WANTED: Women with balls, men without. Is this the slogan for 1997?
John Greenway, in The American Tradition, said about feminist Elizabeth Gould Davis, "She hates testicles, thus limiting the men she can admire to Democratic candidates for president."
This year, Democratic president Bill Clinton appointed a woman as his foreign minister. "At last," said a former diplomat in the Reagan and Bush State Departments, "we have a Secretary of State with cojones".
Meanwhile Down Under, 27-year-old Brad Rogers has become a finalist in the Miss Australia contest. A winner of the Miss Victoria title, he is the first male to compete in the contest's 42-year history.
Conservative writers have been raving for years about the decline in "traditional" values. James Bond creator Ian Fleming wrote in Goldfinger in 1959:
He came to the conclusion that she was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality'. As a result of 50 years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not completely homosexual, but not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits -- barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.
Fleming would have mightily disapproved of Bond's new boss — the current "M" is a battleaxe who considers Bond to be a dinosaur. He might have preferred the misogynistic Taliban, who have seized control of Afghanistan and imposed their own interpretation of Islamic law.
"We don't want haraam (unclean) things on TV, like women," said Nazar Mohammed Shafiyaq, head of the Afghani government's TV stations. Women have already been excluded from all other aspects of public life.
There is much to be said for a society where gender-inspired discriminatory barriers come tumbling down. The glass ceiling is cracking, and must fall. Women cannot be denied access to any field or endeavour which may allow them to develop their potential to the fullest.
But somewhere down the line, some misguided misfit assumed that gender equality implied androgyny men and women who look, walk, talk and dress after the same fashion. Suddenly, Fleming's nightmare is coming true.
Fertility rates are declining in the First World. Modern couples are finding it harder to conceive, while birth rates in the Third World continue to soar.
More libido clinics are springing up to bolster sagging ambitions. They cater not to the limp-wristed but to the supposedly macho — you will find their advertisements among those for shock-absorbers and bull-bars in CAR magazine.
I blame Hollywood which reflects the puritanical values of American society by pushing out the message that sex is bad and violence is good. The rating system makes it acceptable for 13-year-olds to see a woman's breast being hacked by a chainsaw, but you need to be 18 to see a woman's breast when she's making love.
The Hollywood outrage reflects itself in the rest of our society. Parents cringe at the thought of their children seeing them having sex, but have no problem with their children seeing them fighting. So generations have been brought up with the subtle message that the "correct" form of interaction between men and women is violent. Except it's no longer politically correct for men to be overtly violent. Killing is done more subtly by smart bombs and bulldozers, while the picture the world sees is Norman Schwarzkopf brushing away a tear.
Meanwhile, you have films like Guardian Angel, screened by SABC 2 this week which stars Cynthia Rothrock as a martial arts expert hired as a bodyguard by a playboy when his ex-fiancee threatens his life. In addition to the standard fare of bullets through the brain, said fiancee responds to a man who makes a pass by flinging a glass of alcohol onto his crotch, then setting fire to it.
If James Bond were to do that to a woman who made a pass at him, the keepers of our morality would be outraged. But switch roles, and the violence is acceptable. What's a man to do? If he makes a pass, it's unacceptable. If he's violent, it's unacceptable. But it's okay for women to do those things. It's the sort of thing that could make him go off and join the Taliban.
On the bright side, if American fertility rates continue to decline, Hollywood will become extinct. In the meanwhile, we should protect ourselves. We could start by shutting down our Publications Control Board which spends its time banning sex, but not violence.