The Masculine Century: A Heretical History of Our Time

Contents

Prologue

The Age of Aggression

A Brief Disclaimer

CHAPTER 1

THE IMAGE OF WESTERN MAN

CHAPTER 2

WAR AND WESTERN MAN:

IMAGES OF WAR IN

WESTERN LITERATURE

CHAPTER 3

MODERNISM AS PSYCHOSIS

Notes

Chapter Three: Modernism as Psychosis

A Ana

qui réclamait toujours

non pas une histoire

mais une conférence

Prologue  

Every age appears to be one thing to itself, and something different to each of the ages that follow. When we look back on some periods of the past we can only see them as a mistake, a wrong turning—an age so misguided, deluded, or barbaric that it seems to have been in the grip of collective madness. But when we read the writings of that time, what often strikes us is their sense of normality, as if for people then no other reality was conceivable. Every age lives in a closed world, in accordance with a truth and normality of its own, which will one day be the object of the derision, stupefaction, or outrage of those that come after.

Yet however solid ages appear from the outside, the very notion of an age is elusive, and in some sense arbitrary. We can consider the present age to have begun with Copernicus, or with the Internet. It all depends on the time-scale we choose to focus on. Even in the conventional sense of an age as a period somewhere between a lifetime and a century during which a certain world-view or ethos was felt to prevail, the boundaries of almost all ages are fiercely disputed. The Renaissance, which was only defined and labeled hundreds of years afterwards, spans a century and a half for some scholars, and four centuries for others. The Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment are seen by some historians as two distinct periods, while for others they are one and the same. Even more controversy clouds any attempts to define our own age. The fashionable buzzword postmodernism is now pushed by many of its disciples back to the post-Second World War period, and will soon crowd modernism itself back into the nineteenth century. Given the conflicting dogmatisms of literary historians in particular, it is unlikely we will ever reach agreement even on when our own age began and ended. We therefore have no clear idea of which age we are living in. How far back does our age stretch? What came after the Victorian age? Was it our age, or was it a period (or a series of periods) that is now over?

But despite (or perhaps because of) the imprecision of the concept, a vague feeling has grown over the past decade that we have just lived through the end of an age. There has been no cataclysm on the scale of the French Revolution or the First World War, which swept away the mode of life and mental outlook of a century. Yet for Eastern Europeans the collapse of the Soviet Union meant at least as radical a change as those previous catastrophes. For us too in the West the end of the Cold War broke up the old perspective on the world. A half century of nuclear-armed planetary confrontation, the product of world wars and revolution, came to a limping end. The tragic cycle of great-power conflicts that began in 1914 seemed to have played itself out at last. The terrorist attacks on America of September 11, 2001, confirmed the sense of a definitive change in the enemies and threats that face us. For the past decade the political pundits have wrangled over the best new way of organizing the future. The war on terror and the clash of civilizations have been the most dramatic new visions of the era that we have entered upon. Before that the building of Europe and the battle against globalization had their apostles, while lately the fight against global warming has converted millions to its message of impending apocalypse. Each sect competes to impose on skeptics its particular reading of the great struggle of the future, the defining crusade of our time—since in our Marxist-militarist culture we can no longer conceive of history except as a combat against mortal threats, enemies, or infidels. But there is something else that has added to our sense of an end and a new beginning.

For the accidental divisions of our calendar have suddenly led us to view our own age, the modern age, as a previous century, a century apart from us, which we begin to look at with the vague sense of superiority with which we always view the past. The fashion-ridden eagerness of every generation and decade to see itself as different from what went before is pushing us now to see the new century as different, to invent distinctions between us and the twentieth century, as though arbitrary numbers had some occult influence on reality. But this shallow impulse is leading to a more profound change of perspective on the modern age.

The twentieth century, which acquired its own sense of a definitive break with the past through the mystique of the calendar, and which bristled with manifestos of Modernism even before the Great War fell like a judgment on the old order, maintained the illusion of being a single age right up to the shores of the present through the force of numerological superstition. Now that it has retreated across the moat of a millennium we can at last look at it with the eyes of strangers, or rather with the eyes of those departing from a house where they have lived all their lives. This, then, was the age we lived in! What was familiar for so long suddenly becomes strange, questionable, alien, monstrous. We begin to grasp that a set of ideological assumptions, of emotional attitudes derived from the traumatic experiences that forged it, underlay the whole world-view of the age, and all its beliefs, values, ideals and creative works. We begin to understand the psychology of our times with the same shocked insight with which we first comprehend the psychology of our parents: we see what childhood traumas made them what they are. To uncover the premises of our thinking, of our sensibility, of our approach to life itself, and to realize that there was and is nothing inevitable about them, that they are rooted in one historical moment, arbitrary, accidental, fleeting, is one of the most disorienting but also liberating experiences. We see at last that what we are and what we believe are not the products of a rational process, but of chaos, trauma, and nightmare.

Once we free ourselves from the tyranny that calls itself (and has always called itself) modern thinking, we begin to understand that the century we have just emerged from was no more definitively modern than the eighteenth century or the nineteenth. This perception is dimly reflected in the shallow, muddled academic debate about postmodernism or even post-modernity—two radically different notions which those given to this kind of chatter often confuse. While the twentieth century artistic movement known as Modernism will certainly have an end (though so-called postmodernism is merely a pretentious, academic extension of it), modernity itself is inescapable, unending and forever changing. But though modernity cannot end (at least until the scientific civilization collapses back into ignorance and superstition), particular ages of modernity can end and have ended. Every age has called itself modern since the mid-seventeenth century. This was when it first occurred to men that the change they saw as characterizing the sub-lunar world might not always be for the worse, that there was a prospect that knowledge might be accumulated, making progress possible. Every age since then has brandished its modernity like a banner, and has sought in some way to disparage, ridicule or discredit the past. And yet every age has finally become part of that past, as quaintly old-fashioned in the eyes of those who came after as the past it so contemptuously rejected. The modernity of the twentieth century is coming very slowly to resemble the modernity of the late seventeenth or mid-nineteenth centuries. It has acquired a period quality, an air of the style of other days. And the more foreign and alien it appears to us, the more it cries out for analysis and understanding, to determine how and where and why it was an arbitrary, abnormal and even mad period of history. Now that we have crossed the divide of a century and a millennium, the calendar itself is urging us to analyze our particular modern age or the twentieth century as we would any other age that we seek to understand across an ocean of time.

The Age of Aggression  

The masculine century! Can anyone doubt who has paused for a moment over the century that produced the two world wars, the atomic bomb, the Nazi extermination camps, the Soviet and Chinese gulags in which tens of millions were done to death, universal military training in peacetime all over the West for the first time in two thousand years, the cinema cult of the muscle-bound, mass-murdering action hero, and an unprecedented movement among women to lay claim not merely to male rights but to the masculine character, to a masculine sensibility, to the right to fight in the front line—can anyone doubt that the century that has just ended was the most masculine period in all of human history?

The cult of the masculine pervaded the century to a degree unimaginable to Shakespeare or Chaucer, to Boccaccio or Petrarch, to Racine or Stendhal, to Goethe or Novalis, to Christine de Pisan or Jane Austen. In all its most characteristic works, from the erection of gigantic towers by mammoth machines to the obscene destruction of helpless cities by a thousand planes or by a single bomb, the projection of immense aggressive power was the obsession that dominated the age. Never before have so many millions of human beings been massacred, so many millions uprooted and driven across entire continents, in the pursuit of grandiose schemes of destruction and reshaping of the world. And in the shadow of this all-conquering masculine cult, femininity has been reduced to a contemptible caricature—rejected and despised even by the movement that calls itself feminism. A civilization which lived for a thousand years with the cult of the Mother of God, and for thousands of years before that with the Mother Goddess, has shrunk its female deity to a dangerously schizophrenic dualism: on one side that disreputable figure of fun, the Whore of Babylon, the porn star with big knockers, object both of desire and derision, and in the other corner her new masculinized challenger—the sterile, power-hungry, feminist male clone, with her adolescent virtual variant, the computer-generated female kick-boxer, on an obscure and violent quest in a childless castle of horrors. Need one point to the plunging Western birth-rate as a direct consequence of the dethronement of the mother-figure? The self-appointed leaders of women themselves have eagerly accepted the premise that only male virtues count, that women too must cultivate the male mind and the masculine character in order to achieve that masculine nirvana: liberty, equality, independence, power, being constrained by nothing and bound to nobody. And our destiny is to sink into demographic decline, cultural chaos and gradually be replaced by other peoples, in the stubborn belief that our obliteration of the feminine pole of human nature was the last blow struck in a long, historic campaign of liberation.

But there are signs of hope. Over the last thirty or forty years (starting in the cultural civil war of the 1960’s) we have seen a series of movements of revolt, often confused, often at cross purposes, often unaware of their own drift, which added together seem to point to a retreat from the masculine century. While women have rushed to imitate male behavior under the banner of liberation, we have seen men making tentative and fitful moves in the opposite direction—reclaiming the right to wear long hair, colorful clothes, to express their feelings, to weep for joy or sorrow like their ancestors of two hundred years ago—after a long period during which men were shorn like prisoners, dressed in dark suits, and their emotions stifled as contemptible marks of effeminate weakness. Are these stirrings of change signs of a tide turning, or merely passing trends? Will they be sabotaged and counteracted by the noisier movement of women to adopt all the most aggressive aspects of masculinity, thus forcing men to return to it? Are we in the midst of a shift of civilization, more gradual perhaps but comparable in its effects to the one brought about by the French Revolution or the First World War? Is the long testosterone rampage of Western man finally at an end? Or is this merely a new and paradoxical twist in our headlong career of aggressive self-destruction?

Such are the themes of this book. The orthodox view of every age is to see itself as a norm by which other ages are to be judged. It is my conviction that the age that we are emerging from will come to be seen as a psychopathic age, a period of collective mental derangement, reflected not only in our apocalyptic wars but in our systems of thought, our political ideologies, our economic system, our literature, our art, even our sexual relationships—and from this mad period we are struggling in confusion to get back to some semblance of human normality. And the root of our psychosis has been the over-development of the masculine pole of human nature. How we became a high-testosterone civilization, glorifying violence, aggression, and competition, seeing struggle and conflict as the motor forces not merely of social progress and economic prosperity but of the evolution of life itself, how the character of Western humanity was transformed over the past century and a quarter, first by an extreme militarization of men, and then by a catch-up masculinization of women, how we intoxicated our species with a cult of aggression until it killed more of its own kind in the last hundred years than in the previous two thousand—these are the themes we shall explore. And we shall look finally at our chances of emerging from this nightmare, whether the perversions that human nature has undergone in the modern age (in particular its enslavement to a cult of work as irrational and self-destructive as that of the Easter Islanders) can be reversed, or whether the conditions we have now created have made any return to human normality impossible—except perhaps through the disappearance of the Western race itself.

A Brief Disclaimer  

Some male readers may at this point feel a slight unease at the notion that masculinity might be represented in this work in a less than wholly positive light. They may even feel a queasy apprehension that they are about to be subjected (at this late stage) to another feminist diatribe against the male character, or to a gay liberationist attack on heterosexuality as a narrow-minded prejudice, or to a gender-bender’s exhortation to abandon virility for some touchy-feely, limp-wristed exploration of their feminine side. Let them be reassured that nothing as gruesome, tasteless or passé as any of this will be inflicted upon them. The viewpoint of this book is best approached by a glance at the work of the Cambridge professor of psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen, who analyzes autism as an extreme form of the male brain.¹ The male brain, according to Baron-Cohen, tends towards systemizing, and the female brain towards empathy. Most human brains combine elements of both. But when the male brain exists in a pure form, all systemizing and no empathy, we get individuals who are capable of calculating in their heads that Christmas day in 1511 fell on a Tuesday, but are quite incapable of responding to a smile. Autism is the male brain taken to a mad extreme. In a similar way, psychopathic violence can also be seen as linked to extreme masculinity. The same testosterone-driven aggressiveness that makes a man capable of running another soldier through with a bayonet, when pushed a bit further, makes him capable of shooting women and children in the back of the head and pitching them into a mass grave. In both cases a suppression of empathy is the main requirement. One case is simply a more extreme form of the other. Both autism and psychopathic violence are products of an extreme form of the masculine brain. The question is whether the mental derangement of the century that has just ended, which murdered more people than the previous twenty centuries put together, can be usefully analyzed as the sickness of the over-masculine brain.

When we look at other aspects of the twentieth century—a modernist art movement dedicated to abstraction, geometrical forms, and a cult of machines, while rejecting nature, the beauty of the human body, the expression of emotion, and even communication itself—are we not right to see this too as a product of the autistic mind, obsessed with mechanical systems, incapable of empathy or emotion—that same mind that lay behind the world wars, the genocides, the mad totalitarian projects to raze the human past and start again? It is in this sense that this work will explore the notion of the Masculine Century—not as some questioning of what we might call normal masculinity, but as an inquiry into the link between the extreme form of the male brain and the mental and moral aberrations of the century that has just ended. And these aberrations include not only militarism, total war, and mass exterminations, but the adoption by Western women of the male role and character, the collapse of marriage and of the instinct of child-raising, the rise of pornography and the decline of romance, the cult of dog-eat-dog competition, and the exaltation of technology, work, and material goods over human relationships, to a degree the world has never seen before. The usefulness of any theory lies in how much it can explain, and how many diverse things it can link to a common cause. We are embarking on a journey to see what this overall paradigm can account for—and whether it can make more sense of the world we live in.

CHAPTER 1  

THE IMAGE OF WESTERN MAN  

1) THE REVOLT OF THE SIXTIES

Writers are led to subjects by a whole web of personal experiences and it is rare to be able to identify a single incident that seems to have set the whole train of thought in motion. It is even rarer to discover that this incident perhaps influenced the direction of one’s entire life. But I remember such an incident from my early childhood.

I must have been five or six years old, lying on the floor reading one of the ten volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, which my parents had recently bought from a door to door salesman. In a house without many books I had thrown myself upon these heavy tomes as a drowning man seizes a piece of floating wreckage, and I scarcely let my older brother and sisters get a look at them. We lived in a remote corner of the planet in a tiny town where my father was postmaster, and this encyclopedia was my only window onto the outside world. In one section there was a series of pictures of mankind down through the ages. I remember the figures only vaguely: they were of course all men, since this was still the fifties. I cannot say exactly now what periods they represented. I suppose there was an ancient Greek, then a Roman, then a medieval knight, a cavalier, an eighteenth-century aristocrat—the usual potted history of humanity, seen through Western eyes. What I remember vividly is that I liked all the figures except the last one: twentieth-century man.

He had a short-back-and-sides haircut, and one of those faces that looks solid, square but at the same time boring, unimaginative, tame, domesticated, bourgeois. Perhaps he was a scientist or a bureaucrat. Perhaps he wore glasses. He was probably dressed in a grey suit and tie. And I remember thinking: No, I’m not going to become like that, I’m never going to look like that. Never. That’s not my idea of a man. The cavalier, the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century aristocrat, those are the men I’m going to become. And when I think back now I am sure it was because of their hair. They all had long flowing hair and grand colorful clothes.

I had never seen a man with long hair in real life. All my heroes were short-haired rugby players, whose games I re-enacted with cotton-reels on my mother’s sewing table, with an excited commentary in the histrionic voice of the leading rugby broadcaster of the day. Yet the long hair of the knights and cavaliers is something I recognized at once as a fine thing to have. I had only ever seen women with long hair but I had no wish whatsoever to be a woman or to look like one. I wanted to be a long-haired man. I thought of them as looking not like women but like adventurers—wild, dashing, swashbuckling figures who lived life to the full. I hasten to emphasize (in this age of intimate confessions) that this curious predilection was not accompanied by any tendency to adopt girlish clothes, hair or behavior at any stage of my childhood. My schoolboy sartorial tastes remained rigorously conventional. But when in my student years long hair for males suddenly came in, I adopted it instinctively, with a sense almost of recognition, and of relief that at last things were getting back to normal. And in later years when I was a long-haired vagabond wandering about Europe and I talked to young German and French freaks, they often told me similar stories to mine. When they were children they had seen pictures in history-books of long-haired medieval kings and knights and they had at once known that that was what they wanted to look like—that was what men ought to look like, not like their short-haired fathers. And the fact that their fathers were the war hero generation and hated long hair as sissy made them all the more determined to have it. Long hair seemed to our generation the expression of all the most intense and passionate possibilities of life. I was determined from an early age not to live a short-haired existence.

Where did this determination come from? Why did so many of our generation pick on the image of long hair as what we wanted to look like? I suspect because it was the opposite of what our fathers looked like. Personally I had nothing against my father, who was not only a champion athlete but also a man of immense charm and charisma—affectionate, sentimental and emotional (he cried in the cinema and watching TV soaps, which made me cringe and resolve never to do the same.) But the generation of male cinema stars of that time, represented at their most typical by John Wayne (whom my father admired), exhibited a kind of caricature of masculinity, an ox-like, taciturn brutishness, a muscle-bound, narrow-minded, unimaginative dumbness, for which our generation felt a growing contempt as something oddly sexless. Was it because the war hero generation were somehow more masculine than we could ever hope to be that we rejected all notion of competing with them in those terms? Or was it one of those spontaneous revolts of youth against a tendency in history that has gone too far, as if youth somehow still has an ear for the dead, is in touch with previous generations, and instinctively returns to the norms of human behavior from which their parents have deviated? Does youth have an inherited memory of what past ages knew but what the world they have been born into has momentarily forgotten? Does mankind have an in-built correcting mechanism?

At any rate as I plunged at sixteen into the turbulent years of university (anti-Vietnam war protests, the counter-culture), I became convinced that we were living a cultural revolution of historic proportions. The revolt was not just against the Second World War generation but against the entire direction of Western civilization since the Industrial Revolution. I saw the start of the short-haired age as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the introduction of trousers, the disappearance of men’s bodies into dark shapeless suits instead of the skin-tight breeches and colorful flowing cloaks that they had worn for the previous five centuries. I saw the early decades of the nineteenth century as the beginning of a dark age of Puritanism, a systematic beating down of the spirit, a suppression of men’s feelings, a mechanization of the mind, through industrialization, militarization and institutionalization, which had turned men into dark-suited zombies, slaves, oxen, cannon-fodder—a dark night of the soul from which we were only now, in the bright explosive sixties, awakening. I saw the last full human beings as the early nineteenth-century romantic poets, protesting desperately against the dark night they saw closing in on them, and I saw our generation as emerging finally at the other end of the industrial tunnel, free to be as they were. My heroes were Byron, Shelley, Blake, Keats, and later on, as a vagabond in France, Rimbaud, but I saw our generation as freer than theirs, free from the illusions of class, the need for material goods, the repression of sex. Thanks to the pill, girls of our generation had at last understood that we could make love without going through the time-serving slavery to earn money, to buy a house and other material goods, which the system had imposed on previous generations as a prior condition for having sex. Embracing poverty, we were free to enjoy a life of love-making, music, poetry, contemplation, and endless travel, and the world was our oyster. These convictions took a while to reach boiling point, but after dropping out of a Ph.D. program in Canada I went on the road and spent seven happy years, during which I visited every continent and worked for a total of less than eighteen months at whatever casual work came my way. And I saw the end of the long-haired counter-culture in the depression of the early eighties as the failure of a collective dream as tragic and devastating as the defeat of the English Revolution, which drove Milton to write Paradise Lost.

Ah, sweet youth and its illusions! How much of this entire romantic reading of the past stands up to analysis, from the perspective of middle age, now that it is fading into the fond memories of a graying generation? Like all unifying visions of history it is wildly subjective, an arbitrary selection of events and aspects of former ages to support a pre-ordained conclusion, a reconstruction of the past to justify a certain direction in the present. And now as I look back on it (from the serene and settled comfort of a staid Swiss city), I am embarrassed by the over-simplifications, the absurd inflation of superficial, passing fashions into grand historic upheavals. But I also find myself correcting it, modifying it, tacking on vast tracts of ideological reasoning, in the light of experience and of subsequent developments such as feminism and the other neo-Marxist ideologies that sprang from that period. I see that my embellishments and modifications are unconsciously trying to validate a core of beliefs which I still hold to. In short, with the best will in the world I cannot free myself entirely from this intoxicating vision. It is as though my mental perspective on the world had been defined forever by the fresh and magical perceptions of youth, and however much I modify the direction of my thought, I cannot change its point of departure.

What remains unaltered is my conviction that a change occurred in nineteenth century Western man, a new culture, a new sensibility (or rather insensibility) arose, and this cultural regime lasted till the late 1960’s, after which we began to emerge from it. A good deal of the debate about feminism and about the alleged crisis of masculinity in this age would become more coherent if we understood that the men of the first half of the twentieth century were not normal men by the standards of history. What we saw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a process of extreme masculinization and militarization of Western man which reached its apogee in the two greatest wars in history. Fighting these apocalyptic, hellish wars transformed men into harder, tougher, more self-controlled and less emotionally expressive beings than any generation of men before them. The militarization of man had never been carried out on such a massive scale in the West since the Roman Republic or the ancient Germanic tribes. Never since those times had the entire male population been trained seriously for war by compulsory military service—which in most European countries lasted between one and three years throughout the entire twentieth century. In the Middle Ages only an aristocratic warrior caste (or mercenary professionals) trained regularly for war, and mass participation in wars was rare, short-term, and undertaken without serious training. There were isolated experiments in conscription, briefly by Sweden in the sixteenth century, and more durably by Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century. But only with the Napoleonic wars did several European countries, starting with France, begin to conscript their entire male population. At first it was only for the duration of the wars, and in 1815 it came to an end, except in Prussia. But as militarism gathered pace in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, conscription in peacetime was introduced over much of the European continent. Military training for all men, for periods of up to three years, was seen as vital if a country was to be ready for war at any time. The readiness to take part in battle became an essential part of the male character—even its most important part. No other quality of a man could ever compensate for his inadequacy as a soldier. This growing militarization of society reached its culmination in the two world wars, in which poets, artists and philosophers all joined enthusiastically in the greatest mass slaughter in human history. In the twentieth century total war became the central human experience for an entire world-wide civilization. The preparation for this monstrous immolation of human beings became part and parcel of the male character and the male identity to a degree not seen for over a thousand years.

To get an idea of what this means, if you made a list of the thirty greatest European and Western writers of every century for the past millennium, you would find that the twentieth century list had by far the largest number who had seen war at first hand and been in the line of fire. You can take names almost at random: Hemingway, Faulkner, Malraux, Céline, Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Mailer, Solzhenitsyn, Böll, Grass––all of them war veterans. Which great creative writer of the nineteenth century actually fought in a war? I can only think of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Maupassant. Nietzsche observed one at close quarters, Crane described one at second hand, and Byron set off on one, dying of disease before seeing action—but none of these men actually stood in a front line and got shot at. In no century before the twentieth can you find such a high proportion of the major writers of the age whose character and sense of manhood was forged on the field of battle. The age we have emerged from was, beyond comparison with all ages of the past, an age of war, in which war conditioned men’s sense of identity and personal worth. The fact seems an obvious one as soon as you state it, but because it is obvious it has been ignored. We have taken for granted a fact which lies at the root of the fundamental distortion of human nature in the age we have just lived through.

It is this unique culture of war and the type of man it produced that both the pacifist counter-culture of the late sixties and the feminists of the seventies rebelled against. The two rebellions were linked but also at cross purposes. The young men revolted because they did not want to be like their fathers, and rejected the whole cultural baggage of the warrior role and their gender destiny of brave cannon-fodder. By extension, they rejected the whole cult of work, competition, material achievement, self-sacrifice for the goal of wealth—a fusion of aggressive drive and conformist slavery like the warrior cult itself. The rebellion of the young women was more complex. In true Oedipal fashion they wanted to be like their war-hero fathers but felt rejected by them and prevented from imitating them by the barrier of gender roles—which they wanted removed. The young men were like Tamburlaine’s sissy pacifist son who rejected war and preferred wine, women and song. The young women were like Agamemnon’s daughter, Electra, despising their mother, worshipping their warrior father, and demanding the right to be like him. Seventies feminism was both revolt and the ultimate conformity: revolt against the exclusion of women, the gender apartheid that kept them from participating in the culture of masculine values, but at the same time a profound capitulation to that culture—a mass conversion of women to the cult of aggressiveness, competition, achievement, dominance, power. And ironically this adoption of the masculine character by women occurred (like many imitations of the dominant class by the lower orders) a generation late, when the men were already trying to retreat from it. This time-lag produced one of the great mismatches of history: pacifist, hippie, drop-out male meets aggressive, competitive, over-achieving female. The feminist drive to move women in a masculine direction put a rapid end to the counter-culture’s attempt to move men in a feminine direction. By the 1980’s the hippie drop-out men were cutting their hair and re-entering the system, afraid that their jobs and positions had been usurped by the new generation of ambitious, ladder-climbing women. The new orientation of women towards material success—Madonna’s Material Girl—pushed the men back into the competitive mode with a vengeance. And so the stock-trading, yacht-racing golden boy in his BMW replaced the hippie drop-out. From then on the only males who remained committed to a change in the masculine character were the vocal homosexual minority.

When one sex tries to change its traditional image, it is limited in how far it can go by its need to remain attractive to the other sex. The young men of the sixties became long-haired, pacifist drop-outs with the encouragement of the girls, who rewarded the new fashion with their sexual favors. But as women, under the influence of feminism, became more ambitious, aggressive, and competitive, they forced men to return to the stereotype of masculinity in order to remain attractive to them—except for those men indifferent to women. The gay minority thus filled the vacuum after the collapse of the counter-culture and became the new noisy vanguard of change. But for the tiny homosexual minority to try to lead a re-alignment of the male character as a whole was a doomed cause. It only confused the issue and stigmatized all non-conventional male behavior as gay. An opposite current of violent, aggressive subcultures emerged among young men in the 1980’s: skinheads, hooligans, yobs, drunken lads, soon to be followed by gangster rappers. They had new role-models: the grotesquely muscled action-film heroes and the tag-wrestling human gorillas. Against this aggressive tide, the pallid figure of the New Man came to be seen as a spineless wimp—submitting to a strain of aggressive feminism which wanted men to assume the domestic role that women now rejected. He became another awful warning to conservative pundits of the perversions of political correctness and the decline of Western manhood.

But the world wars were not the only factor in the masculinization of men in the last hundred or so years. The great wars were merely the climax of a movement already begun with the Western colonization of other parts of the world and the cult of the intrepid pioneer. Pioneering culture was essentially masculine culture, in much the same way as the army. Many gold-mining towns in America and Australia had almost no women, except for bar-room dancers and prostitutes. The feminine values developed in eight hundred years of aristocratic European civilization were forgotten in the brutal struggle to survive on the frontier or in the outback. The civilization of high art, of sonnets and sonatas, was erased from the memory of the men on the wagon trains pushing through the territory of fierce Indian tribes. The sonnet and the sonata belong to a world where the feminine values of grace, wit, elegance, charm, compassion, gentleness have their honored place. In the world of the wagon train only the masculine values of courage, strength, endurance, hardness and aggressiveness have any usefulness. Femininity is the luxury of a prosperous, peaceful and secure society. When the Anglo-Saxons undertook the forcible settlement of other continents, they left all that behind them. Women became marginalized figures—and often confused ones, torn between the need to wield hoe and rifle and the unreal lure of the Paris fashion catalogues. Then when the New World imposed its imprint on the Old after its decisive intervention in the First World War, the ultra-masculine, pioneering culture came home to Europe and especially to Britain.

The suddenness of the transformation of human types brought about by the Great War is not yet part of our mental picture of the century. A dandy like Oscar Wilde, feeding on the old aristocratic tradition of drawing-room wit and elegance, would never be possible again. Wilde’s effete obsession with what it is to be a gentleman (A gentleman never looks out the window he replied when complimented on the view from his townhouse) was replaced by Hemingway’s cruder obsession with what it takes to be a man—a compound of the American pioneer culture and the war culture. This shift in the primary focus of men’s sense of worth from their class to their sex excluded women at the very moment when they were finally gaining access to political rights and professional careers. It should be obvious that it is easier for a woman to be a gentleman than to be a man. Women are more at home and respected in the world of Wilde than the world of Hemingway. If the measure of human worth is style, class and wit, women can display style, class and wit as well as any man. If the yardstick of human excellence is testosterone-charged physical courage, women will generally be seen as inferior specimens. This is the key to the unenviable position of American women throughout their history and of all Western women in the Americanized twentieth century. Condemned to inferiority by a one-sidedly masculine culture, they faced a dilemma. Should they seek to emulate the dominant masculine values and prove that they too can be hard, tough and aggressive? Or should they accept a social ghettoization and continue to display the feminine qualities which society as a whole looks down on as secondary? The women’s liberation movement of the seventies took the first course: masculinization. And in so doing it sabotaged any attempt to move the general values of society back in a more feminine direction.

But the path seventies feminism took in its masculinization of women had already been laid down by earlier generations. The First World War, by pushing women into the factories to replace the mobilized men, gave them new skills, new confidence, a new independence. They were then expected to abandon all that when the war ended and return to a domestic role. The dislocation of sexual mores caused by both wars, as women began to see their traditional holding off till marriage as absurd and wasteful when their boyfriend might be killed the next week, had far-reaching consequences. After the First World War the massive shortage of marriageable men (since so many young men had been killed or maimed and hence taken off the market in each of the belligerent countries) led women to compete harder for men. Women compete by putting out sooner, and the relative sexual liberation of the 1920’s was the result (including a current of lesbianism for the surplus women.) The same thing was replayed after the Second World War, but with a time lag. The actual loss of life among Western Allied servicemen was lower in the Second World War than the First, but the time they spent away from home was longer (especially for the Americans.) This caused a baby shortage during the war and a baby boom after the war, as husbands rejoined wives or men got married. The effect of this came twenty years later as the baby boom women suddenly found a shortage of men in their normal target age-group. This has generally been two to three years older than themselves because of the earlier puberty of girls. A baby-boom woman, born in 1947 or 1948, was looking for a man born in 1944 or 1945, and she had a hard job finding one in an age-group a quarter smaller than her own. Of course she could look for a mate among the men of her own age, but they were already well provided for by their normal matches two or three years younger (who were even more numerous.) The surplus baby boom women thus had to compete vigorously for a limited market of men. The extreme sexual liberation of the late 60’s was the result. For the first time in history middle-class girls put out on a first date, afraid that if they didn’t there wouldn’t be a second one. The pill removed the fear of pregnancy even as a new cult of liberty removed the social stigma. The unprecedented wealth of sexual opportunity for men (no longer obliged to pay for sexual variety) meant in turn a new instability of marriage. And if women could no longer trust marriage to last, because the girl at the bus-stop was always likely to steal their husband, then the traditional division of marriage roles broke down. The contract whereby the man earned the money while the woman raised the kids no longer worked if the man was likely to be spirited away by another girl tomorrow. So the woman had to earn too. And if she wanted financial independence, she had to earn not just a supplementary income but a real one, which meant demanding access to the top jobs. And so the path of feminist demands was laid down not just by ideology but by demography, and by the change in sexual mores it imposed. The dislocations of our society are striking proof that the mobilization of all the young men to fight total war is a disaster for civilization itself, with consequences that affect all future generations.

Such are the themes of this book. It explores the thesis of the masculine century: that a fundamental change occurred in the character of Western man over a period of the recent past which we can, if we wish, neatly bracket between the American Civil War (the first modern war) and the Vietnam war—that second civil war which tore America apart, and which marked the end of old-style Western imperialism. Or to measure it by a broader standard, a period which began with Darwin and Marx in the 1860’s and ended—after a century of wars based on the two ideologies of violent struggle which these men developed—with the final defeat of Marxism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will examine this change in Western man’s character, its causes, its reflection in thought and literature and art, its evolution, its consequences, and the confusions and conflicts of the period of normalization that we are now entered upon. And we will see how much light this can throw upon some of the most confused and tangled ideological and social debates of our time.

2) MASCULINITY:CONSTANT OR VARIABLE?

Some researchers claim that for the past thirty or forty years the male sperm count in the West has been steadily falling. One study indicated a decline of one third in sperm counts since 1940. The same trend applies, allegedly, to penis size, testosterone levels and various other physical yard-sticks of virility. While the methods of data collection and measurement have been questioned, there is a surprising consensus even among serious scientists that something like this may be happening.² Of course this could be the effect of dioxin or other chemicals in herbicides and pesticides, the use of female hormone-like substances in fattening cattle or poultry, or various other environmental influences which affect the human endocrine system, inhibit the action of male hormone and interfere with the development of fetuses into fully-fledged males—thereby leading among other things to an increase in homosexuality. But it may also be a simple swing of the pendulum. The Western male may be moving back to normality after a period of excessive masculinity, due to the militarization of the entire male population in the world wars. We are unfortunately unable to measure the sperm counts and testosterone levels of men of previous centuries to determine whether early twentieth century man was an average male, or was an excessively virile type which is now fading.

This of course raises the question: is virility a constant or a variable, over time, place, race and culture? And if it is variable, does it have a norm? And who is to say what this norm is? More specifically, what allows us to say that the highest sperm count is the most normal? Or even the best for the survival of the species? Why should we lament its fall? High sperm counts and testosterone levels may appear to maximize survival chances for our race in the short term, but if these very masculine, aggressive males make another catastrophic war with one another, it may well lessen survival chances in the long term. And if the excesses of the cult of masculinity have led to such a devaluation of women’s character and role that Western women have rushed to adopt the reigning masculine values, pursue careers and reject motherhood, provoking a crisis in marriage and a fall in birth-rates, then this again may threaten rather than enhance our chances of survival as a race. Perhaps a move back to a less masculine norm may be a way of improving relations between the sexes, stabilizing marriages, and revalorizing the feminine personality and the essential female task of child-bearing. All of that may well be more important to our survival than retaining the highest sperm counts, given the enormous overkill in the amount of sperm we produce