Men, Ancient Rome, and the "Blank Slate"
Currents
When I was six, my parents took me to a natural history museum, and like many boys that age, my whole life began revolving around dinosaurs. When I was 10, they took me to a Renaissance fair. After I saw reenactors dressed as knights doing actual jousting, the medieval era was all I cared about. And sometime in my early teenage years, I watched the film Gladiator (2000), and my life was changed again. Sagely senators, a mad emperor; the Colosseum, soldiers in legionary armor fighting ferocious tribal armies — these stirred something deep within me. As I learned more about Rome later on, I was amazed to discover a vast empire that ruled all the land from the Scottish border down to North Africa and the Middle East, an empire that laid many of the linguistic, civil, and legal foundations for much of what we take for granted today. I found myself swept by the grandeur of this ancient world. As it turns out, I am not alone.
Discourse about ancient Rome recently took the Internet by storm, beginning with an Instagram query that revealed that the boyfriends of many women thought about the Roman empire on a regular basis. Some of these men said they thought about ancient Rome on a weekly basis, others said every other day. Still, others confessed to pondering about the Romans almost hourly. Asked how many times a day he thinks about Rome, singer Billy Ray Cyrus replied, “15 to 20, max.” Men on social media or interviewed by the press gave similar reasons for their preoccupation: Rome’s historical importance and outsized influence on modern society, what we can learn from it, and simply, well, how “cool” it is. The discourse went viral, racking up over 1.3 billion views on TikTok alone. Although the last vestiges of the Roman Empire died its final death in 1453 CE with the taking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, Rome lives on in the hearts and minds of modern men — and it is men, specifically. But why?
Sure, there are some women interested in the Roman Empire, but this viral trend didn’t highlight an overwhelmingly male phenomenon for no reason. Although, as I have previously written, my thoughts on gender are complicated, it’s pretty clear that among a great many men, Rome is fascinating, impressive, and magnificent. Contrary to popular narratives about gender norms, socialization, and the “blank slate,” the male captivation with Rome points to some real, data-driven sex differences.
There’s no point beating around the bush: men and women are different. This is partly because of nature, and partly because of nurture. We can argue until we’re blue in the face about where to draw the line between those two, but on a group level, it’s an empirical reality that we have different preferences and wants. And when it comes to Roman history, we find a lot of guy things.
First, we know from behavioral research as well as global crime statistics that men are much more prone and drawn to violence than women. In part, this is biological. Men are, on average, physically stronger than women. They also have more testosterone, which scientists have known for nearly a century leads to higher aggression. Violence is therefore an expression of an innate quality that men as a group have: muscle power. Characterized by its martial nature and built off the back of relentless conquest, Rome plays directly into this male affinity for violence. The Roman legion, reliant on strength and discipline, appeals not just to the male excitement of watching ranks of legionaries holding firm against barbarian hordes, but to the male interest in athleticism. It took not just courage and discipline to do what the Romans did, but tremendous endurance and physical strength.
Second, the whole saga of ancient Rome is an intoxicating power fantasy that appeals to something deep in the male psyche. What could possibly stroke the masculine psyche more than an empire whose military might and logistical superiority gave it total dominance of Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean? Even beyond military matters, the cultural and societal aspects of Rome projected a different kind of strength embodied in ideals of duty, honor, and fortitude that men fundamentally find inspiring.
Finally, Rome has a feeling about it that is both exotic and familiar. The togas, breastplates, crested helmets, sandals, and tunics give the feeling of a strange land from a distant era, but the cultural heritage and the recognizable places, ideas, and nomenclature still resonate. The slavery, brutality, and wars of aggression practiced by Rome represent values we no longer hold today in the West, but the fact that these laid the foundations of so much of the world we see today makes for a deeply fascinating story. Rome, as a history, is defined by great men; by conquerors like Caesar, statesmen like Augustus, restorers like Aurelian, and reformers like Diocletian. Men who took life by the horns and seized the day, whose conquests on the battlefield were rivaled only by their bisexual conquests in the bedroom.
Of course, nothing about the appeal of ancient Rome is exclusive to men. Nothing stops women from being Roman history buffs, and indeed, some are. And yet, the fact remains that men are eight times more likely to tell pollsters that they think about the Roman Empire “every day” or “most days” compared to women. Understanding why opens the door to a broader and much-needed conversation about sex differences and the “blank slate.”
The blank slate is an idea traceable all the way back to Aristotle. In essence, it’s the nurture side of the age-old nature/nurture debate taken to its most reductionist extreme. It posits that virtually every psychological or cognitive attribute a given individual displays is purely the product of upbringing, education, culture, and socialization. Under this view, every person is born a “blank slate,” which is then filled in by social and environmental influences, all but wholly erasing any place for biology or genes. The concept of the blank slate is, as Steven Pinker wrote in his 2002 book of the same name, the effective denial that there is such a thing as human nature. Unsurprisingly, this outlook has long been popular among left-wing thinkers whose vision for an ideal future involves implementing ideologies that run counter to our deepest instincts and intuitions. What better way to rebuff the charges that one’s proposals violate human nature than by claiming that human nature itself is a myth?
Of course, this denial of nature in favor of nurture occasionally contradicts other orthodoxies currently popular on the left. For example, adherents of the blank slate have to make an exception when it comes to homosexuality or bisexuality in order to comport with the notion of “born this way.” But when it comes to sex and gender, blank slatists are politically unencumbered. Sex differences, blank slatists insist, are the product only of nurture, not of nature. As such, if men are more fascinated by ancient Rome than women, it must be because they are either encouraged directly by society to become Rome buffs or because the underlying appeals of Rome are things we have culturally ingrained in them.
To be sure, socialization plays a tremendous role in shaping the people we turn out to be. The ways in which we are raised and educated, and the social and cultural norms we absorb, especially in our most formative years, have life-long impacts on us all. Any essentialist or genetic determinist — those who assert that much or even most of who we are is prescribed by our biology — faces a Herculean, if not impossible task in making that case persuasively. Any who doubt that our conceptions of masculinity and femininity are in part influenced by society need only look around the world and throughout history to notice the variations. There is nothing inherently female about long hair, or makeup, or the color pink; those sorts of things are purely constructed.
At the same time, sex differences can’t be explained merely by nurture. None of us are wholly free from our own biology. The blind process of evolution has left males and females with innate behavioral (aggression), physical (muscle mass, bone structure, body fat distribution), and psychological (risk-taking) differences.
But surely, blank slatists argue, these sex differences are still about what we’re told to want by our parents, peer groups, pop culture, and the media? The data disagrees. My native Sweden has the highest equality rating in the EU and is fabled for its progressive stance on LGBT rights. Nevertheless, we have significant self-segregation by gender in our labor market. Nowhere in the world are men and women freer and more empowered to govern the terms of their careers than they are in Sweden. And yet, given this freedom to choose, men and women, on average, make different life choices. Men still prefer to be construction workers more often than women, occupying 92% of such jobs. Women still choose to work in preschools more often than men, occupying 93% of those jobs. Equality, it turns out, sometimes results in a widening of gender gaps, as opposed to a closing thereof. This is an inconvenient fact for blank-slate thinking.
We see a similar dynamic across the Western world. Every social factor blank slatists invoke to explain sex differences — from discrimination to unjust laws to sexism to gender stereotypes — has declined. Women have equal rights. Workplace discrimination against women has largely vanished or even been reversed. And gender norms have shifted enormously. Attitudes about women in the workplace and in politics have completely flipped in recent generations. In the UK, fathers spend sixfold more time with their kids today than they did just a decade ago. In the US, stay-at-home dads now account for one in five stay-at-home parents. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of male breadwinners dropped 30 points while the number of wives outearning their husbands more than tripled. Even trends like the “brony” phenomenon of the 2010s, wherein grown men by the millions found enjoyment in glittery cartoon ponies, show a large, international example of rejecting the confines of stereotypical masculinity. Amid these seismic shifts, however, the differences in life preferences by sex persist. Women have never had more opportunity and choice, yet at a group level, the sexes show different and diverging interests. Men are still more drawn to become engineers, and women to become nurses. What does this mean?
The allure of the blank slate is its promise of pure possibility and equality — the notion that we are infinitely malleable, and all have the same potential. It’s a kind of romanticism about the human condition that imagines we can close every single undesirable disparity between groups if we just take the right steps. The irony is that in pursuing social remedies with human rights, legal protections, and cultural progress, we have shrunk most of the gaps that are social in nature and left those that are more biologically ingrained to stand out all the more starkly. If interest in ancient Rome were a sausage fest because women were somehow being actively excluded or discouraged from partaking, that would be an issue worth criticizing, but there’s no evidence of that. It appears, in the final analysis, to simply be something dudes are really into. And that’s okay.
Published Dec 15, 2023
