The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  “It is overwhelmingly men who have been at the frontiers. All kind of frontiers.

  “Predominantly, it is men who are on the SWAT team, taking down doors and barreling toward danger. Men make up the active resistance, fighting off invaders and occupiers and losing limbs and life in the process. Men are the smokejumpers who combat raging fires in remote areas. Men are on the front line of rescue operations. Men are the ones who have been making the world safe for femocracy.

  “All in all, as a group, it is men who have pushed away the darkness and fangs of predators, making possible environments in which women and children can survive. Later, environments they can thrive in. Later yet, luxuriant environments, in which women can afford to be snide and to kvetch about men on their computers while sitting in an air-conditioned apartment with piped clean water, electric lights and cut marble, some ten stories above ground, and the nearest predator a world away.

  “If not for men, it is likely humanity would still be squatting in huts, only to retreat back to the caves during days of hail or imminent attack from predators.” Aratta clasped his hands around his knee. “It behooves every man and woman in your world to gratefully acknowledge this legacy and what’s so about men at their best.” He looked at the ground with a dim expression. “If anything, the reverse is taking place.”

  Aratta said, “In recent decades, there has been a push to view certain masculine traits as toxic, some of which have made the trailblazing and radical accomplishments possible.

  “In recent decades, your society has obscured in countless ways the male legacy or has explained it away.

  “In The Reckoning episode of The Mandalorian TV series, with largely brute strength, a female brings a mountain of a man down to his knees in a mano a mano grappling contest. In the movie Bumblebee, Charlie, a teenage girl, is a talented mechanic rebuilding an automobile. In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a female general leads the Resistance, while the combat fighters and commandos with the most valor are females. The film Black Panther depicts a woman who is an inventor and mechanist prodigy, in par with the greatest of inventors of all times. In the film Gifted, a female is portrayed as a math titan, one who solved the Navier–Stokes problem. In the TV show DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Einstein’s ex-wife capabilities in physics are purported to match his. On their own, each of these movies is a celebration of female outliers, improbable or otherwise. At the same time, in their totality, these and other numerous movies and works of fiction fabricate a narrative that drowns out the reality that certain behavioral traits and certain groundbreaking high-risk ventures are distinct to men—and to a degree, intrinsic to who they are.”

  The two started strolling.

  Aratta said, “The lens through which neo-feminism views society filters out male suffering, male sacrifice, male-specific strengths—and it has no real empathy toward men. When it suits its needs, neo-feminism infantilizes women and objectifies them—repeatedly casting them as victims, being acted upon, and ultimately lacking agency.

  “This ideology is fueled by resentment, by a permanent sense of joy­less grievance and alleged injustice, seeking a redress that never balances out or is quenched.

  “Under the guise of female powerlessness, neo-feminism procures ever-more power, taking advantage of the far deeper empathy accorded to women than to men in the West. Under the guise of helplessness and purity of spirit, it lobbied and managed to skew family law, domestic-­violence laws, and employment policies to favor females. Under the guise of equity, it wrung preferential treatments, such as women-only college centers, women-only academic organizations, women-only scholar­ships, and dozens of women-only government campaigns and programs. The feminism orthodoxy reigns supreme. Its advocates browbeat with impunity. Consider it the long march toward female hegemony in the West, that is to say, ‘the matriarchy.’”

  Aratta had noted that the neo-feminists in the West were indifferent to the plight of females in northeast Nigeria, where men have been raiding schools, abducting adolescent girls and compelling them into forced, brutal marriages. Or to the rape of four-year-old girls in eastern Congo. There was far more motivation to share and condemn videos of white males mansplaining and to shut up men in the West who questioned females’ hard-earned entitlements, than to denounce and shame Yemeni husbands requiring their wives to be granted express permission to leave home. The neo-feminists in the West did not siege embassies and divest goods on behalf of women who were discouraged from early childhood from having any opinions in India, on behalf of women who were killed by family members due to their sexual conduct in Pakistan, on behalf of women whose vaginal opening got sutured close in Niger. They did not organize mass rallies in support of women in Iran who defied and took off their hijab in public and subsequently may have been jailed. And, if some of those other women were sandbagged into marrying certain men or pressured under threats of hellfire into wearing a niqab or were beaten if mutinous, somehow, it was different. Somehow, these acts of oppression and domination stopped being acts of oppression and domination when they happened among those other people.

  “The long march toward female hegemony,” mused Brandon. This hadn’t occurred to him before.

  “Indeed. Take, for instance, literary agents in the West,” offered Aratta. “They’re cultural gatekeepers. The lists of literary themes they wish to consider are strewn with ‘woman’s fiction,’ ‘strong female leads,’ ‘women’s studies,’ ‘killer feminist voices,’ and ‘romance.’ Not one of them lists ‘men’s interest,’ or ‘men’s issues,’ or men’s anything.”

  Aratta was silent for a moment. “Brandon, I wish you to consider something about modern feminism,” he said. “Consider that at its heart, it is about the individual woman. First, last, and always. It is about women’s liberation from men and from, well, anything that makes a woman feel morally obligated to someone or something other than themselves. ‘You don’t need men, be independent,’ ‘Do what you want,’ ‘You’re beautiful, it matters not what they claim,’ ‘If you are not ready to have the baby, you can abort it,’ ‘You deserve more,’ ‘You can have it all,’ ‘Choose me before we.’ In short, hyper-individualism and self-­autonomy—and precious else besides. How narrowly construed. How self-engrossed. How…sophomoric.

  “The ‘I-and-me-and-myself’ hymn and ‘Born female, O glorious me’ hymn are sung by the female chorus with delight. Never have individual females been empowered as they are now in the West. On its own, divorced of context, it is truly an appealing sight to behold.”

  “A celebration of the individual female,” said Brandon. “There is indeed a lot to say in praise of self-actualization and personal fulfillment.”

  “Without a shadow of a doubt,” agreed Aratta and grinned. He added, “And nowadays, in your world, women pursue any path they set their heart on, professional and otherwise.

  “Yet, the adulation song to the autonomous female is not an unalloyed blessing; its bright light casts long shadows on some things. Perhaps there is a reason why a high number of modern day women report they are in fact deeply unhappy. And loneliness for many is acute.

  “Human beings are individuals and autonomous, yes. However, they are just as much the nodes in intricate webs of relationships. You are brought up by parents, utterly depended on the broader society, and spend much of your years siring others. Any social paradigm, any social outlook, needs to underscore those things—not only put a spotlight on numero uno. This is where the costs of the contemporary narrative manifest.

  “But to gauge the state of affairs, it is better to first note the firmware humans come bundled with and how it has come to be.”

  Aratta puffed a few times on his pipe.

  “Ancestral men fended off saber-toothed tigers and hunted wildebeests. You may think it is because males as a rule are stronger and faster than females. Greater bone density in the arms, larger lung capacity, greater muscle mass—males are indeed physiolog
ically more adapted for fighting. But if anything, this is to confuse cause and effect. I posit the universal gender role differentiation stemmed from one immutable, fundamental fact: for the clan to survive, females had to and did spend their prime physical years carrying babies to term and nursing young ones.

  “This set the basis for a sound survival arrangement of the species, which played out in clan after clan across savannas, mountain ranges, forested areas, and deserts. Predominantly, females operated in relative safety, laboring in the field, collecting food, and caring for the young. Predominantly, males took on the physical risks, hunted big prey, and were the first line of defense. Even now, when men die, it is typically reported as ‘people’; when women die, it is typically made explicit it is women who did.

  “As the song goes, ‘I’d catch a grenade for ya…I’d jump in front of a train for ya.’ Men, at least men from your lineage, can resonate with this song. As the lyrics of the ultimate sacrifice for the female indicate, this drive goes all the way to the core. Men are at their best when needed.

  “In spite of the dominant contemporary narrative in the West, which pooh-poohs this age-old impetus, it is still men who make up its vast majority of everyday heroes. Risking life and limb, it is overwhelmingly guys who drag an unconscious person from a burning car; it is guys who jump down the subway tracks to get someone who fell off; it is guys who brave a blizzard to rescue a stranger in dire straits. At their best moments, men at their core are knights in shining armor.”

  Suddenly overcame with emotions, Brandon recalled the recent mass shooting in a country-music club in California. He remembered the details vividly. A handful of guys had dropped down and shielded with their bodies the young women who were huddled under the pool table, ready to take bullets for the girls. And what was it that many Russian war veterans had said time and again, as to why they held their grounds and fought to the bitter end, if needed? They were the only thing that stood between the Nazi forces and their women and children.

  “And females viscerally respond to those manifestations of male’s valor,” Aratta was saying. “You will find evidence aplenty in popular themes of female erotica about lassoing and then putting a bridle on the untamed, virile lionhearted male, making him theirs. Neither women, nor men for that matter, are prone to entertain an erotic fantasy of being rescued in the arms of a…woman.

  “For the ancestral woman, the best bonding strategy was to play it safe, middle-of-the-road. Making herself alluring yet agreeable, the female was very likely to get impregnated and have a male who would provide a measure of safety for her and her offspring. But for men to play it middle-of-the-road was a dead end. To access a girl, they needed to get out there and prove themselves, obtain, compete, and overtake. It is said a woman simply is, but a man must become time and again. That is why the urging or provocation to ‘be a man!’ is meaningful.”

  Aratta puffed on his pipe, reflecting. “When you consider the pharaohs and the chieftains and the sheikhs and the modern-day big fish of the world, it is easy to be sold on the claim men have been running the world. It is kind of true. Yet, this is also kind of like gawking at the relatively few rock superstars and tuning out the vast masses of wannabe musicians who have failed and amounted to little.

  “Genetics reveals that in the ancestral days, most women reproduced, but only a segment of the males did—the more successful and enterprising segment who proved themselves worthy. This came down to moderately resourceful industrious males, who ended up bonding with one female; and the alpha males, who ended up bonding multiple females. Then there were the other males, who did little more than stare, lust, and jerk off. And when they died of age or under the maw of a predator or from an ax of a member of a rival tribe, they died without ever burying their manhood in between the silken, warm thighs of a maiden and with­out siring anybody to carry their progeny or care for them when they grew nearsighted and frail.

  “All this may seem to suggest that in the main, males had it tougher than females. They did not. Women have also had it rough, just in other ways.

  “For one, not all who were spurned away by females were resigned to their lot; forced copulation was a strategy for some. As a group, males historically were the physically-dominant, outward force across clans and tribes. In some cultures, it had manifested as outright subjugation and abuse of females. In some lineages, these dynamics reach all the way to the present time as attested by the percentage of women smacked around in Papua New Guinea, and the number of women raped in South Africa, and the rate of female infanticide in rural India.

  “The point I was leading to is different, though.

  “The male-female interplay was never about sameness; it was about synergy. It was about coming together as a social and sexual unit, the man and the woman bringing to the table complementary arrays of beha­vioral roles and biologically-rooted traits as they beget and rear offspring. The differences, the peaks and valleys of the gender landscape, have engendered the mystique, the sexual allure, the heady sexual tension, and ultimately provided the glue of bonding for the male-­female relationship.

  “This brings me to modern times,” said Aratta.

  “Much of these peaks and valleys were razed—flattened—in recent decades. Dismissive of the intricate bonding dance that has existed between the sexes for eons, the dominant narrative of today has been doing its darndest to exorcise gender roles and wish away much of the gender distinctions. Coinciding with the long march toward female hegemony in the West is the, somewhat incongruous, long march toward interchangeability of males and females.”

  Aratta continued, “The interdependent men-women relation has been degraded, deemed suspect, and its allure diminished. In fact,” he said, “the existing narrative views the men-women relation not as a boat, indivisible and on which both parties sail, but rather as a long-term transaction between two self-sufficient parties who aim to reap as much satisfaction from it as possible.

  “Historically, building up status and resources have been the way males competed for females, signaling their potential worth as mates. In the modern era, males are facing competition from females—members of the very group they seek to attract. Historically, females sought to bond with males who brought in more resources than they did. In the modern era, a significant number of men do not command more resources, social power, or status than women. These things throw out of kilter the ingrained predisposition of male-female dynamics—a fact that is of concern to some and is applauded or jeered at by others. Be the reaction as it may, it appears that one of the reasons for the decline in women marrying men in the West is the growing shortage of ‘good men,’ that is, men who have a better economic position than women, or otherwise are professionally more successful.”

  “You’re not suggesting we should go back—”

  Aratta raised a hand, cutting him off. “I but point at a few strands in a tapestry of dazzling complexity,” he said and fixed Brandon with a heavy gaze. This is how Terraneans have always navigated. Driven onward by deep anxiety of repeating what was, propelled by appealing slogans of what will be—the Earth people have been lurching from one simplistic set of tenets to another, overreacting, overcorrecting, and ignoring what didn’t fit the dogma of the day. They have never seemed capable of juggling in the air and effectively incorporating multitude factors and considerations.

  In a softer voice, he added, “It’s complex. What I pointed to is far from the whole story. Should not be the whole story. But it is a part of the story, and should be acknowledged and accounted for.

  “You do need to account for the fact that as a species you evolved to live in a physical environment and social reality that no longer exist. Some of you are highly-compensated system engineers for a new aircraft, single, and living in an anonymous mega city with concrete skyscrapers and neon signs. Yet, you are not born blank slates; at the root, you are the upright, social savanna ape species of yore.”
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  Aratta thought about it some more.

  “The most harmful effect of the contemporary paradigm may be on the nuclear family. At the far end of the social spectrum, the nuclear family does not exist; in some sectors of your society, it has all but collapsed. This is bad all around. For the child, growing without a father figure—a masculine, tempering figure—and possibly spending much of his formative years in a day-care facility. For the man, for whom a core drive is to take care and to provide for a family. For the woman, who juggles a lot and holds onto precious little.

  “My point is that in addition to self-actualization, the man-woman relation needs to account for the environment the children grow in. More. It needs to consider the long-term viability of marriage across the various stages of life. More. It needs to account for the well-being of society. And it needs to factor the innate drives and predispositions humans are born with. The firmware.

  “Brandon, understand that it’s not possible to truly harmonize all of those systems, factors, and cravings. Rather, it ought to be a highly-­nuanced, give-and-take act of consolidation. If you people want to bring about more sound pathways, you need to cast away your ideological frameworks and platitudes; they are one-dimensional and cannot contain the complexities and differing dynamics involved.”

  Aratta clapped Brandon on the shoulder. “Look at it this way,” he said, putting his pipe away. “If things go down as you think, it will be an opportunity for a reset, for a do-over. Learn from the present. Learn from the past. Don’t let the future be an extension of either. They both have been riddled with problems. Do one better, Brandon.” He winked at him and vanished.