After America

moderate swimmer. It will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes.

Instead, it is Wells’ Victorian gentleman who leaps in the river, rescues the poor girl, and brings her back to land. He did what any man would have done, didn’t he?

Are you sure about that? As I say, the author’s dystopian vision is off only insofar as the world he predicted showed up 800,000 years ahead of schedule. In Wells’ Britain in the early twenty-first century, men routinely stand around watching girls drown.

In May 2010, a 37-year-old woman was drowning in the River Clyde while police officers called to the scene stood on the bank and watched.¹²⁵

“As a matter of procedure it’s not the responsibility of the police to go in the water,” explained a spokesperson, sniffily, “it’s the Fire and Rescue Service.” And, as they weren’t there yet, tough. The woman would have died had not three Glasgow University students jumped in to save her. Needless to say, the students were in complete breach of “matters of procedure.”

In February 2010, a 5-year-old girl was trapped in a car submerged in the icy River Avon for two hours while West Mercia Police stood around on the bank watching.¹²⁶ They were “prevented” from diving in to rescue her by “safety regulations.” In 2007, two police officers watched as a 10-year-old boy, Jordon Lyon, drowned in a swimming pool in Wigan.¹²⁷ The same year, fireman Tam Brown dived into the River Tay to rescue a drowning girl and got her back to shore, only to find he was now subject to a disciplinary investigation by Tayside Fire Service.¹²⁸

In 2008, Alison Hume fell sixty feet down an abandoned mine shaft. An 18-strong rescue crew arrived, but the senior officer said that a recent memo had banned the use of rope equipment for rescuing members of the public. It could only be used to rescue fellow firefighters. So Alison Hume died, in compliance with the memo.¹²⁹

Could this sort of thing happen in America? Oh, it already does. In 2010, KING-TV in Seattle broadcast footage of three “security guards” at a downtown bus station standing around watching while a 15-year-old girl was brutally beaten for her purse, phone, and iPod.¹³⁰ But it’s okay, the “guards” were “just following orders not to interfere.” The victim later told police that she had deliberately stood next to the “guards” while waiting for her bus thinking it would be the safest place. As the video shows, she was punched and slammed against the wall while standing adjacent to so-called “security”—and still they did nothing. And King’s County Sheriff’s Department congratulated the “men” on their forbearance: “The guards were right to follow their training.”

You have to be “trained” to stand around doing nothing?

Recall Harvey Mansfield’s definition of manliness—“confidence in the face of risk”—and then look at the helmets grown men wear to take a Sunday bicycle ride ’round a suburban park. As for Plato’s concept of “thumos”—an animal instinct to bristle at the sense of danger—the instinct seems all but lost.

To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lepine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.¹³¹

To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc Lepine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in all men, and which all must acknowledge.

For a smaller number of us, the story has quite the opposite meaning: Marc Lepine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater. And no, I’m not suggesting he’s typical of Muslim men or North African men: my point is that he’s not typical of anything, least of all what we might call (if you’ll forgive the expression) Canadian manhood. The defining image of contemporary maleness is not Monsieur Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obeyed, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate—an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

In 2009, the director Denis Villeneuve made a film of the story, Polytechnique. “I wanted to absolve the men,” he said. “People were really tough on them. But they were 20 years old…. It was as if an alien had landed.”¹³²

But it’s always as if an alien had landed. When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It’s supposed to be “women and children first,” but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In real life, First Officer William Murdoch threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship—the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer’s home town in Scotland and offered ?5,000 toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.)¹³³ Mr. Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. “An alien landed” on the deck of a luxury liner—and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them.

The social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure.

Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our “gender-neutral society,” there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale.¹³⁴ But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first?

No female under fifteen or over sixty-five made it. Only 5 percent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three percent of men aged 20 to 24 made it.

No two ship disasters are the same, but the testimony from the MV Estonia provides a snapshot of our new world: according to the Finnish Accident Investigation Board’s official report, several survivors reported that “everyone was only looking out for himself.” According to a Swedish passenger, Kent Harstedt, “A woman had broken her legs and begged others to give her a life jacket, but it was the law of the jungle.”¹³⁵

“Some old people had already given up hope and were just sitting there crying,” said Andrus Maidre, a 19- year-old Estonian. “I stepped over children who were wailing and holding onto the railing.”

You “stepped over” children en route to making your own escape? There wasn’t a lot of that on the Titanic. “There is no law that says women and children first,” Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine. “That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean the early twentieth century.

As I said, no two maritime disasters are the same. But it’s not unfair to conclude that had the men of the Titanic been on the Estonia, the age and sex distribution of the survivors would have been very different. Nor was there a social norm at the Ecole Polytechnique. So the men walked away, and the women died.

Whenever I’ve written about these issues, I get a lot of emails from guys scoffing, “Oh, right, Steyn. Like you’d be taking a bullet. You’d be pissing your little girlie panties,” etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it: “When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”¹³⁶

I prefer the word passivity—a terrible, corrosive passivity. Even if I’m wetting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.

These are Finnish men, Estonian men, Canadian men. Are you so confident after the blitzkrieg on manhood waged by the educational establishment that the same pathologies aren’t taking hold in the U.S.? Consider the ease with which an extraordinary designation has been conferred upon the men who won America’s last great military victory—long ago now, before Afghanistan, before Mogadishu, before the helicopters in the Iranian desert, before