After America полностью

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:

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.