CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: A Woman’s Place, ‘The End of Men'  Sat Sep 29, 2012 6:12 am | |
| “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.”
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.
More: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/books/review/the-end-of-men-by-hanna-rosin.html?emc=eta1 |
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