Book Review with a Bonus Secular Sermon: Severed Roots

Title: Severed Roots 

Author: Nego Huzcotoq

Date: 2023

Publisher; Nego Huzcotoq

ISBN: 978-1-7386781-1-2 

Length: 306 pages

Quote: "And do you not know, Beatrice, that the reason we forbid nonwomen to be alone with children is precisely because of their proclivity to control and abuse them?" 

It's an ancient, deeply rooted, evidently incurable male phobia: If society ever concedes equal civil rights to women--even as a political technicality, much less in the sense that teaching girls about "safety" ceases to mean warning them against going anywhere alone--then women will do as they've been done by. In Severed Roots, it's happened. A particularly grim and unattractive Maoist feminist party has taken over the government of Canada and, apparently, most of the world. (If real feminists ever had a single agenda for how everyone should live, they gave it up by 1967, but the feminists imagined by these phobics always have suchan agenda.) An extremist party, in Canada led by a Monsieur Hardin and called the Hardinians, are agitating for a violent revolution. "Progressives" has become the name a calmer, pro-family party call themselves. Men have no civil rights and are brought up to be numb, defeated "mankeys" whose cravings for control occasionally manifest, as in our protagonist "Nick McTrick," in tolerated quirks like stage magic. Nick's sleight of hand is tolerated as a way to amuse buddies at a bar where they're allowed to drink Coca-Cola--beer having been deemed too intoxicating for the male brain. 

He has, of course, been castrated. Nearly all men are. The ruling party don't seem to rely on men for heavy labor and are trying to reduce the incidence of male births; most men aren't used as sperm donors but apparently the women feel too squeamish to abort or starve unwanted male infants. Instead men, who can barely get enough odd jobs to survive, having been educated mostly in deference toward women, are required to observe "Days of Atonement" where they make speeches about the evils of the bygone days when men lived in family groups and abused their wives and children. 

Nick Wong is a goodhearted fellow, though, at the beginning of the story, a fat slob, too discouraged by his bleak prospects to eat for health or clean his apartment. He has three friends: Angelina, who is much older and may die at any moment, whom he feels guilty about not visiting in the nursing home; Karla, who is a few years older and talks to him in an affectionately bossy patronizing way; and Beatrice Tender, a poor tenderhearted creature who confides to Nick that she wants to rear a baby of her own. Their own generation grew up in institutions with all-female teachers who taught the girls suitable subjects like science and management and taught the boys to be ashamed of the behavior of men in the past, but the next generation are being educated by "Netbots." Professional birth-givers are selected for a combination of physical health and lack of interest in the babies they produce, artificially inseminated, and paid for giving birth to up to twelve babies. Other women are supplied with birth control pills and propaganda and, if they want babies, treated for "Motherhood Syndrome" in sessions where they're encouraged to fantasize about the perfect babies they want, then handed the bodies of babies with lethal birth defects. And Beatrice feels so lonely that she's planning to be one of the protesters who regularly immolate themselves in Ottawa...Beatrice goes to neighborhood meetings where the term of rebuke other women spit at her is not "stupid" or "pathetic" or "suicidal fool," which come to my mind, but "wife." 

At this point I was ready to dismiss the book as a toxic male fantasy about women really being unable to function as anything but full-time mothers, see, because the only really lovable woman Nick knows is a depressive loser who probably wouldn't be able to have healthy babies either...but that's not where the plot is going. One of the women Nick knows does die in the course of the story. Unfortunately it's not Pathetic Beatrice. Nick meets a Progressive man who directs him to a secret community where, inside a maximum-security prison compound, a few people have managed to live underground in families, restore their fertility if possible, and relieve "Motherhood Syndrome" by living with husbands and children of their own. Nick sees for himself that all families are not always dysfunctional, as he was always taught, and immediately wants to bring Beatrice to the prison where they can be a couple. 

Or can they? Karla's ex-girlfriend, Dr. Stone, is a control freak who's not pleased with Nick's defection to the Progressives. When she finds out that Karla is Nick's sister, Angelina is their aunt, and despite Nick's brainwashing and assignment to a different kind of family name, Nick still belongs to the remnants of a jolly Italian family...she has power, though Huzcotoq seems to think separatist feminists couldn't possibly be competent enough to keep power. The Hardinians really are violent extremists and a real shooting war is a possibility...

Meh. If you enjoy fantasy-adventure-coming-of-age stories, here is a wholesome one, free of onscreen sex and violence, in which the point-of-view character affirms his loyalty and gratitude to women. Nick even goes into an Italian Catholic church, though he's not the religious type, and prays in a time of great need. The author's heart is in the right place. And in an oblique way he is telling his truth; Canada has been taken over by an extremist party, although it's only nominally feminist, and ordinary decent Canadians do have to live in fear both of extremists in power and of extremist reactionaries. 

Unfortunately his head is in that position of phobic panic. A novel about a dystopian world run by Maoist-feminist extremists would probably be better written by women; the fact that Margaret Atwood didn't choose to write one--as she could so easily have done--is instructive. A novel that really offers hope for decent men, worldwide, might be written after men had worked through their phobia of losing privilege and thought, as rationally as raging male hormones may allow, about the idea that decent men need to reclaim the power to control themselves if they want to be trusted with control of anything else. 

Am I saying that a world in which the men of the Left are still screaming that they can't say no to whatever hormonal feelings they have, that they believe they'll die if they even stop screaming about what ought to be their most private fantasies about what they'd like to do with whom, is still a world where individual men may deserve women's respect but men generally have hardly earned our pity? I suppose I am. That it needs to be said that women who feel sorry for most of the wormboys we have observed are not expressing hate, or fear, or even a lack of physical attraction toward men, is part of the problem. Men who feel a need to define their identities in terms of "sexuality" are pathetic. We say this not because we hate them, but because some of us think enough of men to cherish a hope that some of them can improve.

Women, as a group, could improve our approach to feminist issues, too. What my mother used to repeat, often enough that I suspect it was a sort of mantra, was "individuals." God makes individuals; individuals form groups. Differences among groups are easily exaggerated into false, counterproductive stereotypes. Differences among individuals are the ones worth considering when we consider social roles. Some individual women want to be mothers, some don't. Women who don't want to be mothers may have different hormone balances from women who do, but the majority of women who don't want to be mothers are not lesbians, Nor does smpathy for the idea of political lesibanism necessarily interest women in lesbian relationships; the idea of trying to have sex with a same-sex friend feels like a betrayal to more people than it feels like a consummation. Some people, like Nick, feel a great deal better about everything when they can identify with a family or at least with an ethnic group; others feel a need to identify with a place; others feel burdened by both homes and families, and brag that they can grow their own roots. Trying to build a society that guarantees everyone's happiness is doomed. Trying to build a society that backs off and lets individuals pursue happiness is the beginning of political wisdom. 

And those who think that, if the world of Severed Roots were real and they lived in it, they'd be Progressives...I'm close to agreeing with them, but I think those two insights will lead to some that are more helpful than the ones "pro-family" writers seem to be leaning on these days. When we focus on individual responsibility, there are certainly ideas being spouted by confused feminists and "sexual minority" types that we don't endorse, but we don't just wail about the "gays" or the feminists as if either of those groups had the power to control the next generation's lives. What really causes young people to be less enthusiastic about reproducing the species than the older generation were in the 1950s?

* "Something's gotta give"--The survival of the species on this planet may not be "zero-sum," but you can't go on cramming an infinitely increasing number of people into a finite amount of space. Nature has ways of dealing with overcrowded populations. Among the more benign are sterility, homosexuality, asexuality, gender-confusion, and, when those don't work in time, a decrease in the number of viable births.

* Depopulation Through Chemistry: A lot of young people have been started on physically addictive feel-good pills, without which they're likely to be depressed for years after they stop using the drugs--and those drugs work by suppressing sexuality. Then there are the chemical contaminants people ingest without knowing it, like atrazine, the lawn care chemical that's known to induce physical gender-confusion, specifically "feminization" through hyperestrogenemia, in male animals. Glyphosate is not specifically correlated with sexual or reproductive problems but it is an endocrine disruptor that can contribute to sterility or fatal birth defects. I've chosen to focus on glyphosate and know about atrazine only because its effects can be so dramatic, but several other chemical contaminants to which people are exposed today, as "pollutant" by-products or as "boons to farmers," also contribute to sterility. And anything that disrupts the hormone balance of young married people is, in fact, a factor contributing to divorce; if sex hormones were a big factor in drawing and keeping people together, changes in those hormone levels are guaranteed to make them "feel like roommates." Unless there is a strong commitment, on both sides, to stay together such a couple will divorce. (So, yes, glyphosate and other chemicals can and do cause divorce.)

* As Barbara Ehrenreich documents at length in The Hearts of Men, the 1960s' and 1970s' feminist movement was not a cause but an effect of male irresponsibility--the "playboy" philosophy. Bitter young men sometimes claim that all the girls want to marry older, richer men. Well, some do, some don't. Sometimes women who like men their own age happen to fall in love with individual men who are older--or younger. The good news is that it takes only a little self-discipline for young men to acquire the qualities young women want if they are attracted to older men. Grey and/or thinning hair, hypertension, and a strong chance of dying "old" while the wife still considers herself "young," are not positive attractions. Responsibility, competence, frugality, fortitude, willingness to commit, and even an oldfashioned sense of honor, are positive attractions. Some life experiences (adventures!) can help young men develop these qualities while they're still cute and energetic. Military service tends to be the one everybody thinks of first in Virginia, but a committed pacifist can always find an opening to fight fires instead of people. Or be the healthy caretaker of a disabled parent. Or an emergency medic. Or an inner city school teacher. 

* Taking responsibility for ourselves means we don't participate in the endless bickering about the "sexual minorities" that accomplishes nothiong but to distract people form more substantial debates, either as people who lead with their "sexual identities" or as people who hate them. (I've phased back and forth between intensely heterosexual and completely asexual, from year to year. I took responsibility for what I did with either of those "orientations" and regard that as one of the least interesting things about me.) We recognize that if it's possible to induce homosexuality in rats or gender confusion in butterflies, it's not rational to hate, fear, or punish people who show similar conditions--though those people are human and are responsible for what they do with their bodies. 

* Rigid social gender roles broke up because they didn't work for individuals. There is no need to try to bring them back. The gender roles do work for some people, without the social rigidity, and those people can enjoy them as individuals. Very few feminists, and only a minority even of "gay" activists, positively disparage plain-vanilla breadwinner-homemaker relationships. Most people think those relationships are sweet--when they happen. If "traditional" types can refrain from badgering young people who pick and choose their dates and marry late, far from bashing their "traditional" marriages the young may replicate those marriages...only at 35 rather than 25.

* A majority of young people are still heterosexual, fertile, and comfortable with their biological sexes, so why don't they want to give us more grandchildren? Y'know...one of the saddest moments of my writing career was during the editing of a review of Headspace for strangehorizons.com. Astra Ching's pre-game life was, I'd written, an ordinary yuppie life: finish degree, don't rush into marriage but use degree to get good job and feather nest, start paying off a nice house while staying close to friends. The editor corrected "ordinary" to "aspirational." And it's true. What my generation did to breeze through our twenties like Astra does not get those results when it's done today. The young often finish college burdened with debt, are likely to get the same entry-level jobs my generation did while earning our degrees, and can only afford cramped little apartments, not even full-sized flats, while banks and investors sit on the houses where they might be interested in bringing up children. So their prime breeding years pass them by and, if and when they do take the plunge into responsible parenthood, the pregnancies are more difficult and the babies may be less healthy. Nature is forcing us to slow down population growth, whether it breaks our hearts or not. We might as well accept it and look forward to correcting the overpopulation problem by having one grandchild. If you want to enjoy the company of more children than that one perfect grandchild, you can always be an aunt or uncle, at least an honorary one.

* Nevertheless there are things we as a society can do about this situation, if we really want to. If we really want our children's stellar genes to be reproduced while the best ova and spermatozoa are being produced, a way to encourage responsible parenthood between ages 25 and 35 would be to start renting or selling spacious, baby-friendly houses at prices recent college graduates can pay. Take the price a real estate appraiser gives for a house and knock a zero off the end--or two zeros, depending on how much you want the grandchildren to grow up close to you. Try forming entire neighborhoods of houses that aren't pretentious but have two or three spare bedrooms, outbuildings, and space for pets and gardens, where it's easy for people to work from home or walk to one or another of a few main employment hubs, where a car is optional and most people keep their own hens. It's called lowering property values, and it can be done with style and charm, rather than the usual method of raising prices until the residents of a neighborhood are desperate money-grubbers and nobody wants to live there any more. Standards for voluntary behavior can be maintained or raised while sale and rent prices are simply reduced. It would not make realtors, insurance agents, or local council members very happy, but it would reduce 25-year-old couples' anxiety about letting Old Mother Nature have her way.