Why I wrote "Cameron's Encyclopedia"

"Cameron's Encyclopedia" was a story I wrote approximately six months after moving to Chicago, between May and August of 2002. At the time, I had just completed work on my first novel, and was looking to write something for a more adult audience. The story synthesizes a number of issues and educational paradigms that I studied while in college. St. Lawrence University is a small liberal college in upstate NY, and as such the entire learning environment is heavily influenced by liberal feminist thought. Since I double-majored in Sociology, I could hardly avoid the influence of radical feminist literature on my own work.

It was my opinion, and continues to be, that while a worthwhile discipline of thought, Feminist sociology is founded in a murky and unsteady social theory framework. Common sense and practacility are abandoned in favor of highly-abstract theoretical models (see also: Jaques Lacan, Luce Irigeray, Judith Butler). Influences of minority interest groups such as lesbian and trans-gender rights promoters have ensured that feminism as a theological doctrine has moved away from the grass-roots equality movement that it once was. Instead of being an equalizing, rationalizing force on an otherwise unequal society, it has proven to be largely divisive and counterproductive to relations between the sexes. The sort of feminism that I was introduced to at St. Lawrence University was pro-woman and anti-harmony. No more, and no less.

I have since come to realize that there is a world outside of the tiny little knuckle-headed sociology department that I got my second major in, and that most of the world knows nothing about Judith Butler's whacko "I want to invent a whole new language" feminism. Nonetheless, I was able to synthesize a number of concepts that I learned in the classes that I took, and formed what I consider to be a pretty decent dystopian fantasy about a world where women have gained an authoritarian control over men. Not just their will and motivation, which some could argue has already happened, but over their very bodies. I realize that authoritarian oppression is sort of an "easy" target for dystopian science fiction, but I do thoroughly enjoy it myself, and I felt that I could do the story justice that way.

There have been quite a few questions about this story from readers who were wondering what I was trying to prove or what the motivation was to write it in the first place. I would like to say difinitively that the story is not a missive about women in general, nor is it a way to express unspoken anger I have toward feminism in general. If anything, "Cameron's Encyclopedia" is a comment about 21st century men, and where our disassociation with masculinity has taken us. It was announced just last month that college admissions are leaning very heavily toward women for the first time in history. The class of 2010 will be, if the numbers hold, 58% woman and only 42% men. 21st century men are distracted, ineffectual beings. We play video games all day, and listen to sports broadcasts (rummy robots and sports scores from the story), while women quietly gain control of the machinery that runs the world.

If tomorrow there was no trace left in our society of the patriarchy, I would not miss it at all. But right now, right this minute, there is a whole generation of young men who have been completely alienated from their own gender. Masculinity has no flag or bugle call to rally around anymore. Every earmark of boyhood and masculinity has been to some extent vilified by an intolerant, reactionary pro-girl culture. Robert Bly said that despite the fact that men of the late 20th century were kinder, gentler, and objectively more likable people, they were weak, and almost universally lacked the spark of manhood present in previous generations. Additionally, they were very nearly universally unhappy. And why not? They are a generation of fatherless anomalies, raised and taught by women to hate and fear their own gender. If I do have children, I hope sincerely that I have only girls, because even if the exaggerated dystopia that I describe in "Cameron's Encyclopedia" doesn't happen, I foresee a dark and unfriendly era for men on the horizon.

I do not think that anything like "Cameron's Encyclopedia" might actually happen in the future, but just as in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", some ghosts of the concepts he foretold are now a firm part of our society. "Cameron's Encyclopedia" isn't a story about how I hate women, it's a story about how disappointingly easy it was for the gender-bonds of men to deteriorate and eventually fail.