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The End of Men
And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Riverhead
So, women have gained the right to work soul-crushing, corporation-drone, 80-hour weeks, the right to bear and raise children without male interference, the right to live alone until the stress of having a career while retaining most of their family responsibilities gradually squeezes the life out of them.
Hurrah!
So goes the general tone of “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin’s misguided paean to feminism’s success in marginalizing males and denying basic facts of nature (women crave commitment, men are lousy caregivers).
Rosin’s book and its (sad, harrowing) accompanying Atlantic magazine story about how women allegedly love hook-up culture (the romantic lives of these “empowered” co-eds have been reduced to 11 p.m. texts from guys who don’t even buy them a yogurt first) arrive pre-refuted by the Atlantic’s long-running leadership role in the Feminist Reformation, with its withering examination of the movement’s shattered idols.
Rosin’s book seems blithely, even willfully deaf to the despairing cries of fellow Atlanticists Anne-Marie Slaughter (“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”), my friend Lori Gottlieb (“Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” and essays about the difficulties of single motherhood), Caitlin Flanagan (who brutally diagnosed the yearning for love that motivated the would-be jaunty PowerPoint presentation of the Duke woman treated like an unpaid prostitute by school jocks).
Rosin celebrates Ivy League women who claim that men are “the new ball and chain,” that the worst thing that could possibly happen to them would be marriage and/or kids, and what they really want is lots of no-strings-attached sex so they can focus on their careers until their 30s, at which point they imagine men will come flocking around with marriage proposals.
Sure.
Rosin says, “The most patient and thorough research about the hook-up culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventures without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t derail their careers.”
The more loudly women profess such thoughts, the harder it is to believe them. Rosin’s interviewees are smart and dynamic, but the men who share their beds are juvenile, passing along porn on their phones, getting drunk, inviting their “dates” to go to strip clubs. They do all this because they can — because women will sleep with them anyway.
Women who have given up the power to withhold sex no longer have a way to keep men in line. It turns out that the supposedly anti-feminist, “repressive” Victorian standard, in which all of society pushed toward delaying sex and keeping reproduction within marriage, was a hugely successful way to force men to be responsible.
To a Gloria Steinem feminist like Rosin, women are one side, men are the other, and you should always root for your team, especially when it comes to economic figures. She finds a town in Alabama where women’s median income is 140% of men’s. “After all these years,” Rosin writes, “we have located our feminist paradise in a small college town in the deep South.”
Here’s what happens where women win all the bread and men merely consume it. In another Alabama town, Rosin meets the “smokin’ hot” Shannon and Troy, the father of their child. In the last month he’s worked four days. She works full-time at Walmart, does most of the child care and earns extra cash as “an exotic dancer.” He stays home and smokes and drinks beer. Once he choked her till she passed out. Her income may be several times that of her mate’s, but this is neither feminist nor paradise.
In a strange chapter about the explosion of violent crime among women, Rosin keeps hinting that this is a sort of an advance — an implicit rebuke to “the notion of women as vulnerable.” Besides, she argues, maybe more female criminals means more women as corporate barracudas.
Yet a fancy degree and a high income are not the objects of existence. Happiness surveys going back four decades consistently show women growing less happy with their lives as the economic numbers continue to tick relentlessly higher. During Rosin’s visits with couples in which the woman works and the guy stays home with the kids, he does such a lousy job that women essentially do both jobs instead of just one.
Rosin is puzzled to discover that MBAs with rich husbands are increasingly opting to become stay-at-home moms. These fortunate few can do anything, and they choose to dial their lives back to a modified Eisenhower era.
Feminists, and women in the classes below, declare good riddance to all that, when they’re not sobbing in frustration or wilting with exhaustion.