After America

BOY MEETS GIRL

For H.G. Wells’ late Victorian traveler, what was most striking about the Eloi was how they had evolved beyond sex:

I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb…. In all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike….

Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity—for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears.

Victor Davis Hanson had a similar experience, some 800,000 years ahead of Wells’ time-traveler. He noticed that “the generic American male accent” has all but died out, to be replaced by something affectedly “metrosexual” with “a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago… a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female.”⁹⁸ As for the old-school males, wrote Professor Hanson, “I watched the movie Twelve O’Clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded like they were from another planet.” (To be fair, the feminization of men is complemented by the masculinization of women. One recent Miss America winner, lantern-jawed, hipless, concrete implants, looks in the bikini shots like someone who should be suing the British NHS for a botched sex change.)

In 2006, Harvey Mansfield wrote a book called Manliness and was much mocked for it by the likes of Naomi Wolf, the feminist who picked out earth-toned polo shirts for Al Gore in his presidential campaign to make him seem more of an Alpha male—because nothing says “Alpha male” like hiring a feminist to tell you what clothes to wear.⁹⁹ “I define manliness,” Professor Mansfield told one interviewer, “as confidence in the face of risk. And this quality has its basis in an animal characteristic that Plato called ‘thumos.’ Thumos means bristling at something that is strange or inimical to you. Think of a dog bristling and barking; that’s a very thumotic response to a situation.”¹⁰⁰

Thumotic certainly. But not approved of terribly much nowadays: Bristling at the strange? Where’ve you been?

“I don’t think manliness has gone away or become less manly,” Professor Mansfield continued, “but it certainly has much less of a reputation. It’s what I call ‘unemployed,’ meaning there’s nothing responsible or respectable for it to do.”

Quite so. Promoting her new film, about a fortysomething “choice mother” who decides to conceive a child by sperm donor, America’s sweet-heart d’un certain age, Jennifer Aniston, declared that women “don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child…. Times have changed, and what is amazing is that we do have so many options these days.”¹⁰¹ Some women want a “new man” who’ll be there at the birth. Others don’t even want him there at conception. The progeny of such “choice mothers” have rather less choice in the matter, and research on the first generation (from the report “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor”) suggest a higher incidence of drug abuse, police run-ins, and the other now familiar side-effects of social rewiring.

But hey, don’t let that get in the way of your “many options.”¹⁰²

As for all those amazing options, don’t try this one at home: marry young, have kids and a successful career. You’ll be inviting a mountain of opprobrium.

In the weeks before the 2008 election, I received an extraordinary number of emails from so-called “liberals” revolted by Sarah Palin’s fecundity. One gentleman—well, okay, maybe not a “gentleman” but certainly an impeccably sensitive progressive new male—wrote to me from Shelton, Washington:

“This abortion prohibitionist hag won’t cut it among women with brains.

And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard.

I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed.”

Golly, if Mister Sensitive is typical of the liberal male, you can understand why Jennifer Aniston would rather load up on turkey basters. By contrast, a few years back, it was reported that Mrs. Palin’s contemporary, Alexis Stewart, daughter of Martha, was paying $28,000 a month in an effort to get pregnant.¹⁰³ She told People magazine that she’d “wanted a baby since she was 37,” but that her ex-husband was “completely ambivalent about kids.”¹⁰⁴ So these days she injects herself once a month with a drug that causes her to ovulate in thirty-six hours. “I go to the doctor’s office and they put me under anesthesia and use an 18-inch needle to remove about ten eggs,” she explained. “Then, I go home to my apartment in TriBeCa, change, and get ready for my Sirius Radio show, ‘Whatever.’” The doctor then fertilizes the eggs by a method known as intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection. “I’m using an anonymous donor,” Alexis confided to People, “but not from a genius bank. Those are creepy.” Unlike giving celebrity interviews about your 28-grand-per-month intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection.

Each to her own. You can be a 45-year-old mother of five expecting her first grandchild and serving as Governor of Alaska. Or you can be a 45-year-old single “career woman” hosting a satellite radio show called “Whatever” and spending a third of a million dollars a year on intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection in hopes of becoming pregnant. What was it the feminists used to say? “You can have it all”? Politico reported that, to the enforcers at the National Organization for Women, Sarah Palin is “more a conservative man than she is a woman.”¹⁰⁵ It seems “having it all” doesn’t count if you do so within more or less traditional family structures. These days, NOW seems to have as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad. Miss Stewart is untypical only in her budget in an age when, according to one survey, massive numbers of British women, their maternal instincts stymied by indifferent male “partners,” are unfaithful in order to get pregnant.¹⁰⁶ One day Jennifer Aniston will make a glum romantic comedy about that exciting “option.”

Alexis Stewart is probably wise to skip the genius bank. Her mom is genius enough—who else would have figured out there were millions of dollars in things like “coxcomb topiary”? Nevertheless, there is something almost too eerily symbolic about the fact that America’s “domestic diva” is a divorcee with an only child unable to conceive. The happy homemaker has no one to make a home for. You look at the pictures accompanying Martha Stewart’s Thanksgiving and think: Why bother just for her and Alexis? Why don’t they just book a table at the Four Seasons?

A fortysomething single woman’s $27,000-per-month fertility treatments are the flip side of the Muslim baby boom in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Just as Europeans preserve old churches and farms as heritage sites, so our homemaking industry has amputated the family from family life, leaving its rituals and traditions as freestanding lifestyle accessories. Today many of the western world’s women have in effect doubled the generational span, opting not for three children in their twenties but one designer yuppie baby in their late thirties.

Demographers talk about “late family formation” as if it has no real consequences for the child. But I wonder. The abortion lobby supposedly believes in a world where every child is “wanted.” If you get pregnant at seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, you most likely didn’t really “want” a child: it just kinda happened, as it has throughout most of human history. But, if you conceive at forty-six after half-a-million bucks’ worth of fertility treatment, you really want that kid. Is it possible to be over-wanted? I notice in my part of the country that there’s a striking difference between those moms who have their first kids at traditional childbearing ages and those who leave it till Miss Stewart’s. The latter are far more protective of their nippers, as well they might be: even if you haven’t paid the clinic a bundle for the stork’s little bundle, you’re aware of how precious and fragile the gift of life can be.

Hence, the so-called “helicopter parents”—always hovering. When you contemplate society’s changing