Sanity and the Sexes

George Gilder’s last book, Sexual Suicide, was a brilliant, biting rebuttal to all the now orthodox malarkey about the sexes. It irked everyone worth irking, from Playboy to Ms., and won praise from others as a startlingly original and fertile defense of traditional sexual roles. Gilder reasoned, following Margaret Mead (following her, indeed, further than she probably meant to lead), that since men are biologically more remote from their own children than women are, it takes more powerful incentives—social, moral, material —to make a man a good father than to make a woman a good mother; that marriage provides the incentives; and that the present ideological subversion of marriage can only lead to a rootless class of men who will variously tend to perish, or destroy, or both.

Naked Nomads is a less ambitious (but still mighty ambitious) book. It concentrates on single men themselves, who, taken all in all, are a bad lot. Only 13 per cent of the population, they commit 90 per cent of the violent crime. They lead the league in suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, venereal disease, you name it; the Bureau of the Census backs Gilder up dramatically. Single women aren’t even close when it comes to suffering and inflicting misery.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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George Gilder’s last book, Sexual Suicide, was a brilliant, biting rebuttal to all the now orthodox malarkey about the sexes. It irked everyone worth irking, from Playboy to Ms., and won praise from others as a startlingly original and fertile defense of traditional sexual roles. Gilder reasoned, following Margaret Mead (following her, indeed, further than she probably meant to lead), that since men are biologically more remote from their own children than women are, it takes more powerful incentives—social, moral, material —to make a man a good father than to make a woman a good mother; that marriage provides the incentives; and that the present ideological subversion of marriage can only lead to a rootless class of men who will variously tend to perish, or destroy, or both.

Naked Nomads is a less ambitious (but still mighty ambitious) book. It concentrates on single men themselves, who, taken all in all, are a bad lot. Only 13 per cent of the population, they commit 90 per cent of the violent crime. They lead the league in suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, venereal disease, you name it; the Bureau of the Census backs Gilder up dramatically. Single women aren’t even close when it comes to suffering and inflicting misery.