Maybe it’s just me, but I have a nagging feeling that my gender, which once was fairly successful – Jonas Salk, Saul Bellow, Lowell Thomas, Tom Jones, the list goes on – is sagging and sinking, uncertain about changing norms of behaviour, and we don’t whoop and holler the way we used to, and what this predicts for our species is not good. Geneticists are talking about the need to establish testosterone banks so that future males will be able to produce sperm and deliver it where needed, never mind earning a living or playing ice hockey.
Women, who have always been in charge of social life, are now openly wielding power, outlining goals and purposes, establishing spending limits, deciding what colour the sheets and tablecloths should be. Men’s clubs, like the Masons and Elk and Moose, are a faint shadow of themselves, except perhaps in parts of South Dakota, while women are reforming the culture to their liking, and in my men’s group, the WBA (Wounded Buffalo Assn), we discuss how, when we’re in a mixed group, women do most of the talking and men toss in the occasional nod or shrug or “I suppose so”. Back in olden times, women occupied the kitchen and talked about children, neighbours, ancestors, people at church and men occupied the living room and talked about ideology. Now the two have merged and people are vastly more interesting than ideology, so men sit silent, dehorsed.
Last weekend my wife and I were visited by Lytton and Libby and Libby’s cousin Donna, and the three women went off in a burst of happy chatter and had a fabulous day together seeing art galleries and a botanical garden and historical sites, and we two men spent the day in separate rooms working silently on our laptops. This seems to be the pattern of things.
Men read the wrong books and get educated in the wrong subjects.
Graphs show clearly the dramatic increase in the percentage of women in science, technology, engineering and maths – the cheerful, hopeful, rational, progressive realms of knowledge – and women have now achieved equity in law school enrolment, the study of troublemaking, but too many men are enrolled in the humanities, which is the study of man’s inhumanity, and this is our problem. We’re reading too much history and literature and taking depressing courses in the social sciences. Too many men go into the arts, hoping to meet nice women, but the failure rate in the arts generally is about 95%, a dismal fact.
“History is a terrible field for men and should be avoided at all costs”
This idea that higher education has been bad for men occurred to me last week when I arrived in Minneapolis and met two very happy men. One was a cabdriver who was following the instructions of the GPS lady and the other was working in a Dairy Queen, making Blizzards, and I ordered a medium Butterfinger Blizzard and I heard him singing to himself as he whipped the candy chips into the ice milk, something I never hear men do who have a PhD in history. History is a terrible field for men and should be avoided at all costs.
History is the study of slimeballs and what good does this do a young man, to realise that for centuries our gender has been a blight upon the world? I majored in English, which is almost as useless as history: you read the novels of Thomas Hardy and you’ll want to live alone in a cabin in the woods and take up beekeeping and never talk to another human being. My brother was an engineer, a cheerful field of rational problem-solving, and I was an English major, which gives you no useful knowledge, only a superior attitude. If English departments were shut down and their students given jobs driving cabs and given the classics to read while they wait for fares, this would be a step forward.
My grandson is enrolled in architecture and is very happy about it, and I’ve told him that if he switches to humanities, I will disown him. I made a career writing fiction, but if I had it to do over again, I’d get a job in the field of desserts. I still could. My cousin Ben, a retired car salesman, bakes cherry pies and I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about him. I talk to him regularly, always about people we know, never ideology, and he is the cream of the Keillor crop.
Originally published by garrisonkeillor.com and reprinted here with permission.
