14
The Expendability of Males
"There are too many men, too many people, making too many
problems, and not enough love to go around."
                                     a lyric from the rock group Genesis
"Men were designed for short, nasty, brutal lives.  Women are
designed for long, miserable ones."
                                     Dr. Estelle Ramey, Georgetown
                                         University Medical School
In many primitive societies, there are two very separate
worlds--the world of women and children, and the world of adult men.
A male infant lives his life in cozy comfort, clinging to his mother,
suckling until the age of three or four, playing with other little boys
and girls, being hugged and fussed over by his older sisters.  Then, at
roughly thirteen, he goes through a brutal expulsion.  He prepares for
rituals that will separate him from the warm world he has known.
These rites will emphasize his rebirth as a new kind of creature--a male
adult.
Now the young initiate must carry a weapon and demonstrate
his fierceness, winning the respect--and tolerating the ridicule--of boys
far older and more experienced at adult ways than he.  He must go into
the forests hunting for food...and enemies.  The sections of the village
where women laugh and groom the hair of their little boys, the garden
plots on whose walkways children play, are places he must never enter
again.  He has been expelled into the cold, harsh world of men.
In the 50's, America too established separate worlds of women
and men.  The American dream became the flight to suburbia.  Couples
escaped the central cities and bought homes on plots where sheep had
been grazing a few years before.  There, they brought up their families.
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