Gimlé

A couple of articles have been causing a bit of a brouhaha on the web recently.

One is Kim Du Toit’s “The Pussification Of The Western Male”.

The other is Steven Den Beste’s “Anglo Women are an endangered species” (who exhibits good taste and sound judgement by playing GURPS and listening to Shostakovich).

Go on, read them, then come back here. Be warned though, Du Toit’s article, especially, is what the traditional English gentlemen would have called “uncouth”.

As in “lacking in good manners and refinement”.

Done? Good.

I’m going to be rude enough to paraphrase the point and conclusion of the two rants into one unified statement:

“There’s been a strong tendency in Anglo-American culture and society to turn men and women into de-sexualised, gender-neutral persons at the cost of sex-specific characteristics”

I apologise to Kim Du Toit for cleaning out his ignorant gay bashing, but unfortunately it doesn’t quite gel with his point. Gays like men to be men. After all, that’s the whole point of being attracted to them, isn’t it?

But then again, I suppose he can be forgiven for missing the whole Bear movement or the leather-gay thing.

The de-sexualisation of the Anglo-American culture, if a fact, is a bad thing. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to realise that.

Me being a European means that I don’t really have a sense for what your average American is like, any more than Du Toit knows what your average European is like, so I can’t honestly claim to be able to judge whether Du Toit’s and Den Beste’s observations are true or not.

It is something, though, that other cultures have claimed to observe about the anglo-american culture (Cesar, my Columbian friend used to be a frequent proponent of this theory).

It is one the few characteristic that seems to be fairly unique to the anglo-american one.

Although I’ve heard this description of American culture many times since, I still remember the first time I heard it. I, fairly young then, was arguing with my mother about film-ratings (me not being old enough to watch a movie I wanted to) and the discussion then turned to the fact that those ratings vary from culture to culture (I was trying to argue my way into seeing that movie).

One point that came up was that in Iceland violence tends to get a movie a high rating while nudity doesn’t. A movie with full-frontal nudity in a comic context would get a fairly low rating.

The UK and the USA are different. The movie with full-frontal nudity would probably get a higher rating there than a movie with a bit of casual violence.

To most of us who aren’t anglo-american this only means one thing. Those who are in charge of film-ratings, and consequently their culture as a whole, think that the physiological differences between a man and a woman are somehow harmful or a bad thing.

Frankly, it doesn’t make sense, but it is a symptom of a larger problem which Den Beste’s and Du Toit’s more polite examples exhibit as well.

I can’t say that it is a problem in my country. Or in most other European countries I know of.

There is a word for this Anglo-American problem but the word we’ve used to describe is not “pussification” and it isn’t a way of turning men into “girly-men”.

It’s Puritanism.

“The Scarlet Letter”, Den Beste’s “Anglo Women are an endangered species” and Du Toit’s “The Pussification Of The Western Male” all describe to us the same puritanical, sex-phobic America.

They are right to rail against it.

Just don’t blame it on gays or Europeans, because this one is entirely a problem of your own making.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.