquiring everything she had said I was missing. I feel confused and, I guess, angry.”

All this may remain on a subconscious level for most men, who (like the women of 20 years ago) have not had their consciousness raised. Once a man has raised his consciousness, he slowly understands that Alan Alda is loved not because he’s sensitive, but also because he’s successful and sensitive . I call this the Alan Alda syndrome.

Each sex strives to attain from the other sex the type of power it is most discouraged from attaining itself. The more a person expects from the other sex, the more trapped he or she becomes by the expectations on himself or herself. The less a man is willing to give up a sex object, the more he will be trapped into becoming a success object.

As he drops the hope of becoming a Henry Kissinger, a Woody Allen, or a Dustin Hoffman he may lower his sights from the starlet. But if he still desires the female model, he’ll find himself becoming the medical model. Or a star. As the 5-foot, 6-inch Dustin Hoffman put it: “When I was in high school, women wouldn’t touch me with a 10-foot pole. Now I can’t keep them away with a 10-foot pole.”

The distinction between the impact of success on men and women helps explain why men are so compulsive and competitive about their pursuits. Either consciously or unconsciously, the adolescent boy observes how much each option will help him solve his “oil crisis” by getting him to the pump before his neighbors.

Questions of the Spirit

It takes a rare teen-age boy not to need the approval these options supply--to turn in isolation to questions of the spirit, introspection, sensitivity and love. (People who were trying to beat their neighbors to the pump rarely found themselves focused on questions of love.)

For each man who makes it to the top of a pyramid, there are a thousand who do not--a thousand who live at least in part vicariously through the “superiority” of “my” sports team, “my” children, or “my” country. They get their women vicariously, too--through Playboy, Penthouse, pornography.

It’s neither men’s fault nor women’s fault. They are adult men still playing out their “oil crisis”--getting their rewards vicariously to the degree they earned them vicariously.

I am increasingly impressed by the degree to which so many men risk their lives, investments and careers for an attractive woman’s attention, especially her sexual attention.

Think of the men willing to risk their careers with charges of sexual harassment for an affair with a secretary or student. Think of the men who risk years in prison, total humiliation, and the destruction of career and family for the attention of or sex with an underage female, the one female they believe they can have access to--a child.

Think of how often we read of men throwing themselves into cold rivers or hot fires to rescue a woman. We hear of women performing such heroics for the sake of a child--but try to recall one example of a woman doing that for a man, even her husband.

One Wonders About Limits

It is not inherently good or bad to risk one’s life for another. But when men risk so much to be a hero or to get sex, it makes one wonder about the limits of male sexual vulnerability.

ITEM: Look at the praying mantis and the black widow spider. The male and female are “making sex.” The male gets so involved he cannot undo himself. The female satisfies herself, then bites off the head of the male. The male is so locked into the sexual act that he cannot prevent himself from being consumed. The ultimate in vulnerability.

Like the praying mantis and the black widow spider, a man may feel so vulnerable and powerless that, for the sake of visibility and respect, he will risk his “head being chopped off” as a war hero or boxing hero; as a fireman; as a President or an astronaut; as the person who creates the master race or destroys the human race--or gets the Nobel Prize to save it from destruction.

Or, if national heroism is out of reach, as a volunteer fireman in his hometown. It’s all the same. In the process of gaining his family’s respect, peer group respect, female respect and his own respect, a man may forfeit his family, sacrifice his wife, destroy his body and lose his soul.

The male training to overcome sexual rejection also turns out to be valuable for success. Both at work and with women, not taking no for an answer creates the core of male strengths and the core of male neuroses.

Women are attracted to men’s success; they hate men’s defenses. They hate men who don’t take no for an answer; they love men who don’t take no for an answer.

Direct, Indirect Approaches

Both are ways of dealing with female sexuality; changing no’s into maybes with women is direct; changing no’s into maybes at work is indirect.

Success is the most respected defense against rejection. It is the male insurance policy. Success is preventive medicine. But the characteristics it produces do not always make the male lovable at home, or keep him alive for the one he loves.

What are the deeper implications of the messages to women and men? These messages say, “Make yourself attractive to the other sex by making yourself opposite from the other sex.” The problem? Opposites attract; they just can’t live together. Sex-role training becomes divorce training.

Why are men so preoccupied with success beyond the intrinsic rewards, peer group and parental approval of success--to the point of forfeiting life itself? Success is the form of power women feel most deprived of.

While women desire sensitivity in men, men sense women are in need of their success. So men also work to get what they feel deprived of--women’s respect, attention, sexuality and love. Men don’t feel great about spending their lives overcoming potential sexual rejection directly, so they do it indirectly as well--through success.

Success is preventive medicine for the cancer of rejection. It is the male form of power, designed to compensate for the male form of powerlessness; it is the most respected defense against vulnerability. In part, it is men earning their way to equality with women.

From the book “Why Men Are the Way They Are” by Warren Farrell, Ph.D. Copyright (c) 1986 by Warren Farrell. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, McGraw Hill Book Co .