15
One r
esult: father and mother spent their days in environments as
different from each other as Mars is from Moline, Illinois. Out in the
suburbs was the world of women and children--where doting mamas
dragged their kids from dance lessons to cub scout meets, stopping off
at the shopping center on the way home. In the city was another
planet, a macrocosm invisible to the kids. It was the unseen world into
which the father disappeared every day when he set off for the train, a
place whose rhythms were faster, whose ethics more brutal, whose
rewards more difficult to achieve, and whose punishments could turn
a man into an insomniac.
Among American Indians of the plains, some boys chose not to
make the violent transition to manhood, and remained in the world of
women and children. They were called berdache--women-men. They
wore woman's clothing, did woman's work, married men, stuffed
their clothes to look pregnant, and even cut themselves to imitate
menstruation.18 Ever since the sixties, young people have dressed in
more and more androgynous styles. Could androgyny, like that of the
Indian women-men, be the way in which the children of the 50's and
60's, raised in the cozy world of suburbia, have balked against entering
the harsh reality into which they saw their fathers disappear five days
every week?
No matter what the truth of this conjecture, androgyny may also
be a rebellion against a fact of life that is not speculative in the least: the
expendability of the male. In nearly every known society, men alone
are cannon fodder, laying down their lives to defend the tribe or
aggrandize a leader. Males in animal groups and primitive societies
may seem rather glorious creatures, accorded the privileges of gods.
But in reality, they are treated by nature like the biological equivalent
of paper plates, creatures whose prime feature is their disposability.
When times get tough for the Karamojong in Uganda, they save
their scraps of food for their girls and allow the boys to die. In 1979,
when Uganda was starving in the grip of civil war, the Karamojong
tossed the stiffened bodies of their male children out of the village each
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