This topic is not new in this blog, even going back three summers, as a quick search will show.
This topic will be debated, and the speakers include Hanna Rosin, who will
debate for the motion that "men are finished" during the Sept. 20 live Slate/Intelligence Squared U.S. debate at NYU.
Why are men finished, exactly? Rosin says they've failed to adapt to a modern, postindustrial economy that demands a more traditionally—and stereotypically—feminine skill set (read: communication skills, social intelligence, empathy, consensus-building, and flexibility). Statistics show they're rapidly falling behind their female counterparts at school, work, and home. For every two men who receive a college degree, three women will. Of the 15 fastest-growing professions during the next decade, women dominate all but two. Meanwhile, men are even languishing in movies and on television: They're portrayed as deadbeats and morons alongside their sardonic and successful female co-stars.
In an interview with Slate, Rosin says this:
Slate: That's something you bring up in the piece—this failure of men to adapt. Ideally, of course, we'd have gender equality in all industrial and domestic spheres. But is this even realistic? Will men eventually assimilate to the new economy?
Rosin: I'm not prepared to answer that question. Some people say it's biology and brain makeup that make women do better at this moment. Obviously that's partly true: There's some way in which women are wired to kind of concentrate and focus and do better in school. On the other hand, it may be because they're the underdogs, that they're getting this extra juice somehow. Sometimes I look at this new class of women who are surpassing their husbands and really hustling, like in places like pharmacy school, which is where one of my book chapters is set. And they remind me of new immigrants. They're this class of people who are trying to get somewhere in a real hurry, and the men just seem to be sitting around in no hurry. One of the young guys I interviewed put it to me: "I just feel like my team is losing." They feel like women have clocked them, and it came as a surprise to this young generation of men, so I don't know that they can't catch up. They might.
However, popular culture is being very slow at catching up with these rapidly changing gender issues. For instance, on TV:
You might think that this one-two punch of promising-sounding sitcoms about young women and fairly repugnant shows about middle-aged men (Man Up thinks that using "vagina" as an insult is the height of hilarity), would mean that this is the moment for young, female creators to really say something bold about the women of their generation women who dreamed of being Claire Huxtable, not June Cleaver.
Unfortunately that's not the case. Instead, the slew of new lady comedies rehash old stereotypes about long-term relationships between men and women, the elaborateness of female grooming rituals, and using feminine wiles to get what you want.
And, that ultimate stereotyping of females--beauty or brains, not beauty and brains, tragically, continues to be marketed:
While things have gotten much better in many regards, however, not all sexist prejudices about girls and intelligence have fallen by the wayside. For some reason, Forever 21 felt this girl's T-shirt that says "Allergic to Algebra" would still have an audience, after all, suggesting that the stereotype that girls are naturally bad at math is alive and well. (This stereotype is so pernicious that within a few years of my graduating high school, I found myself having to correct relatives who "remembered" me as struggling in math classes, when in fact my grades were about equal in all my classes.) Equally distressing is that this shirt--discovered right on the tail of an outrage over a JCPenney shirt that said "too pretty for homework"--suggests a persistent belief that intelligence and attractiveness are mutually exclusive.
Rosin says she was a mega-debater in high school. I can't wait for the debate to be aired. Meanwhile, here is Hanna Rosin losing to the debater-extraordinaire, Stephen Colbert, on the topic of the end of men, which I blogged about in June 2010:
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