The end of men

By Bob Allen
Monday, August 23, 2010

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) -- Bumps, scrapes and bruises are not just associated with boyhood but are necessary in order to raise men equipped to exercise spiritual leadership in their homes, a Southern Baptist seminary professor said at a weekend conference on "connecting church and home."

"We are raising our young boys to be way too soft, way too careful, as if the ultimate prize in our parenting of boys is to get them to 18 years old and say they never got hurt, nothing bad ever happened," Randy Stinson, dean of the School of Church Ministries at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said at the conference held Aug. 20-21 on the seminary campus in Louisville, Ky. "They never experienced pain. They never experienced disappointment. They have just had a wonderfully smooth life,"

"What you've done, you have handicapped that boy for the rest of his life," Stinson counseled. "He will be a weak, soft, ineffective man."

Stinson, who also serves as president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, said a "therapeutic" model that eliminates competition and rough play among boys has created a generation of 20-something males that are the "most self-absorbed generation in American history."

All of these measures come as a response to a perceived "feminization" of liberal Judaism: declining male involvement in both the leadership and laity, among some Reform and Reconstructionist, and to a lesser extent Conservative, Jews. In 2008, Brandeis professor Sylvia Barack Fishman coauthored a monograph, Matrilineal Ascent/Patrilineal Descent, based on survey data and her own interviews. On a range of metrics, she found Jewish men to be less invested in their religious identity and less active in synagogue life than Jewish women. Women typically wish to marry within the tribe and raise Jewish children, while men often expressed hostility toward Jewish women and religion generally. Fishman declared this disparity a "crisis." Predictably, spirited debate erupted in the Jewish press and blogosphere. Does liberal Judaism really have a serious gender imbalance?

Uhhhhh... Hasn't Hebrew tradition always been matriarchal?

Hanna Rosin's 2010 Atlantic cover story, "The End of Men," was one of the most talked-about magazine articles in recent years. "Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind," wrote Rosin, an award-winning journalist for Slate and the Atlantic. "But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed."

That shift, she says, hasn't showed signs of slowing in the past year. And that's why she'll 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.
I caught up with Rosin earlier this week to talk about the downside of female dominance, her own decidedly unfeminist upbringing, and how she plans to win the Sept. 20 debate. Excerpts from the interview are below.
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Why, then, are we even having a debate about man's demise? Because we're living in a society that's enamored with the "WAW", or "Women are Wonderful" phenomenon. WAW, a kind of reverse female chauvinism, is everywhere. Magazines, TV shows, newspapers, and even scholarly journals run endless stories and articles claiming women are the better sex. Women, we are told, are superior leaders and communicators. They're also more charitable, empathetic, and noble than men. The rules of the WAW game make it impossible for men to win: If women do something better than men, that is evidence of their superiority. If men outperform women, that's proof of invidious discrimination against the fairer sex.
To violate the spirit of WAW is to invite havoc. Suggest, as Larry Summers did, that men may have some innate advantages in science and math, and prepare to change your job. Write a book or article titled Are Men Necessary?, "The End of Men," Man Down, or Women are From Venus, Men are from Hell," and the gods smile.

. . . the feminist agenda is to oppress men by all means necissary.

The implications are extraordinary. If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction. As long as women were denied the financial and educational opportunities of men, it behooved them to “marry up”—how else would they improve their lot? (As Maureen Dowd memorably put it in her 2005 book, Are Men Necessary?, “Females are still programmed to look for older men with resources, while males are still programmed to look for younger women with adoring gazes.”) Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?

My friend B., who is tall and gorgeous, jokes that she could have married an NBA player, but decided to go with the guy she can talk to all night—a graphic artist who comes up to her shoulder. C., the editorial force behind some of today’s most celebrated novels, is a modern-day Venus de Milo—with a boyfriend 14 years her junior. Then there are those women who choose to forgo men altogether. Sonia Sotomayor isn’t merely a powerful woman in a black robe—she’s also a stellar example of what it can mean to exercise authority over every single aspect of your personal life. When Gloria Steinem said, in the 1970s, “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry,” I doubt even she realized the prescience of her words.

But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller. What does this portend for the future of the American family?

Quote:

. . . the feminist agenda is to oppress men by all means necissary.

Oh . . . poor bay-bee . . .

What a pathetic whiner you are.