As a science-fiction writer it is my craft to write of future possibilities. This does not so much amount to predicting the future but rather working out scenario narratives. As far as the future of emasculation I see two possibilities, which might coexist. The chief driver of emasculation is currently technology which makes many of man’s traditional roles obsolete and results in increased social complexity. Social complexity in a hierarchal collectivist society is navigated by the more collective and submissive female with less friction than her male counterpart, which makes Eve a more desirable citizen of Archimedes’ Garden of Eden than Adam.
Any precipitous decline in automated technology—imagine the dearth of bitches in an SUV-free world—will keep the ages old cycle of emasculation and masculine renewal on its circuitous course. If such happens I personally think Islam is the best positioned of the non-materialistic ideologies to thrive, and will gain more than other ideologies in the face of a collapse. I am illustrating this possibility currently in the serialized novel Under the Crescent.
A continued increase in automated technology will absolutely bring more emasculation. I have written of this possibility extensively in Motherworld and the Sunset Saga. Below are a few markers to consider.
1. Currently roughly 75% of first world humans are unable to deal with modernity without medication, legal or illegal. This addiction paradigm is increasing along a hockey stick curve like all of the attendant woes of modernity. Once drug addiction has reached 90% expect it to become mandatory beginning with the military and in utero treatment of the unborn.
2. The need to suppress masculine traits such as defiance [which is sometimes irrational] will be medicalized and treated with medication and social engineering methods such as…
3. The encouragement of homosexuality and the favoring of practitioners—particularly among military and law enforcement—would be beneficial in engineering a compliant population for it could serve as a means to separate women from the men that often do influence them in counter-collective notions.
4. Homosexuality between men in military and law enforcement could also be a refuge for autonomous sentiment and resistance to the hierarchy, as it was among elite militaries in feudal Japan and ancient Hellas where—and notably in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is essentially a story of homosexual rebellion against the Goddess: civilization—bi-sexual war leaders including Alexander, Leonidas, and most Japanese Daimyos—and epically Achilles—used informal homosexual patronage systems to assert free will. As Winston Churchill once quipped, the Royal Navy had been kept together, “by rum, buggery [ass-fucking] and the lash.”
5. Eventually the hierarchal control of conception, birth and gestation will be extended from the current cradle to grave socialism to encompass the entire life of the human organism, further eroding distinction between the sexes and permitting men to be harvested for sperm remotely without female contact.
6. Any such hierarchical control of reproduction—this is a given in any technologically advanced society that retains hierarchies—will result in designer humans, most prominently drone types of no particular sexual aspect. Recall that social insects have very few males—and these die or are killed as soon as they serve their reproductive purpose—and that most types only have one actively sexual female—a queen; Ishtar, civilization, the beating heart of society.
7. Notwithstanding the above, the need for ultra masculine operatives in military and law enforcement will result in the continued existence of traditionally masculine men, but in a socially truncated role. This is the premise behind the Pozer Sensky and Jay Bracken characters explored in the serials Out of Time and Astride the Chariot of Night.
The above predictions are not very far out there among those who write predictive fiction. David Brin explores this question in Glory Season as did Alice B. Sheldon in Houston, Houston, Do You Read? reviewed on this site in ‘The Ataraxia Effect’. Whatever becomes of Man and Woman, and Mankind, I do predict, that for at least a generation, it will be a real and actual crime [a complex of crimes most likely] to behave according to the traditional notions of manhood, and that books such as Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation and The Way of Men will be banned.
I am a man, and despite such brutal prognostications remain optimistic that Man shall rise again. In the meantime I see a dark nutless night ahead.
James, defiance is not exclusively a male trait. Even irrational defiance. Just ask a corrections officer in a women’s prison. They are prone to tell you that the women convicts are more defiant than the males. The women cons will demand to know “why” they are being told to do something or go somewhere and will refuse to move until they get an explanation. In the mainstream of American society the principle way that women display defiance is through passive-aggressive non-compliance. My ex-wife had this down to a fine art. She would seldom argue or disagree, but if she didn’t want to do something it would not get done. In fact I learned a lot from her. Here’s a first class example of the effective employment of such passive-aggressive tactics in the workplace: qz.com/294686/how-a-female-us-army-colonel-tamed-the-males-only-egyptian-army. The delightful thing about this is that even women lack the tools to effectively resist passive aggressive non-compliance in many instances. Which serves to give us one explanation as to why women in particular get stressed-out working with other women.
“The wise learn many things from their enemies.”- Aristophanes
“Fight by any means which can achieve victory.” - General Vo Nguyen Giap
Nice work Jeremy,
Giap is underrated I think.
With defiance as a gender trait I am really thinking in social terms, of men traditionally not being as easily frightened into compliance over time, being less institutionally loyal; more of a consistently focused defiance. This is changing as we speak with more men taking on female roles and women behaving more aggressively in public. Virtually the only fist fights in Baltimore are now between black women.
As a manger I would have women defy me emotionally all the time. I would change tact, approach them later, and they would be compliant. With the male employees that defied me most of them would take that time I had given them to cool down to plot my demise, or their witty line, or work on drumming up support from a coworker—one guy I caught making notes on a cardboard box;his misspelled bullet point presentation of why he told me to fuck off in the stockroom, etc. So in my experience with most women and most men in the work place, and in coaching, male acts of defiance—though sometimes pure emotional outbursts with certain head cases—where usually more well thought out, more diligently followed through, and more hopelessly clung to.
Yes Jeremy, thanks to my extensive training under my own wife's passive-aggressive tutelage I had little problem dealing with the female staff. The main thing that helped was that they knew I was committed to protecting them from the creeps that came in the store hoping to harass a captive audience. Half of my female cashiers were threatened, insulted or touched by mostly older white men. The other factor was this: I was The Man. My assistants would get stone walled by these girls and then groan when I showed up and the girls would bat their eyes and address my as Mister Jimmy. My one assistant got to the point where he would not talk to the female staff without me—calling me The Senator.
What I think we were experiencing was the equivalent of the female inmates demanding an explanation. What they really want is attention from the power in their life. This could be a statement of official policy as an explanation or a demand—as in my case—to 'talk to you boss! I also think this is key to the bland day nothing oratory of the current Autarch who just needs to be visibly concerned and smoothly articulate to appease the ladies. Clinton I think worked out the feel good oration template. Think about it, the federal government is now every woman's daddy, with the real one rotting in an assisted living facility.
The interesting thing was these ladies did not seek to go over my head to the ownership because they were women, and known to be nasty. Having that job for four years gave me a different angle on the female psyche, which I now see as looking for family surrogates in the workplace. The two bat shit crazy female owners who had a clinically insane older brother looked to me to fill his absence and demanded as my first condition of employment as GM that I moderate their discussions, as they could not have one without throwing stuff at each other unless a man was there to calm them. To the female employees I was clearly 'daddy', while to the guys I was 'The White Devil', 'The Snake', 'Fuckin' Jim', 'The Supermarket Nazi' and 'Dat Evil Muvafuda.'
Thanks so much for the substantive input Jeremy. If I become Slave Master of the World my second pronouncement—right after I buy the Klitscko Brothers and the Williams Sisters to start my breeding program—will be to name you 'The Advisor Inviolate.'