Thursday, July 09, 2009

Save the males, part two :-)

In August of last year, I blogged that we needed to worry about the males.
Now, two significant developments--one from economics and the other from science. (No, economics is NOT a science!)

In the world of economics, in this Great Recession, it turns out that males have been losing jobs, and finding it difficult to get employed again, than what has been the female experience thus far. So much so that apparently one economist has termed this the "mancession"--"a recession that hurts men much more than women, and we are allegedly in the worst mancession in recent history"

The huge loss in manufacturing has a significant gender implication. On the other hand, services like teaching holding steady to a large extent has kinds of gender implication.

Amidst this kind of an update from economists, comes a completely surprising, though not that unexpected, news from the world of medicine--reports, which are yet to be confirmed through independent studies, that scientists have been able to create human sperm without any help from a male! To which the BBC has assembled a bunch of funny and serious responses; here is my favorite:

The Daily Telegraph's Rowan Pelling says men are redundant but worth keeping for menial tasks.

"Yet I feel compelled - and not just as the mother of two small boys - to make a spirited defence of the weaker sex. Where would I be without my husband to read 80 pages of a car manual, in French, to find out how the back windscreen-wiper works? Who would tug the dried lumps of excrement from our cat's backside? Who would explain the rules of cricket to an American? Who would clear a blocked drain of unspeakable clotted matter? Who would take hours to demonstrate the dreadnought manoeuvres at the Battle of Jutland, armed only with salt cellars and jam jars? Without men, there would be no one to read Joseph Conrad or Norman Mailer, to remove spiders from the bath, or (important one, this) to tell women they're pretty."
So, if unemployed men had so far been lining up to donate at sperm banks, the prospects are getting dimmer, eh!

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