House of Eratosthenes

I was doing three seemingly unrelated things that got me to thinkin’. The first was to re-read Gerard Van der Leun’s excellent piece about the American Castrati…

If you focus on it, you realize that you hear this voice every day if you bounce around a bit in our larger cities buying this or ordering that, and in general running into young people in the “service” sector — be it coffee shop, video store, department store, boutique, bookstore, or office cube farm. It’s a kind of voice that was seldom heard anywhere but now seems to be everywhere.

It is the voice of the neuter .

I mean that in the grammatical sense:
“a. Neither masculine nor feminine in gender.
“b. Neither active nor passive; intransitive,”

and in the biological sense:
“a. Biology Having undeveloped or imperfectly developed sexual organs: the neuter caste in social insects.
“b. Botany Having no pistils or stamens; asexual.
“c. Zoology Sexually undeveloped.”

You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

The second was listening to my own voice upon stumbling across an old video, in which I teach my son to ride a bike without training wheels. I’m not talking like a Castrati, thank God. My declarative sentences are indeed declarative. It’s the pitch. Slightly diffferent from what I use talking to grown-ups. Or even him, and his friends, in different settings. Somehow, when little kids are scared out of their wits, we’re indoctrinated to try to defuse the situation by altering the pitch. Just a fraction of an octave. Why do we do that? It doesn’t calm me down when a woman is addressing me and the pitch of her voice goes up.

The third thing I did was just wander around Folsom. It’s a kid-friendly place. The patchwork-quilt of folsom is polka-dotted with parks of varying size, and being a parent myself I get to watch lots of parents interact with their children.

This last part is a little disturbing.

Fathers…and mothers…modulate their voices way, way upward. Several octaves in the case of the gentlemen. It does not sound like me telling my kid to keep his feet on the pedals. It does not lack a declarative tone at the end, like the Castrati described by Van der Leun. They declare things. They just declare them in this weird, other-worldly, somniferous voice. Kind of like Marvin the Martian. Except Marvin the Martian sounds like an opera baritone compared to this.

Kailey…hunny? We have…to stop…it’s time…to go…eat din…ner……okay?

And way freakin’ up there. It’s not just strange. It’s creepy.

In quieter moments, usually before the sun peeks up over the foothills, like right now — I worry more about this than I do about Barack Obama winning the election tomorrow. That’s one of tomorrow’s leaders swinging away in the playground. Boy or girl, when does s/he ever get to see some masculinity in some form or another? When is s/he allowed to see it implemented to solve a problem? How can that happen, with the Daddy talking like that?

Does the little curtain-critter put the XBOX controller down long enough to wander out into the garage and see Papa Bear repairing the lawnmower engine? Or…simply replacing an inner tube in a bicycle? Are they walked through the exercise, or is it just — give your broken whatever to the small-d dad, like a toddler giving a used tissue to momma to crumple up and put in her pocket. Pick it back up from him, later, fixed.

Does he teach the children about maintaining gear properly? Not losing things? How to watch for those tell-tale signs you didn’t spend enough money on something? Anticipating the need to have certain safety-related items working…well…the very first time they’re needed…with no fiddlin’.

Do they use the “Batman” analogy, like my son and I have been? You know — when Batman’s falling off the building, it’s way too late to ponder whether he brought with him the “good” bat-a-rang or settled for that crummy bat-a-rang he can’t really count on.

In what pitch do they tell their children about gear, supplies, tools and skills? Is it that creepy faux-female voice I see on the playgrounds so often? This…is my…workbench…I wash my…hands before…I go in…Mommy’s kitchen…

I suppose it’s none of my business. Or at least it seems not to be — until I start to think waitaminnit. This is all the kids I’m seeing around here. An entire generation. Now, look at the kids voting for the first time tomorrow. When were they on the playgrounds; Bill Clinton was already President. We really haven’t got that long to wait, and then we’ll have some decisions made by an entire generation of kids who have been raised to think of testosterone not even as something despicable or deadly, but something even worse than that: Something alien. Strange. Undesirable. Something to be kept distant.

An enemy at the gate.

Maybe that’s already happened. Maybe that’s why Obama’s ahead in the polls right now. Four years ago, John Kerry had better military credentials than George W. Bush, and that was supposed to mean a lot. Now, the delta between McCain’s experience fighting for the country, and Obama’s…it isn’t even necessary to find a counterpoint to this one. The discourse doesn’t even head off in that direction. Masculinity is an enemy at the gate. As a voting society, it seems we comprehend its useful purpose, about as well as a thawed-out caveman might comprehend the useful purpose of a calculator.

With one exception. The caveman might grasp that the calculator is assembled to get something done that otherwise could not have been done. To our prevailing sentiment, it would appear masculinity lacks that much meaning for us. There are signs — on the playgrounds, and in a lot of other places too — that our culture has come to view it as a hindrance. Something that is, quite simply, in the way.

And we got here without investing too much quality thought in the issue. What a shame.

My brother does this with his kids. It’s not only the higher pitch, or the exaggerated cadence, it’s the wheedling tone that he uses. He was trying to have a rational discourse with a toddler. Maybe that’s an analogy for today’s society.
- chunt31854 | 11/03/2008 @ 11:39
It is manifested also in our ill-advised and inexhaustible drive to share EVERYTHING with our wives. Everything is getting muddied up, and our kids don’t get role models(plural) but a role model(singular). Tits or testicles, it’s all the same to the child now.
- Andy | 11/03/2008 @ 11:41
actually the explorers of the world are still here.

They’re slowly getting more and more frustrated and they’re wondering why space travel isnt a reality so that we can get out and start exploring again instead of watching the socialism that we left behind nearly 300 years ago slowly strangle us to death.

Virgil
http://www.KeepAmericaAtWork.com
- vbierschwale | 11/03/2008 @ 12:00
[…] — where men talk to their very own kids as if they aren’t really men. Children go through their entire childhoods, never seeing anything good coming out of masculinity. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/11/2009 @ 06:27

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Higher PitchMonday, November 3rd, 2008

Higher Pitch
Monday, November 3rd, 2008