The Last Manly Man by Sparkle Hayter Read Free Book Online Page B

adapt to it or rebel against it.”
    â€œThey’ll do neither for very long,” she said, and went into her usual rap, women were evolving, men were not, the Y chromosome was devolving, and women would rule the world in the foreseeable future. When Alana DeWitt talks, don’t even try to interrupt her until she takes a deep breath, because she’ll just talk louder and roll right over you. As she spoke her face grew redder and redder, in splotches, like a rash.
    â€œBut let’s say we don’t evolve beyond men. In that case, how do you see men evolving, and adapting to evolving women?”
    â€œI don’t. That is why we must evolve beyond them. They’re brutes,” she said.
    â€œYou can’t envision any scenario where men will evolve enough so you could get along with them, just for argument’s sake?” I asked. “What if they refuse to become extinct?”
    â€œNature will take care of it,” she said. “The Y chromosome will grow smaller and weaker and I believe fewer and fewer male children will be conceived until men just disappear.”
    To lighten the genocidal tone of things a bit, she told a feminist joke from Hysteria magazine, about the army’s new weapon, the estrogen bomb. You drop it and all the combatants throw down their arms, hug, and cry out, “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”
    â€œSeriously, though,” I said. “The estrogen bomb would only work if all the women had aligned menstrual cycles and were all postmenstrual and in Good Jesus mode …”
    â€œGood Jesus mode?” she said.
    Now I’d done it. Lost control of my tongue and blurted out the name of a very specific man.
    â€œHumble, self-sacrificing, I-feel-your-pain Jesus,” I explained.
    â€œAs opposed to …”
    â€œMean Jesus, turn the other cheek, and if that one gets slapped too, kick ’em where it hurts and run like hell. You know, tearing through the temple overturning money changer tables,” I said. “Like when you’re premenstrual …”
    â€œI’m the same way no matter the time of month. And you were clearly warped by patriarchal religion. This interview is over now.”
    With that, she rose, her fists clenched, and stormed out of the room like a stevedore. Didn’t much matter that she was pissed off—the woman was always pissed off—and we had what we needed, a few provocative sound bites from a so-called expert, a controversial, academic feminist.
    DeWitt got me thinking about the John Doe again. Now there was one less man, or “testosterone-addled mammal” to use her preferred term, on earth for her to worry about. Somehow, I knew that DeWitt would have been cheered by this. For all her talk about the moral superiority and caring-sharing ethos of women, she was sure lacking in the milk of human kindness her own self. Speaking of violence … the woman was known to be a terror on a book tour and had allegedly bitch-slapped a small Mexican man in her Acapulco hotel last year because of a reservation mix-up.
    Maybe it was as Wallace Mandervan had said in an article a couple years before, that people crazy enough to envision utopias usually design utopias they themselves could never live in because of their nutty individualism. If DeWitt got her all-woman world, it would just be a matter of time before she’d try to take power, purging disloyal women. Before you know it, it would be a full-fledged Reign of Terror, and women like me would end up with our heads in straw baskets.
    Back in the crew car, Jim the cameraman said, “She’s full of shit, isn’t she? About that Y chromosome stuff?”
    â€œFace it. You guys are going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon,” I said. “Just kidding. Yeah, she’s full of shit. The next guy thinks you guys will not only survive, but live longer than ever.”
    The next interview, Dr. Budd