And what of the western world? Between 2000 and 2005, Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every one hundred girls. A similar pattern seems to be emerging among Chinese, Korean, and Indian communities in America. “The sex of a firstborn child in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the firstborn was a boy,” wrote Colleen Carroll Campbell in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch the other day. “But if the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy’s birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1.”
By midcentury, when today’s millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed. As I wrote in my book America Alone, unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. Unless the Japanese have invented amazingly lifelike sex robots by then (think Austin Powers’s “fembots”), we’re likely to be in a planet-wide rape epidemic and a world of globalized industrial-scale sex slavery. And what of the western world? Canada and Europe are in steep demographic decline and dependent on immigration to sustain their populations. And—as those Anglo-Welsh statistics suggest—many of the available immigrants are already from male-dominated cultures and will eventually be male-dominated numbers-wise, too: circa 2020, the personal ads in the Shanghai classifieds seeking SWF with good sense of humor will be defining “must live locally” as any ZIP code this side of Mars.
Smaller families may mean just a boy or a girl for liberal Democrats, but in other societies it means just a boy. The Indian writer Gita Aravamudan calls this the “female feticide.” Colleen Carroll Campbell writes that abortion, “touted as the key to liberating future generations of women,” has become instead “the preferred means of eradicating them.” And while it won’t eradicate all of them, Phillip Longman, a demographer of impeccably liberal credentials, put the future in a nutshell in the title of his essay: “The Return of Patriarchy.”
Enlightened progressives take it for granted that social progress is like technological progress—that women’s rights are like the internal combustion engine or the jet aeroplane: once invented they can’t be uninvented. But that’s a careless assumption. There was a small, nothing story out of Toronto this week—the York University Federation of Students wants a campus-wide ban on any pro-life student clubs. Henceforth, students would be permitted to debate abortion only “within a pro-choice realm,” as the vice-president Gilary Massa put it. Nothing unusual there. A distressing number of student groups are inimical to free speech these days. But then I saw a picture of the gung-ho abortion absolutist: Gilary Massa is a young Muslim woman covered in a hijab.
On such internal contradictions is the future being built. By “The Return of Patriarchy,” Phillip Longman doesn’t mean 1950s sitcom dads. No doubt western feminists will be relieved to hear that.
HOW WEIRD HOW SOON?
National Review, August 15, 2011
FROM LONDON’S Daily Mail:
Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.
You don’t say. Now why would they do that? Don’t worry, it’s all perfectly legit, the fruits of the 2008 Human Fertilisation Embryology Act. So some scientists have successfully fertilized animal eggs with human sperm, and others have created “cybrids,” using a human nucleus implanted into an animal cell, or “chimeras,” in which human cells are mixed with animal embryos.
Writing After America, I had to resist the temptation to go too far down this path. If you start off analyzing unsustainable debt-to-GDP ratios and possible downgrades of U.S. Treasury debt and suddenly lurch into disquisitions on a part-Welsh, part-meerkat chimera, the fiscal types tend to think you’ve flown the coop. Yet as I contemplate the prospects of the developed world I confess I do find myself wondering: How weird how soon?
Transformative innovation requires a socio-economic context: A few years back, a European cabinet minister explained to me at great length that governments had enthusiastically supported both the contraceptive pill and abortion because there was an urgent need for massive numbers of women to enter the workforce. A few years hence, developed nations will have a need for anyone to enter the workforce. Japan is the oldest society on earth. China, as I always say, is getting old before it gets rich. Europe is richer but lazier: Fewer than two-fifths of eurozone citizens work, and over 60 percent receive state benefits. If you track, as prudent investors should, GDP vs. median age in the world’s major economies, this story is going nowhere good.
When President Sarkozy’s government mooted raising the retirement age from sixty to (stand well back) sixty-two, the French rioted. “Retirement” is a very recent invention, but it’s caught on in nothing flat to the point that most western citizens now believe they’re entitled to enjoy the last third of their adult lives as a twenty-year holiday weekend at government expense. And that two-decade weekend is only getting longer: Developed societies face the prospect of millions of citizens living into their nineties and beyond and spending the last twenty years in increasing stages of dementia—at state expense. That sounds pricey, whether you rely on immigrants to tend them (as in Europe) or “humanoid” “welfare robots” (as the Japanese are developing).
So the disease the west would most like to cure is Alzheimer’s. How would you do that? The obvious way to experiment would be one of these human/ animal hybrids the British are hot for: You’d inject human material (brain cells) into animals that are closest to man (primates). As it happens, that’s the plot of this summer’s new movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which title suggests the experiment went somewhat awry. “If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into the brains of primates,” worries Professor Thomas Baldwin, co-author of a new report for Britain’s Academy of Medical Sciences, “suddenly you might transform the primate into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human—speech, or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to us.” “The closer an animal brain is to a human brain, the harder it is to predict what might happen,” warns Martin Bobrow, professor of genetics at Cambridge University.
So the Brits retain a bit of squeamishness in this area: They’re aware of the pitfalls of injecting Ozzy Osbourne’s brain into an orangutan. Who might be less concerned about this fine ethical line? It was recently disclosed that China has a herd of thirty-nine goats with human-style blood and internal organs created by injecting stem cells into their embryos, the work of Professor Huang Shuzheng of Jiao Tong University.
I wonder what else the Chinese are sticking human stem cells into. I’m sure they’ll tell us when they’re ready.
The Coming of Age changes everything. The developed world will have insufficient numbers of young people to sell new stuff to: That’s an economic issue. But a distorted societal age profile doesn’t stop there: Switzerland, once famous for expensive sanatoria where one went to prolong life, is now doing gangbusters business with its “dignified death” resorts. With the increase in demand for “assisted” suicide at their general hospitals, the Dutch are talking about purpose-built facilities: You have an ear, nose, and throat hospital, so why not a death hospital? After all, it’s more “humane” than the alternatives—for example, the mini-epidemic of missing centenarians in Japan: Tokyo’s oldest man was supposedly Sogen Kato, 111 years old. Last year, police broke into his daughter’s home and discovered his mummified corpse, still in his bedclothes. His relatives were arrested for bilking the government of millions of yen in fraudulent welfare payments. Tokyo’s oldest woman was supposedly Fusa Furuya, 113 years old. When welfare officials cal
led at her home, her daughter said she was now living at another address just outside the city. This second building turned out to have been razed to put a highway through. “Human bonds are weakening,” a glum Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, told Parliament. “Society as a whole tends to sever human relationships.”
Like I said: How weird how soon? Dutch drive-through death clinics on Main Street. Japanese welfare robots doing the jobs humans won’t do. British scientists breeding a Brit-animal hybrid class purely for the purposes of experimenting on them. . . .
And at a research facility somewhere deep in the Chinese hinterlands, an ape injected with human brain cells waits for the midnight shift change and a chance to bust through the security fence. . . .
XIII
CURTAINS
DOUBLE ACT
Maclean’s, February 18, 2008
And that’s why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it . . .
“LET’S DO IT” was the first of Cole Porter’s great “laundry list” songs, an accumulation of examples that all go to illustrate a single point—in this case, “Let’s do it.” And, despite the qualifying phrase of “let’s fall in love,” you get the distinct impression the “it” he was urging you to do was an encounter of a more transitory nature:
The most refined ladybugs do it
When a gentleman calls
Moths in your rugs do it
What’s the use of moth balls?
When I was a child and the song came on the radio, my father would sing along and my mother would coo in pleasure, until the following quatrain:
The Dutch in old Amsterdam do it
Not to mention the Finns
Folks in Siam do it
Think of Siamese twins
—at which point my mum would always grimace and say she didn’t think the line was appropriate. Indeed. Why would the thought of Siamese twins be a spur to erotic intimacy? It’s an unforeseen calamity, not an incentive.
Well, we’re a long way from 1928, when Porter wrote the song, and Siamese twins as a pop-culture phenomenon have waned somewhat since then. Still, it was exactly one hundred years ago—February 5, 1908—that the most famous Siamese twins of the twentieth century were born. They weren’t Siamese, but English, born in a room above the Queen’s Head pub in Brighton to an unwed barmaid, and delivered by the landlady. Violet and Daisy Hilton went on to star in a memorable film by Tod Browning (director of the Bela Lugosi Dracula) and to inspire in the 1990s at least two musicals.
How’d they get from Brighton to Broadway? Well, Daisy and Violet were pygopagus twins, conjoined at the buttocks. And, having delivered the babies, the pub landlady saw her opportunity and more or less bought the kids from her employee. Shortly thereafter, they were entrusted to the management of Ike Rose, impresario of Rose’s Royal Midgets, who arranged to “exhibit” them with Josefa and Rosa Blazek in a show business first: never before had two sets of Siamese twins appeared on a single bill—the Hilton babies and the grownup Blazek sisters, who were then about thirty. They weren’t Siamese, either, but rather Bohemian—although Rosa, the alleged nymphomaniac of the pair, was considerably more bohemian than Josefa, who disapproved of her sister shagging like a minx, even though, according to rumor, she experienced her sister’s coital sensations simultaneously in her own erogenous zones.
The Siamese angle derives from Chang and Eng, who were born in Siam and made so famous by P. T. Barnum that ever after all “conjoined twins” were Siamese. As it happens, Chang and Eng were three-quarters Chinese and known in their native village as “the Chinese twins.” But, in global media terms, it was Barnum’s designation that prevailed. They were joined at the sternum and, even in the nineteenth century, could easily have been separated. But they were able to stretch the tissue and stand side by side, looking like two Thais joined at the thighs. That image came to define Siamese twins in popular culture. Chang and Eng married the daughters of a North Carolina minister, kept them in separate homes and divided their time between the two. Chang had ten kids, Eng nine, and their descendants can apparently still be found scattered throughout the Piedmont.
That’s what every Siamese-twin manager in the early twentieth century was shooting for: a slice of the Chang and Eng action. The pub landlady died and “bequeathed” Violet and Daisy to her daughter, and they all wound up in a big house in San Antonio, with the sisters touring in vaudeville as singers, dancers, and musicians. By 1926 they were part of an act called the Dance-medians, with another up-and-coming British-born performer, Bob Hope. The gals’ three-legged tap routines didn’t leave a lot of room for him. “They’re too much of a woman for me,” said Hope.
The high point of their fame was Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, which is no more or less than what it says: a portrait of the “freaks” in a travelling circus. Daisy and Violet played themselves, a novelty act who appear mainly in scenes with their two fiancés: when Daisy is kissed by her betrothed, you can see the sexual charge on Violet’s face. Today, such a film would use computer technology, or some Hollywood A-lister augmented by Oscar-bait prosthetics. But in 1932 Freaks had no option but to use 100 percent bona fide freaks—not just the Hilton twins, but Martha the Armless Wonder, Koo Koo the Bird Girl, and all kinds of visually arresting people missing various combinations of body parts. There’s a bearded lady in childbirth, and a handsome fellow with no legs or lower torso walking around on long arms and feet-like hands. There’s another chap dragging around the grounds who’s just a head and about eighteen inches of fleshy lump. It ought to be cruel and exploitative, but, by the time Browning’s wrapped it up, it doesn’t seem that way.
By this stage, the twins were, well, not exactly stars, but certainly celebrities. They posed for cheesecake shots, crouched on the beach in artfully conjoined bathing suits. Violet had a run of B-list boyfriends—boxers and musicians—before announcing her engagement to the gals’ bandleader Maurice Lambert. Twenty-one states denied them a marriage license. “The very idea of such a marriage is quite immoral and indecent,” pronounced William C. Chanler of the Manhattan license bureau. Violet, her betrothed, and her sister crossed the Hudson to Newark, New Jersey. “Nothing doing!” said town clerk Harry S. Reichenstein. “Moral reasons.” Reporting the story, Time magazine explained to its readers that “Daisy-&-Violet Hilton are a pygopagus, a double-monster joined at the buttocks.” Violet had to wait till 1936 to wed some other fellow entirely in a quiet ceremony on the fifty-yard line of the Cotton Bowl at the Texas Centennial Exhibition.
By 1950, their exploitation movie, Chained for Life, had bombed and they were broke. By 1955, their hot-dog stand was run out of Miami by other vendors resentful of their unique marketing gimmick. By 1962, they were bagging groceries in Charlotte, taken in by a kindly store manager who bought them some work clothes: all they had in their wardrobe were specialty costumes from obsolescent routines for long-shuttered vaudeville circuits. One morning in the winter of 1969, they failed to show up at the store. Daisy had succumbed to Hong Kong flu, and, sharing the same circulatory system, Violet inevitably followed.
Hilton-wise, I’ll take Daisy and Violet over Paris. Unlike her, they had a modicum of talent—instrument-playing, tap-dancing, even acting—and their sex lives are more original, too. I said above that Siamese twins have waned in pop culture, which is certainly true compared to the Chang and Eng era. But the phenomenon waxed quite impressively during the Nineties. We don’t have films like Freaks and Chained for Life anymore, but in recent years we’ve had Twin Falls Idaho and Stuck on You. In 2006, Dean Jensen published a full-blown biography of Daisy and Violet, not bad for a couple who were the very acme of has-been: grocery baggers with a vaudevillian wardrobe. In 1990, I saw my first Hilton twins musical, 20 Fingers, 20 Toes, full of lines like “When it comes to dancing, you girls got four left feet.” Side Show in 1997 was more self-consciously arty: “Come look at the freaks / Come gaze at the geeks,” sang the creepy carny boss, introducing us to his parade of attractio
ns. The stark directness of that couplet was somewhat diluted as the song proceeds and the lyricist found himself encumbered with that “-eek” rhyme scheme: “Come explore how they fascinate you / Exasperate you / For weeks.” Also, they have the “best physiques” and they “flush your cheeks.” As for the music, the composer was utterly incapable of evoking the rowdiness of the era, either in its vulgar energy or its casual cruelties. In his worst strategic error, the director first showed us Violet and Daisy not as Siamese twins but as detached individuals.
Yet, if we’re to understand their predicament, we have to try and imagine what it must be like never to be alone—when you’re asleep, when you’re taking a shower, when you and your husband want to go on your honeymoon. . . . Unable to separate physically, Violet and Daisy were given exercises by Harry Houdini, one of their celebrity chums, to help them separate mentally.
What they really felt about life, we can only guess. But Browning’s Freaks remains a compelling glimpse of a lost tradition. The plot’s simple. Cleopatra, a blowsy Teutonic bitch of a trapeze artist, is putting the moves on Hans the midget in order to get his money. Hans disregards the warnings, putting them down to jealousy: “Let them laugh, the swine!” In this community, the regular full-sized circus folk are corrupt and conniving and emotionally stunted, and the genuine human warmth is found among the misfits. Thus, Browning is an early pioneer of the now conventional Hollywood thesis of the self-defined “alternative family.” And his direction is so skilled that, although you never quite lose your awareness of their physical deformity, he does succeed in shifting your point of view to the freaks’ perspective—literally, in fact, since most of the smaller creatures spend much of their time under the circus wagons rather than up inside them—and making Cleopatra and her violent drunken lunk Hercules seem like the real deformations of the human spirit. The wedding-feast scene is one of the best examples in film history of a fully realized, self-contained world existing on its own terms. Freaks starts off feeling like weird, overspecialized porn but, by its closing, is both touching and moral. Violet and Daisy Hilton were born too late for the Chang and Eng big-time, but they had their moment and they made their mark.