516
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
chapters seven and eight of
Waiting for the End),
neglecting only the
sense in which what starts as a specifically American movement
be–
comes an international one, spreading to the
ye-ye
girls of France or
the working-class entertainers of Liverpool with astonishing swiftness
and ease.
What interests me more particularly right now is a parallel
as–
similationist attempt, which may, indeed, be more parochial and is
certainly most marked at the moment in the Anglo-Saxon world, i.e.,
in those cultural communities most totally committed to bourgeois–
Protestant values and surest that they are unequivocally "white." I am
thinking of the effort of young men in England and the United States
to assimilate into themselves (or even to assimilate themselves into)
that otherness, that sum total of rejected psychic elements which the
middle-class heirs of the Renaissance have identified with "woman."
To become new men, these children of the future seem to feel, they
must not only become more Black than White but more female than
male. And it is natural that the need to make such an adjustment
be
felt with especial acuteness in post-Protestant highly industrialized
societies, where the functions regarded as specifically male for some
three hundred years tend most rapidly to become obsolete.
Surely, in America, machines already perform better than humaru.
a large number of those aggressive-productive activities which our an–
cestors considered man's special province, even
his
raison d'etre.
Not
only has the male's prerogative of making things and money (which is
to say, of working) been preempted, but also his time-honored privi–
lege of dealing out death by hand, which until quite recendy was re–
garded as a supreme mark of masculine valor. While it seems theoreti–
cally possible, even in the heart of Anglo-Saxondom, to imagine a
leisurely, pacific male, in fact the losses in secondary functions sus–
tained by men appear to have shaken their faith in their primary
masculine function as well, in their ability to achieve the conquest (as
the traditional metaphor has it) of women. Earlier, advances in tech–
nology had detached the wooing and winning of women from the
begetting of children; and though the invention of the condom had at
least left the decision to inhibit fatherhood in the power of males,
its
replacement by the "loop" and the "pill" has placed paternity at the
mercy of the whims of women.
Writers of fiction and verse registered the technological obso-
