When Owen Schmitt, fearsome fullback for the Seattle Seahawks, opened a game last month with a presentation of his manly bona fides that consisted of skull-bashing himself with his helmet until blood ran down his forehead like it was the lobby of the Overlook Hotel, what should your response have been?
(a) Laughter
(b) Alarm
(c) Disbelief
Trick question, The answer is (d) Nostalgia. Owen Schmitt, for being the snarling, sweaty avatar of pumped-up, hoarse-throated, brain-damaged heavy metal manhood, did you ever know that you’re my hero? You are the idiot wind beneath my wings. Owen, my good hombre, your breed is dying, but at least it is going out with the battle cry of a true Hun.
The evidence is gathering more quickly than people are getting tired of Jon Gosselin: For the male, the decline part is over. Now we’re onto free fall. Chaz (nee Chastity) Bono, I’m sorry to break it to you, but you picked the wrong time to turn yourself into a guy. (Especially one who looks like Horatio Sanz).
Next year, demographers say, there will be more women than men in the US workforce for the first time ever. This year, more women than men graduated college for the first time ever. This year, the movies taught us that the most notorious gangster of the 1930s actually wore eyeliner. It’s only a matter of time before the NFL is supplanted as the nation’s favorite sport by the newly launched Lingerie Football League (star players have names like Tanyka Renee and Krystal Gray. Who can resist a gang tackle that looks like a pillow fight, complete with giggling and possible accidental loss of frilly garments?)
Just to rub it in a little, a new book (as yet unavailable in America, though Australians are already digesting its harsh truths) compares today’s man to his counterparts from history. We come off about as well as Tom Cruise would hold up against Clark Gable.
“Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male,” by anthropologist Peter McAllister, reports that 20,000 -year-old footprints of Australian Aboriginal men indicate that if their fastest athletes agreed to a footrace with Usain Bolt, they’d leave him behind like the Coyote standing next to the cloud of dust where the Road Runner used to be.
Twenty thousand years is a long time, but the Aboriginal men were essentially the same species as today’s homo sapiens. Calculations indicate that one of them, “T8” — sounds like an action hero right there; Vin Diesel’s XXX wouldn’t stand a chance — reached 23 miles per hour while chasing prey. OK, Usain Bolt hits about 26 miles per hour on the 100-meter sprint — but T8 was just a random dude out of a population of 150,000, and he was running barefoot in a muddy lake edge. Give the guy a pair of sneakers and a little training, and Usain would be lucky to get a job as a middle-school gym teacher.
Even over shorter time periods, things look bleak. In the Victorian age, bridge builders spent all day working with 40-pound sledgehammers. Their counterparts today wield toothpick-sized 14-pounders. In the same era, young lads who worked as runners for British glassworks regularly ran 13 to 17 miles a day. They didn’t need some cocktail-party credential like “Oh, did I mention? I ran the Marathon” to prove their mettle.
Mongol bowmen in the 12th century fired arrows with better accuracy than today’s Olympic contestants, at six times the distance, and from the backs of horses in full gallop. Still feeling pretty proud about your short game at the country club?
Still, as bad as all this news is for us guys, the decline of man is worse for women. You want to bring home the bacon for the next millennium? Fine. We have a lot of video games and Slim Jims at home. The kinder, gentler, mewling modern male isn’t exactly what you wanted, the film career of Orlando Bloom notwithstanding. McAllister relates the story of a college experiment in which young women observed men doing anti-social, aggressive things. The women said they disapproved of the aggression — but also admitted they were more attracted to the aggressive men. After Owen Schmitt bashed his own skull in, in other words, he probably went to bed with half the athletes in the Lingerie Football League.