House of Eratosthenes

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 voice whisps across your ears as if the speaker is in a state of perpetual uncertainty with every utterance. It is as if, male or female, there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise. As a result, it has a misty quality to it that denies it any unique character at all.

I hope this is not a case of plagiarism against our blog-uncle, because if it is one, it works at a sluggish, pokey pace. Good choice in figuring out what to plagiarize though…and I deplore, in the strongest terms, that all these years later it remains an unchanged but equally timely subject. This says something about our society, and what it says is not good:

If you are forced to use public transport, you see them all the time. Soppy young blokes in skinny jeans, hair artfully arranged to mimic a guinea pig in a hurricane, being mollycoddled by a domineering, post-Spice Girls vixen who, if figures released last week are correct, also earns more than him.
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It’s not just young bucks. Men who would once have been called middle-aged are behaving like teenagers, faces nourished by some male consumer-targeted unction (because he’s worth it), huddled over their Nintendo Wii or iPhone, desperate to ignore the spectre of maturity tapping on their shoulder.
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Remember the boyband East 17? I think the rot might have set in there. They looked like they had borrowed their big brothers’ clothes and crooned: ‘If you’ve got to go away, don’t think I can stand the pain.’ Just like a child to his mother on his first day at school.

What a weird century. We fret endlessly about little girls growing up too quickly, while men regress back to the womb.

We can ask: What would happen if, today, a man on the silver screen dashed in to save a helpless female who’d been placed in some awful death trap by an unscrupulous villain while she just…waited to be saved? James Bond saves Honey Rider from being drowned at the end of Doctor No, or Dudley Doright severs the binds that tie Nell Fenwick to the railroad tracks, or Superman saves Lois Lane from some elaborate death trap cobbled together by Lex Luthor…and the females do nothing. No slapping the bad guy across the face, or spitting in it. Heck, more recently than that, Marion Ravenwood wasn’t doing a whole lot while waiting for Indiana Jones to save her. She clobbered some guy with a skillet, but mostly just hid in a basket getting moved around. Can you make a movie like that today? A decisive NO.

It’s boycott-based feminism. Revolutionary-minded females put the movie industry on notice that the male heroism was disposable, and the female heroism was not. Have the chick do something, or we’re not going to see it. In this demand, they brandished a feminine power that, although they pretended it was new, was anything but. In truth, Grandpa didn’t see movies Grandma didn’t want to see. Car salesmen were never as excited seeing your grandfather browse their lots, unless the little lady was with him. Women have driven consumerism as long as consumerism has been around. What happened, somewhere around the seventies and eighties, is they got bitchier.

Usually when I talk about movies as they relate to the broader picture of what’s happening to us, I treat them as a symptom. In this case, they are a cause. Movies have become more and more of a kid thing. Back in my day, when you were in the pre-teen years a movie was an occasional treat, and you saw them a bit more often when you started dating. Nowadays it seems things have become reversed; the pre-teen set is the target market, and I don’t even want to ask what comes later. But it seems once kids are about fifteen they’re done with movies. So there are no slasher movies about murdering madmen rampaging through a summer camp; only occasionally, and they’re mostly straight to video. The IMAX screen is saved for adorable feel-good things about dolphins with prosthetic tails, and comic book superheroes. Who do not, repeat do not, save the damsel in distress.

The movie industry is cause rather than effect, here, because young people are impressionable. They pick up on messages that it is their destiny to get in a laser sword fight with Darth Vader and bring peace and order to the galaxy…or…to make asses out of themselves so that the leading lady can lead, and feel good about herself, and laugh at the silly toddler-man, and most of all, find him completely adorable. Occasionally. When he isn’t annoying her.

The tenor of the message has changed, the message has changed, and now our young men have changed.

I’m afraid this ties into the Occupy Wall Street movement, because that demonstration has offered young men a rare opportunity to say absolute things, express absolute thoughts, with certainty and conviction, without being criticized for it. They appreciate this opportunity all the more because it is only occasional. But two questions arise from this: One, are things like certainty & conviction genuine, when they can & will be expressed only when there is assurance that criticism will not result?

And two: What does it say about a so-called “man,” when he possesses certainty & conviction only when he discusses the deconstruction of some unknown stranger’s right to earn and own property? And on all other subjects he reverts, with all the reliability of gravity, right back to the dreaded emasculated tone of the American Castrati? What do we know about someone who is certain about the world in which he lives, only when he seeks to destroy things, along with people who built those things and might build other things?

Excellent. I LUV getting a three-way going over in my sidebar.
- vanderleun | 10/08/2011 @ 11:28
Make that a four-way.
- vanderleun | 10/08/2011 @ 11:46
[…] Eratosthenes marvels at the way left-wing ideology makes the metrosexuals start talking tough. […]
- Never Yet Melted » Quotation of the Day | 10/09/2011 @ 06:50
The more uncertain we can keep you about everything — the more we can teach you to avoid forming your own opinions, the more programmable you are. See? It works.

Create a void, fill it with a sense of entitlement and deconstructionist arguments. Bingo. Drone.

Incidentally, aren’t drone’s sexless bees?
- philmon | 10/09/2011 @ 07:17
Why are men so “childish” today?

Let’s assume that the modern twenty, thirty, fortysomething men in America really are more immature than any prior generation.

It probably has something to do with the fact that society has beaten it into them that there is no reward, whatsoever, for manliness. All the outlets of maturity and manliness are despoiled. Marriage is a sucker’s game, military service gets you patronized to your face and insulted behind your back, commitment to a career is all but asking to be downsized the next time the CEO wants a bonus or the government wants a new tax hike, defending your honor is “brutish,” protecting your person and property is a crime, running your own business makes you “the Man,” being the breadwinner means you’re “oppressing” your wife, hunting is “barbaric”, and fatherhood is alternately mocked and criminalized.

It is not legally permissible in the modern United States to be a man. It is, in fact, routinely punished— and our culture REWARDS those who do the punishing.
- rhjunior | 10/09/2011 @ 22:46

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“Why Do Today’s Men Act Like Toddlers?”Saturday, October 8th, 2011

“Why Do Today’s Men Act Like Toddlers?”
Saturday, October 8th, 2011