    14

    The Expendability of Males

    "There are too many men, too many people, making too many

    problems, and not enough love to go around."

                                         a lyric from the rock group Genesis

    "Men were designed for short, nasty, brutal lives.  Women are

    designed for long, miserable ones."

                                         Dr. Estelle Ramey, Georgetown

                                             University Medical School

    In many primitive societies, there are two very separate

    worlds--the world of women and children, and the world of adult men.

    A male infant lives his life in cozy comfort, clinging to his mother,

    suckling until the age of three or four, playing with other little boys

    and girls, being hugged and fussed over by his older sisters.  Then, at

    roughly thirteen, he goes through a brutal expulsion.  He prepares for

    rituals that will separate him from the warm world he has known.

    These rites will emphasize his rebirth as a new kind of creature--a male

    adult.

    Now the young initiate must carry a weapon and demonstrate

    his fierceness, winning the respect--and tolerating the ridicule--of boys

    far older and more experienced at adult ways than he.  He must go into

    the forests hunting for food...and enemies.  The sections of the village

    where women laugh and groom the hair of their little boys, the garden

    plots on whose walkways children play, are places he must never enter

    again.  He has been expelled into the cold, harsh world of men.

    In the 50's, America too established separate worlds of women

    and men.  The American dream became the flight to suburbia.  Couples

    escaped the central cities and bought homes on plots where sheep had

    been grazing a few years before.  There, they brought up their families.

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