    22

    on dri

    nking beer and smoking cigars while watching Sunday football,

    the time would be now.

    Save up enough semen in communal refrigerators, and it would

    seem the species could move along quite well without humans of the

    masculine persuasion.  In fact, an increasing number of women live

    with other women, and turn to artificial insemination when they want

    to have a child.

    Fortunately, most women seem to need men emotionally.  They

    flock to singles bars, put personal ads in newspapers, and sit in corners

    of the office complaining about the lack of available mates. Bless them.

    What's more, economically males have not yet become entirely

    obsolete. In 1987, the household blessed with a working husband and a

    working wife earned a median income of $38,346--a comfortable figure

    at the time.  But if you threw out the husband, the income plunged to

    an impoverished $13,647.33  Do away with the earnings of the male,

    and the lone female-- left to raise children and bring the bread home on

    her own--  suddenly falls from the upper ranges of the middle-class to

    below its lowest depths.  American men are not completely expendable

    after all. At least not yet.

    None of this mitigates the fact that in the eyes of nature,

    individual men are a dime a dozen.  For males, as we will soon see, are

    the extinguishable junction points in the neural net, the disposable

    elements that make the social learning machine work.

    Could it be that men in this country sense their expendability?

    Could that be the reason modern males are--perhaps for the first time

    in American history--working hard to imitate female virtues?  Could

    this account for the premium we have suddenly placed on masculine

    sensitivity and vulnerability, on the male capacity to nurture children

    and whip up a quick meal?  Could it be that men are trying to hide

    from the fate they sense that nature has in store for them?  The fate of

    leading a short, nasty, brutal and bloodily-ended life?34

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