Of all the chalk messages that appear from time to time on various objects around campus, the best among them is "Fight the Gynocracy," as it is both true and beautiful.
Gynocracy, or gynecocracy, refers to the condition where society, or government, is dominated by women--for those of us whose knowledge of Greek roots is shaky, combining "gyno," meaning woman (or, variously, a female reproductive organ) and "cracy," meaning government. Presumably the author of the graffiti intended "gyno" to mean woman, in this case, because a society ruled by female reproductive organs would be nothing for a sane man to fight.
In any event, "cracy" comes from the Greek word for strength, while "gyno" derives from the word "gunai", which I believe means yikes. But no matter how you want to define gynocracy, men know what it is, that it is building, and that they are feeling their virility dissolving. Males get the impression that they are losing the gender war; that their power is slipping, that their identities are in terrible limbo and that the center cannot hold. Somehow things just aren't right anymore; we have lost our essence, our proper function and our potency--to women.
But the gynocracy men yearn to fight lies not in the province of politics, where we continue to enjoy our historical advantages, such as cigar-loving interns and myriad opportunities for mismanagement. According to the Economist, only 7 percent of parliament in Japan is female (a similar percentage of male sheep are exclusively homosexual), 11 percent in France and 14 percent of legislators in America. Even in Sweden, where equality is most nearly achieved, women occupy 43 percent of the seats. Men still run the show politically, though rather violently.
Yet socially the situation is gravely different. The New York Times reports that according to Harrison Pope, author of "The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession," the emergence of working women and single mothers dislodged men from their historical functions of fathering and breadwinning. Confused males, in response, started buffing their bodies to assert fading masculinity, replacing virtues with unwieldy slabs of flesh. Never before have men concerned themselves so obsessively with their physical selves. When asked by his daughter to come swimming, Thomas Edison replied, "I don't believe in physical fitness. The only function of the body is to hold up the brain."
Attitudes of this sort are dead. For the first time in history, women are able to exert total control, in every possible sense, from reproduction to their economic situation. Men don't really know what to do to attract women anymore, since women don't need them for anything other than amusement. The task of the modern man is to please, not provide. With previous avenues of living closed before him, he is left alive but without any real power, oftentimes sleeping on the couch in Mom and Dad's basement; he is superfluous. In an interview in The New York Times, Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger noted, "The decline of men has everything to do with them being alienated from the means of reproduction." With the advent of birth control, which separated sex and procreation, women have a monopoly on the production of children, and thus the future, enjoying complete social dominance.
In confirming his "threatened masculinity" hypothesis, Pope and two other researchers looked at advertisements using male and female models in women's magazines (Cosmopolitan and Glamour) to see how the percentage of semi-nude models of each sex varied over time, finding that the number of ads with disrobed women stayed the same, 20 percent, between 1950 and the '90s, while the number of ads containing pseudo-naked men went from 5 percent in 1950 to 35 percent during the '90s. The dramatic increase of exposed male bodies in women's magazines indicates how what women want from men is evolving, and the rates at which men have started to exercise proves that this shift in female preference has radically changed the way in which men live their lives and view themselves. This progression from substance to superficiality is inherently connected to the growing power women exert in directing society (by way of reproductive control), and it is against this sensation of diminution men are presently rebelling. At Duke, this tendency is readily apparent. Our crisis of masculinity churns with angry vigor. Weight rooms overflow with eager participants who stay for hours at a time, neglecting their hobbies, friends and studies. Without the certainty of finding a mate by just being a good provider or caring father, college students are turning by the score to bodybuilding. While these gentlemen are fine to look at, even for heterosexuals, they don't do much to keep our great nation one step ahead of the communists, whose evils can only be defeated with great effort in math, science and marijuana cultivation. Besides, emphasizing the physical at the expense of the intellectual isn't much of a long-term plan. Muscles lack earnings potential. Women know this; and demand them on those grounds; they have come to enjoy the taste of economic dominance. And we have lost our self-esteem.
There are many signs that the gynocracy's grip will only tighten. According to an article in Newsweek, male participation in the workforce is dropping, falling from 80 percent to 75 percent between 1970 and 2000 while female participation is growing enormously. And now more women than men are pursuing higher education while the economy moves increasingly toward service, as prototypically "masculine" jobs in manufacturing head overseas in search of cheap labor. Service economies, at least in the stereotypical sense, are more favorable to women. As the Newsweek writer notes, "The rise of the service economy is shifting the emphasis in hiring, almost everywhere, from brawn to brains and charm." If this trend continues, men are in grave peril.
So we now can see that the fears of the intellectual who chalked "Fight the Gynocracy" on the wall are justifiable. Women have taken control where it counts most, in the department of having children. They are able to tightly regulate the supply of our most valuable resource, the human mind. Since this situation is not likely to change spontaneously, and cannot be made to change ethically, men must think creatively. As a living organism, our mission is to reproduce and promote our offspring. Successful humans accomplish this task, while unsuccessful humans fail. Since it has become much more difficult to control the outcomes of the heterosexual reproductive process, we need to look at the alternatives, such as cloning, exuberant homosexuality and yeast-like budding to retain our dignity and purpose. But, at the very least, we need to find something better to do than lift weights.
Matthew Gillum is a Trinity junior. His column appears every third week.
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