    15

    One r

    esult: father and mother spent their days in environments as

    different from each other as Mars is from Moline, Illinois.  Out in the

    suburbs was the world of women and children--where doting mamas

    dragged their kids from dance lessons to cub scout meets, stopping off

    at the shopping center on the way home.  In the city was another

    planet, a macrocosm invisible to the kids.  It was the unseen world into

    which the father disappeared every day when he set off for the train, a

    place whose rhythms were faster, whose ethics more brutal, whose

    rewards more difficult to achieve, and whose punishments could turn

    a man into an insomniac.

    Among American Indians of the plains, some boys chose not to

    make the violent transition to manhood, and remained in the world of

    women and children.  They were called berdache--women-men.  They

    wore woman's clothing, did woman's work, married  men, stuffed

    their clothes to look pregnant, and even cut themselves to imitate

    menstruation.18  Ever since the sixties, young people have dressed in

    more and more androgynous styles.  Could androgyny, like that of the

    Indian women-men, be the way in which the children of the 50's and

    60's, raised in the cozy world of suburbia, have balked against entering

    the harsh reality into which they saw their fathers disappear five days

    every week?

    No matter what the truth of this conjecture, androgyny may also

    be a rebellion against a fact of life that is not speculative in the least: the

    expendability of the male.  In nearly every known society, men alone

    are cannon fodder, laying down their lives to defend the tribe or

    aggrandize a leader. Males in animal groups and primitive societies

    may seem rather glorious creatures, accorded the privileges of gods.

    But in reality, they are treated by nature like the  biological equivalent

    of paper plates, creatures whose prime feature is their disposability.

    When times get tough for the Karamojong in Uganda, they save

    their scraps of food for their girls and allow the boys to die. In 1979,

    when Uganda was starving in the grip of civil war, the Karamojong

    tossed the stiffened bodies of their male children out of the village each

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