It wasn't so very long ago when men were not so. Only about 10,000 years ago--I remember it as if it were yesterday--Thug sauntered out of his cave, yawned, stretched, and gazed steadfastly into the horizon with a gleam in the eyes only seen on recruitment posters or in a woman hunting for a husband. Neither flinching nor stalling, he stepped out into the dawn, his hand clutching a piece of oak like Babe Ruth.
"There goes Thug," a neighboring cave-dweller was heard to remark quite briskly, "off wife-hunting, I suppose."
That was, however, 10,000 years ago when men were too thick-skulled to know that one does not hit a lady and when the ladies were too thick-skulled to care. Things have flip-flopped now. Women slug their men and think nothing of it. Men simply think nothing.
While many men, glancing with that half-closed-eye look of a Britain summoning Jeeves for more tea, complain that women are "not what they used to be" and women, excitable as hares on a May morning, complain that men are "what they used to be," no one seems to see the real source of the problem. Of course, if you ask an adult, the blame, with Adam-like swiftness, is laid out against the children--"They're not what they used to be." That comes, nonetheless, from the parents, who, being more infantile than childish, are not as they used to be. Come to think of it, neither are the toys and the toymakers. In fact, nothing, except hypocrisy, seems to be what it once was.
I think, if I am still allowed to do so because heaven knows I am no longer permitted to hold and preach my own opinion for fear of annoyance, the problem is a shallow one. It's not shallow because the reason is shallow, but because the cause of the reason is shallow--man. As the old statement says, "If a women hears a tree fall in a forest, a man is still wrong." Firstly, I shall be very clear: women are right that men are wrong. But men are wrong not because women are right. Men are wrong because women are "as they used to be." Women have, since Adam became the first organ donor, wanted men to be manly and to be in charge. For that reason, while women may not have liked it, the daughters of Eve never held conventions to complain about Thug twacking his bride-to-be. That's not to say they enjoyed the beaming. Absolutely not. But they wanted the security. If Thug, their reasoning is, was bold enough to clobber his soon-to-be-Mrs. just once, he was bold enough to control a household and a host of children.
Regardless, Thug still remained a brute. He was so not because he wanted to control his house, but because he thought it manly and necessary to knock out his heart's-delight to prove his love. The principle is true, but the action is not. A woman, I am told, desires a man who can put his foot down, not on her toes but on the threshold of his house, and keep it there regardless of his brutish inclinations and her feminine whims and wiles.
Because of their desires, yesterdays feminists had always been fighting for a great cause--not the emancipation of women, but the masculinization of men. Carrie Nation began waving a hatchet not because she hated alcohol, but because men stopped waving clubs and had begun drinking to solve their problems. Susan B. Anthony began crying for population control not because she hated population, but because she hated a leaderless population. Both reactions were wrong for the right reasons. That is, however, how the feminists--and most heretics, for that matter--work.
