A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis

1.3 (Summer 2001)

A quarterly publication of The Center for Moral Reason

Board of Directors:

John R. Harris, Ph.D. (President)

Thomas F. Bertonneau, Ph.D. (Secretary)

Helen R. Andretta, Ph.D.; York College-CUNY

Ralph S. Carlson, Ph.D.; Azusa Pacific University

Kelly Ann Hampton

Michael H. Lythgoe, Lt. Col. USAF (Rtd.), Smithsonian Associates

A Few Words from the Editor

Praesidium in print or online—take your pick.

Immediately below

Breaking Line at Payback Time: Victim-Ideology’s Culture of Rage

Everybody’s stewing away about something. Feminism, while not the sole cause of ruffled feathers since the 60s, ensures that bad feelings will flourish now that gentlemanly decorum has been annihilated.

Peter Singleton

Express Train to 1929

No "Middle" in Middle America, No Aristotle in the Academy

A survivor of the cultural Death Camps also known as grad programs in English literature is glad to have escaped… but to what?

Semper Inutile: In Praise of the Useless

Three Poems Under Clear Skies

Pantoum for Gardeners (Michael H. Lythgoe)  Intimations of Spirality (John R. Harris)

Global warming or not, flowers continue to grow between cracks in the sidewalk.

It's Been Said Before

Scholarly colossus Jacques Barzun had the professoriate’s number more than three decades ago.

Baseball Strikes Out

Zoom out, Cam 3: you’re getting his chewing gum.

Dr. Palaver, Word Therapist

The Académie Française would never catch on where Spanish is spoken.

Contemporary Antiquities

In this three-part short story, the architecture of the future catches up with our caveman mentality.

Criteria for Submissions

A Few Words from the Editor

A few of you will be reading these words in the old format—that is, on the printed page. Others, however, will have received a letter inviting them to view the issue on the Internet. (Since I am not at this instant entirely sure of what our address will be, I cannot include it here; and in any case, we will simply be "hosted" by a donor site until we can find funds to afford our own.) I have mixed feelings about the strategy, as do most of the Board. On the bright side, I save a lot of postage, as well as all the time spent in trivial pursuits like affixing labels and sealing envelopes. Most appealing of all is the prospect of having our pieces read by thousands of eyes rather than dozens or hundreds. On the dark side (notice that I conclude with the bad news… is that terribly revealing?), the global Net audience is indeed a mere prospect. Many who have struggled to build a "Web presence" have discovered that you’re better off sticking fliers under windshield wipers. Oh, you can deceive yourself that thousands are visiting (at least until you actually pay someone to track activity at the site for you); but the mounting evidence suggests that people who surf the Net are in haste, if not positively giddy. A person who takes just slightly more time to assess your home page than Ted Williams would to decipher an incoming change-up is probably not in a mood to wrestle with knotty issues. I try to find grounds for optimism on the screen… but the only sure thing is eye strain.

Well, you can always print out the issue, or those pages of it which intrigue you. Then you will indeed be paying precisely for what you consume, no more and no less. Let me underscore, however, that anyone who wishes to receive a printed, bound copy of Praesidium has only to tell me so. Since there is little demand for such gratuities, I see no great obstacle to bestowing them. We still have a few pennies in the till—and, frankly, I am eager to encourage bibliophilia where it is sincere.

Have you noticed that the same people who once carried placards demanding the elimination of our nuclear arsenal are now chaining themselves to missile silos lest we switch to a "Star Wars" defense? Many of them also told us that the computer was the dawn of a Golden Age in education, nor have most of these sacrificed their progressivism in matters cybernetic… except for shooting down missiles, which is fraught with insoluble problems. Let’s see, now: stem cell research, good… Star Wars, bad… computers in classroom, good… nuclear power plants, bad… expensive jetliner to Paris, good… oil rigs and tankers, bad… does this tally up to anything comprehensible? All I can see is that we continue to be accelerated into major "lifestyle" decisions for whose careful arbitrating we have insufficient information and time. Of course, Praesidium is dedicated to resisting this rush of the lemmings toward the precipice… and here it is online. I don’t suppose anyone will rally before Starbuck’s in protest of the inconsistency, nor am I convinced that the Net is necessarily an agency of dumbing down. (Books can be that, you know: drop by the chain-store at your local mall.) Nevertheless, I assure you all that I have transformed the journal into an "e-zine" with hesitation and, I confess, distaste. We’ll see.

Steve Kogan’s much-delayed essay on John Dos Passos has primed me for some of these sardonic reflections. As the summer rounded another Fourth of July’s meta (I allude to chariot racing, which seems appropriately wild and headlong), a couple of malignant reporters hereabouts decided to interrogate passers-by on such arcane matters as the year of the Declaration’s signing and the adversary of the Colonies in their struggle for independence. Though TV audiences apparently get a hoot out of such streetcorner profiles in vacuity, I find them very unsettling. Professor Kogan reminds us that Dos Passos sensed some vital spark to be slipping out of our culture more than half a century ago. I have my own pet theory about our cultural hemophilia, which I share in a piece about the glories of the "useless"; and it just so happens that Peter Singleton also chose this season to ruminate upon the degeneracy of the Western male. So we appear to have for this quarter various assessments of a maelstrom made from various levels of descent into its unsavory vortex. Mr. Moseby’s short story has traveled well down the funnel—and its claustrophobic revelations, as is art’s way, somehow lighten up the whole landscape.

I might add that Steve Kogan’s essay should have appeared much sooner—and would have, but for (of all things) a software problem! I’m not making this stuff up, just reporting it as it occurred. Seems that Microsoft has effectively squeezed the Apple off the market, and that Steve (who prefers manuscription, in any case) is one of the last patrons of the latter. Only after weeks of combing the city did I find an outfit that could make the conversion from his disk to my version of Windows.

I ended up (for those few of you who are reading hard copy) inserting the cartoon on the page where the Dos Passos essay concludes. The levity was intended to follow a short piece about the All Star Game before the blunt realities of layout intervened. When all is said, however, I think Dos Passos might pull a wry smile to see his work "footnoted" with a jab at the media feeding frenzy around Cal Ripkin. No doubt, Dos Passos didn’t quite foresee the Age of the Organization morphing into the Age of Hype, Spin, Web, and Net—or only toward the end of his life. The question now is, what next? How long can we graze on "Cal" nostalgia, or how long can a Cal-clone scanned into a video game amuse us?

I suggest we start at home, all of us. Close your windows and your Windows, and think. ~J.H.

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Peter Singleton 1

Road rage, air rage, restaurant rage, waiting room rage. Frayed nerves, flaring tempers. "Get outa my face! Get outa my life!" The computers are down, or else your browser won’t access this site. Your e-mail came back marked "User Unknown", or else you can’t collect the e-mail because your server is flooded. Or else you’re bombarded in SPAM (we use acronyms because even short phrases take too long to pronounce) and you hardly have time to find the one message you were waiting for. Now you have to rush off and pick up the kids, get to the bank, hit Quickstop for a gallon of milk. Why is that idiot in your lane? Either hang up the phone or get off the road, you jerk!

There’s nothing very new about the idea that the pace of life has picked up, and that our manners have eroded in the process. Electronic technology has been especially deadly to our patience. It has shortened the time we must wait, all right: but it has also destroyed our patience, so that any wait is too long. How many of us who marveled at our first computer’s ability to scroll through an entire book manuscript now grind out teeth because our state-of-the-art model needs ten seconds to boot up?

On the other hand, we really can’t keep up with any of this. A new software program is always mildly terrifying: make a single careless or uninformed move, and you find yourself, not one step down the path you didn’t want, but two counties down the wrong highway. And speaking of highways, automobile traffic now decimates our "peaceful" era’s population about as steadily as reconnaissance patrols ever did during a major war. At 70 m.p.h., your car really isn’t entirely under your control. You just missed your exit while catapulting through a busy city: now how do you get back? You don’t know these streets—time to panic! A different kind of panic can overtake you when your monthly credit-card bill arrives, but speed, again, is the culprit. At a click of your computer’s mouse or the touch of a few buttons on your cell phone, you’ve bought a gem or food processor or set of golden-oldie CD’s before you had time to think the transaction through. Now you have to pay up, at least on some of the interest. How did you manage to spend so much… where are you going to find all that money?

It’s enough to make anyone sullen. Always waiting, but always too late. You’re in a hurry because this brave new world is too fast for you, and you have to catch up; but since you’re always catching up, the traffic is always moving at a crawl, it seems, and the Internet connection always runs like cold molasses.

And because there’s no time to stop and examine your own feelings, let alone to re-shuffle your priorities, each new frustration is painted against a backdrop of brooding blues with occasional red flecks. Your own system is overloaded, and you won’t even know it until you explode over some trivial provocation. Then you’ll be left with the task of trying to explain to any friends you wish to keep just how bad you’ve been feeling today, for several days… you’ve been thinking of getting help. But first you’ll have to slow your friends down, and they may prefer simply to chalk up your hysteria to a "bad morning" without breaking stride. What are friends for? Catch you later!

The analysis above, itself rather staccato, is usually offered in some form to explain the collapse of "civil society". And it certainly isn’t without merit, even though it never leads to a remedy when one sees it squeezed into twelve minutes on Dateline or 20/20. What are we all supposed to do—take a deep breath and say "omm"? Find our soul’s center of gravity and let our psychic energy swirl around it? "This isn’t really happening… all these people, all this noise, it’s not really where I’m at." Solipsism, we call it: the belief that reality stops where one’s senses end. That should solve our crisis in manners!

Such "fixes" of pop psychology also overlook (or perhaps reflect) an essential aspect of the problem. Our ruthless, cutthroat approach to life is not just the madness of haste: some of it has been thoroughly, even voluminously worked into a system. Since the late sixties, the party line in our universities has been that all etiquette, all tradition, all morality is ultimately a machine designed by those in power to keep the underclass quiet. The "party" which purveyed this line was often Marxist; but with the discrediting of the Soviet Union and Red China by voices from within that could not be silenced, the dogma shifted and grew more "refined". Marxism at least had an overall sense of history and—admit it—a latent sense of decency. Though it "empowered" people to stick up their rich neighbors, the proceeds were supposed to be applied to giving Tiny Tim medical coverage. That all historical versions of Robin Hood have failed to measure up to the legend was a hard fact to impress upon socialists. It still is. Their sense of decency depends on the suppression of their sense of history.

But even this highly flawed system is positively Newtonian compared to what comes out of the academy nowadays. Pick a group—any group: racial minority, women, homosexuals, certain designated non-Western religious faiths… okay, so I didn’t mean just any group. It has to comprise non-whites, non-males, or people of non-European descent. Within these parameters, you argue that the chosen group has suffered centuries of oppression. Now the time has come for its masses to rise up, strap the saddle on the master’s back, and ride him with spurs and whip. Usually these arguments are advanced in arrogant defiance of the historical evidence—far more even than designer-brand Marxism. Assuming that you can stomach their "do unto to others what their remote ancestors sometimes did unto yours" kind of morality, you still have to confront an unscrupulous exaggeration of just what was done. To be sure, history may be accepted as an ally—and warmly embraced—for the short distance that it seems to walk beside systematic paranoia. A couple of documented incidents or a period of a few weeks may well sit constantly in the spotlight. Otherwise, the pseudo-histories of Hollywood and the talk-show rant of its darlings are called upon to bear witness as if they constituted an "oral record" passed down by field hands and washerwomen. "Everybody knows that they chopped a slave’s foot off when he attempted to escape"… well, it must be true, then. Everybody saw Roots, so everybody knows.

I’m talking about college professors, though. Sometimes they can’t get away with this kind of populist grandstanding among their colleagues, a few of whom still read original source materials. So the New Historicists (as they style themselves), when faced with facts, simply rule all the hard evidence out of bounds. If something was written down, the person who composed it must have been literate: that is, a member of the ruling élite. If that something was preserved, or even published, it must have met with the approval of the ruling élite generally. Hence you can’t trust it. You’d be safer assuming that at least every other word is a lie.

Let’s stick with the Africans imported to be slaves for a moment, since their reason for collective rage is probably stronger than anyone’s. (I would except the Native Americans; but then, not enough of them are left to voice much rage.) A movement is afoot for the descendants of slaves to be indemnified for their ancestors’ labor. Back wages with interest—a nice fat cash settlement for those concerned. Several obvious questions at once occur to me (or to anyone who dares to think openly and honestly). Who would pay—only whites, and all whites? All all-whites? That is, would a Chinese-Caucasian be excluded, or would he pay half the levy? What about whites descended from immigrants who didn’t even arrive here before Emancipation? What about whites whose forefathers fought for the North? I suppose I should pay something: some of my ancestors were definitely slaveholders. But then, some of them also took up arms against their cousins and sided with the Union. That strikes me as pretty commendable: to enter mortal combat against your own flesh and blood for the rights of people not even of your race. Would I get any discount for those of my forebears who risked their lives to free the slaves?

What about people who are half-black, half-white? Would they make out a check to themselves? What about blacks whose slave ancestors were freed within years of arrival—within far less time than the whites shipped over in indentured servitude? What about full-fledged African-Americans—émigrés from Biafra or Rwanda who were only too glad to make landfall on these shores in recent decades?

Would England and France chip in something for having operated a lucrative slave shuttle across the Atlantic? Would Arab Muslims pay something for having financed slave raids on the African continent, where (in the Sudan) they continue the practice as you read?

If the case depends upon the assumption that Southern plantations made fabulous profits, would the revelation that most were in deep financial trouble have any bearing in determining payments? What about the disclosure that room and board would have been considered adequate compensation, more or less, for field laborers at the time? Is the collective fine for back wages or for the outrage of having been forcibly transported to the New World? If the latter, then are the descendants of white debtors shuffled off to Georgia or Catholic political refugees hounded out of Scotland and Ireland eligible for a few bucks?

And speaking of the Irish… if an onslaught of lawsuits is permitted (as trial lawyers pray it will be: they, of course, are the guiding light behind this vast act of penance), shouldn’t something be done for the descendants of tenant farmers who were squeezed out of Sligo and Mayo and Cork during the Famine by greedy landlords? I have some Irish forefathers, too, as I recall—I should be able to recoup some of my "penance" money through them. The Potato Famine was really a series of famines during a time when every sort of staple but potatoes was thriving. The government could easily have stepped in and alleviated the suffering. Instead, the landlords pulled strings in Whitehall (where there was actually some sentiment in favor of relief) and secured inaction so that they might sweep their cumbersome tenantry away and employ new methods of mass cultivation. The potato blight was a godsend for their cause. Many of them even put up the money for the destitute farmers to book passage to New York or Boston or Quebec. The only problem for the latter was that since the shipping company had made all the profit it could off them before they ever came aboard, they were packed like sardines, and little space or cash was wasted on food and water for them. A slave who reached America dead was an investment gone down the drain: hence the number of slaves that could be boarded safely was calculated on those model ships where you see dark figures sketched in lying down. The swarms of Irish were another matter. When cholera made its rounds (as it almost invariably did: the city of Quebec was plunged into a major health crisis), the sick were sometimes tossed overboard with the dead. Ships’ captains didn’t want "the fever" to spread above-deck, so they took precautions, some quite extreme. There is a documented case of an ailing woman who clung to a wooden post lest she be jettisoned while still alive: "with that, one of the sailors struck the blow of an axe upon her wrists," and she put up no more resistance.

Pretty awful story, isn’t it? It ought to be worth something. I get made just writing about it. I’m mad right now. I feel a rage coming over me.

But then, I’m also part English: so if I ever did win a cash settlement, I’d be among those required to make a check out to themselves (minus an attorney’s fee and new taxes to fund the Federal Restitution Commission, which would well nigh clean out my account). Furthermore, I have a hunch that the Irish Gaels did some terribly inhumane things to one another before the Normans ever divided and conquered them. History is not very clear on the details, but the Irish heroic sagas are full of foul betrayals, ruthless beheadings, and mass carnage. If I were 100% Hibernian, research would surely suggest that I should be making checks out to myself until my pen runs dry.

You see the problem that keeps surfacing. People are despicable to one another, yes, and if you select any particular period, you’re certain to find one group dishing it out with special relish to another group. Yet the more you back away and look at context, the more you realize that inhumanity is an essentially human condition. The Serbs whom our government succeeded in vilifying recently before an ignorant public had in fact fought with the Allies against Nazism, while the Islamic minorities in their midst had so fully collaborated with the fascists in places that they themselves were grinding the tyrant’s boot upon innocent victims. Follow history back a few decades, and the ball of brutality is back in the Serbian court, and so on. As I write, the freedom fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army with whom we officially sympathized are fanning the flames of new conflict in Macedonia. This part of the world has seethed with ethnic hatred since before the Macedonia of King Philip (Alexander’s father) started flexing its muscle—since before the invasion of Darius’s Persians (Alexander’s pretext for conquest). The only periods of peace during recorded history have been stand-offs.

On this side of the Atlantic, the Native American nations were certainly not all co-existing in sweetness and light before the white man’s arrival. The relatively peaceful Caddo, for instance, had been all but exterminated by their more bellicose neighbors, the horse-borne Comanche; for once tribal groups like the Comanche and the Sioux had acquired the progeny of the conquistadors’ chargers, they became a terror to those around them. To the extent that they didn’t resolve all their age-old rivalries permanently, it was because other tribes (e.g., the Shoshone) had also mastered horseback-riding, and also because their self-interest really didn’t require wiping out the other side. It was scarcely out of charity. The land which was later "stolen" from them included vast tracts of prairie over which any given group migrated perhaps once a year. Had they lived in fixed villages like the ancient Anasazi of the southwest (who mysteriously disappeared, perhaps bullied by an Aztecan people which sacrificed humans), they would have settled their disputes less like Tamerlane and more like Milosevic. Indeed, the comparatively sedentary Huron and Iroquois were ferocious beyond anything within European memory (though just beyond the intruders’ polite memories, many parallels lurked in the shadows). They slaughtered their adversaries and mutilated their prisoners. And they took slaves.

Usually the slaves were women and children. This is the rule in traditional cultures which have no need of raw man-power in large amounts: the men are butchered, while the women get to live. When the Greeks sacked Troy, legend has it that they went so far as to slaughter male children like Hector’s son Astyanax lest the boys grow up to avenge their fathers. This is a legend, of course: even those ancients like the Roman playwright Seneca who wrote it down viewed it as some kind of allegory. ("Civilized" memory was already sending the bad boys off into the shadows.) Yet such legends often reflect what was once standard practice much more faithfully than we care to believe. It makes a brutal kind of sense, after all: kill the potential warriors and breed a new underclass from the serving girls.

So the women got to live. You may say that they would have been better off dead, and you may well be right. Homer and Aeschylus don’t paint a very happy picture of the female slave’s existence. But then, such value judgments further vex the issue, don’t they? If it were you, would you really rather die? Can you confidently speak for your sister, your neighbor, everyone you know? All females everywhere?

When certain feminists complain that they have suffered a history of oppression, they seem to me to err on all three counts above. That is, they first ignore that we are all oppressors, generically as a species and potentially as individuals. Secondly, they simply aren’t correct with any respectable degree of detail. The most prosperous male peasant farmer in the Middle Ages had a far more arduous life than the most cloistered female aristocrat, and men have always been expected to volunteer as cannon fodder for an unending succession of wars while the women stay home and wring their hands.⁵ Well, maybe you’d rather starve than be cloistered, or maybe you’d rather be vaporized than left to wait in anguish. That’s Point Number Three. Just because you personally might not be daunted by the miseries of the working class or of male social obligations doesn’t give you objective cause to rate the miseries of conventional womanhood above all others. Some people, I truly believe, find getting shot at quite exhilarating. It is willful blindness bordering on insanity, however, to insist upon this "right" for all women (in the form of frontline military service) because you really hate housework and shopping.

I’m not saying that I personally enjoy housework, on the other hand—and if I were, it would be just as irrelevant as another’s rare love of whistling bullets. Personal preferences are not in competition here. My point is precisely that labeling one gender’s habits of life better or worse than the other’s is mere shooting of the breeze and blarney. The irreproachable Gertrude Himmelfarb cites the reluctant work of one feminist scholar who, having scrutinized long and hard the "miseries" of less affluent Victorian matrons, had to conclude that the picture wasn’t so very bleak: "In the working-class family, the women were far more dominant [than in the middle class]. There, in their separate sphere, they constituted something very like a matriarchy."⁶ This sort of conclusion just won’t do if you aspire to the feminist "ideal" of dictatorial power confirmed by propaganda. On the other hand, if you are interested in truth, it is inescapable.

The Marxists at least had such objective measurements as health and nutrition on their side when they designated the poor as oppressed. What similarly objective standard do today’s feminists have? Before the twentieth century, women often died young in childbirth… yes, but men often died young in battle. Women were often kept close to home and not allowed to participate in politics… yes, but the travel undertaken by most men was toilsome and dangerous, and access to politics was extended only to a privileged few. If you make a scorecard, you can go on like this all day. Every time you think of a way in which women were shortchanged, you need only think a little longer to balance it with a way in which men were shortchanged. No, the two sexes didn’t live the same lives in yesteryear’s world—only in degree of labor and grief. And that is another human constant, rarely fluctuating from person to person. We all have pretty hard lives.

What about the person who’s ugly rather than beautiful? Regardless of gender, those who are pleasant to look at enjoy a lot of coddling and preferential treatment. What about the overweight, especially overweight women? What about the undersized, especially short men? These groups have drawn a certain fashionable sympathy lately, but nothing approaching the legally sanctioned preferential treatment lavished upon some minorities whose victimization is more "classical". What about the shy? They have no lobby whatever—how could they? They’re shy! Or what about the most persecuted, execrated, crucified minority of all: the minority of honest people? They get passed over for promotions, they get squeezed out of work if not openly fired, they get transferred to Siberia, and in some societies they are literally imprisoned or executed. Should we protect honest people under the Fourteenth Amendment? Should their descendants be eligible to collect damages from descendants of the persecutors? Should Solzhenitsyn’s grandchildren have their day in court against Stalin’s grandchildren?

But a truly honest person is probably also a good person; and a good person would tell you that honesty is its own reward—that the person who lives in lies is as pitiable as the damned in hell. Those who tell lies have bad consciences, don’t sleep well, poison their personal relationships, send up their blood pressure, and otherwise self-destruct. Maybe they should seek indemnity—from God, for making the human heart so weak at the prospect of its own evil. Why, even the handsome and the beautiful often share a corner of this hell; for to be celebrated for something so shallow as your looks is itself a lie, and eventually pretty posterboys and beauty queens begin to choke on the very laurels meant to please them. What real happiness did Elvis or Marilyn ever know? Or to retreat to ancient literature again, what woman ever ended up more miserable than Helen of Troy, who beauty rivaled the goddesses in beauty? If you prefer Celtic legend, the Irish Deirdre, the Welsh Branwen, and Arthur’s lovely Guinevere all died deaths of utter despair after causing the destruction of everyone dear to them. Who would pray for beauty in the light of such examples?

The feminists I have known around the campus would have agreed enthusiastically that beauty is a curse—a male curse, they would have added. Just look at the sacrifices women are forced to make to appearance! Brow-beaten by their fathers, bullied by their lovers, and admonished by their poor brainwashed mothers, girls grow up thinking that they have to starve themselves, spend hours in front of the mirror, and wrap themselves like Christmas packages to be pleasing. Then men deride them for their dread of smeared make-up and their closets full of clothes! Setting aside the fact that this portrait of the slavemaster matches few males I personally have ever known, I would pose feminists the one question which their raves invariably leave me pondering: what is the feminist alternative? If only they would answer, "Freedom from frivolity and shallowness; clean, well-groomed people of both genders who do not waste time and money on coarse, gaudy allure"... now that I would cheer three times! Simply, tastefully dressed women have always had an attraction for me, precisely because their appearance advertises intelligence and character rather than subjection to fad and eagerness to elicit the lowest sort of interest.

Yet how few such women one sees! For my vision of gender equality is altogether too puritanical for feminists of every stripe: they groan at my New Jerusalem of browns and grays, just as their imaginary slavemasters are supposed to do. Their alternative is a world where women get to "hook up" with men at will, without wasting time on flirtation or money or perfume. I envision a meeting of minds, of souls: they envision good sex on demand. No wonder that their ideological descendants, the carnivorous neo-feminists of Naomi Wolf’s species, have returned to their mirrors and walk-in closets—not to adorn themselves for the master, but to bait the hook for passing sharks! The name of the game is consume and be consumed, with an emphasis on the former. Always strive to get more pleasure than you give. That’s how you know that you’re not being exploited.

This discussion may seem to have wandered off track: one minute, an argument that oppression and victimization are basic to all human relations… the next, a straight-laced gripe against feminism. Actually, the fusion of these two efforts is the very heart of my present purpose. Feminism is a specific example of victim-theory. As such, it has all the liabilities and fallacies of other examples. People always suffer, and they always inflict suffering. The best people choose individually to take more than they dish out; but even in them, the potential to hurt always abides. Particular patterns of abuse flowing from one group to another are inevitably reversed over time (or perhaps an undercurrent is secretly returning the abuse at the same time). In the matter of women having to primp and preen for domineering males, I would briefly protest (from bitter experience) that men are often held to standards just as shallow and demeaning by women. A letterjacket is the key to hot dates in high school. A new sportscar draws a girl’s longing gaze from the first Barbie Doll until about thirty (because, I suppose, cars represent escape from parents for the young, and for the slightly older a ticket to high-rolling evenings and weekends). Licentious male buffoonery seems "wild" and "fun" to the fair sex well into their fourth decade of life, by my reckoning. The standards may be different in a Comparative Literature graduate program, but they are just as shallow and impersonal: wild hair and tattered jeans were cool in my grad days, along with anything else which signaled utter contempt for bourgeois decorum.

My generalities, of course, are sweeping—just as those which feminists make about male expectations. There is plenty of just cause for either gender to complain about the other. My question remains: what’s the alternative? Where does all this complaining get us?

At present, it’s driving both sides into an ever more unsightly rage. The more feminists lead women in a kind of inside-out pep rally, the more ordinary female citizens with no academic connection begin to attribute all their bad days and hard times to men. If your boss is a man or the person promoted in your stead is a man, then the "old boy" network must be involved. If the guy you’re dating is a jerk or your husband is having an affair, it’s not because you sadly misjudged his character—it’s because he’s a man, and he’s running true to form. Why are there wars in the world? Why so much poverty and abuse of power? It’s a "guy thing": men are violent, aggressive, competitive, pitiless, and selfish. It’s all their fault.

Of course, this outrageously "bum" rap creates a smoldering indignation in men which is coming ever closer to full-scale ignition. Women want their share of executive positions, yet the same women often won’t date a guy whose position and power are not at least equal to theirs. Women gripe about a Playboy magazine on some guy’s desk at the office, yet they spend thousands of dollars a year sculpting their bodies at the gym or on the plastic surgeon’s table so that they can make a man’s jaw drop. They don’t want to be brushed against at the water cooler, but they won’t refuse a promotion or a contract if showing a little leg helped to get it. They’re working both sides of the street at once. "Don’t treat me like a carnal object unless I want you to," they seem to say—or to avoid saying (since that would be too honest). "Even then, you’d better make independent calculations to be sure that I’m not in error, that I’m fully sober, and that I’m really going to come out ahead in the deal."

Unfortunately, I believe the enraged male response is already well under way. In manly style, the guys bury their resentment so deeply that they themselves don’t know it for what it truly is; but I believe that the way men have "yielded" to women and agreed to treat them as equals conceals an immense amount of hostility. I’m waiting for the day when men say, "You want to join the marines and be on the front lines? Sure, go ahead! In fact, let’s have an all-woman army to make up for the years when it was all-man. Affirmative Action in action!" I haven’t yet heard any male seriously advance this proposal. Most men are still too chivalrous—for some reason—to tolerate the thought of women in a battlefield slaughterhouse, or else they love their sisters and wives and daughters too much.

But in other ways, I can see that attitude shaping male conduct: "You want to play rough? Okay, we’ll play rough!" Dating customs are the most obviously impacted form of behavior. Men have entirely stopped caring whether or not the lady shares their diseases or conceives their children, let alone whether or not she forms some strong emotional attachment. The dating game is now definitely hardball. You go out in the evening hoping to "score". You assume that the girls all want what you want (and that you want what the feminists insist all guys want). Everything is "foreplay": it’s all a matter of figuring out how much this particular chick expects to be finessed. If you’re not carnally elated by the evening’s climax, you have a right to be disappointed, to go elsewhere. If you are elated thus—if things went "well"—you may wish to see the lady again. She’d just better not get any ideas, okay? This is all about sex. She’s good at sex. No more to say.

I do indeed see a lot of violence and aggression in such behavior—but I don’t see anything fundamentally male in it. Or maybe I should put it this way: such behavior is fundamentally human insofar as it expresses contempt and suppressed rage. It’s about half a step above administering physical beatings. Of course, many of these relationships stray across the line and become assault cases. You grab them, you force kisses on them, you get their clothes off or out of the way, you attack… you pull hair, you squeeze wrists, you pin down elbows, you gnaw and bite… you tie up, you chain down, you whip and slap and burn… a distinct progression from mere lustful passion to brutal rape to sadistic torture. Are we to believe that the man at the far end of this scale is expressing love? Or even that he is just in hot pursuit of great sex?

Well, maybe the latter. For the problem is that the progression can never be very distinct, after all: sex is always potentially violent. Without tenderness, it can quickly become criminal assault. I haven’t mentioned the volley of rape accusations discharged at men by the New Woman as part of what we guys have to "put up with" because, frankly, I find a lot of truth in these charges. Like Wendy Shalit in her splendid book, A Return to Modesty, I see very, very little to distinguish the contemporary practice of "hooking up" from a kind of low-key, institutionalized rape. In case you haven’t encountered that elegant term, allow me to let Ms. Shalit explain it:

Hook-up is my generation’s word for having sex (or oral sex) or sometimes for what used to be called "making out". The hook-up connotes the most casual of connections. Any emotional attachment deserves scorn and merits what Sex on Campus [a politically correct manual of social etiquette for students] calls a dangerously high "ball and chain rating". ("A ball-and-chain rating of 0 or 1 would mean that you should be able to go on about your business without much worry.") Without embarrassment, there cannot be any surrender. We can only hook up….

In this light, it is not very surprising that so many date-rape charges should fly after these "hook-ups". At every turn our romantic hopes are quashed by the words once used to rationalize faithless marriages. Our sexual landscape is already soaked in the language of betrayal before we’ve even begun.⁷

Consensual rape, if you like oxymorons. Make no mistake: the men who engage in such practices have no true respect for women as human beings—and little enough for themselves. I’m sure that they admire a beautiful girl as they would a pizza with all the toppings or a sportscar with a V-8 engine… but to esteem a person on that level is to feel contempt for her as a person. You don’t devour people you love—or even people you like.

In my opinion, this is male rage at the death of love. When feminists no longer allowed men to love women, they took something essential away from the healthy, responsible male. I shall discuss just what I believe that thing to be in the next section. Being deprived of it was also a kind of assault—was, indeed, the initial assault, with the male at the receiving end and the female dishing out lethal punches. Love died, and something in men died with it. In response—in revenge—men started giving women just the de-romanticized version of love that feminists demanded. They started clamoring for sex, lots of it, and in varieties as exotic as anything the Marquis de Sade ever dreamed of. They counter-punched, and these punches, too, were lethal. Most young women were caught in the middle, spouting feminist cant without which they would not be thought intelligent, then absorbing the libidinous punishment of their "boyfriends". Today we are told by researchers that oral sex among teenagers is about as routine as kissing: girls who have had dozens or hundreds of such encounters may even consider themselves still virgins. Could we need any further proof that young men are in a spiteful, vengeful mood—that they are in the throes of rage? All that’s left now is for them to behead each girl after they soil her.

And however much neo-feminists may fantasize about it—however deep Naomi Wolf may dig to find her ultimate "shadow slut"—women will never be able to soil men in the same way. Not remotely. Male biology dictates when the event is over, male biology dictates the character of the event (details spared), and male biology requires that the event be an "invasion" of sorts with the male entering the stronghold. Feminism can juggle words and feminists can flirt with lesbianism, but nothing can truly change these basic facts. The New Woman, therefore, will continue to feel more rage as the Degenerate Man takes out ever more of his rage upon her. What’s next? Female serial killers targeting males? That unheard-of phenomenon has already begun. Look for it to become a criminal trend.

Unless, of course, we can work our way back from the abyss. Somebody somewhere has to stand up and cry "enough". Several people, no doubt, have to do so. Wendy Shalit and her spiritual sisters (Maggie Gallagher, Danielle Crittenden, and a few others) have already done so. Now, who on the male side will stand up, accept derision, keep silent under repeated insult, and do the right thing? Why, isn’t every "real man" supposed to be ready for that moment?

I know that a certain type of man is probably guffawing to himself after my first chapter, "What a pansy this guy is! Since when did a real man ever put all this heavy-duty stuff into sex?" (I’m trying to imagine what monosyllables this complacent hairy ape might use: frankly, I doubt that he would have struggled past the book’s front cover.) This is the sort of man which feminists have caricatured: and it is the caricature which young males think they must live up to if they are to become "real men". Gloria Steinem once remarked (with that urbane irony of hers which conceals so much contempt for the human race) that every woman is entitled to a parking lot attendant once in a while. Here we find the "real man" image in a nutshell. His dark hair is slicked back, his sinuous lips work around a stick of chewing gum, his broad shoulders swell a leather jacket open at the collar, his Elvis buttocks are poured into a pair of blue jeans… he stares at women as if they were meat on the butcher’s counter, he squeals tires around dangerous curves with an indifference to annihilation bordering on idiocy, and he listens to music which must evoke in his etiolated brain either an engine in need of tune-up or a primeval thrash through the treetops. Yeah, real man. Bon appétit, Gloria.

In fact, this debased stereotype strikes me as thoroughly effeminate in many ways. I think of a man as someone who is strong. Well, so does Gloria, I daresay: but what I mean by strength has nothing directly to do with sexual stamina. Imagine a clichéed Hollywood survival story where a passenger plane crash-lands in the Sahara or the Indians steal all the pioneers’ horses in the wastes of Utah. Who will make it back to civilization? Actually, women fare rather well in these situations, because nature has given their bodies more fat to draw upon; but among the men, who will be able to stare hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and death itself in the face? Will it be the kind who has spent his life appeasing his senses, or the kind who has always kept his senses in subjection to his reason? If a man’s primary ambition in life has always been to get a woman in bed, then how will he handle not only doing without that pleasure, but doing without food and water? If he has been unable to deny his body the joys of love-making, how will he force that same body to walk thirty miles a day in blistering heat? I don’t see him getting very far. His stamina is in the pursuit of carnal thrills, not in the mastery of physical pain.

Speaking of Hollywood Indians, they were my greatest heroes when I was a boy. I often rooted for them even when I wasn’t supposed to. The White Eye soldiers had cannons and repeating rifles, leather saddles, warm clothing, and fireplaces back at the fort: the Apaches who slipped off the reservation had a few arrows, no saddles, loin cloth with moccasins, and a bed of blowing sand. The Captain’s daughter wasn’t cozying up to any of them, yet they were the true men. That was pretty obvious, even to a kid. The closest thing to a man in the fort was often the scout who had been raised by the Sioux. Maybe he got the Captain’s daughter, and maybe he didn’t: he refused to let her perfume cloud his mission.

Then James Bond came along. Before the sixties, I can’t remember a single instance on TV or at the movies when the toughest guy in a fight was also an insatiable, wholly unprincipled Don Juan: desired by women, yes—very much so—but not inclined to exploit every woman’s desire for one night. One of the reasons I tried to be "manly" as a boy, in fact, was so that girls would find me attractive. I wanted to be strong and silent, impervious to pain and devoted to duty, like Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood. Or maybe not quite like them… I was too young to know Gary except from The Late Show, and Clint was always tough without any cause deserving of such toughness. (More on that later.) My real hero was probably Patrick McGoohan (Secret Agent), the agile, handsome, cerebral British actor who was first approached to play James Bond, and who refused precisely because the part’s cold-blooded killing and cold-hearted sex-for-sex repelled him. He was too much of a man. McGoohan’s last great role was as Number Six on the highly creative (and controversial) experiment in futurism, The Prisoner. No kisses or cuddles, no tears or whining, not even a lot of fistfights where he prevailed over his jailers’ far greater numbers: but moral determination flowing over the brim—the ability to define himself through will power rather than through visceral impulse. I vaguely classed Number Six with a man who has remained my real-life hero, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Yes, those were men.

I doubt that I ever succeeded remotely in emulating such figures. What I do know is that the girls wouldn’t have been impressed even if my emulation had been picture-perfect. I used to dream of moments when I could display my raw courage, yet I never observed any fair classmate clasping her hands and sidling up to a proud, straight sapling of a lad the way she might to a trembling, anemic "bad boy". I used to imagine a bomb scare at school where everyone else would dash for the doors screaming: I, of course, would impassively, even nonchalantly raise the doomsday parcel in one hand and walk it to the football field. Boys still have those dreams of a beautiful death—only now they plant the bombs instead of defusing them. The bad boys plant them: the wholesome churls are busy shoving their victims against lockers. As I said in the last chapter… rage, smoldering rage.

I distinctly recall that the heart-throbs of my female classmates were the Man from U.N.C.L.E. duo rather than McGoohan, Redford and Newman rather than Eastwood and Bronson. Well, I admit that I can understand the latter: the Eastwood man of marble, having already degenerated from McGoohan into the icy rage of nihilism, was a potential bomb-maker himself. Had I seen that as a boy, I might have diagnosed my own rising rage… but still, I couldn’t and cannot to this day comprehend the attraction of the sybaritic smart-aleck. I tried and tried at the time. I even watched some of the girls’ favorite shows all the way to the end. It didn’t help: I remained mystified. How could they idolize such soft, smirking, self-coddling twits? How could they be swept off their feet by men who were so… so feminine?

Most of the guys came around to the girls’ way of thinking, or pretended to. Sex is one of human existence’s great motive forces, along with thirst and hunger, and few can cross the desert of enduring abstinence any more than that Hollywood Sahara where the airplane goes down. So the boys grew their hair out, modeled their hips, openly whined about not wanting to die and needing somebody to love… and the seventies happened. Far more than the sixties, which were pretty tied-down until halfway through, the seventies were the decade of our cultural degradation.

Certainly no decade was ever more forgettable. After withdrawal from Vietnam, death became an illusion for young America, or at most a Third World plague. Love was everywhere, but without conflict: a woman’s world, to be sure. Or up to a point. It was a world without consequence or commitment, which didn’t leave most girls very happy. It was… free. God was fun, Jesus was a superstar, and you could buy the whole world a Coke to dissolve any persisting bad vibes.

This spectacle taught me something very, very important about being a man: that the real man cannot be defined through female desire. Women tend to pine sexually for a man who is more like them. (I’ll never forget one beautiful blonde telling me that all the handsomest guys are gay… which, of course, left me wondering just which side of the hand I was being slapped with.) The Gary Coopers and John Waynes—and later, the Eastwoods and Schwarzeneggers—were probably always more admired by males than females, but certainly were so by 1980. Feminism was in the ascendancy. Men who "had it all under control" were male chauvinists and enemies of freedom. Men who "let it all hang out" were cute and sexy. None of these bell-bottomed swingers would have accompanied Solzhenitsyn to the Gulag: none of them could even have understood how or why he got himself into such a mess. But they were just what the New Woman had ordered, so the party began without any hint of the rage stirring behind its strobe lights.

For men don’t really like not being men: it eats away at them, and sooner or later it rises to their surface. When Queen Dido manages to detain Aeneas for a year in Virgil’s Aeneid, her riches, her power, and her sweet self suffice to distract him somewhat from his sacred mission; but finally he can stand his life of impotent luxury no more, and he resumes his voyage amid Dido’s shrieks and curses. To Dido, his conduct would be insane if it were less brutal. The season for smooth sailing has not even arrived—is he trying to commit suicide? Homer’s Calypso contains herself rather better upon the departure of her beloved Odysseus, but she, too, is surely bewildered. Why would a man turn down immortality, a beautiful goddess’s bed, and a life of idle beach-combing just to fight the seas and his mortal enemies on a far shore?

The real man, the man of will power whose body breaks before his resolve bends, is after all something of an insult to a woman, I suppose. To a certain kind of woman, anyway. Life has a higher vocation than her charms, be they ever so numerous and seductive: that is what his devotion to duty announces. She must watch him leave her and all she may represent—perhaps home and security and family as well as mere torrid romancing—for the sake of some idea that no one can see or touch. Grace Kelly’s character is furious with Gary Cooper’s in High Noon for jeopardizing their life together, and probably sacrificing his own life literally, just to prove that he isn’t a coward. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do… how crude, barbaric, stupid, pointless, insensitive, egotistical, belligerent, and homicidal! Why not enjoy what few perishable fruits this vale of tears offers? Eat, drink, and party, for nothing lasts. Why hasten to your grave? Gather ye rosebuds while ye may….

Andrew Marvel’s verse, of course, is a favorite "line" among men in their efforts to seduce women: if you refuse sexual offers for too long, the wrinkles will come and the offers will disappear. I do not mean to suggest for an instant that women may not live for a higher purpose, too, from which certain men struggle diabolically to distract them. Devotion to principle is not an exclusively male characteristic.

Yet it is an utterly necessary characteristic for anyone who would be a true man—and perhaps the motive for this devotion also differs somewhat from men to women. The man serves principle in the abstract as duty, whereas the woman tends to embrace it as the best means, over the long haul, of achieving social harmony. Carolyn Graglia seems to me to model such practicality in arguing for the truly feminine woman’s need of reserve.⁸ I for one find her argument fully convincing. The woman who can say, "No rosebuds today, please: you can either be permanent caretaker of the whole garden, or you can stay at the gate," will eventually have far deeper, richer experiences with the man she marries than the woman who frolics with every lithe lad. I see no reason to deny that the same common sense applies to the male’s experiences (though men are less likely to appreciate it). If a man lives for something higher than sensual gratification, and if he happens to meet a woman who shares that higher calling, then he and his mate will very likely find that their inattention to sensuality as an important end in life actually enhances the physical magnetism of their union. There are some things you destroy through analysis: a butterfly under a magnifying glass can’t fly. In the same way, when you deliberately separate sex from love and brood about how to spice up your "sex life", you are well on your way to sabotaging both experiences—or both sides, I should say, of a single experience.

I have much more to write about the "higher calling". For now, let me return to the man who hearkens to it: the real man. In the last decades of the tormented twentieth century, this kind of man has no longer been able to count on the understanding and support of a woman with that same calling. Instead, he has had to deal with Didos and Calypsos—with Glorias and Naomis. I repeat that all those femmes fatales and bad girls are right, in a way, about the attempt to dominate them. What they cannot or will not see is that the dominant force comes not from the man, but from the idea he serves. Since feminism has joined the academic trend to reduce all value systems and hierarchies to selfish bids for power, it is ideologically blind to the notion of service. A man who is abstinent in his focus upon an ideal can be only one of two things: a slavemaster trying to cow women into submission or a fool who has sincerely enslaved himself to a non-existent god. (I am assuming a world, of course, where everyone who was once "in the closet" of dark aberration has come out: surely that world is ours.) The very wellspring of this chaste male’s manliness repels feminism’s votaries. He must serve their god of unreferenced freedom—of Self and the dizzy thrill of self-serving Power—to win a smile from them. And in the shackles of their freedom dies whatever strength of will he ever had.

Does this mean that the degeneration of the "real man" began with that of Wendy Shalit’s "modest woman"—of the lady, if I may so call her? Ms. Shalit seems to think so, and many are of her opinion. Certainly the percentage of real men in the population is higher when ladies will not tolerate the degenerate, effeminate kind. (I’ve avoided discussing sexual deviance here: but it’s worth noting that if the New Woman’s handsomest man is likely to be gay, she tends to caricature the strong-willed man slanderously as a pedophile, or whatever could be worse.)⁹ Yet I have been working toward an argument that the fluctuating devices and desires of women should not be allowed to determine what makes a real man... so I would contradict myself if I fully concurred that the vanishing of that man resulted from the lowered standards of women. What I am about to say, on the other hand, may appear to contradict my insistence that both men and women can hearken to a higher calling, so I must express myself, very, very carefully.

Women, as I have implied already, are more pragmatic than men. Forget about the scatterbrained fifties wife buying a new dress that bankrupts her petty-executive husband: that, indeed, is a sexual stereotype based entirely on passing custom. (Or to the extent that it wasn’t, the cause may well have been the sudden deluge of labor-saving household appliances—dishwashers, clothes-washers, electric mixers—which left men wondering just what women did with all their new time.) In a far more profound sense, women tend to reason with reference to specific circumstances. Authors like Wendy Shalit, Carolyn Graglia, and Christina Hoff Sommers are a case in point: they counsel a return to more conventional behavior because they see it as the best way to enhance the contemporary woman’s pleasure, happiness, and material prosperity.¹⁰ They make a good pitch (especially Graglia, as noted), and I hold their work in great esteem. Yet what I have been calling a real man would scoff at all these motives for doing the right thing—so much so that he might consider doing the wrong thing just to affirm his will’s independence of circumstances. (Why else do men tempt fate with dangerous hobbies and needless risks?) Women are more Aristotelian: pleasure, for them, must number among the natural, healthy "goods" of life along with a clean conscience. Men are more Stoical, and in a sense more Platonic: unless they have been as feminized as today’s man, they are more likely to be scandalized by those who straddle the boundary between self-interested and "pure" goodness.

Well, then… am I saying, after all, that women are less principled, less equipped somehow for abstract philosophizing? I suppose that depends on what you think of Aristotle! History has clearly judged his principles very favorably. I would state the distinction differently. I would say that men need a purity of purpose, a mathematically abstract perfection of ideas, which can become highly unrealistic and which, indeed, haunts them with a sense of emptiness, of loneliness. That image of the Saharan desert to be traversed is very powerful for a man. Women, on the other hand, recognize better that no distinctions are clear and pure in reality, that everything is tied to everything else. They make better literary critics for that reason (or used to, before ideology trumped taste). They understand how a woman might be passionately attracted to another man yet not want to betray her husband; but they also understand that a man, if passionately attracted to another woman, will often make the stupid blunder in his male simplicity of leaving his wife to pursue a mirage!

Why the difference? Hormones? Left brain/right brain? The genetic code? I leave such explanations for the scientists to quibble over—and I confess that I am not really very fond of deriving human behavior from biological determinism. If such a thing as morality is possible, then it must be equally applicable to men and to women; but if men and women are fully controlled at different points by different biological mechanisms, then they can’t fairly be held to similar standards. (Actually, this "men and women are the same" case was once made by feminists, and still is when they want a crack at trying out for the football team; but the evils of testosterone are decried far more often on campuses today. If the reader will pardon my parenthetic cynicism, "research" seems to come stumbling along after such trends in hope of funding rather than blazing new trails with hard facts.) A man with no ear for music can chime in passably when a hymn is sung at church; a woman with acrophobia will forget all about heights if her child is stuck on a ladder; a boy who hates asparagus will wolf it down if he can’t go play before his plate is clean. People of both genders do things all the time which they’re not naturally disposed to do. What conditioning could be so rigorous and uniform that it draws a clear line between the male response and the female response?

I propose child-bearing: this is one thing which most females may do in their youth if they wish (or so they think) and which no man can possibly do at any time. It isn’t a deterministic effect: women aren’t forced to think about child-bearing the way geese are forced to think about flying south in the autumn. With instinct, no true thought goes on at all—and I am not hypothesizing some cuddly, heart-warming maternal instinct which leaves men out in the cold. I simply say that any woman with a functional brain is seriously reflecting by early adolescence upon the possibility that she might one day carry another life inside her. Her reflections may be grim. For some reason, she may want very much for that day never to come. If so, she will have to take certain precautions.¹¹

But grim or expectant, fearful or joyful, such thoughts twine a woman’s sense of reality intricately into her sense of others, of community. I am convinced that this ever-looming presence of community alarms some female intellectuals, especially, who do not want to see their meditative existence compromised by extroverted obligations of a strong and lasting nature. No wonder they envy the man his freedom—no wonder they become feminists in search of a formal, contractual liberation from pregnancy and family! It is the dark shadow wherein they pass their days, this biological mechanism of theirs which could so easily steal away their autonomy forever. If only they could run wild and free on the male savanna, under the male sun….

"A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun," wrote Yeats in his nightmare of the Second Coming. What a male vision! The ancient prophets, in both the Greco-Roman and the Hebrew worlds, were almost all men (though a male god might possess a female to be his mouthpiece in classical lore, as Apollo does the Sibyl). The man’s gaze sweeps from horizon to horizon, from beginning to end, like a wind in the desert that bloweth where it listeth. The mood is sublime, but also, as Yeats said, blank and pitiless: empty, lonely, infinitely puny and infinitely vast. Inhuman, in a way. Whence this great grand emptiness in men, this free fall through the void? Isn’t it because they can never bear a child? Sire children, yes—dozens or hundreds. But every one of them, upon conception, would be physically tied to the woman until the umbilical cord was cut, and then again tied to her until her breast milk was no longer sought. A man can say, "That’s my child!" all he wants, but no bond is ever formed which could not be as easily formed with a stranger’s baby.

Furthermore, and more importantly, a man in any society with even the most primitive degree of order must win over a woman and satisfy certain customs before he may beget children. Only an outlaw or a mortal enemy of the tribe would do otherwise, and his punishment, if he were caught, could well be capital.¹² A woman, in contrast, may simply invite a man into her tent, send him on his way in an hour, and have the fruit of their union entirely to herself nine months later. The penalties for that behavior, too, could be severe, but would not be life-threatening for either mother or child in any culture I have ever heard of (excepting the burlesque legend in Ariosto’s fourth canto, Rome’s no-nonsense attitude about its Vestal Virgins, and the exotic savagery of certain Islamic fundamentalists). Today, of course, out-of-wedlock childbirth is routine; and today, more than ever, the father is considered wholly redundant to the arrangement.

So the man is cut loose, set free. Yes, there is a kind of exhilaration to it—a kind which has been excessively documented and absurdly exaggerated, in my opinion. Nobody has wasted any ink trying to describe the frightful isolation of being so adrift, of knowing that all of your relationships with others must be painfully negotiated and maintained if they are to last—that no other person is or ever will be, by nature, yours or of you. I speak not genetically (for, by that nature, every child is one-half a man’s), but emotionally, psychologically, viscerally. A genetic bond cannot be seen the way anyone can see a cord being cut.

Perhaps men even tend to form their odd-ball fraternities for this reason: that is, to share the burden of being cut loose. Women get together and drink tea, quilt, or discuss books and relatives. Men get together and drink beer, rough-house, or discuss how to overthrow the government. Their groups are often tinged with the anomalous and unruly, if not the sociopathic. They find a comfort, perhaps, in briefly sharing the anguish of their desert crossing, and perhaps even in showing it off. Soldiers on the front line sometimes diffuse the tension by betting on where the next shell will fall or how long the new lieutenant will last.

I do not contend that these dissimilar effects of child-bearing have a truly major impact on the two genders, or one which allows of no variation from case to case. Personally, I don’t like beer or quilting. I’m not saying, either, that most men are sooner or later plunged into grief because they don’t have a womb. Mr. Freud tried that one on women in reverse, and they rightly resent his presumption. I say simply that there is an obvious and valid reason why men should feel less tied to the community than women—a reason based in biology and as well supported by observing social groups of higher mammals as by reflecting upon the human maturing process. As a result of this detached perspective, men tend to see things more abstractly than women and to be more suspicious than women of mixed motives and combined purposes. They tend to think in Platonic ideals, and to act in Stoical defiance of compromise. The "real man", at least, is like that, and in being so he is closer to his male nature.

Which is good, as well as bad. The worldly disappointments of Platonic idealism are compensated by high hopes in a purer existence: the loneliness of crossing the desert is softened by getting to see all the stars blaze forth at night. For the real man, that’s a fair trade. He isn’t crippled by some neo-Freudian lack. He doesn’t seek some "victim" status to rival that of those who claim to be offended by his severity.

At the same time, though, he is grateful for a link back to the community. Indeed, he yearns agonizingly for it, though he will not sell out his principles to purchase it. There is a lack in him, after all—but not a crippling lack, not an absence where certain others have presence. He is not lacking a leg while others around him have two. He lacks the ability to sit still, rather, and he needs someone to slow him down and to represent him among the settled. He is already a whole man, or as whole as a prophet can be in a world separated from God; but his perfectly square corners could be perfectly fitted into a coupling where they would not scar all the furniture.

In short, the real man longs for a woman. Maybe she will bear his children, yes, and thereby make him part of his people’s history and of their future. Yet his childlessness and woman’s child-potential only symbolize the true source of his anguish: distance from the community. A woman in and of herself is quite enough to make him feel redeemed for the activities of civil society. If I may hearken back to Hollywood Westerns for a moment, the lone man who rides in from the desert is a terror to every citizen on the streets. Let him appear the next day with a respected lady on his arm, however, and the town is prepared to elect him sheriff.

Real men need women, yet they are not necessarily the kind of man most pleasing to a woman. There lies the rub. The real man often, perhaps even constantly feels the tension between his Stoical, unbending nature and the approval he seeks from women who find that nature somewhat repellent. Were he more "flexible", he would be less tortured by the need for a complementary partner subtle enough to negotiate his place in the community; but because women are more compromising, they find the prospect of living with his severe nature unattractive. They prefer the company of "softer" men ("more vulnerable", we would say now in our soft age)—who, however, don’t particularly need them, and certainly not for the long haul.

The ill-starred romance of Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei and Natasha in War and Peace classically illustrates this tension. Natasha regards her engagement to Andrei as too good to be true: he is so strong, so valiant, so high-minded—so manly! Eventually, the burden of being admired by such a perfectionist becomes suffocating. The cad with whom she plans an elopement (which is fortunately thwarted by her parents) is infinitely inferior to Andrei; but, for that very reason, he seems to love her "as she is".

The history of philosophy tells us that Platonists and Aristotelians, as well, caused each other to fidget. Yet how vastly richer is our tradition because we have both schools of thought, and not just one! Surely the ultimate truth is more closely approached by taking both together than by choosing between them: so it is with men and women. They are forever trying to draw the other across the center line. Or, to put it more accurately (since this equilibrium of straining alternatives is harmonious, but not quite true), women are forever trying to draw the real man back from the edge of his precipice—to get Marshall Kane out of town before high noon, to convince Sitting Bull that today is not a good day to die. The men, in their turn, are forever trying to keep this moderate influence, welcome and civilizing though it is, from corrupting their bedrock of belief. Something must be worth dying for, if not today, then tomorrow.

Which reveals, if you look closely, a deep disequilibrium in gender relations: the real man actually prefers a gentle, feminine lady to bring him back within the pale of culture, while that lady will always be uneasy with her man’s severity as a potential threat to their love, their home, their family, their offspring’s future. Feminists have identified this disequilibrium as male condescension. David gazes at cute little Dora, croons "She’s so cute!", pats her on the head, puts her on a pedestal, and then continues to brood over the destiny of the cosmos. It is a correct assessment, but its condemnation isn’t fair. Were David to wear his hair in curls as little Dora would have him and otherwise adjust all his tastes, he would become a frivolous fop, anemic and impotent in the world of ideas. He needs and craves her mitigation, but he also needs (and feels honor-bound) to resist it at some point.

I have observed that many men fight this battle over recreational dancing. The waltz allowed the man to stand erect and square-shouldered as he glided across the floor: it was the perfect expression of manly grace in motion. (Sergei Bondarchuk’s cinematic version of War and Peace generates the most memorable images of Prince Andrei from the grand ball where he meets Natasha.) Contemporary dancing, however, feminizes men. It requires male and female alike to melt into sensuous curves and to display themselves in extremely "vulnerable" positions. As one woman remarked to me, "Conservative guys are never good dancers." I don’t know that her political distinction adequately isolates the group I have in mind (it was a Reagan-era remark, in any case: words have changed their meanings since then); but a real man would indeed be horribly uncomfortable on today’s dance floor. Can you picture the Duke "getting down"?

Of course, the feminists would counter that they don’t want to turn David into Dora: they want Dora to become David. The "masculinized woman", however, is no more a success than the feminized man. Granted, no intelligent human being would want to spend life as a simpering, feckless Barbie Doll—but that’s not what I mean by femininity. (Dickens’s ball of fluff was not being offered above as a paradigm: I would much sooner volunteer Natasha for that role.) Femininity in this discussion is the complement to man’s abstract idealism and existential aloneness: it is integration, compromise, optimism, and social harmony. Women who find this immersion in community suffocating and strive to attain a male liberation from it have one of two effects upon men. In the straight-laced days when liberation was forbidden from touching sexual conduct, these women chilled their men at the heart. The Victorian woman typically expected her man to return with his shield or on it, in Spartan style, from his empire-building ventures. Her severity rivaled his, or surpassed it. Her dominant personality has been comically immortalized in Lady Bracknell (The Importance of Being Earnest). Purged of Wilde’s exquisite humor—which in nowise belonged to her true character—she would have been a dynamo of overpowering will. Kurtz’s mysterious fiancée in Heart of Darkness is an extraordinarily spiritual example of the type. Nevertheless, one must still wonder if a more sensible woman, less resonant with "high ideals", might have pulled Kurtz back from the bloody excesses of his crusade.¹³

Many of the late nineteenth century’s most respectable men ended up in the arms of chorus girls. A plague of syphilis struck down more than a few (such as Guy de Maupassant and Winston Churchill’s father) as this most prim and proper of ages wound to a close. No doubt, the chill of a domestic tranquillity feigned by "decent people" and of abstract utopias drafted by a reform-crazed middle class had much to do with the schizoid motif which haunts the period’s literature. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were born in these years, as was Dorian Grey.

Then you have today’s liberated women, whose masculinized nature is less defined by their inflexible ideals than by their highly elastic sexual morals. Obviously, they are unlikely to drive a man into the arms of "a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair" (in Kipling’s phrase) with expecting their knight to die at the head of the Light Brigade. Their effect upon men is intimidating and feminizing for another reason. I remarked toward the first chapter’s conclusion that they represent the death of love: I can explain that more clearly now. As well as requiring that a man become ruled by anti-social lusts to court them, they provide him no access to the community from which his maleness distances him. They, too, would be male: liberated of child-bearing and family, as free of commitment as a rolling stone is of moss. The devoted sensuality into which they invite their temporarily chosen man, while it feminizes him by corroding his will power, masculinizes their own nature in the same motion, since it threatens the stability of the community’s attachments. We may note, by the way, that the sensuality which has caused the death of love is neither a distinctly masculine nor feminine contribution. Just as Platonists and Aristotelians are both highly principled in different ways, so the worship of the senses, though it assumes different forms in men and women, transcends their differences to spell ruin in either idiom.

The specific poison which ultra-feminists have injected into love—the contribution which is indeed all theirs—is a deliberate, often eloquent contempt for the bourgeois family. ("Bourgeois"—burgische in German—is simply an adjective formed from bourg or burg, a settlement, a place where people live together by rules.) What man in his right mind would select a feminist ideologue as his best hope of having and raising children, or would even ask her to Thanksgiving dinner at his parents’? Her contempt for such investments and ties, the most permanent things this world has to offer, is withering. He’d be better off with a sweet Mexican girl or a Chinese émigrée—"Yes," the feminists taunt, "to wash your laundry and to call you master!" "No," the real man responds, "to raise a family and make tomorrow worth living. Too many days are good days to die. Will someone not help me make them good days to live?"

Is this, then, the sad lot of today’s real man, as I have called him: to seek out some unspoiled girl from a foreign culture, probably far below his educational level and perhaps unable to speak his language, just because she doesn’t resist her female genius for participating and renewing? Is there no possibility that we might reawaken the femininity of women in Western culture? Or is it precisely femininity—even in the new, "masculinized" woman—which is most repelled by manliness? Isn’t the Internet bride from the Ukraine or Cambodia really running away from political chaos and economic misery rather than shopping for the strong silent type? Don’t all women, whether professors or seamstresses, dread that impervious, introverted frown?

The strain between the sexes has only been exploited—not invented—by feminists. It turns out to be very basic, as I shall explain in the next chapter.

NOTES