2001-05-28 - 7:11 p.m.
I finally stopped reading Salon even to point and laugh at its pretentiousness about six months ago. Its political reporting is still adequate (or at least better than CNN�s, which isn�t saying a lot), and editorially it shares my low opinion of the Shrub administration, but on the whole it just isn�t worth my time anymore. Even the ridiculously self-involved, navel-lint-picking essays which make up 99 percent of its content, and which I used to skim regularly in search of anyone deserving a GOYA ("Get Over Yourself Award," for those new to Miguelitoland), have gotten boring. And whoever wrote those random-text-generation programs pretending to be Camille Paglia and David Horowitz needs to upgrade them.
But then a friend pointed me to this piece of drivel. I try hard to be a Sensitive 21st-Century Male (honest), but some people are so deeply stupid and narcissistic that they need to be slapped upside the head for their own good and that of the whole human race:
"The boy is 12. He's a kid. So who knew I would be venturing so soon into the shadowy world of Celebrity Sex, Free Fuck Theatre and the tasteful BigBoobs.com?"
Oh! My! God! Can you believe it? This woman�s 12-year-old son is LOOKING AT PICTURES OF NAKED WOMEN! With no clothes on, even! On the INTERNET! I�m shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!
In her world, apparently, the proper parental response is to act out some weird pedophiliac version of the Pina Colada Song (getting an anonymous e-mail account and sending her own son mash-notes to "scare" him) and to strategize about how to de-gonad the poor kid so he�ll grow up to be the little girl his mother always wanted: "So how do I raise this child into a responsible and caring man in the blitz of Celebrity Sex and Free Fuck Theatre? I can only do it bit by bit as I figure out the terrain of his early teenage years. I can make him see �Pollock� instead of �Hannibal� or �Babette�s Feast� instead of �The Silence of the Lambs.� I can take him to hear Sister Helen Prejean lecture. I can drive him and his sisters to see snow in the mountains. I can take him to church, although he has recently decided he is agnostic or would prefer to believe in Zeus as much as God. I can keep taking walks with him."
That�s going to be one seriously fucked-up man-child. I can tell you that much already.
At what exact point in time did boyhood become a disease, anyway? It�s tempting to blame feminism for it, and a lot of fundie family-values types do (as if "feminism" were some sort of neuron-destroying drug everyone was doing back in the �70s, like poppers or macrame), but they�re wrong. This sort of knee-jerk blame-everything-on-the-Y-chromosome hysteria is just the flip side of good old-fashioned male chauvinism, when you think about it.
I�m not itching to go back to some mythical past when Men Were Men and Women Were Women--particularly if it means returning to an age when Negroes Knew Their Place and Gimps Were Packed off to Institutions Right After Birth--but at the same time I wouldn�t mind putting a little hair back on the chest of North American culture. Any ideas? Sneak some testosterone into the water supply? Ban chick movies? Appoint Uncle Bob Minister of Propaganda? Start a war with China? My guestbook is crying out for suggestions, people.
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