Of "The End of Men"

“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.”

-- Jennifer Homans at The New York Times

Thus begins what I am glad to say is a rather negative book review. I also think of Naomi Wolf's new release, "Vagina", in which Ms. Wolf celebrates the goddessness of women. In the light of all this feminist consciousness-raising, one can get the idea that men are just freeloading rapists-in-potential, neanderthals clumsily smashing things as we stumble around in this exalted feminine civilaztion.

Ms. Homans notes that Rosin's argument rests on how well women have been doing in the 'new economy', but the economy has a way of changing again and again, and what seems promising today can become tomorrow's bitter illusion. As Ms. Homans concludes her piece:

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.

When it comes to revolutionary talk, I liked it better when people were focusing on the 1% versus the 99%, about trying to get at that obscene wealth that is being hoarded at the very tippy top of our human hierarchy and trying to make life fairer and more decent for the rest of us, but I guess some revolutions are not meant to be, just as I suspect that it will always be men at the very top and in charge.

Of "The End of Men"

“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.”

-- Jennifer Homans at The New York Times

Thus begins what I am glad to say is a rather negative book review. I also think of Naomi Wolf's new release, "Vagina", in which Ms. Wolf celebrates the goddessness of women. In the light of all this feminist consciousness-raising, one can get the idea that men are just freeloading rapists-in-potential, neanderthals clumsily smashing things as we stumble around in this exalted feminine civilaztion.

Ms. Homans notes that Rosin's argument rests on how well women have been doing in the 'new economy', but the economy has a way of changing again and again, and what seems promising today can become tomorrow's bitter illusion. As Ms. Homans concludes her piece:

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.

When it comes to revolutionary talk, I liked it better when people were focusing on the 1% versus the 99%, about trying to get at that obscene wealth that is being hoarded at the very tippy top of our human hierarchy and trying to make life fairer and more decent for the rest of us, but I guess some revolutions are not meant to be, just as I suspect that it will always be men at the very top and in charge.

Atlas Shrugged (2) The Sensational Henry Rearden

With the first batch of his revolutionary new metal well underway, Hank Rearden takes the long walk home, and it is a sort of victory lap, as he reminisces about the long march that has led him to this point in his spectacularly successful life, as Ayn Rand paints a vivid love story of a man who works and works, who struggles and tries and tries again, working through so many failed experiments, fighting through all those moments when if felt so damn tempting just to give up and take life a little easier (like the way so many of we losers do). The passage we are taking down is when he recalls buying these mills ten years ago, which has culminated in tonight’s historical success with his new Rearden metal.


_ _ _

He saw the day when he stood on a hill and looked at a grimy wasteland of structures that had been a steel plant. It was closed and given up. He had bought it the night before. There was a strong wind, and a gray light squeezed from among the clouds. In that light, he saw the brown-red of rust, like dead blood, on the steel of the giant cranes - and bright, green, living weeds, like gorged cannibals, growing over piles of broken glass at the foot of walls made of empty frames. At a gate in the distance, he saw the black silhouettes of men. They were the unemployed from the rotting hovels of what had once been a prosperous town. They stood silently, looking at the glittering car he had left at the gate of the mills; they wondered whether the man on the hill was the Hank Rearden that people were talking about, and whether it was true that the mills were to be reopened. “The historical cycle of steel-making in Pennsylvania is obviously running down,” a newspaper had said, “and experts agree that Henry Rearden’s venture into steel is hopeless. You may soon witness the sensational end of the sensational Henry Rearden.”

-- “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

_ _ _

Through the use of this newspaper account, Ms. Rand illustrates how society, instead of appreciating a great and creative man for what he does for society, always tries to knock him down and cut him down to their own size of small, hapless mental-midgets, for whom success is more like magic rather than a combination of genius and hard work.

Atlas Shrugged (2) The Sensational Henry Rearden

With the first batch of his revolutionary new metal well underway, Hank Rearden takes the long walk home, and it is a sort of victory lap, as he reminisces about the long march that has led him to this point in his spectacularly successful life, as Ayn Rand paints a vivid love story of a man who works and works, who struggles and tries and tries again, working through so many failed experiments, fighting through all those moments when if felt so damn tempting just to give up and take life a little easier (like the way so many of we losers do). The passage we are taking down is when he recalls buying these mills ten years ago, which has culminated in tonight’s historical success with his new Rearden metal.


_ _ _

He saw the day when he stood on a hill and looked at a grimy wasteland of structures that had been a steel plant. It was closed and given up. He had bought it the night before. There was a strong wind, and a gray light squeezed from among the clouds. In that light, he saw the brown-red of rust, like dead blood, on the steel of the giant cranes - and bright, green, living weeds, like gorged cannibals, growing over piles of broken glass at the foot of walls made of empty frames. At a gate in the distance, he saw the black silhouettes of men. They were the unemployed from the rotting hovels of what had once been a prosperous town. They stood silently, looking at the glittering car he had left at the gate of the mills; they wondered whether the man on the hill was the Hank Rearden that people were talking about, and whether it was true that the mills were to be reopened. “The historical cycle of steel-making in Pennsylvania is obviously running down,” a newspaper had said, “and experts agree that Henry Rearden’s venture into steel is hopeless. You may soon witness the sensational end of the sensational Henry Rearden.”

-- “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

_ _ _

Through the use of this newspaper account, Ms. Rand illustrates how society, instead of appreciating a great and creative man for what he does for society, always tries to knock him down and cut him down to their own size of small, hapless mental-midgets, for whom success is more like magic rather than a combination of genius and hard work.

College and Sex

I am reminded of why I want to get around to reading "The Virgin Suicides" one of these days. Here is a nice passage by the author Jeffrey Eugenides on the awkwardness of going to college and first dealing with being in a more sexually open environment with one's expectations boiling over but still not over that delicate line oneself.

_ _ _

The signal event of my first-year orientation was the showing of an X-rated film called "Debbie Does Dallas." This was long before porn had gone mainstream on the Internet. Most of my fellow 18 year olds had never seen anything like it before, and if we had, we’d certainly never watched it with members of the opposite sex around. But now we were in college. We were, by universal agreement, all grown up.

And so we sat there watching the acts being performed on the screen, acting as though it was funny to us, or reason to cheer or holler. I remember one jock shouting, "Why doesn’t my girlfriend do it like that?" In actuality, we were all extremely uncomfortable. College, we’d been told, was going to feature a lot of sex. But we weren’t quite ready for the rules to change so quickly. We had to pretend to be more seasoned and blasé about the whole thing than we actually were. I don’t remember a single thing about that movie. All I remember was how everyone was trying to pretend to be someone they weren’t yet and maybe never would be.

-- Jeffrey Eugenides

College and Sex

I am reminded of why I want to get around to reading "The Virgin Suicides" one of these days. Here is a nice passage by the author Jeffrey Eugenides on the awkwardness of going to college and first dealing with being in a more sexually open environment with one's expectations boiling over but still not over that delicate line oneself.

_ _ _

The signal event of my first-year orientation was the showing of an X-rated film called "Debbie Does Dallas." This was long before porn had gone mainstream on the Internet. Most of my fellow 18 year olds had never seen anything like it before, and if we had, we’d certainly never watched it with members of the opposite sex around. But now we were in college. We were, by universal agreement, all grown up.

And so we sat there watching the acts being performed on the screen, acting as though it was funny to us, or reason to cheer or holler. I remember one jock shouting, "Why doesn’t my girlfriend do it like that?" In actuality, we were all extremely uncomfortable. College, we’d been told, was going to feature a lot of sex. But we weren’t quite ready for the rules to change so quickly. We had to pretend to be more seasoned and blasé about the whole thing than we actually were. I don’t remember a single thing about that movie. All I remember was how everyone was trying to pretend to be someone they weren’t yet and maybe never would be.

-- Jeffrey Eugenides

Wading Tiger

Wading Tiger

Kurt Vonnegut

“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?”

-- Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut

“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?”

-- Kurt Vonnegut

The Clash of Civilizations

"The clash of civilizations exists, and it is within Islam, between those who want to burn American embassies and those who want to partner with us in building modern societies."

-- Fareed Zakaria at CNN's "GPS"

Well framed. We see several reports, for instance, that the Libyan people regret and denounce the murder of the American ambassaor who was instrumental in helping them bring down the Ghadaffi regime. The problem, though, is whether the modernizers stand a real chance. Even if they have numbers on their side with the people standing behind them, it can seem that the medieval fundamentalists always win their way, having intensity of resolve and the willingness to use terrorism on their side, which leads to a greater clash of civilizations against us.

The Clash of Civilizations

"The clash of civilizations exists, and it is within Islam, between those who want to burn American embassies and those who want to partner with us in building modern societies."

-- Fareed Zakaria at CNN's "GPS"

Well framed. We see several reports, for instance, that the Libyan people regret and denounce the murder of the American ambassaor who was instrumental in helping them bring down the Ghadaffi regime. The problem, though, is whether the modernizers stand a real chance. Even if they have numbers on their side with the people standing behind them, it can seem that the medieval fundamentalists always win their way, having intensity of resolve and the willingness to use terrorism on their side, which leads to a greater clash of civilizations against us.