Corseted Minds: Does Fear of Irrelevance Send Conservative Men Fleeing to the Victorian Age?

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Lynn Parramore

Corseted Minds: Does Fear of Irrelevance Send Conservative Men Fleeing to the Victorian Age?
If you focus on the utilitarian value of human beings, you may find yourself at some point nervously glancing in the mirror.

February 28, 2012 |


In the last 50 years, American women have finally been able to reliably earn a living, thus rendering men economically unnecessary. Women are outstripping men in education. We’re breaking the glass ceiling. Childbirth out of wedlock no longer carries disgrace. There’s enough sperm stashed away in banks to promulgate the human race indefinitely. On a biological level, modern science has debunked the Adam’s rib story about the female being a derivative of the male.

Still more shattering, there’s even worry that the Y chromosome is in danger of extinction. At the very least, it has seen better days. As the New York Times recently reported:

“Men, or at least male biologists, have long been alarmed that their tiny Y chromosome, once the same size as its buxom partner, the X, will continue to wither away until it simply vanishes. The male sex would then become extinct, they fear, leaving women to invent some virgin-birth method of reproduction and propagate a sexless species.”

That’s gotta make Rick Santorum nervous. (Though the Times does concede that men may have “long-term viability” after all).

Conservatives find themselves in an era of technological advance, information on steroids, women on the rise, and men who do not know what their role is supposed to be. Can we be surprised that they look back wistfully on a “simpler time” when gender roles were strictly defined – and when men did the defining? ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/news/154296/corseted_minds%3A_does_fear_of_irrelevance_send_conservative_men_fleeing_to_the_victorian_age/

[enough]

1. I especially like the last paragraph of the article.

Nostalgia for a simpler time is a form of dragging your heels. It's a protest against something to which you have already partly capitulated. The demise of patriarchal structures, which ultimately derive their authority from religious systems, has been in progress for a while, and it will continue. The tragedy for conservatives is not this demise, but their failure to imagine a viable, dynamic and diverse culture in its place. A place in which men and women do not ask what the other is for.

Thanks for posting this, marmar.

[starroute]

2. That Y chromosome stuff has been thoroughly debunked

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120222154359.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2012) — Over the past decade, Whitehead Institute Director David Page and his lab have steadily been churning out research that should have permanently debunked the rotting Y theory, but to no avail.

"For the past 10 years, the one dominant storyline in public discourse about the Y is that it is disappearing," says Page. "Putting aside the question of whether this ever had a sound scientific basis, the story went viral -- fast -- and has stayed viral. I can't give a talk without being asked about the disappearing Y. This idea has been so pervasive that it has kept us from moving on to address the really important questions about the Y." . . .

"The Y was in free fall early on, and genes were lost at an incredibly rapid rate," says Page. "But then it leveled off, and it's been doing just fine since."

How fine? Well, the sequence of the rhesus Y, which was completed with the help of collaborators at the sequencing centers at Washington University School of Medicine and Baylor College of Medicine, shows the chromosome hasn't lost a single ancestral gene in the past 25 million years. By comparison, the human Y has lost just one ancestral gene in that period, and that loss occurred in a segment that comprises just 3% of the entire chromosome.