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A Woman’s Place
‘The End of Men,’ by Hanna Rosin
“The End of Men”? This is not a title; it is a sound bite. But Hanna Rosin means it. The revolution feminists have been waiting for, she says, is happening now, before our very eyes. Men are losing their grip, patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching “the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era” in which women — and womanly skills and traits — are on the rise. Women around the world, she reports, are increasingly dominant in work, education, households; even in love and marriage. The stubborn fact that in most countries women remain underrepresented in the higher precincts of power and still don’t get equal pay for equal work seems to her a quaint holdover, “the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration.”
THE END OF MEN
And the Rise of Women
By Hanna Rosin
And to whom do we owe this astonishing revolution? If there is a hero in Rosin’s story, it is not women or men or progressive politics: it is the new service economy, which doesn’t care about physical strength but instead apparently favors “social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus” — things that “are, at a minimum, not predominantly the province of men” and “seem to come easily to women.” And so, “for the first time in history, the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men.”
Human history? Global economy? Her evidence for women the globe over consists of thin, small facts cherry-picked to support outsize claims. We read, for example, that “women in poor parts of India” are rushing ahead of their male counterparts to learn English so that they can man call centers. But will this impressive display of initiative really liberate them? And even if it did, are we to deduce a country from a call center?
But Rosin’s real focus is the United States, and here she delivers a blizzard of numbers, studies, statistics. Consider: By 2009 there were as many women as men in the work force, and today the average wife contributes some 42.2 percent of her family’s income — up sharply from the 2 percent to 6 percent that women contributed in 1970. The future, Rosin says, looks brighter for women still. For every two men who will get a bachelor’s degree this year, there will be three women graduates. And even if they remain underrepresented at the top of just about everything, they have “started to dominate” in lower-profile professions like accounting, financial management, optometry, dermatology, forensic pathology and veterinary practices, among “hundreds of others.”
Rosin has invented comic-book characters to explain the momentous changes she sees: “Cardboard Man” is rigid, stuck in old habits, mentally muscle-bound and unable to adapt to the fleet-footed and mercurial global economy. “Plastic Woman” (an unfortunate name choice, given the surgical “adaptability” it calls to mind) is infinitely malleable, nimble and endowed with “traditionally feminine attributes, like empathy, patience and communal problem-solving,” that make her the perfect match for the new economy. For her, the only way forward is up.
But this “rise,” which Rosin so cheerfully reports, is in fact a devastating social collapse. It starts with inequality and class division. As Rosin herself shows, men at “the top” of society are not “ending.” It is all happening to the lower and middle classes, because “the end of men” is the end of a manufacturing-based economy and the men who worked there, many of whom are now unemployed, depressed, increasingly dependent on the state and women to support them. We know the numbers, and they are bad: since 2000 the manufacturing economy has lost six million jobs, a third of its total work force — much of it male. In 1950, 1 in 20 men in their prime were not working; today the number is a terrifying 1 in 5.
And so, a new matriarchy is emerging, run by young, ambitious, capable women who — faced with men who can’t or won’t be full partners — are taking matters into their own hands. For the poor, things are especially tough. One single mother Rosin interviewed fell asleep standing in the elevator of the community college where she was studying to get her degree — between caring for three children and working a night job. No wonder these women don’t want to get or stay married: unless a man can pull his weight, he is just another mouth to feed. But as Rosin herself points out, the new matriarchy is no feminist paradise. To the contrary: we have been here before with African-American women, and it is not a happy story.
The matriarchy isn’t just happening at the low-income end; it is happening among the middle classes too. Take the young women who are flocking to school to become pharmacists, one of Rosin’s favorite fast-feminizing professions. Giddy at the prospect of a $100K salary and certain they will never not work, even if they have children, these women are planning for lives without men — or without reliable men.
That goes for the bedroom as well. If you thought today’s “hookup” culture was run by young testosterone-charged men who want sex and no commitment, think again. Rosin insists that women are often in charge and the primary beneficiaries. A steady relationship with a guy, as one researcher puts it, is like adding an extra course to an already full load. Who needs it? These women have “hearts of steel,” and the hookup culture gives them sex without getting in the way of career-building. Yet Rosin’s interviews with these young women are at times heartbreaking; they really do want love in their lives.
Hookups notwithstanding, college-educated men and women are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce. And although women still do a majority of the child care, men are changing, Rosin says; they are becoming, well, more like women: flexi-, plastic men willing — wanting — to share in domestic life. Some workplaces are changing too, and some women are finding more ways to work and have children. Everyone is happier.
Except, of course, that everyone is not — or not quite. Rosin’s chapter on women at “the top” indulges the soul-searching of educated women trying to “have it all.” She gives us Silicon Valley as today’s mecca, insisting that companies like Google and Facebook — flexible, new-economy places — are (in spite of their notorious frat-house cultures) solving the problems of women and children and work. But while I’m happy to learn that a woman at Google persuaded her boss to fly her child and her nanny with her around the world business class, this hardly seems a viable economic model for most companies, or most mothers.
And what about Rosin’s faith in the adage that for women to make it to the top, you need to get women like Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, to the top so that they can “remake the workplace in their own image”? Sandberg aside, we know this doesn’t necessarily work: women aren’t always, or even usually, looking out for other women — or even being nice to them. Many prefer to work with men; and some are willing to put in the long hours it takes to wrest their way up the chain of command.
In the end, there is something smug — and wrong — about Rosin’s depiction of “Plastic Woman.” Is it really a good idea to say that we are, by gender if not by sex, open, empathic, flexible, patient, prone to communal problem-solving and the like? We’ve known for a long time that men do not hold a monopoly on being rigid, hierarchical, close-minded or authoritarian. Yet the women in this book are almost all organized go-getters, whereas the men come across as lazy, unambitious couch potatoes.
It is hard not to cringe when Rosin compares a Type A girl who sits still in school and makes pages of to-do lists every night with a sloppier but equally high-performing boy who can barely remember what comes next in his day. Rosin holds the girl (her daughter) up to the light and suggests that the boy (her son) will need to find his own “inner secretary” if he is to succeed in the world we live in. Well, maybe, but everything in me wants to defend the boy for just being who he is. Do we really want an alpha-girl model, even if she does succeed in the new world economy, whatever that is? Do we want a model at all? Why should a son — or anyone, for that matter — want to be more like anyone else (much less his sister — or mother)?
Above all, is it really a good idea to suggest that women are poised to inherit the economy and that over time men and boys, God bless them, may learn to adjust and become more — more what? More like us (except when we’re not)? To suggest, in other words, that success — material, social, sexual, emotional — depends on (our!) gender traits and not on the legal and institutional frameworks we live in? I’m all for each of us remaking ourselves from within, but this kind of argument seems carelessly apolitical, especially at a moment when we are faced with public officials actively working to undermine access to birth control, abortion, equal pay for equal work. Talk about endings.
And I can’t share Rosin’s rosy faith in the global economy. Revolutions, economic or otherwise, have a way of disappointing women. They tear down the old, women step in and make strides, and as a new order sets in the strides disappear. Are Rosin’s Plastic Women genuine victors, or are they — or will they become — unwitting victims? Will the women who are so diligently training themselves as pharmacists today be as flexible and confident when the winds of the feckless global economy turn against them? How flexible can a woman be when she has been training for something for years and suddenly it is blown off the map by the “new” economy? Ask the men who are ended.
Jennifer Homans is a historian and a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University. She is the author of “Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet.”
Fellow GAF dudes, what say you that the other gender of our time is taking over?
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/b...f-men-by-hanna-rosin.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
More related links:
http://www.facebook.com/HannaRosinBooks
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-End-of-Men-by-Hanna-Rosin/181740658607831
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/the-end-of-men-at-the-atlantic/262229/
