As Gloria Steinem proclaimed, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Today, in our feminized aquarium, we have all but eliminated the bicycle, save for a few rusting barnacle-encrusted spokes on the bottom. The full impact of our endlessly deferred adulthood is not yet known, although its contours can already be discerned. What kind of adults emerge from the two-decade cocoon of modern adolescence? Even as the western world atrophies, not merely its pop culture but its entire aesthetic seems mired in arrested development. In his book
Like George Will, Victor Davis Hanson, and others who’ve posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square.
But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.
“It is easier,” said Frederick Douglass, “to build strong children than to repair broken men.” But what if, as a matter of policy, we’re building our children to be broken men? And broken not just psychologically but biologically. Headline from the
Don’t ask me why: I’d blame Tony Blair’s cozying up to Bush were it not for “Sperm count drops 25 % in younger men”123 (
Do we still need sperm? Oh, a soupçon here and there still has its uses.
In 2009, a shortage of the stuff was reported in Sweden.124 There had been an unexpected surge in demand, from lesbian couples anxious to conceive.
So they headed off to the sperm clinic, whereupon the Sapphic demand ran into the problem of male inability to satisfy it. The problem seems to be higher than usual levels of non-functioning sperm. Even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant
H. G. Wells’ Time-Traveler writes of the softened Eloi: It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a 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
