NO MAN'S LAND

If you were a science fiction writer freelancing for a men’s magazine in the 1940s, you might have dreamed up a lurid dystopian future where women rule. You might have described a “New Girl Order,” or titled your tale “The End of Men.” For your bizarro tomorrow, you may well have envisioned a world where boys were punished, drugged or expelled from school for the kinds of things you remembered doing as a kid. Males would be referred to as “the second sex,” regarded as “louts” and relegated to low paid, low status jobs. Women would be sexually promiscuous, even marching together as “proud sluts,” while men would be legally required to ask for explicit verbal permission for every kiss. When it came time to reproduce, females would often raise children (hopefully female children) on their own. Fathers would be considered quaint but ultimately disposable.

Your readers, back then, would have had quite a chuckle.

However, if writers for America’s major newspapers and magazines are to be believed, that future is not far off. While their phrasing could be a touch fantastic and things may not yet be quite as bad as they say, there seems to be a growing consensus that unless major changes occur, the future is no man’s land.