The desexualization of the American (fe)male
<p>There&#8217;s been quite a blogospheric flap lately about Kim DuToit&#8217;s<br />
essay <a href='http://www.kimdutoit.com/dr/essays/essays.php?id=P2327'> The<br />
Pussification Of The Western Male</a>.  The single feature of the<br />
conversation that surprised me most is that nobody connected it to<br />
Steven den Beste&#8217;s equally searing essay <a href='http://denbeste.nu/essays/femaleperson.shtml'>Anglo Women are an<br />
endangered species</a>.</p>
<p>Steve&#8217;s point complements Kim&#8217;s and amplifies it in some useful<br />
ways.  Nobody wants to go back to the days when women were treated as<br />
chattels or second-class citizens.  Anyway, attempts to do so would be<br />
doomed for reasons not so much moral as economic; societies that<br />
suppress the productivity and intelligence of 50% of their members are<br />
inevitably going to lose out to societies that don&#8217;t.  But what Steve and<br />
Kim have pointed out is that Western society often has pursued the<br />
worthy goal of equality in a way that is hamfisted and destructive,<br />
because it tries to remake human nature rather than acknowledging and<br />
working with it.</p>
<p>These essays address two specific problems we&#8217;ve been saddled with;<br />
Kim&#8217;s with the attack on masculinity, and Steve&#8217;s with the attack on<br />
femininity.  Among white anglos (especially bicoastal<br />
&ldquo;progressive&rdquo; white anglos), it is no longer respectable<br />
for a male person to behave like a man and a female person to behave<br />
like a woman.</p>
<p>In fact, in today&#8217;s bien-pensant circles, one can be attacked as a<br />
sexist for suggesting that the phrase &ldquo;like a man&rdquo; or<br />
&ldquo;like a woman&rdquo; has any meaning at all.  Many of us have<br />
become obscurely terrified of sexual dimorphism, apparently out of<br />
fear that acknowledging it will bring back the bad old days.</p>
<p>This kind of attitude has done more damage than most people<br />
realize.  Read those essays.  There&#8217;s something gone badly wrong when<br />
normal boys are dosed with Ritalin for being normally loud and<br />
aggressive, and only strippers have the privilege of hugging a man<br />
they like while at work.</p>
<p>I think our culture will recover from this.  Beginning in the<br />
1950s, portions of the kibbutz movement in Israel made the most<br />
fervent try yet at erasing sex differences &mdash; they raised kids<br />
in creches and tried to systematically stamp out sex-differentiated<br />
behaviors.  They failed; the children of the first generation, despite<br />
intense socialization, gravitated back to traditional sex roles.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ll all be happier when we relax enough to acknowledge that<br />
although equality before the law is something every human deserves,<br />
some things naturally fall in men&#8217;s country and some in women&#8217;s<br />
country &mdash; and the fact that minorities of men and women behave<br />
in gender-atypical ways doesn&#8217;t change that reality.  There will never<br />
be more female soldiers or policemen than male ones, and never more<br />
male nurses and child-rearers than female ones.  Men are going to<br />
groove on power tools and women are going to coo at babies; that&#8217;s<br />
just the way it is. down to our DNA. Behavioral dimorphism is wired<br />
into us for good reasons that have everything to do with Darwin and<br />
nothing to do with political correctness.</p>
<p>The first stage of recovery is recognizing that there&#8217;s a problem<br />
&mdash; that men and women find each others&#8217; behavioral as well as<br />
physical sex differences attractive, and that neither men nor women<br />
are well served by efforts to cram us all into a unisex box.  My wife<br />
once observed, on behalf of a billion sisters, &#8220;What good is a man if<br />
you cut off his balls?&#8221; &mdash; and she was talking everyday behavior,<br />
not just anatomy or sexual function.  There aren&#8217;t a lot of men who<br />
will seek out the company of defeminized women if they have a choice<br />
in the matter, either.</p>
<p>That is where essays like Kim&#8217;s and Steve&#8217;s can help.  By waking us up<br />
and pissing us off, they remind us that our sex-linked behaviors and<br />
our preferences for sex-linked behaviors in others actually<br />
<em>matter</em>, that they&#8217;re every bit as much a part of our normal<br />
human makeup as having penises or vaginas.  People who want us to<br />
forget this for ideological reasons are objectively inhumane.</p>
