Some see this as a threat to the traditional notion of masculinity, and some educators and parents want to turn the tide, or at least put a brake on it. They send boys to boot camps where the youngsters can presumably toughen their bodies and minds. I don't know whether they also lament the disappearance of after-class fistfights that were such a fixture in coming-of-age movies of yore.

The young male image in popular culture is largely shaped by entertainment imported from South Korea and Japan rather than from Hollywood. It is probably the racial affinity that has made male icons from China's eastern neighbors easier to identify with for Chinese youth. Action heroes from across the Pacific Ocean are welcomed as they are deemed to be in a different league, one that elicits more shock and awe than reliability.

Lament all you want, but I feel the sociological underpinnings for the current pendulum swing toward less masculinity are peace and prosperity, allowing young men to spend time on grooming and styling. In times of war and poverty, physical prowess would count more than delicate skin or facial features. The archetypal worker or peasant as depicted in propaganda is the buffed-up body shown in old-time posters and billboards. Nowadays an urban male frequents a gym to tone his body not so he can look like a manual laborer, but rather like a white-collar worker with an enviable physique. He wouldn't be able to plow a field with the help of an ox or strike an anvil with a hammer for a day. Therein lies the difference between pragmatism and aesthetics.

Of course there are many other reasons people cite for the decrease in masculinity. But Lin's mention of household travail is quite unprecedented as far as I know. It is obviously built on the assumption that cleaning dishes, doing the laundry and vacuuming the apartment are the exclusive realm of women. Well, they used to be for sure when women were denied education and could work only as nannies and maids. But things have changed in the past century and in most Chinese households there is no fixed rule about who should take care of the daily chores. Usually the arrangement depends on the specific skills and schedules of the husband and the wife, or the father and the mother. Honestly, with the ubiquitous use of home appliances, cleaning up no longer means scrubbing your laundry on a washboard for hours a day. Still, every member of the family should chip in even if one is wealthy enough to hire a maid or other form of help.

Had Lin's remarks been a totally isolated incident, they could simply have been brushed aside. Unfortunately, he may represent the vestiges of history, the part of Chinese tradition that had better be left in the archive of undesirable cultural legacy. When the government called for a revival of traditional culture a few years ago, public interest in Confucian classics was rekindled. Amid the renewed fascination with old customs are worrying signs of simmering ashes of feudalism and bigotry. There arose private schools devoted to the teaching of "female virtues", including the principle that women must obey their husbands unconditionally even when the latter are wrong. The local government shut down the class after the media reported on it.