FEMINISM is a worldwide phenomenon. Japan, for instance, has a record low birthrate and relations between the sexes are showing the same symptoms as secularised Western society. Things are so bad, Japanese women have been publicly swooning on social media over Shabani, a male gorilla in the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens:

For many Japanese women, especially busy working mothers, an “ikemen” [handsome guy] who is also an “ikumen” [nurturing father] is their dream come true, as evidenced by the enduring popularity of Japan’s top pop idol, Takuya Kimura, who is now 42 and a dad of two.

There has been a trend among Japanese male celebrities to emphasise that they are good and loving fathers, and Shabani’s popularity may be the latest addition to that trend.

[Shabani] was born in the Netherlands 18 years ago and came to the Higashiyama Zoo in Nagoya, Aichi prefecture, in 2007 as a gift. In human terms he would be in his mid- to late-thirties, the age most men, human or ape, are at the height of their strength and virility.

And what has proven more endearing for adult women is that Shabani’s wife Nene is 24 years his senior, who bore his son aged 40 – a surprising age for a female gorilla to give birth, according to the zoo.

— Comments —

Mark Jaws writes:

From 1991 to 1993 I was assigned to an Army unit in Frankfurt, Germany, and I performed an additional duty as a coordinating liaison with the German Army for our corps-level exercises. I travelled from one Germany installation to another, and through that work got to see how our German counterparts operated. I noticed a definite difference between German professionalism and ours. In short, the German soldiers were less disciplined, less focused, and dare I say? less serious about soldiering. One of my American colleagues laughed and said, “That’s because all the manly Germans were killed during the war, while the malingerers and shirkers managed to survive and spread their seed into the next generation.” It made sense to me, but of course I had to consider the defeat and demoralization of a once proud, but guilt-ridden people, and the impact that must have had on the warrior ethos.

I wonder if Japanese were affected in a similar manner. In fact, I would guess that as a percentage of the population far more Japanese alpha-males bit the bullet in World War II, only to leave behind the beta males. Something to ponder.

John Purdy writes:

The theory that Mark Jaws offers has been floating around the Internet for some time now. It doesn’t seem to stand up to scrutiny well. The United States lost vast numbers of men of military age in the Civil War with no discernible effect on the masculine virtue of subsequent generations. Similarly, Canada and the UK, combining the casualties of World War I and World War II lost an enormous number yet both armies remain highly professional. As well, the pattern of battlefield casualties in modern warfare is going to get a lot of betas as well as alphas. The decline of masculinity probably has more to do with the lack of hard things left to do. In the absence of the opportunity or necessity of handling hard situations will lead to a corresponding decline in those virtues associated with such times. There’s nothing hard left to do in the West. That may be a good thing over all but it will have effects.

Laura writes:

“There’s nothing hard left to do?”

Wow, I didn’t know that.

I’ll tell my husband that tomorrow when he’s on his way to work.

Mr. Purdy writes:

Yes, yes, very amusing but you know perfectly well what I mean. I don’t know what your husband does for a living but I personally have worked a lot of long hours under tight deadline pressure in IT (which is why I’m not a wimp) and I would still view it as a soft job. Mining and construction are tough but I still wouldn’t place them in the same category as going into combat or rebuilding a country that’s been bombed flat (as German men did after WWII) or even building a farm in the West in the 1880s. We face difficult challenges in the West, yes, but they are of a different kind from what men have typically faced in the past. Masculine virtue will be required but as it stands today no one is much interested in it.

Laura writes:

The idea that manual labor is “hard” and masculine while mental labor is soft and feminine is just false. I entirely reject that idea. A lot of mental labor is harder than manual work. It causes stress and conflict that one must take home while a manual job is done when it’s done. My husband works in a profession while his father was a welder. I don’t think the latter was more conducive to masculinity. The expectations of men with regard to family are different. When male authority in the family is weak and people have very few children, life is not hard in the traditional sense, but that has nothing to do with manual vs. mental labor.

Laura adds:

The notion that a decline in manual labor has feminized men strikes me as the kind of thing you read on men’s rights sites where they are trying to blame the loss of masculinity on inescapable trends and anything and everything but recreational sex and the decline of the male provider. Men’s righters have a habit of ignoring the obvious. I wonder why?

Mr. Purdy writes:

This has taken us very far afield from my original point which is that I don’t think war losses have led to the ennervation of subsequent generations of men. I believe I have demonstrated this well. As to the toughness of jobs, I am not arguing that mental work is not demanding or stressful. I’ve spent many a sleepless night because I could not solve an algorithm due the next day. There is, perhaps, a confusion of definitions going on here. In any white collar job one’s chances of being killed or injured are very low. Not zero; I’ve known men who suffered heart attacks under the pressure but the statistics are clear. My argument is not that the shift toward white collar work has destroyed men but that we live in a world, in the West, that is, materially, close to utopia, except for the moral degeneration which I agree is a serious problem. This represents a new type of problem that most men are not biologically wired to deal with. Therefore we have what we see today.

John R. writes:

It is quite simple measuring the masculinity of a job. Firstly does it attract high T-men and considering high testosterone levels are positively associated with objective masculinity. Number two, does doing the job increase T if so by how much?

Paper work while stressful does not increase testosterone as much as blue collar jobs do. Likewise blue collar jobs are more male-dominated and the men that participate look more masculine in comparison.

Testosterone is the fuel of masculinity. Cutting of testicles causes a steer to act like a cow for example.

Linda N. writes:

May I suggest another possible explanation for the recent odd obsession of Japanese women for a brooding, high-T gorilla? Mass hysteria. It may be unfashionable to mention such things, but women — and Asian women in particular — are subject to such bouts. Indeed, the outtake you cite mentions the nuttiness over some Japanese pop idol. And there have been regular reports over the years of large groups of Asian girls going gaga en masse. It could be a fit of laughing or crying or coughing. And it happens to men, too. There have been “penis panics” in Asia and Africa in recent years. During one such event in China, men flocked to hospitals thinking their members were withdrawing into their torsos. Others tied a string to the refractory little organ so it could be pulled back out again.

 Laura writes:

Yikes.

Absolutely, about mass hysteria. This gorilla thing couldn’t happen without the mob mentality of social media.

People are being controlled through their sexual passions.

Please follow and like us: