It will happen over the next five years, and it will start with professional women from their mid 20s to their late 30s and gradually filter downwards. The conditions are absolutely right. Look around you at any party. On one side you find animated women, diversely dressed, marking their personalities with their appearance. The hair – some bright red and short, some long and natural, some curled, some ironed, some bobbed, some coiffed; the clothing – their bodies are enlivened with colour, or shrouded in black, accessorized by gold, sequins or bright plastic.
And on the other side, bonjour to the men! They lean against walls or stand mutely next to the booze, hair universally cropped short, bodies clad in bland t-shirts, legs bathed in jeans, jeans, jeans or jeans, and jeans universally faded and universally straight.
The men’s t-shirts distinguish them only as acolytes of Nike or Puma, and this evening’s Puma acolytes are as likely to turn up as Nike fans at the next occasion; it’s as interesting as their allegiance to different football clubs, all essentially the same, and no longer even unequal – I’ll have Arsenal, you can have Chelsea, he’ll take AC Milan. Their faces say “don’t talk to me, I don’t really have anything to say”; their bodies say “I have been going to the gym a bit lately”.
The confidence of Serbian men with brains is at an all time low, and the others are only able to carry on because they can’t see the impending threat. And how could it be otherwise? Hundreds of years of exploitation and domination has toughened these women, given them essential survival skills that allowed them to realise something of their ambitions and hopes within the narrow confines the men allowed them. This situation persisted because they were brainwashed, conditioned to keep their ambitions small, to believe this was all they were capable of, because this was natural law. It was natural for women to want nothing but to have their drinks bought and their flowers brought and then get pumped with child and to cook for a while. In the same way, it was natural for homosexuals not to exist, and yet somehow they transgressed this law, and did.
It is economic transition with its harsh judgments and get-what-you-give nature that has provided the fertile soil for this revolution. In this climate women are adapting faster because they have less to lose. They are getting the jobs and excelling in them; and when they are not excelling they can see this is only because they are being blocked. They are realising that anybody can read a map if you bother to try, just as anybody can iron a shirt, clean a flat or cook a meal if the motivation is there. And because they have less to lose they will take the jobs, and will work at them, and if the employer is open enough to realise the assets they have within their buildings they will rise and rise.
And what hope is left for men in this climate? What woman, looking round that same party, is going to fail to be more attracted to those vivacious, optimistic, colourful creatures of her own gender, rather than these dour muscular lumps just waiting to lie upon their bellies and fill them with cock? Mass lesbianism is the eventual inevitable outcome, and who can blame women for that? Too many mistakes over too many generations, guys; the chickens have come home to roost.
However, this emancipation is not a fair exchange – territory has been taken from the men and no territory has been relinquished in return. Here a woman can still expect to go out with no cash in her pocket and come home drunk. Can you imagine a situation in Serbia where a man can be supported by a hard-working wife, free to write some poetry or do a bit of political campaigning? He would be castigated as selfish and weak, by men and women alike. Women still expect a man to be somehow better, stronger, more confident, to know more, even to earn more. They have been conditioned to expect this. But the more women know and the stronger they become the fewer men they will find who actually meet these criteria, and so again the inevitable move to lesbianism, and – albeit unfairly – they will not expect other women to have this innate superiority, only equality.
It’s possible it will be merely a phase. At some stage in the future women may realise that everyone is actually in the same boat, that life is hard and work is usually boring and shit; that men also suffer from weakness, doubt and fear and they need to be able to express these emotions, and that’s why they’ve been boozing and beating all these years; women have discovered that their belief that men are superior in worldly matters was a con, a con lasting maybe even millennia, and that men are at best their equals in a society where moving heavy things is not the main criteria for survival; so they may give men another chance.
The alternative is that we will all end up gay (all the men too because even the straight ones will have no choice, just like in prison). I don’t know what to do to prevent it, so I’ll just suggest that the men out there do their best to keep the women they’ve got, and those without start laying in stocks of lubricant gel. Buy shares in KY Jelly or Vaseline now, or invest in porn, made in happier lands far away, and be content to become a nation of wankers.