It's a Woman's World - The phasing out of men
National Review
by John Derbyshire
Forty-five years ago the British science-fiction writer John Wyndham published a story titled "Consider
Her Ways." A woman of that time, Jane Waterleigh, volunteers to test a hallucinogenic drug. She wakes in the body of another woman some generations in the future. That future is a woman's world; all men were killed off by a rogue virus, which also prevented the birth of any more male babies. After a spell of disorder, the women got civilization going again, and erected a society modeled on those of the ants (hence the title, from Proverbs 6.vi). Bloated, obese "mothers" are dedicated full-time to childbearing it is in the body of one of these monsters that Jane's personality has lodged itself. The "mothers" are attended by midget, sterile "servitors." Society's heavy lifting is done by muscular Amazon types, also sterile, and the whole thing is presided over by a wise "Doctorate" of normal-looking women who can give birth if they wish to. The medical specifics are left unclear, but some sort of parthenogenesis seems to be involved.
Wyndham's purpose was to set a fictional frame for some 1950s-ish arguments about "romance" and the place of women in a consumer society. In years to come, however, he may be hailed as a prophet. While it is foolish to attempt to predict the future in any detail, there are signs that the world we are heading into, with its unprecedented demographic changes and momentous advances in the biological sciences, may be a woman's world. Those qualities we are accustomed to think of as "masculine", that have been brought forward more or less intact from our origins as hunter-gatherers in the Old Stone Age, are now surplus to requirements. Masculinity, as it has been understood from the beginning of our species, is now at last obsolete.
The signs are everywhere. In post-industrial society, men simply do not do very well. As everyone knows, we do not live as long as the other gender. A woman aged 20 can expect to live 6.3 years longer than a man; at 60 the gap is still 5 years. It is less well-known that this is a modern phenomenon; until the early twentieth century, American men lived longer than women. Men are less healthy than women, and get more of most diseases. The culprit here is testosterone, which weakens the body's resistance, and causes it to age more rapidly. Eunuchs have longer life expectancy than other men.
It is notorious that men misbehave much more than women: 90 percent of U.S. jail inmates are men, as are 90 percent of murderers and 80 percent of drunk drivers. Men are also of declining economic importance: Male participation in the civilian labor force has dropped from 86 to 75 percent since 1950, while the female rate has risen from 34 to over 60 percent.
As Western society moves ever closer towards pure meritocracy, it is becoming clear that women are not only healthier and better-behaved than men, but also smarter or, at least, more willing to be educated. More women than men pass straight from high school to college (this has been true since the early 1970s) and more women than men now earn degrees. In 1996, women were 56 percent of graduate students, compared with 39 percent in 1970. The education business is, in fact, being colonized by women at all levels, including the administrative: As of last summer, four of the eight Ivy League colleges has female provosts.
Even more striking results come from England, where single-sex secondary schools are still common and the Department of Education publishes "league tables" of schools nationwide based on results in standard examinations. In the league tables for year 2000, four level" exams, taken at age 17 plus, were girls-only schools. The top 20 schools broke down as: 11 girls-only, 6 boys-only, 3 mixed. Preliminary results for 2001 indicate that women have widened the gap.
As men slip further behind in the meritocratic rat race, the culture sends out more and more signals that traditional masculinity is passé. Peter Whittle reminded us in the Los Angeles Times last February
that Clark Gable would, if he had lived, be 100 years old this year. Whittle went on to compare the ideal of masculinity represented by Gable with the one currently on display in our movie houses. You can get
the point by noting that Gable arrived on the set of Gone With the Wind two days before his 38th birthday, a milestone that Tom Cruise reached in July 2000, and that Brad Pitt will arrive at this coming December.The difference is, of course, that Gable was unapologetically and unambiguously a man, while Cruise and Pitt are, in their screen personae, essentially boys. The trend line is heading off even further into pretty childishness, too think of Leonardo DiCaprio.
Whittle: In my interviews with countless fans, it became clear that for teenage girls, the boyish but androgynous look was the one they preferred in their idols smooth, hairless, lacking traditionally adult,
masculine physical attributes, and, by implication, sexually unthreatening.
The bankability of these present-day movie stars also depends in part on their appeal to homosexual men, a large and wealthy constituency with disproportionate influence over all matters of style and taste in our culture.
The modern workplace has also been de-masculinized. I have spent many years working in the offices of big corporations, among the vast clerical middle class of the Information Age. It has often struck me how much more suitable this work is for women than for men how, in fact, men seem rather out of place among the "tubes and cubes" of the modern office. No masculine values are visible here. The mildness of manners, the endless tiny courtesies, the yielding and compromising, the cheery assertions of labor-room stoicism ("Hangin' in there!") that are necessary to get this kind of work done, leave little outlet for masculine forcefulness. Such outlets as did once exist have been systematically sealed off by the feminists and "sexual harassment" warriors. Was it really only twelve years ago that my mixed-gender office in a big Wall Street trading house celebrated the boss's birthday by bringing in a full-monty stripper to entertain us? Yes, it was. If we did that today, we should be the subject of a 60 Minutes segment.
The more boisterous manifestations of masculinity physical courage, danger-seeking, the honor principle, belligerence, chivalry, endurance, small-group loyalty which were once accessible to all men, in episodes of war or exploration if not in everyday life, have now been leached out to the extremes of our society to small minorities of, at one extreme, super-rich sports and entertainment stars, and at the other, underclass desperadoes. There is no place now for a Francis Burton, whose love of danger and of alien cultures led him to be the first, and quite probably the only, non-Moslem ever to penetrate the holiest sanctuary of Islam, the Ka'aba in Mecca he even had the audacity to make a surreptitious sketch of the place while he was supposed to be praying. (Burton, by the way, was a holy terror as a boy would be a sure candidate for heavy Ritalin treatment nowadays.)
Even war, that most quintessential of masculine activities, is probably a thing of the past. For war
you need a large supply of young men. With the great demographic collapse of modern times, that supply is drying up. Soft, feminized, over-civilized, under-militarized societies of the past were likely to
be jolted back into vigor, or just overrun, by warriors from the wild places. Now there are no more
wild places. While one should never be complacent about these things, and it is possible that a starship fleet of unwashed plunderers, cutlasses in their teeth and knives in their boots, is on its way from Alpha Centauri even as I write, the odds are good that the human race ain't gonna study war no more.
Sexual intercourse itself is on the way out. I have written elsewhere about the sudden (historically
speaking) ubiquity of fellatio among young people. This is a genuine social phenomenon of our times. Its significance in this context is that fellatio is an act of condescension by a woman towards a man. The subtext, as we say nowadays, is: "I am not willing to engage in sexual congress with you. However, to maintain your affections, and pacify your beastly masculine nature, I will do this." Fellatio is Ritalin for adolescents. What the mostly-female staff of elementary schools are doing to 8-year-old boys, female students are doing to the 16-year-olds, though the meaning of "orally administered" is of course somewhat different in the two cases. Along with the normalizing of homosexuality, we see here another sign that ordinary heterosexual intercourse is losing its market share. Sperm is no longer much in demand for its original purpose.
Males are, in fact, not biologically necessary. Plenty of species manage without them. One family of aquatic organisms, the bdelloid rotifers, seem not to have produced any males for about 30 million years, yet they are thriving. Whiptail lizards in the Arizona desert happily reproduce by parthenogenesis. The shuffling of genes that occurs in heterosexual pairing is useful to our somewhat more complicated species in keeping ahead of diseases and parasites, which base their attack strategies on the commonest genetic patterns of the previous generation. This shuffling can, however, be accomplished by fusing two eggs, instead of a sperm and an egg. Presumably this was the trick performed by the women in John Wyndham's story. There are some small points to be cleared up the placenta produced in egg-egg unions is unsatisfactory but these problems can no doubt be mastered. Or mistressed.
There is a movie that has haunted me for years, one of those under-appreciated masterpieces that Hollywood used to turn out from time to time when the accountants were looking the other way. It was titled Lonely Are the Brave (1962). In it, Kirk Douglas he wrote in 1989 that this was his favorite among all the movies he had made plays the part of a cowboy who has outlived his time. Escaping from jail, he heads for the hills on horseback pursued by various cops, rangers, and soldiers, all riding in jeeps and helicopters. At last man and horse make an absurd, hopeless dash for freedom to a frontier that no longer exists. A truck driven by Carroll O'Connor hits them as they attempt to cross the Interstate.
We of the male gender are in basically the same situation as Kirk Douglas's cowboy, lingering on in a
world that has less and less use for us. We may puff and preen and work out for a few more decades, but it will all be empty show. The world that is just over the horizon will be a woman's world. At last, when we and our paleolithic skill set have fallen into complete desuetude, some Caroline O'Connor in a sixteen-wheel rig will come along and put an end to our sorry little performance. It was fun while it lasted the patriarchy, the wars, the all-night poker games, the seductions but now the game is up. The male gender is finished. Shall we be missed, I wonder?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Are men obsolete?
By Jodie Allen
US News and World Report
One bad mistake the administration made in trying to return Iraq to civilization, according to Kenneth Pollack, was to disband the Iraqi Army. Why? Because, says Pollack, a widely respected Middle East expert, the last thing you want to do is let loose in the land a bunch of armed men trained only in mayhem. Iraq, of course, has special problems, but there is a larger lesson here. Not just in places on the margins of the medieval, but even in America, men are a perennial and perhaps deepening problem. To be sure, men--like women--aren't all alike. They vary greatly in the degree of their aggressiveness, need to dominate, and so on. Still as the social scientists say, certain "central tendencies" characterize the sexes, and in recent weeks, both Business Week and CBS's 60 Minutes have featured stories on the mounting maladies of maleness. "From kindergarten to grad school," Business Week reports, girls now outperform boys in grades, admissions, student government, and extracurricular activities. "Women are rapidly closing the M.D. and Ph.D. gap and make up almost half of law students," the magazine says. Meanwhile, boys dominate in such dubious categories as remedial education, stimulant-drug prescriptions, and suicide.
School isn't life, of course, and boys may well find their footing as they progress through the labor markets, especially at the higher reaches where daring, assertiveness--and connections--can pay off big. After all, at least for a few centuries, men have found productive niches in industrialized society, building roads, bridges, and communication networks, and founding (and periodically bilking) massive conglomerates, while contributing to the sciences, arts, and humanities. But even during these periods of industrial growth, the great majority of the male species contributed far more muscle than mind to the commonweal.
Exporting men's work. And now, in our globalized economy, many of those jobs in factories, mines, and repair and maintenance shops are fast disappearing, fleeing to foreign shores. "Manufacturing continues to hemorrhage jobs," said National Association of Manufacturers President Jerry Jasinowski recently, as he noted the 34th consecutive month of job losses in the sector, losses that extend well beyond the assembly line. A new NAM study by economist Joel Popkin points out that manufacturers now account for nearly two thirds of all private research and development and averaged twice the productivity gains of their sectors in the past two decades. But 83 percent of U.S. jobs are now categorized as "service providing." While many of these require the spatial and mathematical skills at which males still excel, the great bulk rely on the sort of diligent, low-ego, cooperative effort at which females traditionally shine.
All of which prompts the question: What shall we do with all the men? Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, was surprised when his son, a software developer, said he was considering buying a snow-removal company out west. "They can't move the snow to India," he explained. But at best that's a seasonal occupation. Sports and entertainment are other possibilities, but to make a living at them requires rare skill. Leisure is an option for those of independent means--or with productive helpmates. But women tend to excel even in non-market domains, at least at such harmless pursuits as flower arranging, shopping, and, of course, child rearing.
There remains, to be sure, one large sector in which men retain unquestioned domination: crime. In 2001, the FBI reports, men arrested for violent crime outnumbered women by roughly 5 to 1. (For murder the ratio was 7 to 1.) Even in nonviolent categories males prevailed (11 to 1 in illegal weapons possession; 5 to 1 in drunken driving). Indeed, aside from prostitution, only in the categories of fraud and embezzlement have women begun to close the gender gap. And even in these officebound areas--witness the latest round of corporate scandals--when it comes to big-time booty, the boys are still way out in front.
Unfortunately for the career aspirations of those skilled in outlaw pursuits, popular demand for the fruits of their labors is negative. No surprise then that popular prophets have foretold the coming of a male glut. In his book Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut paints a world in which computers have taken over planning, production, and much of science. War has been abolished globally, but America retains a large, if pointless, standing army. Others among the idle are enrolled in the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps (aka the Reeks and Wrecks) and spend most of their days leaning on shovels. Everyone is very depressed. Or, if you prefer, there's the Anthony Burgess dystopia of The Wanting Seed. In this not so future world, surplus males fight endless wars against unnamed enemies--who turn out to be themselves. But then, that would never happen in America.
_______________________________________________________________________________
