22
on dri
nking beer and smoking cigars while watching Sunday football,
the time would be now.
Save up enough semen in communal refrigerators, and it would
seem the species could move along quite well without humans of the
masculine persuasion. In fact, an increasing number of women live
with other women, and turn to artificial insemination when they want
to have a child.
Fortunately, most women seem to need men emotionally. They
flock to singles bars, put personal ads in newspapers, and sit in corners
of the office complaining about the lack of available mates. Bless them.
What's more, economically males have not yet become entirely
obsolete. In 1987, the household blessed with a working husband and a
working wife earned a median income of $38,346--a comfortable figure
at the time. But if you threw out the husband, the income plunged to
an impoverished $13,647.33 Do away with the earnings of the male,
and the lone female-- left to raise children and bring the bread home on
her own-- suddenly falls from the upper ranges of the middle-class to
below its lowest depths. American men are not completely expendable
after all. At least not yet.
None of this mitigates the fact that in the eyes of nature,
individual men are a dime a dozen. For males, as we will soon see, are
the extinguishable junction points in the neural net, the disposable
elements that make the social learning machine work.
Could it be that men in this country sense their expendability?
Could that be the reason modern males are--perhaps for the first time
in American history--working hard to imitate female virtues? Could
this account for the premium we have suddenly placed on masculine
sensitivity and vulnerability, on the male capacity to nurture children
and whip up a quick meal? Could it be that men are trying to hide
from the fate they sense that nature has in store for them? The fate of
leading a short, nasty, brutal and bloodily-ended life?34
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