Men are useless in modern, Western society.
I’ve been thinking about this for many years. Gentlemen, we’ve worked ourselves out of a job over the last hundred years or so.
We’ve designed machines that do almost all of the heavy lifting and dangerous work. Our food is grown, caught, harvested, slaughtered, processed, and shipped around, by machines. We’ve built social structures based on law, and discussion, and technology, that eliminate danger and risk. Even our wars are fought by machines and computers. We’ve built consumer, convenience economies based on complex and convenient exchanges of blips and mental constructs, on partnerships and alliances and cunning and intelligence and social interchange which are female strengths, not on brutality and fighting and might and assumption of risk and other traditional male strengths. Of course this is a tremendous boon– the essence of civilization. And I’ve never had much talent for– or patience for– macho bullshit anyway. But my point is: women can do civilization better than we can.
Men have become useless; masculinity has become more of an unseemly vestige from a vanished era.
I find that this might explain a lot of things.
I think Michael Moore nailed it: the right-wingers are so virulent and vicious and loud, because it’s their last gasp. They’ve become irrelevant, and they are very, very pissed off about it. The Neanderthals in the fundamentalist Christian churches, in the fundamentalist Islamic madrassas, in the Military-Industrial complex, in the “traditional” patriarchal cultures, are history. They’re howling with indignation at the fact that there is no place for them anymore in this world. George W. Bush is a blustering, idiotic, cartoon-cowboy asshole, because that’s all that remains of masculinity; he (and his few remaining followers like Bill O’Lielly, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc.) are holding on to it for dear life. And they look so ridiculous doing it.
The book and movie “Fight Club” says it most plainly: we are a generation of men raised in a world dominated by women. Some are OK with that, some are lost, and some strike out against it in silly and pathetic ways. But it won’t help– this is a woman’s world.
Intensely interconnected, complex social environments, like beehives and ant colonies, are dominated by females. Nature keeps only a few males around for mating. That’s it, and the boys don’t do much else. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s certainly not any kind of position of power or influence. Everything else is run by the girls, because they do a better job of it.
That’s how the ants and bees do it, anyway. If this project of civilization continues for another thousand years or so, I predict that you’ll see a similar gender distribution– and division of labor– among homo sapiens as well.
