Scott Adams is the genius behind one of the most successful and innovative comic strips of all time, Dilbert. It was Office Space and The Office before either existed and it spoke, in the pop-culture landscape, to the dehumanization of corporate office life and the commonly felt malaise of the modern corporate worker.
He maintains a great website for Dilbert that features frequent updates, strips, videos and a personal blog from Adams himself. In a recent post from June 15 entitled “Pegs and Holes” he had some interesting and controversial views on gender roles and the natural instincts of men.
His general argument is, “That society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes.”
He believes that blame and shame are used by society as tools for keeping things under control. All of this kind of jives so far but he gets somewhat radical in his examples of how the human male is a round peg obviously fueled by the Anthony Weiner wiener scandal:
Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior.
He goes on to add that society in general is a virtual prison to keep men from acting on their natural desires. Because of this trend Adams sees a drug induced future that essentially will castrate men thus ceasing all of these natural urges:
Long term, I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond. Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.
Adams makes an interesting argument but many people are taking offense to the grouping of rape as a “natural instinct” along with tweeting nude photos and adultery. What do you think about Adams’ ideas in regards to round pegs and square holes?
Dilbert Image: Via embeddable YouTube video clip
