Eros and Erosion

...Nonetheless, Sexual Suicide is charged with intellectual excitement, and chock full of bibliographical references, ranging from Robert Briffanlt and Virginia Woolf to Irving Kristol and Esther Vilar, so that we have a veritable encyclopedia of up-to-the-minute thinking on male and female...

...The Arapesh, the Mundugumor and the Tachambali all permitted extraordinary diversity of sexual function, and they all, like the dinosaur, became extinct...

...The word "sexual," for him, embodies the whole complex of preludes and sequels to the union of male and female that takes place under the momentum of their common aspiration for progeny...

...Not only does the ghetto male grow up in a milieu where women get most of the available jobs, receive the welfare money and run the schools, but the feminists add insult to injury by depriving him even of the benefits of fair employment laws...

...To wean them from their ingrained evolutionary role as hunters and predators, and induce them to create and support families, women have had t" use all their ingenuity and attractiveness...

...Many of us have tended rather automatically to admire the speed with which Libbers picked up the political tactics of the civil rights movement, but Gilder's special quality as a social critic is to persist in an interpretation even if it is uncomfortable to our sentiments or somehow offends our sense of nicety...

...It has raised our consciousness not of our potential erudition, decency or charm, but of the presumed threat that someone might be undervaluing us...

...In other words, he is capable, unlike his opposition, of holding more than one idea in his mind at the same time, the mark, according to Scott Fitzgerald, of a first-rate intelligence...

...A good deal of the reader's confidence in Gilder derives from this undercurrent of the universal in his thought...

...He attributes enormous weight to the book Open Marriage by George and Nena O'Neill, with its vulgar terminology of "synergic couples," "peak experiences" and "Nowness of self...

...Perhaps, though, there is a strong intuitive element in impassioned homiletic writing like Gilder's, because his most eloquent chapter, "Women vs...

...And should we begin to feel too secure about the life force preserving sexual order, we had better keep in mind the three New Guinea tribes Gilder adduces for his argument in favor of differentiated roles out of Margaret Mead's Three Primitive Societies...

...and upper-class white women are promoted into the prestigious positions that educated black men might for the first time have won...

...Yet it rests on the somewhat questionable first premise that because woman's responsibility in procreation is more important and more sensuously satisfying than man's, men feel emotionally deprived...

...these in turn depend poignantly, perilously, on how women behave and what expectations they have...

...Most jobs are boring, performed by men to maintain their role as provider...

...That men feel in any way inferior is not clear...

...private companies prefer to hire black women to dispose of two aggrieved categories at once...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp WOMEN'S Liberation may have helped some of us to be better than we were by enhancing our career opportunities, yet it has damaged more of us by ushering in a period of female pridefulness and solipsism unmatched in history...

...He believes that if women invade realms conventionally regarded as masculine, men will desperately try to escape, to the street or to higher levels, as they did in the Soviet Union, where women moved into medicine and medical men departed into administration and surgery...

...Not a fraternal or democratic line of thought, but a touching plea for privacy that may do more for amicable relations than a scrupulous division of household chores...

...This did not happen, as romantic egoists might suppose, to promote intimacy and companionship...

...Faced with the imperious combination of female sexual and financial power, the men all too often storm in with guns, knives and phalluses high...

...Under their pressure...

...If large numbers of women move into the job force in important professional capacities, large numbers of men will be frustrated in their careers...

...The book is both a fiery sermon about the indispensa-bility of monogamous marriage and durable family structures to civilized life, and a lucid examination of the distinction between "rights" and happiness, between what seems superficially to be fair and what mankind can tolerate...

...George Gilder's Sexual Suicide launches a systematic, many-sided thesis that ferries us from the tight little island of Liberationist ultimatums to the livelier mainland of complex bisexual negotiations...

...They foster the delusion that the branches of a tree can be liberated from the trunk...

...As painful as it is to say it," he writes, "only a small portion of Americans can hold interesting and remunerative jobs...

...Gilder warns that the fulfillment of women hinges on the outlook and morale of men...

...and he unfolds with masochistic relish the "perils of androgyny" that will reduce us to "behavioral gibberish...

...if they falter, we tumble into social disarray...

...Gilder calls this "positively obscene from the perspective of slavery and segregation...

...it seems to put him beyond the incursions of the immediate and the concrete...

...Even when he comes to a basic feminist tenet like equal pay for equal work, accepted by the most outspoken critics of Women's Lib without question...

...government is diverted from paying attention to discrimination against him...

...Blacks," turns out to be a brilliant confirmation of his argument...

...What happens in the inner realm of women finally shapes what happens on our social surfaces, determining the level of happiness, energy, creativity and solidarity in the nation...

...Gilder projects us with chilling detail into a future where "cloning" has erased individuality by implanting the nucleus of a human cell into the enucleated cell of a female egg and creating an exact reproduction of the donor...

...So whether we are after private amity or public weal we must, according to Gilder, abide by what he calls "the sexual constitution," the series of implicit understandings and arrangements which make it worthwhile and inviting for men to become providers...

...Like Steven Goldberg, who methodically argues in his recent The Inevitability of Patriarchy that a hormonal factor gives males a greater capacity for aggression which can be invoked as an advantage in almost any activity, Gilder adopts a certain stoicism in the face of unalterable facts and uncontrollable forces, and is not disposed to rail at the laws of biology...

...But Sexual Suicide is actually a response to the very current attention-capturing conglomerate intellectual phenomenon known as Women's Liberation, down to its perhaps most trivial manifestation, Susan Brownmiller's essay "On Goosing...

...We can take it as testimony to the complementary mentality of the sexes that we had to wait for a man to put the subject of feminism into a broader context, where work, money, sex and achievement all affect one another, and where both genders must show some submission to the purposes of society...

...Gilder is not concerned about espousing the politically uncongenial point of view...

...The feminists galvanize us to forage for recognition, variety, impact, the equal fruits of experience, regardless of what the reverberations of success will be outside the newly glamorized perimeters of ourselves...

...The most ardent feminists could not have fantasized a more triumphant image of power than this one, based on the ancient awe of the hand that rocks the cradle...

...As a result, the book suffers from the journalistic syndrome of oversusceptibility, and of making instant predictions of dire trends that may well require rapid reassessments six months later...

...He can, for instance, detect the prurient note when spokespeople like Germaine Greer or Kate Millett write or talk about rape, without worrying that he will be regarded as calloused to acts of brutality against women...

...But if there really is biological sense to human behavior, if male and female do indeed have a systematically ordained role to perform, is Gilder not being far too responsive to fads, rhetoric and publicity...

...To compensate for this male disadvantage, women must hew to their role and reinforce men in theirs...

...The beauty of Gilder's reasoning is that it is so persevering and complete...

...Still, the women's movement cruises in, claiming that its grievances are on a level with blacks...

...The movement is in spirit very like the poetess who, aspiring to utmost brevity of composition, eventually refined her concepts to the one-word poem, "I...

...Before women can exercise their power, however, they have to acknowledge that civilization does not come naturally to men...

...In real life, few males minimize their part in conceiving babies, and most seem content to remain fond spectators in the process of bearing and nursing them...

...When the sexual constitution is jostled and ghetto women become, via thoughtless social policy, the main providers, the men bolt...

...and culture has had to invest marriage with the ceremonial sanction of religion and law...

...These goals do not indicate a moral lapse, like simple selfishness, but an intellectual one: a deaf ear for polyphony, a short vision for crosscurrents and interactions...

...It evolved and survived in the course of sustaining civilized societies where love, intimacy and companionship might flourish...

...Women control not the economy of the marketplace," he says, "but the economy of Eros...