Another Meditation on the Superfluity of Men

Kay S. Hymowitz has put together an insightful (and often funny) take on a recurrent favorite topic here at Underbelly Central—the increasing superfluity of (young) men (link). She reads Nick Hornby, watches The Man Show and (mostly) flips through the pages of Maxim—all in the interests of science, of course—and puts together a pretty-near bulletproof brief that men are pretty much what you always suspected: a bunch of mindless oafs.

It’s a dead-on putdown (and BTW, is there really an article entitled ““How to Make Your Girlfriend Think Her Cat’s Death Was an Accident”?). But despite a few faltering attempts, Hymowitz doesn’t seem to have much to offer about how they got this way or what to do about it. I can clarify: men are this way because (a) this is their natural state of being and (b) in the current environment, there is simply no incentive to act otherwise. More directly, men are surplus: the world doesn’t need them any more and has left them parked, as it were, in the play yard, with the earnest hope they won’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves.

In earlier times (somewhat oversimply, before birth control), women had to make deals with men; to pretend to tolerate, even to admire, some of their goofier habits. For their part young men found themselves faced with a juggernaut of constraints—the threat of prison, starvation and celibacy—designed to turn Big Bad Bill into Sweet William. Pretending to Be Nice was part of the package. I have some dim, not entirely pleasant, memories of those days: the responsibilities of adulthood falling on me around the age of 25, like a landslide in an earthquake. But I didn’t know any alternative.

Both sides of that bargain have broken down. These days, there is simply nothing women need out of men that can’t be accomplished with a high school chemistry set. Always ahead of her time, Malvina Reynolds saw it coming 50 years ago (link):

They can come to see us
When we need to move the piano,
Otherwise they can stay at home
And read about the White Sox.

Malvina understood: even with threats or inducements, men are a damn nuisance. So without them, they are impossible. For their part young men have figured out that the threats or inducements, however strong, are simply not enough to overcome their natural tendency to oafishness.

I grant this is a somewhat Eurocentric view of things: in some other parts of the world, the phallocentric posse appears to continue to (oh tee ee) hold things well in hand. But unless (not an entire impossibility)—unless we slide back into a world of total male domination, I can’t see any reason why women won’t, after another generation or two, just breed ‘em out.