Colonel Joe's Post World War III Love Bunker - Sodomania!

From: nsingman Date: August 21st, 2003 05:22 am (UTC) (Link)

You might find this amusing, Joe. It was on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page yesterday, or the day before. And, of course, it's (c) 2003, Dow Jones, Inc. :-)

You've Got Male!

By LIONEL TIGER

There has been a great big whoosh of public palaver about the Bravo network show involving five homosexual men -- the Fab 5 -- who have busied themselves renovating, for a fee and in public view, the clothes, food, hair, skin and comportment of hapless heterosexual males.

Among the latter was that secular American Cardinal Jay Leno, who on national TV recently had his ear-hairs pruned and his skin marinated in green carbon-derivative. Notwithstanding the perplexing anomaly of a huge silver Crawford Texas belt buckle, Mr. Leno smilingly turned from his usual denim caterpillar into a Milanese butterfly, turtlenecked in dark striped suit. And more, his stage set was Fabbed into an unusually well-lit VIP banquette at a velvet-rope nightspot you're too drab to get into. Mr. Leno accomplished all this adroitly, with frequent winks to Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch to reassure them that he'd rapidly Clark-Kent back into his usual and legendary denim-on-denim once the show was over.

All very amusing, and nothing to do with homosexuals, but rather everything to do with another assault on heteromales and what gets defined as maleness in this Women's Studies-afflicted culture. In one episode of the show, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," a NY/NJ Port Authority cop -- cheaply called a "polyester policeman" -- is prepped by the Fab 5 on how to propose to his lady under optimum conditions, even though he lives in a "feng shui nightmare." For readers depressed by the rye futures market, a quick pick-you-up is available if you call a Fab-number where you'll be told that the best solution to all those autobiographical T-shirts you thoughtfully acquired is to "roll them in a ball and throw them out the window" -- along with all your risible male career as a guy doing his best in life.

The charade feeds on an enthusiastic glee in confronting what I call the "male original sin," which is that all men and boys are in urgent need of remedy from their natures and must rapidly liberate "their feminine side" (the front? the back?). It is all remarkably condescending and peculiarly rancorous, but also nationally fashionable. It has little to do with homosexual rights and everything to do with antipathy to maleness and confusion about what it is. It stems from the post-modernist ideology that sex is a social construct somehow promoted by a "patriarchal culture," whatever in fact that is supposed to mean. As Henry Higgins didn't sing in My Fair Gentleman, "If only a man were more like a woman . . . "

But hope is at the manicurists'. If men read the right magazines, listen raptly to sensitivity trainers, eschew the competitive games that boys enjoy and aren't allowed pick-up trucks with big tires, they'll be fortunate enough to become more like females. (Meanwhile, even among other primates, males choose toys rather like the ones human boys do -- and hit and bite each other -- while females ape their human sisters.) But the toxic net-effect of all the earnest sexual upgrading and male undermining is that boys do less well all through the feminized school system. They are now only 44% of the college population. By 2010, men are expected to receive only one-third of bachelors' degrees.

Imagine if this Fab-5 stylish caper in ameliorated petty taste were focused on teaching people with dark skin how to act more like those with lighter skin. Or Jews to be more like Wasps. Or Hispanics more like Swedes. There would be outrage, and justifiably so. But male-baiting? Ha-ha, and right on.

Mr. Tiger, an anthropology professor at Rutgers, is the author of "The Decline of Males" (St. Martin, 1999) and "The Apes of New York," a forthcoming e-book from Cybereditions.com.

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