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In Praise of the Sexual Constitution
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12309 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1987 |
2,999 Words |
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Michael Levin
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The verdict is indeed in. A bank's advertisements for tuition loans feature a little girl playing doctor. Another girl, this time on a brochure for summer camp, wields a baseball bat as confidently as Darryl Strawberry. Newspaper articles bemoan the neglect suffered by the new mother when her husband bonds with the baby. To judge by television programs, most police officers are female. A welter of government studies and lawsuits suggests that sex discrimination is a national crisis. Underway is a ubiquitous if uncoordinated effort to kill masculinity - to create an aversion to it to the extent that its very existence is doubted.
George Gilder was angry and apprehensive about this attack on manhood in Sexual Suicide, originally published in 1973, and he is just as angry but considerably more apprehensive in Men and Marriage, his new update of Sexual Suicide. Gilder's fear is not that emasculation will transform the American male into a race of Alan Aldas. He rightly insists upon the biological basis of the male's greater aggressiveness and readiness to use force, and the consequent impossibility of expunging these tendencies by any regimen of socialization. He believes, in fact (and again rightly), that only one group of people in the world is so "abjectly retarded," so "mystically impervious to its own nature" as to deny this sex difference - "the community of social science scholars in America."
Gilder worries, rather, that the ejection of males from their traditional, constructive role as provider and protector will rechannel their inherently dangerous energies toward disruptive needs. As Gilder sees it, the building block of society is the family with children, created by a bargain between the sexes. The woman agrees to bestow her sexual favors on the man in return for his fidelity and lifetime support. This "sexual constitution" benefits both parties, but chiefly the husband. Children give purpose to his existence. Meeting his responsibility to support his wife and children is an ongoing confirmation of his manhood. (Gilder hammers home the alarming statistics on the pathologies of bachelors.) In a larger sense all of society benefits from the domestication of the male - or, more properly, society is made possible by it, for without women to inspire them to transcend the circumscribed horizons implicit in male sexuality, marauding bands of males would keep human existence fixed in a condition of Hobbesian anarchy.
Masculinity under Siege
Gilder argues that the sexual constitution is being repudiated in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. Tax laws have made it difficult for a man to support his family by his own income alone. Thanks to affirmative action, fewer jobs remain that can satisfy a man's nonrational but nonetheless quite real need to feel he is doing something "only a man can do." Even the military, the traditional proving ground of masculinity, has become heavily female. Lacking appropriate outlets for his aggressive energies, rendered insecure by the relentless denial of his right to manly pride and hence unable to command the respect of a woman, a young man is tempted to affirm his manhood in a world of anomie, alcohol, drugs, gangs, and crime. Gilder calls this "the barbarian's revenge." Loosed from the civilizing bonds of marriage and community, some young men lose the capacity for romantic love and revert to loveless sex as a way of proving their sexual powers; some, whose sexual identity is made the more precarious by such an environment, turn to
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