The gender evolution

A recent issue of Atlantic Monthly featured an article entitled “The End of Men” by feminist Hanna Rosin, in which she opines that the gender revolution is near completion, and women are the clear winners. Women’s particular brand of intelligence is perfectly suited for the current economic order, and their “social skills” are primed for world domination. Ellen Galinsky, on the Huffington Post, bemoaned Rosin’s article for its potential to awaken the sleeping male beast and arouse him into action. Just let sleeping dogs lie, and women will quietly take over.

Rosin hit the nail off kilter, and bent it: “Once you open your eyes to this possibility (that the economy is now oriented toward female strengths) the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer. “ Rosin doesn’t explain precisely the productive nature of the jobs that have replaced “macho” jobs, but that’s just detail best not dwelt on.

I don’t see this as so much a “revolution” as gender evolution. The usefulness of the male species is clearly at an end. Rosin tells us so. Calvin Coolidge once said "After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world." But that’s ancient news. There is no need to actually produce anything. That is not progress. That is so yesterday. The fact the economy is tanking and most of the job losses are in manufacturing jobs that require brutish strength means than men are no longer needed. We don’t need to actually make “things” anymore; they do that in other places, like China. We don’t need silly construction jobs, where women stand around with those “Slow” signs: We don’t need any more houses, or office buildings, or cars, or airplanes. The superior social skills of the female, centered on self and sob-sister commiseration, will create an alternate reality in which the grass hut and the horse will comprise the new paradigm of evolutionary progress, once men have become extinct. Rosin opines “Mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn’t have, brighter than their sons, even, so why wouldn’t you choose a girl?”

“Why would you want a boy?”

Yes, why? 60 percent of students receiving bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are women, and this has absolutely nothing to do with the war on boys’ natural aggressiveness, having been deemed offensive and destructive to female advancement. Once that impediment was removed, along with the widespread introduction of the calculator and word processor, the way was made clear for evolution to take its logical course: thinking was always less important than talking, according to Rosin’s worldview. A study I read noted that in the period that the number of females in colleges and universities increased dramatically, in the Science and Engineering fields there was a dramatic shift away from engineering, physical sciences and mathematics toward behavioral and biological sciences.

This is evolution at its purist—meaning that the majority rules. The majority decides what is useful, and what is not. Just ask any racial minority.

Rosin opines that "the postindustrial economy is indifferent to men's size and strength” and Galinsky agrees with her. Furthermore, "the attributes that are most valuable today--social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus--are at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true… a white-collar economy values intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts.” There is clear evidence of that. I have too many fingers to count the number of women who can compete on an equal footing with Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, Edison and Einstein. These guys couldn’t sit still for one minute and focus on anything. They were not communicators. They had no intellectual “horsepower” that could approach any woman, let alone giants like Rosin and Galinsky. To suggest that such men could compete on the same level with a woman cannot be countenanced. It is against all evolutionary principle. This is the postindustrial world, after all. I don’t even know what that is; it must be something just made-up to fit this particular alternate reality. Everything you know is wrong, according to the Firesign Theatre. But who were they? They were all bozos on that bus.

Today, bullshit is good. Bullshit works. Bullshit gets you by in college. Bullshit gets you a job, especially if you are white. And a woman. That is evolution. That is how the world according to Rosin works. Who am I to disagree with her? I work at an airport. The Operations people are allowed to wear civilian clothes because they need to be pampered, because they are the “smart” people. Controlled chaos might look like a game on a computer screen, and moving this to there an easy keystroke away, but for the people outside who have to turn these shiftless shiftings into concrete action, it provides a different perspective on the order of the universe. Back in Ops, the men know they are either incompetent and crazy; the women don’t. They are just arrogant and conceited. It’s a state of mind. That’s what they call evolutionary progress.

Making judgments on other people has always been a strong point of women, even when they are wrong, which is most of the time. Rosin and Galinsky claim that women are more apt to take into account other people’s “feelings.” That is quite true; if you agree with a woman that she is the center of the Universe, and the world is conspiring against her in some way, she’ll be your best friend, and she will say nice things about you. Women always like people who understand their feelings.

Women are so superior to the dullard male, that they have managed to maintain status as both evolutionary end-all and victim. Attorney Gloria Allred, for example, knows the courts and the media can be manipulated into maintaining this status. This dichotomy addresses no mendacity. She helps skanks and floozies become millionaires by just walking into her office, because she loathes men who have actually earned their money. She has a talent for this; this is evolutionary progress. Taking their money is her way of getting even for unknowingly marrying a man in her younger days who had Bipolar Disorder, who she promptly abandoned before he committed suicide. This is what Rosin and Galinsky mean by women being in touch with other people’s “feelings.” But I think I’ve already addressed that issue.

Evolution, according to Darwin, is aided in its progress by something called “natural selection.” I used to work at a company where “natural selection” was practiced. The Chief Operating Officer (a somewhat glorified position given the fact that it was a very small company) was a woman with a certain amount of sensitivity, and when someone like that is in power, politics tends to take precedence over productivity. There was some discontent was over the fact that the health of males in the warehouse was something the COO did not take into consideration in her hiring approvals (I told you it was a small company); women had priority. If all there was to warehouse work was picking and packing, this would not be an issue; but we routinely had 40-60 foot shipping containers with up to a thousand 40-60 lbs boxes that had to be loaded or off-loaded, and unless we had temps who did that work during the summer, it was the five or six full-time male employees who were called off their regular responsibilities to perform this function, sometimes all day. None of us were what you would call “young men,” either. There were physically-fit women who could have given us a hand, but they were all office employees, and such work demeans the intellectually superior.

During my five years at this company, the result of was as follows: One man had a stroke, before he died of cancer; another man had a mild stroke, and went blind in one eye; another man developed Alzheimer’s Disease right before our eyes in a very short time; I recall the last time I saw him, the company gave him a rather belated farewell luncheon so that we could also see him in his last throes. The president of the company toasted him, and enjoined him to give a speech; unfortunately, he was so far gone, that speech escaped him altogether. Watching him make a painful effort to speak and failing, I decided to end this pathetic, embarrassing spectacle myself by initiating an applause. Soon after this another man had a heart attack, and never worked again.

If there is an “end of men,” this—and a concerted effort at the unnatural selection suggested by the “Why have boys” comment—is what it will look like. And evolution will wind down to its natural course—back to the grass hut and animal transport.