Thanks -- this is spot-on, I'd say, but I have one quibble (related to my reply to you re: sexual vs. asexual reproduction). I quite agree that masculinity has lost its distinctive role. But along with that, femininity has too, apart from the child-bearing role; other than that, anything's potentially up for grabs. It is not only masculinity that is lost or distorted. And I think that the feminine is not really the "default" sex in human beings. In languages all over the globe the feminine form is the marked form. In Genesis Eve is made from Adam; in Christianity God is incarnated as a man. I certainly don't think this is a mere male power-grab; it's a deep insight. I'll go out on a limb and argue that it is the masculine, human masculinity, that most greatly distinguishes the human from the animal. When the Greeks contemplated the boy as the ideal exemplar of beauty and the good, love for the boy was ideally also chaste, not tainted by the "merely animal" sexual act crucial for reproduction; that also, I think, reveals this insight. So, though I'm in no doubt about the process of emasculation that is taking place and the role of the feminist desire to castrate, I don't think the masculine is being replaced by anything genuinely female; rather, what is distinctively human is being neutered into indistinction. That's why this process goes hand-in-hand with atheism and nihilism (which is what I fear in BAP): we don't want to be imago dei anymore. |