July 9, 2003
I’ve always wondered the opposite of what ol’ Lerner and Lowe queried in their famous My Fair Lady ditty.
And now Maureen Dowd says maybe what I’ve been hoping for is happening.
You can read her article here or here or here.
Dowd’s article on the "Incredible Shrinking Y" includes the following VERY interesting information:
The darlings have been fretting for some years now that they may be rendered unnecessary if women get financial and biological independence, learning how to reproduce and refinance without them. What if nature played a cruel trick and demoted men, so they had to be judged merely by their appearance, pliability and talent for gazing raptly at the opposite sex, no matter how bored?
New research on the Y chromosome shows that my jittery male friends are not paranoid; they are in an evolutionary shame spiral.
As Nicholas Wade wrote in The Times: "Although most men are unaware of the peril, the Y chromosome has been shedding genes furiously over the course of evolutionary time, and it is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. . . . The decay of the Y stems from the fact that it is forbidden to enjoy the principal advantage of sex, which is, of course, for each member of a pair of chromosomes to swap matching pieces of DNA with its partner."
[snip]
In a new book called "Y: The Descent of Men," Steve Jones, a professor of genetics at University College in London, says males, always a genetic "parasite," have devolved to become the "second sex."
The news that Dolly the sheep had been cloned without masculine aid sent a frisson through the Y populace, he writes, because men began to fear that science would cause nature to return to its original, feminine state and men would fade from view.
The Y chromosome, "a mere remnant of its once mighty structure," is worried about size. "Men are wilting away," Dr. Jones writes. "From sperm count to social status and from fertilization to death, as civilization advances, those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline."
Now, I have to say that, while I’d love to see some men I know taken down a peg or two, I really don’t want to see them slide into total decline. And I certainly know men who (I think) are pretty cool the way they are. So, I hope that the men in question look at what seems like a downward shift in their various statuses as a leveling out from all of those centuries of gender inequities -- an evolution toward a breed of human males who know, as most women (and some highly evolved men) have always known, that bigger is not the same as better. And that Betsy Devine's "Alephs" are the way to go. (Maybe she'll reprise her great post on that topic. )
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Old Comments (3)
Betsy Devine on 11 Jul 2003
http://betsydevine.weblogger.com/2003/02/22#a52
Hi Elaine, I found the link, way back in February! Thanks for liking it!
Kate S. on 22 Jul 2003
Nature's original state was feminine? So...all that gorilla chest-thumping has been just a pathetic seeking of attention...and we gave it to them. Then they puffed up, slighted us, and now the cycle comes back round again, completing the circle of life...science has poked a hole in their latex, let all the air out of their pretty colored baloons.
Can we be equal now?
Potatoes Browning on 31 Aug 2003
The fact that you asked the question "Can we be equal now?" tells me that there is some doubt in you that it can happen. Why do you need permission from anyone? Just consider yourself equal.Equality is in your mind,socity may have a set of rules,but if you dont like'em then break'em. I might also add that while society may see women trying to be more"male" as trendy they will always see men trying to be more"female" as some sort of perversion.A woman in a buzz cut will always be more acceptable than a man with fem looking bobbed hair. While some men may want that they will be denied because you see in the end there is no true equality,there is only the rhetoric about it.