Person of the millennium:

Maling into insignificance

A panel of international experts – drawn from all walks of life – has finally selected The Bug's Person of the Second Millennium.
With a thousand years to choose from, it was not an easy task.
Would Adolf Hitler be our man? Has anyone else so encapsulated the evil into which our species seems capable of descending?
Would it be one of the great Baroque composers? The medical geniuses behind the discovery and development of penicillin or The Pill. The inventor of the jet engine that has shrunk our planet? Heaven forbid, a politician? Mandella, for time served? Nixon, for time evaded? Mother Theresa, for all her work in battling the results of her church's gross hypocrisy? Thatcher, for a Britain changed forever and a hung jury on whether it was for good or bad.
Some other woman? John Howard, for his services to the Fifties? Anna Kournikova for her services in tennis. Surely a chance.
Well, all great awards should be contentious - and The Bug's selection will be no different.
The winner of this prestigious award as we bid farewell to the true second millennium is not just one person – but a group as a whole.
Yes, we have decided to award the Person of the Second Millennium Award..... the envelope please .... to not just one person but to a collective – the male of the species.
Men. That's right. They started the millennium with a swagger and a purpose; they leave it the nutless wonder of our age.
More sap than sapien, more homo than ever, the modern male has never been in worse shape.
That massive thump you heard on the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve was not the sound of celebratory fireworks around the world but the collective thump of blackened and shrivelled testicles finally sloughing off from the emasculatory ring of political correctness snapped firmly into place in the final decade of the millennium.
The panel's chairman explained how the award was determined.
"Basically the panel came to the conclusion that while many of the world's species are under threat as we enter the new millennium, none has a dimmer prospect at recovery than the human male," said Steve Hardcourt, an A grade motor mechanic from Geebung on Brisbane's northside.
"Nobody wants to see a return to the despised dominant male patriarchal hegemony of the past, but the poor bastard has never been more confused or more uncertain of his role. A decade ago, he was expected to be a sensitive new age guy. Now the worm has turned and apparently he's got to revert to the macho, swaggering, confident male of old. The poor prick's straddling a barbed-wire fence with one foot in each camp."
Stephen McKenzie, a psychiatric nurse from Townsville and the panel's deputy chair concurred: "What makes matters worse, the modern male had no complaint at all with political correctness per se. A lot of it was common sense – a crackdown on language which stereotyped the sexes was long overdue, and in many industries affirmative action was the only way women could move up the ladder into positions that to then had been the sole preserve of the male. But somehow it's all turned sinister."
"The whole process seems to have gathered a momentum that no-one could ever have envisaged," agreed Charmaine Simpson, a barmaid at the Tramways Hotel in inner Melbourne and the panel's token sheila. "At the turn of the millennium, the male of the species seems to be the brunt of increasing ridicule. In the media particularly, it seems to be almost an orchestrated campaign – a dreadful conspiracy. The blokes used to come into the pub and laugh all day and night long, look you in the eye and flirt away harmlessly. Now they just sit there quietly, cowed and broken. The poor pets have seen their jobs lost or downgraded. They were once the breadwinners; now they're on the bread line."
Frank Gardiner, the other panel member and an unemployed groundsman currently back living with her widowed mother in Clifton on the Darling Downs concurred: "The lezzo ball cutting femmos couldn't have done a better job of cutting us poor pricks down to size!"
So what has happened to the modern male.
In this special issue of The Bug, we look at how the electronic and print media have played their part in the downfall of men, and our world-famous resident columnists each contribute an analysis.
It's not pretty reading, but goes some of the way to explaining how the modern male has finally lost his bearings along with his balls.