Culture of Androgeny
Blurring the Lines Between the Genders
by Lee Grady
Does anyone remember a time in America when men were men, women were women, and the children could tell the difference?
In case you haven't noticed, the entertainment industry and the educational establishment have teamed up in the last few years to try their best at destroying traditional sex roles. We are told that in this enlightened era we need to learn to be "gender neutral." Men are encouraged to explore their "feminine side"; women are pressured to get out into the working world and fight their way up the corporate ladder.
Michael Jackson, the epitome of 1980s androgynous chic, paints a clear picture in the minds of our youth that you don't have to be male or female - you can be both. He can belt out a song and dance about "The Man in the Mirror" and sound like Lady Soul at the same time. Meanwhile, polished talk show hosts assure us that we will all eventually be bisexual, thus ridding our society forever of unwanted stereotypes.
If this confusing trend continues, a trend which author George Gilder calls "the androgynous agenda," then America's sexual landscape is going to be drastically marred beyond recognition in a few more years. Consider some of the shocking developments which are taking place in relation to male and female roles:
* The number of male flight attendants rose from none in 1960 to a current total of over 10,000. Other traditionally feminine occupations also have experienced a surge of male interest, all the way from telephone operators to male strippers; 1
* Most state educational budgets now call for increased emphasis and spending on girls' athletics, and less for boys', causing boys' overall participation in school athletic programs to drop from 76 percent to 50 percent; 2
* The Boy Scouts of America, after fighting several costly legal battles, announced last year that they will not bar women from becoming leaders of scout troops;
* Leaders of mainline Protestant denominations have called for the removal of "sexist language" in the Bible and church hymns, proposing that God Himself is both male and female;
* Recent court decisions have mandated that the U.S. Army must admit professed homosexuals into military service;
* The state of California has now officially recognized America's first lesbian sorority on the UCLA campus. Gay rights activists praised the decision as a great victory, and are expecting similar rulings in favor of homosexual fraternities;3
George Gilder, who chronicles this erosion of the sex roles in his excellent book Men and Marriage, says the trend should alarm us: "Every year's statistics break the previous records and ever more graphic images arise to signal the passing of the sexual concepts of masculine and feminine on which Americans have based their lives and expectations."4 But why is it that we are experiencing this sex role crisis?
Cultural Bone Rot
Actually, what we are experiencing in the U.S. today is nothing new. It happened in ancient Sparta and in glorious Rome. It happened in 18th century France and is presently occurring in the nations of modern Scandinavia - as well as most other democracies in the West. George Gilder calls it sexual suicide. It could also be called God's cultural judgment.
It is explained very simply in a Bible passage penned by the Apostle Paul, which he wrote to the Christians in Rome at a time when the imperial capital was well on its way to becoming an androgynous society. In this classic epistle he describes in detail the fate of a culture which rejects God's authority and His immutable laws:
"For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools ... Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them ...
"For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire towards one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error" (portions of Romans 1:21-27).
This passage outlines the systematic breakdown of sex roles and the entire family structure itself - a structure which God designed to be the foundation of a healthy society. In a culture where men have rejected God's government and refused to submit to His moral requirements, a process of decay is set in motion. This moral entropy begins in the minds of men; as God's enlightening presence and protective influence is withdrawn, a pall of intellectual confusion settles over the society as a whole.
This intellectual depravity, as it progresses in intensity, brings about a twisting and a perverting of all that is natural and normal. And if we interpret Paul's comments to the Romans correctly, it would appear that sexual habits and roles are the ultimate target of this cultural bone rot process. When a society has divorced itself from God, the final result will be that men stop being men, women stop being women, and the institutions of marriage and family are destroyed.
When Paul tells us that men and women"abandon their natural function," this does not simply refer to homosexuality. What is "natural" for woman? Most assuredly her natural instinct is to marry, bear children, and devote much of her life to nurturing those children. In an anti-Christian society, women abandon these instincts. They revolt against the concept of childbearing, either through abortion or through neglect of nurturing responsibilities.
What is natural for the man? The most natural, God-given male instinct is for a man to give himself to one woman as her lifetime sexual partner in marriage, providing for her and for the children which they produce together. Whenever a civilization revolts against God, men simultaneously revolt against the institution of marriage.
This revolt does not begin with homosexuality. The large-scale breakdown of marriage in this country tends to parallel with the publication of Playboy magazine and the philosophy that it began to promote in the 1950s. Hugh Hefner's revolution encouraged men to leave the confines of marital fidelity under the guise of male sexual expression. But adultery is actually a revolt against masculinity and the natural male function, because it, and the resulting divorce, actually removes men from their primary role of husband, father and family provider.
Once men have rejected marriage, the door is then opened for the onslaught of homosexuality. Children no longer have a genuine male role model in the home, and this lack of a strong father figure completes the cycle of perversion: the young sons are sent out on a desperate search for the masculinity they never found by natural means, and the wounded daughters find it forever difficult to respect men when they reach adulthood.
Stopping "Gender Neutral" Policy
America's gradual drift from Judeo-Christian morality has now led us into the danger zone I have just described. One writer recently stated that the last twenty years in this country, in terms of public policy, could be described as"the homosexualization of America." But we did not get into this predicament without the help of an elite group of policymakers who have adopted an anti-family, anti-male, and anti-female agenda.
Leaders of the feminist movement (many of them are men, by the way) have told us that traditional sex roles are oppressive to one's individuality. They tell us that marriage is institutionalized rape, and that our economy is designed to enslave women to domestic duties. They tell us that women not only belong in the White House or on the construction site or in a fighter jet, but that we have a moral imperative to discriminate against men to put them there.
According to Gilder, Americans should learn a valuable lesson from the Swedes before it is too late. Over the last 25 years, Swedish social planners under the influence of feminism began to devise national policy that directly attacked the nuclear family. Legislation was enacted which removed all special protections for married women. Tax laws eliminated the joint return for a married couple, thus forcing both married partners to pay the same in taxes even if the wife did not work.
After a few years of such policy changes, it was impossible for a husband to provide for his family on one income. Women were forced into the workforce, and children were simultaneously forced into federal day-care facilities. Housing and tax benefits were even curtailed if families refused to place their children in the day-care centers. 5
Today in Sweden, traditional male and female roles have virtually been abolished. Men can no longer act as the principal providers. Women can no longer care for their children. Marriage has become a serious economic disadvantage, therefore most Swedish young people have rejected it. Not surprisingly, Sweden is now considering legalizing homosexual marriage - and will most likely be the first country in the world to do so.
Does the story of Sweden sound like a socialist nightmare? We are much closer to copying the Swedish pattern than most of us realize. Says Gilder, "The United States is enacting many of the policies that brought sexual suicide to Sweden. Despite the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and universal day-care, the feminists are gaining their ends piecemeal. In particular, the decline in the value of the child deduction has shifted the tax burden onto families with children.
"Through court decisions in favor of comparable worth, through the infiltration of the schools by feminists texts and teachers, through the day-care tax credits and other subsidies for the two-earner family, and through the rapid erosion of the joint income tax return and the housewife's right to social security, feminists are winning quietly by legal and legislative action what they cannot win in referenda."6
The Swedish agenda is already being seriously discussed in the halls of Congress as a viable option for American society. A bill proposing a massive federal day-care system is in consideration during this current legislative session. The feminist rallying cry is convincing more and more mothers to pursue employment outside the home. Our current welfare system has all but destroyed the self-esteem of lower class black males, mainly because single black mothers lose economic advantages if they marry.
What we need desperately in America today is a public policy which honors the clear differences between male and female; which places marriage in an honorable and economically desirable position; which eliminates no-fault divorce; which offers protection and security to the housewife; and which encourages home child care.
We cannot allow maleness and femaleness to drift together into a vague, unisexual zone of neutrality. We cannot allow monogamous marriage to become just one of several legally accepted lifestyles. We cannot allow federal economic policies to cripple and dismember the family structure.
Returning to pro-family policies will not be easy. It will require real men to stand up in the public arena to challenge the anti-gender activists. It will demand real women to defend the paramount role of traditional motherhood. But we cannot sit idly by while the social scientists plan America's sexual suicide. The culture which refuses to acknowledge and honor the differences between the sexes will neuter itself, and ultimately fade away into a childless oblivion.
1 George Gilder, Men and Marriage, ( Gretna, LA:Pelican Publishing Company, 1987), p. 138. 139.
2 Ibid., p. 122.
3 William Jasper, "Perversion and Ignorance," The New American, April 11, 1988, p. 45. 4 Gilder, p. 140.
5 Ibid., p. 151, 152. 6 Ibid., p. 153.
