The Useless American Male

 

 

Note: This is an excerpt from Sissy Nation: How America Became a Culture of Wimps & Stoopits, published by Virgin Books USA in 2007.

Everyone knows the Average American Male is completely useless. Curled up here inside the bubble of Sissitude and Stoopitness — inside Fundadome —  he plays with his guns, some real, some imagined. He plays with his on-line friendsters. He plays air guitar and fantasy football. He plays with himself.

In terms of emotional maturity, the Average American Male never makes it out of high school. That crotchety old geezer tootling down the sidewalk in his go-cart chair with his Life Alert and laminated AARP card hanging from his neck is a boy inside his head.

American society used to be organized to force the American Male at least to pretend to be a mature, responsible adult. He had to get a job, he had to get married, he had to be the bread-winner and bring home the bacon for the wife and kids. Specific days or hours were set aside for his playtime — almost always in the company of other males. He got to go on his fishing or hunting trips, watch football on Sunday, spend an hour at the bar sometimes after work. He looked forward to these free times the way he'd looked forward to the end of the school day and summer vacation. His woman knew that if he wasn't allowed this playtime he might go postal, or run away from home, or at the very least become mopey and resentful and even more useless to her.

Whatever else the institution of marriage ever was, it was a system for forcing males to act like responsible adults.

With the rise of the independent, wage-earning female, the simultaneous destruction of the family unit at the poverty end of the scale, the putting off of having kids or decision to have none, the spread of alternative relationships, and the general de-emphasizing of the male's lifetime commitment to marriage and to being the sole financial support of a family, he has found himself under less and less pressure to pretend to be a mature, responsible adult. He has more playtime. He can, with an ease unknown in his grandfather's day, indulge his inner adolescent in perpetuity. He can surround himself with games and toys, fantasy sports and fantasy adventures and fantasy friendsters. Freed from having to pretend he's a responsible adult, he can pretend he's whatever his boyish heart desires. A gangsta, a pimp, a zombie-hunting space commando. It doesn't much matter if we play these roles at home, on the screen or in the street. We're all Gameboy.

It's no wonder, then, that the Average American Male has become so confused about his masculinity and the role of masculinity in the Sissy world. He feels thoroughly pussy-whipped, not just by his own woman, but by women generally. He is treated like a lazy idiot, useful only for heavy lifting and procreation. No wonder he has retreated into a state of perpetual adolescence. No wonder so many young black males try to live like hypermasculine cartoons (hypermasculinity is Sissiness with a severe complex), and so many young white males try to dress, act and think like girls. Their mamas, girlfriends and wives wear the pants in this society. There's a good reason "yo mama" jokes are ubiquitous but you never hear "yo papa" jokes. Papa just is a joke.

Yes, we all know about the glass ceiling in the board room, and that women's average salaries are lower than men's. Guys set it up that way on purpose, a long time ago. They built in disincentives to women joining them at the workplace. It was one place men could go and pretend to be boss. That's why they didn't want women in their bars and clubs, either. Men needed zones where they could pretend to be in charge, pretend to be organized, pretend to be independent, and generally look busy pretending to be busy.

"I'm in charge of this office."

"I'm the boss of this boilermaker. Gimme another, I'll boss that one around too."

Bartenders observed a cardinal rule: If a woman calls, you never, ever say, "Yeah, he's right here. Hold on." Girltenders knew the rule, too.

Girltenders were allowed because, same as secretaries, they pretended the men were boss.

Men needed these places because everywhere else in their lives the women were in charge and made no pretense about the men being the boss. Opening up the workplace to women — and to everyone else — was the right and proper thing to do, but it did eliminate it as a place where men could hide. No wonder they all headed out to the woods to bang their drums. Where the hell else were they going to go?    

What's left? I'll tell you what's left. Those fake-fancy "gentlemen's" topless clubs with doofusy names like Scores and 10s and Foxes. The Average American Male drops fortunes in these joints. And for what? To watch putatively pretty fantasy women take off their shirts to show their plastic fantasy breasts. Woo hoo.

And for lap dances. Is there anything more demeaning than the lap dance? Not for the woman, for the man. The lap dance isn't about sex. It's interpretive modern dance illustrating the woman's total dominance of the male. The encounter is entirely in her control. A complete tease. He can get aroused, but he can't get no satisfaction. He can't kiss her, he can't even touch her, and it's for sure that if she gets him off it's going to be inside his shorts. The ultimate dry hump. How humiliating. And he pays top dollar for it. It'd be cheaper to marry her. Then she might actually have sex with him once a week.

Scores? It should be called You Won't Even Make First Base. Or Jagoff's.

These clubs have been designed specifically for the American Sissy. They are to real strip clubs what Internet porn is to peep booths, what the Generica is to real cars. They're clean, safe, generic, chained. They're Starbucks for Sissy sex. They're perfect examples of how here inside Fundadome, virtually all reality has been turned into virtual reality. American Sissies are terrified of actual sexual contact, of the physical and emotional exposure. They feel much safer and more comfortable with Internet porn and places like Jagoff's than with actual intimacy.

The Sexual Revolution only lasted about a decade, from the general availability of the pill by the early '70s to the AIDS panic of the early '80s. American Sissies were never all that into orgies and swinging anyway, and never did get the point of the zipless fuck. Wasn't that what had given them blue balls all through adolescence? When it comes to sex, the American Sissy is anything but a revolutionary. Sissies were just trying to act like they enjoyed it because everyone told them they should. When the media started screaming at them that SEX = DEATH, the revolution shriveled up overnight. By the time it became apparent that the looming heterosexual AIDS epidemic had been just another one of those manufactured panics the social engineers whip up to stampede us wandering cattle back into the barn, it was too late. Sex had shifted to the phone lines and the Internet, giving the zipless fuck a whole new meaning, and the American Sissy was much more comfortable having virtual sex anyway.

The truth is that even without AIDS, the Sexual Counterrevolution would have happened. As usual, Americans stoopitized the Sexual Revolution. Gay and straight, male and female, they made sex, one of the very most fun things humans can do, boring. Talk about a missed opportunity. Freed up to have all the sex they liked, American Sissies soon discovered they really didn't like sex all that much, at least not the sex they were having on their one-night stands and in Plato's Retreat and gay bath houses. It was plastic sex, polyester sex, disco sex, anonymous sex, affectionless sex, meaningless sex. A dull, dispirited end-of-empire orgy. The sex they were having might as well have been Internet porn all along, for all the real human contact involved.   

So the obedient American Sissy stopped having free sex, and started having Safe Sex. "Safe Sex" was an infantile euphemism for what used to be called wearing a rubber, but it was much more than that. Safe Sex was the kind of sex Sissies had been wanting to have all along. Sex without direct human contact. Sex without exposure to danger.

Our public health institutions don't harangue us about Safe Sex with the ferocity they used to, because it's become largely irrelevant. The Sissy has moved on from Safe Sex to Virtual Sex, Fantasy Sex, laptop and lap-dance sex. Sex couldn't get much safer.

There's nothing wrong with phone sex or Internet porn per se. If you feel like having sex and you've got no one to do it with, by all means do it yourself. The Do-It-Yourself spirit drove a lot of creativity and innovation in America's heyday.

The point is that phone sex and Internet porn aren't real sex, and they're no substitute for sex, no matter how many devices you hook yourself up to to make it seem like you're not just jagoffing. If you've done both you know the difference. Phone sex and Internet porn are to real sex as reality TV is to reality. If you're meeting people over phone lines or in chat rooms, you're not really meeting people. If you're talking or typing with them about having sex, you're not having sex. It used to be solely children and people with multiple personality disorder had imaginary friends. Now all the Sissies are having imaginary sex with theirs.

Sex without some degree of intimacy, of affection, of risk and exposure — of actual human contact —  is just porn. Sissies don't have sex, they have porn. They're afraid to have sex, they only like to watch it.

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