It is no doubt a coincidence that 69 Americans have so far died after taking the sex-enhancing drug Viagra. Aphrodisiacs are often said to result in all sorts of behaviour, including soixante-neuf. Now we know soixante-neuf what. And true to the genderless rules of modern politically correct journalism, the sex of the victims was not given in the Reuters story which appeared in this newspaper - though we can be sure of a few things.
The first is that the overwhelming majority of the dead Americans, if not all, were men; another is that the increasing inclination to "personise" men and women, and refer to them by the neuter noun, might well accord with feminist requirements of the day (whatever they are) but is also increasingly concealing the truth; a third is that if such a death rate had occurred among women because of sexual services rendered there would be uproar and demands that the drug be taken off the market.
American feminism
Genderlessness is, of course, resorted to only when appropriate. We know that if the victims of the Viagra coronaries had overwhelmingly been women, the sex of the dead would have been declared, if only to satisfy the victimhood requirement of American feminism in particular. Similarly, journalists resort to the term "single parent" when what we invariably mean is single mother. But a feminist-egalitarian political agenda is being satisfied by the myth of the degendered single parent: that, being equal, we are all equally likely to become single parents, and that it would be invidious and sexist to refer to single parents by their sex. Which is female - so female, indeed, that our courts could make the astonishing judgment recently that an abandoned father could not in law be entitled to the financial support from the State to which an abandoned mother is.
That ruling is, of course, no part of any feminist agenda, merely proof of the rum things that can happen when you seek the opinions of the courts on anything. But it surely comes as no surprise that the courts should take such an unsympathetic view of the male predicament. As John Waters has so often pointed out, the position of petitioning fathers who seek custody of their children is, to say the least, quite pitiful.
No other language has been thrown into the confusion that English has been by the triumph of political and linguistic feminism. A few journalists having decided we should import that miserable little reptile, "Ms", we no longer know what to call woman in political life. Is Mary O'Rourke Mrs or Ms? I have seen the two appearing in the one report; similarly, the fair Monica is in the same breath referred to as Miss and Ms Lewinsky. Even young girls are now being absurdly referred to in newspapers as Ms, though boys their own age are (quite properly) given no honorific.
"Spokespersons"
Male-blindness is causing many journalists to be reluctant to admit that anybody can be a man. RTE journalists in particular seem to get their information from Government spokeswomen or Government spokespersons: but a spokesman, alas, is one with the pterodactyl and the dodo. My own preference for the word spokesman to apply to either sex - almost anything, dear God, rather than that great ugly, cranking and cumbrously worthy pantechnicon of a word, "spokesperson" - is, of course, in vain. We share our language with the Americans, and they dominate its political discourse and its vocabulary of prudishness.
The culture of ALP - authoritarian linguistic prudishness - has been a powerful current (among many others) in American life. Americans devised the word rooster rather than call their male fowls "cocks" and applied the word bathroom to a room which has no bath. American feminists would be lost for words if they heard that the plain Irish for vulva, "pit", is the cheerfully bawdy root of the word for effeminate, "piteogach", which I am quite incapable of rendering into colloquial English - or rather, this newspaper would not publish it if I did.
Why do we seem incapable of drawing on native Gaelic attitudes towards sexuality, vocabulary and body-parts even as we digest unchewed and barely understood American norms, attitudes and platitudes? Why have we accepted the sexual-political agenda of a country whose sexual politics show every sign of being deranged to the point of insanity, in which men are now scared of complimenting women on their looks without being sued for harassment and where a commonplace piece of adultery, familiar in the chancelleries of great European powers through the centuries, is threatening to tear down an entire administration and make that commonwealth ungovernable?
Anglophone angst
Indeed, even aside from that body of lore and wisdom within Irish tradition, might we not learn from the extraordinarily unagonised French, or Germans, or Italians, who have coped with the shifting power balance of the sexes without any of the apparent angst of the Anglophone countries? When we go shopping for ideas, political agendas, for practical ways of perceiving the need for change and then implementing it, must be always be hunting through the American ideology supermarket? Merely because Americans appear to speak the same language as us doesn't mean that they actually do so. Their ways are not our ways. After all, their marriages traditionally began on Niagara; 69 of them have now ended on Viagra; and we have neither.