“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.
-- 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.