How We Got Here by David Frum

Author:David Frum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

GENDER BENDERS

ALL TWENTIETH-CENTURY REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS HAVE DREAMT OF CREATING a “new man.” Only in the United States has one done it.

That’s him, changing a baby on the changing tables now found in both men’s and women’s public restrooms. That’s him too, sitting on the bus staring past the pregnant woman standing in front of him. For a quarter of a century he’s been poked and prodded, screamed at and scolded. He must do more of the housework. He must express his feelings more articulately. He must hug more. He should take pride in knowing how to cook. He should let his wife drive, quit feeling obliged to hurl a punch every time he’s insulted, stop dominating and bullying, and get in touch with his feminine side. He will be better for it. Really.

A new baby is born, lamented a 1974 book by a self-described male liberationist. “A cursory examination of the pubic area reveals the presence of a penis, and the exhausted mother and nail-biting father are informed that they have a son. From that moment, the cultural indoctrination begins. The blue blanket, the miniature boxing gloves, the blue Superman tights with accompanying cape, subtly inform this newly hatched amorphous bit of protoplasm of the great and impossible expectations which constitute the essence of his recently acquired humanity. He is to become the embodiment of heroism and courage, aggressivity and aptitude, an amalgamation of the fantasies of Hemingway and Mailer. The roughhouse play with adults, the injunction that ‘little boys don’t cry,’ the ‘did you win?’ when he returns home after his first pugilistic encounter with the boy next door, nose bloodied and tears only barely contained: the message is received, the boy is trained to be a ‘man.’ Vulnerability is a vice, emotionality is odious, and stoicism connotes strength.”48 That’s how it had been in the bad old days. But it would be that way no longer.

“As men,” the publisher Michael Korda observed in an early dispatch from the sex wars, “we don’t see the way our behavior is oypressive .... I think of my wife, C., as an equal—no question about it in my mind as we dine with a mutual woman friend in London. I try not to make decisions for C., try to ask what she wants to do, try not to impose, but the old urge to dominate, the simple crass desire to have my own way, still marks the male chauvinist’s power erection, so linked to the sexual one, that it is sometimes hard to separate sex from power.” And then he told the following story.

“Across from us, at a banquette, a group of noisy gentlemen on the verge of drunkenness are staring at us—at C., to be exact, who is beautiful and tanned and has her back turned to them. I, on the other hand, am facing them. Ponderously and inaccurately, they toss a few pieces of bread in C.’s direction to attract her attention. She ignores them. A few minutes later the

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