Feminization of Human Males

Catching up on blogging saved links. Check this one out: a cross-cultural parallel to what's been going on lickety-split since Glam Rock shoved itself down your MTV channel.

Japan's 'herbivore men' -- less interested in sex, money

Fukasawa said Japanese men from the baby boomer generation were typically aggressive and proactive when it came to romance and sex. But as a result of growing up during Japan's troubled economy in the 1990s, their children's generation was not as assertive and goal-oriented. Their outlook came, in part, from seeing their fathers' model of masculinity falter even as Japanese women gained more lifestyle options.

If this post were to be as heavy as I'd like it to be and as the subject matter deserves, it'd be a book and I'd never get it done. So here I come with a few observations.

Somewhere along the evolutionary path of our branch of hominids, we discovered the value of warfare for the winners: access to the hunting and gathering territory and the fertile females of the losers. Victorious human groups began to extol the virtues of the warrior male, which development had been foreshadowed in many if not most animal species' sexual dimorphism: the larger, protective, best-fighting male and the smaller, ready-earlier-to-procreate female.

After the atomic bomb blasts that ended World War II against Japan, the danger of all-out warfare as a group strategy began to show its limitations. In time, decadence set in. American boys watching MTV affluently on their own televisions in the privacy of their own bedrooms began to think Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and the droves of their clones that followed were "cool." Homosexuals, generally regarded as pathetic perverts in warrior cultures, began agitating through political activism (despite their relatively small numbers) for legal and social acceptance. Heterosexual women began competing with men for jobs and the status and control that market income provides.

Many young men just gave up on living up to traditional male roles. The jury is still out on whether women being in power make for a more peaceful world, as has been the hype. If women, like Indira Ghandi, are aggressive in dealing with overpopulation and can remain in power as she was unable to do, more power to them.

There is news that the chromosome that creates a male, the Y chromosome, is shrinking. Perhaps males have outlived their evolutionary usefulness. Males have made superior scientists (excepting Madame Curie), and it would be unfortunate to dispense with scientific advancement in a male-free world; but some of male superiority in science is cultural, so perhaps science will mosey along in time for us to move to a new planet before this one is incinerated by our dying sun.

I won't be around to see how all this plays out. I have several reasons I am glad I will not live forever. This is one of them. I abhor the excesses of male macho, but I have an unpleasant gut reaction to girly men; and I believe that is not primarily cultural, either, any more than my attraction to females displaying female traits is primarily cultural. You all and your spawn will get to work all this out. I don't have any spawn, and I am no longer middle-aged. I am ready to watch the waves splash onto the shore. Think about these matters, though. The future of the human species is in your hands.