The End of Men?: Gender Flux in the Face of Precarious Masculinity

I wanted to start out very briefly talking personally to Hanna Rosin, who expressed a bit of existential terror about the hookup culture. I really admired her depiction of it. I have been watching, because older feminists are extremely down on this. I disagree: I think it's complicated. The downsides of the hookup culture have been well documented. The upside, though, is that people don't have to lie to themselves and to each other. But mostly to themselves. Because when my generation was coming up, in order to hook up with somebody, you had to convince yourself you were in love with him. And you know what? I'll tell you a little secret. You weren't.Let's proceed to The End of Men} What really jumped out at me from the book was the personal pain quotient she captured: the unemployed husband whose wife derides him as a loser; the unemployed man whose wife makes fun of him for buying dress socks when he hasn't had a job interview in months; the blue-collar guys who feel "humiliated and fucked"; the former miners now on Oxycontin; the unemployed sheetrock worker whose daughter's mother saw him waiting at the bus stop, just looked him in the eye, and drove straight on.2Rosin's reporting is stunningly good. But is this really a story about gender or a story about class? What Rosin documents is the end of a way of life. As she aptly observes, "What dried up was a path to the middle class and all of the familiar landmarks that went with it."3 Isn't the drying up of this path to the middle class really the story?The most important thing about the heartbreakingly brief Occupy Movement is that it gave us a language to talk about what is happening to the top one percent. The past twenty-five years have been pretty sweet for them. But it has come at the cost of eviscerating the path to a settled middle-class life. For two generations after World War II, men in the middle could deliver the house, the car, the washing machine, with only intermittent part-time work from their wives.4 Since then men's median income has fallen nearly thirty percent.5 Today, one in five men are not working, and even when the recession is over, one in six will not be working, according to Rosin.6To me, that is the story of the end of the American middle class, not the end of men. Rosin struggles hard to account for the fact that the people who left the middle class so bereft are a very powerful group of men who have not "ended" in the least. "Yes, women still do most of the childcare," she says, "[a]nd, yes, the upper reaches of power are still dominated by men. But given the sheer velocity of the economic and other forces at work, these circumstances are much more likely to be the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration."7Actually, I looked this up. At the current rate of change, it will take 276 years for there to be an equal proportion of men and women serving as CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies.8 And it will take ninety-seven years for there to be an equal proportion of men and women in Congress.9Sure, as Rosin points out, women are forty-five percent of law firm associates.10 But in law, as elsewhere, women are allowed in on the ground floor. That does not mean they reach the top. Only fifteen percent of law firm equity partners are women.11 If you had told me when I graduated from Harvard Law School in 1980 that in 2012 only fifteen percent of partners would be women, I would have told you that you were out of your mind. To quote the most recent Annual Survey of the National Association of Women Lawyers, "The bad news is that along every dimension of comparison, and in spite of law firms' expressed support for gender equity, women have not made significant progress either economically or in reaching leadership roles during the seven years the Survey has measured the impact of gender in law firms."12 This is not a portrait of the end of men.Rosin, with her astute reporter's eye, identifies some of the very specific reasons why the gender revolution has stalled. …