After America - Mark Steyn [86]
I think we know the answer to that.
BOY MEETS GIRL
For H. G. Wells’ late Victorian traveler, what was most striking about the Eloi was how they had evolved beyond sex:
I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb.... In all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike.... Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity—for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears.
Victor Davis Hanson had a similar experience, some 800,000 years ahead of Wells’ time-traveler. He noticed that “the generic American male accent” has all but died out, to be replaced by something affectedly “metrosexual” with “a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago...a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female.”98 As for the old-school males, wrote Professor Hanson, “I watched the movie Twelve O’Clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded like they were from another planet.” (To be fair, the feminization of men is complemented by the masculinization of women. One recent Miss America winner, lantern-jawed, hipless, concrete implants, looks in the bikini shots like someone who should be suing the British NHS for a botched sex change.)
In 2006, Harvey Mansfield wrote a book called Manliness and was much mocked for it by the likes of Naomi Wolf, the feminist who picked out earth-toned polo shirts for Al Gore in his presidential campaign to make him seem more of an Alpha male—because nothing says “Alpha male” like hiring a feminist to tell you what clothes to wear.99 “I define manliness,” Professor Mansfield told one interviewer, “as confidence in the face of risk. And this quality has its basis in an animal characteristic that Plato called ‘thumos.’ Thumos means bristling at something that is strange or inimical to you. Think of a dog bristling and barking; that’s a very thumotic response to a situation.”100
Thumotic certainly. But not approved of terribly much nowadays: Bristling at the strange? Where’ve you been?
“I don’t think manliness has gone away or become less manly,” Professor Mansfield continued, “but it certainly has much less of a reputation. It’s what I call ‘unemployed,’ meaning there’s nothing responsible or respectable for it to do.”
Quite so. Promoting her new film, about a fortysomething “choice mother” who decides to conceive a child by sperm donor, America’s sweetheart d’un certain age, Jennifer Aniston, declared that women “don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child.... Times have changed, and what is amazing is that we do have so many options these days.”101 Some women want a “new man” who’ll be there at the birth. Others don’t even want him there at conception. The progeny of such “choice mothers” have rather less choice in the matter, and research on the first generation (from the report “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor”) suggest a higher incidence of drug abuse, police run-ins, and the other now familiar side-effects of social rewiring. But hey, don’t let that get in the way of your “many options.”102
As for all those amazing options, don’t try this one at home: marry young, have kids and a successful career. You’ll be inviting a mountain of opprobrium. In the weeks before the 2008 election, I received an extraordinary number of emails from so-called “liberals” revolted by Sarah Palin