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of fertility treatment, you really want that kid. Is it possible to be over-wanted? I notice in my part of the country that there’s a striking difference between those moms who have their first kids at traditional childbearing ages and those who leave it till Miss Stewart’s. The latter are far more protective of their nippers, as well they might be: even if you haven’t paid the clinic a bundle for the stork’s little bundle, you’re aware of how precious and fragile the gift of life can be. Hence, the so-called “helicopter parents”—always hovering. When you contemplate society’s changing attitudes to childhood—the “war against boys”107 that Christina Hoff Summers has noted, and a more general tendency to keep children on an ever tighter chain—I wonder how much of that derives from the fact that “young moms” are increasingly middle-aged. Martha Stewart’s daughter seems a sad emblem of a world that insists one should retain timehonored traditions when decorating the house for Thanksgiving but thinks nothing of dismantling the most basic building blocks of society.

As always, conservatives fight these battles by playing catch-up: “gay marriage” is seen as a threat to “traditional marriage.” But, after the societal remaking of the last half-century, marriage is near kaput in most of the developed world, and hardly worth finishing off even in America. Rather, “gay marriage” offers a far more enticing target: today, a “family” is any living arrangement you happen to dig at that particular moment; a “marriage” is whatever tickles a California judge’s fancy; and along with these innovations proceeds the de facto and de jure abolition of “the sexes.” In his decision striking down California’s Proposition 8, the most significant of Judge Walker’s so-called “findings of fact” are about the elimination of sex, of male and female. After all, if a man can marry a man and raise a child, then the division of marital roles into “husband” and “wife” no longer applies, and the parental categories of “father” and “mother” are obsolete—“Parent One” and “Parent Two,” as the new U.S. passport form now puts it, or, in the friskier designations of Spanish birth certificates, “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B.” And in that case in what sense do we still have “men” or “women”?

“The gender-neutral society is really a kind of experiment,” says Mansfield, himself adopting the prissy liberal usage of mutable “gender” rather than immutable “sex.” “It’s something that hasn’t been done before in human history.”108 If the aim is to create an androgynous people, then so far women are proving better at being men than men are at being women. For the first time in American history, there are more women than men in the workplace, and they dominate the professions.109 The 2008 downturn accelerated the trend: the recession was for the most part a he-cession. There are more women than men at college: for 2009 graduates, the college enrollment rate was 73.8 percent for girls, 66 percent for boys.110 Almost 60 percent of Bachelor’s Degrees go to women.111 Speaking of bachelors, in 1980 the number of men who reached the age of forty without marrying were 6 percent of the population.112 A quarter-century later, they were 16.5 percent. How many by 2030? Currently some 55 percent of men aged 18 to 24 live with their parents.113 Even before the recession, more than half of all American college seniors moved back to the family home after graduation. 114 Thirteen percent of American males (“men” doesn’t seem quite the word) aged 25 to 34 live with their parents.115

From time to time, many ambitious regimes find themselves minded, as Bertolt Brecht advised, to elect a new people. The immigration policies of most western nations seem intended to accomplish that goal. But you can also change the existing people, in elemental ways and over a surprisingly short space of time. Give me a boy till seven, said the Jesuits, and I will show you the man. Give me a boy till seventh grade, say today’s educators, and we can eliminate the man problem entirely.

Men are no longer hunter-gatherers,