glaze at the word.’
‘Maana man, then,’ says Bill. ‘Like tomorrow, he never comes.’
‘But how can he be postmodern? Post-all-that’s-present. Post today? Post now?’
‘Post the present era. Us male humans are to be transformed. We’re all to be part one and part another: the world of both. It’s a world in which the dividing lines of opposition – oppression or competition – are no more. It’s a land of blur, of ambiguity. Little wonder the eyes cloud over.’
‘I get it,’ says Anne. ‘Postmodern means post men.’
Some cynics may doubt whether this gender-bending new postmodern man truly exists outside advertisements, women’s magazines and a few urban enclaves, but the ideal persists. It is based on the assumption of bisexuality: that within each of us lies both a male and a female nature, and that the male can be tamed by getting in touch with his feminine side. A man who succeeds in doing so will be less threatening, especially to women and gays, and it is hardly surprising that most of the strident headline pressure for men to cast off their old macho image and become sensitive, caring, new-model males stems from the women’s and homosexuals’ lobbies. Women and gays, after all, have most to fear from the old, unreconstructed male who can be intolerant, crude and show a frightening capacity for violence; the new man, if he can be fetched into existence, will be a much pleasanter creature. We have turned Professor Higgins’s question on its head. Now we ask why a man can’t be more like a woman?
The straight answer would be that it is not in most men’s nature to be like a woman, nor in hers to be like him. That assertion, however, ignores another fashionable belief which insists that our sexuality is not natural at all, but a social construct. This belief, which goes hand in hand with claims about bisexuality, insists that we all have the capacity to be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, and the only thing which determines our sexual orientation is social pressure. At first glance this might seem an odd assertion, but increasingly the western world is being driven by the belief, often enshrined in law, that the only differences between men and women, other than their obvious physical attributes, are those caused by privilege, opportunity and influence.
Social reformers, with their aim of eliminating oppression, now think they have found a way to eliminate male aggression. The male is to be socially transformed. He is to be turned into a non-hostile, uncompetitive type. There is an obstacle: any realistic account of gender differences which denies the male competitive world denies the nature of men. Does that bother the social reformers? Not at all. What cannot be changed can be swept under the carpet. It is to this end that the male is found by the liberal arts academics to be a social, cultural construct – open to deep transformation. Only sexual orientation does not wash away in the communal bath; human nature is not biodissolvable.
‘Nothing is transmitted but the social?’ asks Anne.
‘It’s in the vested interest of the social sciences to find all things socially transmitted,’ Bill answers.
‘You mean,’ Anne asks, ‘that if we transform man’s social world then we transform him?’
‘Those who believe in the perfectibility of man do not want to know about the masculine as natural.’
‘There’s evidence to support the social hypothesis…’
‘… but only if you don’t look beyond the external.’
Scholars are no longer allowed to imply that heterosexuality is the norm for sexual attraction. In the standard US handbook for avoiding bias in language (Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses, 1995) we are not to talk of husband, wife, spouse or marriage. We are asked to substitute gender neutral terms like domestic companion, longtime partner or primary relationship. Language is freighted with splendid deceits, and to impose rules of thumb as to what can (cannot) be said is to put one’s finger on the point of a tack. To the average male the language of the thought police is disparaging, offensive and prejudicial. There is fear and loathing in the new sexism: it is both anti-sex and anti-male.
The male is pre-judged – as prejudiced. Here is the belief that all should conform to the bisexual ideal: a social idyll in which sexual differences are eliminated. He is wrong-footed at the starting line. He is accused of homophobia. But what of heterophobia? What if it is not the average male who is prejudiced but all those who assume that straight is potentially bent – unisexual, bisexual, part-one-part-another, desexed, androgynous, queer, both/and, homosexual, crossing over, in between.
‘The word police will get you.’
‘The charge?’ asks Anne.
‘Heterosexism.’
‘Because we say that the heterosexual male is normal? Or the norm?’
‘To be born Chinese is the norm in China.’
‘A gay might stand out as abnormal.’
‘My green eyes might stand out in Mongolia,’ says Bill. ‘Would that be queer? You know I’m no more likely to change my sexual orientation than the colour of my eyes.’
‘Lots of people think everyone’s a bit unisex.’
‘Like being a bit pregnant?
“‘DELETE, DELETE, DELETE,” say the word police. We are all potentially bisexual.’
‘One in a hundred, more like,’ says Anne. ‘Those who include speak only for themselves.’
If women, the argument goes, are given the same opportunities as men, and are not restrained by the dead hand of ‘old boy networks’, then they can achieve all that a man can achieve. It is hard to argue against that well-meaning assertion, even though a dangerous and unscientific assumption lies behind it: that men and women are the same.
Perhaps the most extreme and obvious example of this assumption is seen in America where, in the last few years, lawyers have forced the hitherto male-dominated military to open all its doors to women. The result has been legal equality and constant trouble. The men are consistently accused of insensitivity or, worse, of sexual harassment – and it does not take much for a serviceman to be accused of that most heinous crime. Indeed, according to guidelines laid down by the Pentagon, if a soldier merely looks at one of his female colleagues for more than three seconds then he is harassing her. The US Navy even closed itself down for a whole day so that its men could be lectured on the evils of sexual harassment. The whole experiment, which rushes on with the inevitability of the Gadarene swine nearing the precipice, can be simply summarized: women demand equal opportunity, gain it, then complain that the men behave badly. ‘Sensitivity training’, or even disciplinary action, then follows to change the men’s behaviour to make them gentler; in fact, to make them more like women. It would be easier, surely, to recruit only women?
The homosexual lobby is as eager as some women to blur gender identities. It is axiomatic among many gay lobbyists that everyone’s sexuality is a mix of male and female, and that where any one person ends up on the sliding scale depends solely on social pressures and influences. Homosexuality, they tell us, is a convenient social label, no more ‘real’ than heterosexuality. Ten years ago a conference devoted its entire agenda to just that assertion. One of the conference’s published conclusions was that ‘homosexuality is not inherent in an individual but constructed’.1 No wonder such
