Courtesy of Lukáš Osladil, courtesy of wikipedia.org
Weaving in and out of the lunch tables at the retirement center one afternoon, I paused to sit beside a woman I hadn’t seen for a while. Looking up from her book, she frowned. “Do you know the meaning of viand?” she asked.
Wondering if hers was a trick question, I answered tentatively. “It means ‘food,’ doesn’t it?”
“Correct!” She slammed her palm on the table for emphasis. “You’d be surprised how many don’t know the answer.”
Shrugging a little, I replied. ”Well, it’s an antique word by today’s standards. What brought it to mind?”
“Dickens, naturally!” This time, the hand covered with liver spots landed on the thick book lying on the table.
I nodded with understanding. We exchanged a few more words about the author, then I left her to her reading. Headed for my apartment, I continued to think about words, particularly the new ones I’d learned that week–Flop era, gynecocracy, 4chan.
Vocabulary expands so rapidly these days, why should I be surprised that Viand had fallen out of favor. Other words have suffered a similar fate or undergone revision. Take Man for example. Who can say what it means these days?
Christine Emba shares a dilemma similar to mine. In her article, Men Are Lost, she notes the definition of man began eroding in the twentieth century. In 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote ..the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity. As a result, …something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.
Historians blame women for the muddle. They argue that when the industrial and technical revolutions created jobs that no longer required strength, women escaped domesticity for work outside the home. As typists and file clerks, for example, they enjoyed the independence of personal incomes that allowed them to be choosey about their partners. Some even chose other women.
White males seemed to suffer most from their loss of economic status. Not only was it harder to find a wife, but they were obliged to compete with women for employment. Some males retreated to the sidelines, creating a vacuum their counterparts were eager to fill. Today, the fair sex has infiltrated what formerly were all-male bastions, finding jobs in higher education, science, and politics. (“Explaining Men,” by Jackson Katz, Ms, spring, 2024, pgs. 25-27.)
A few closet misogynists have stepped forward in the hope of restoring male hegemony and taking society backward. Jordan Peterson is prominent among them but there are others. Constin Alamariu, a Romanian-American with a Ph.D from Yale became famous when he published his seminal book on misogyny, The Bronze Age Mindset. Unfortunately, vainglory brought him unwanted attention which led to his arrest. Currently, he resides in a Romanian jail convicted of rape and human trafficking.
Jackson Katz draws a connection between women’s liberation and the rise of autocracy. …white men find comfort in regressive ‘strong man’ politics and the very conservative gender norms that underlie them. That primordial longing for the past, he suggests, makes the masculinity crisis […] a threat to democracy (“Explaining Men,” by Jackson Katz, Ms. Spring 2024, pg. 26.)
Katz may have a point, but I would argue that a society founded on the masculine norm of winning and losing also poses a threat. Inequality can destabilize the system, transforming democracy into an autocratic power game. We know the forms of that corruption well–rape, suppression, a collapsed justice system, and war.
I admit that democracy and equality aren’t natural bedfellows. The former is an organizing principle. The latter is a value. Athenians, for example, saw no contradiction between their method of governing themselves and their right to own slaves. Our founding fathers held the same split view. While championing equality for their peers, they saw no reason to extend that right to women or slaves.
Even so, many in the United States have come to believe the relationship between democracy and equality is a symbiotic one, each as vital to the other as rain to a garden. When the preamble of our Constitution speaks of the general welfare, a majority of us believe it refers to everyone who resides in the country.
Dissenters exist, of course, and in numbers sufficient enough to risk an insurrection. What we’ve learned from the present struggle is that the conventions we’ve adopted are neither universally understood nor agreed upon. Words have failed us.
Admittedly, some among us would rather pluck out their eyes than glimpse a future they cannot control. Nonetheless, time and tide are forcing choices upon us. Shall we continue to accept the masculine paradigm of winners and losers? Or, shall we create a society based on values we hold in common? Either way, the critical issue to resolve isn’t about how we define a man or a woman, but how we define what it means to be human. Yes. I’m convinced, we need new words for that.
