MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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The Contempt of Women by Stephen Marche | Esquire
By EmmaZahn on Thu, 08/09/2012 - 6:54pm |
The rise of men. And the whining of girls.
Eventually, the sexual always morphs into the political. Contempt for men has become so widespread and acceptable that it's a commonplace for politicians' wives. Michelle Obama loves to describe her husband's morning breath and struggles with smoking and failure to put away his socks. Her pull quote: "He's a gifted man, but he's just a man." Got that, boys? You can be editor of the Harvard Law Review, first African-American president, director of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, loving husband and father, and an innovator of "absorption marijuana ingestion" to boot, but in the end "just a man." Michelle uses that hokey line because it inevitably provokes warm ovations and knowing laughter. The wife of the British prime minister, David Cameron, has borrowed the technique, moaning about how Cameron "makes a terrible mess" when he cooks and can be "quite annoying." This is what the political operatives call "humanizing the candidate": Contempt for men is what ordinary women understand.
There's a well-developed intellectual expression of contempt for men, too, encapsulated in the idea of the "masculinity crisis" — men are doomed, in this argument, by their own inherent natures to flounder in the emotionally complex, predominantly social postindustrial world. Dozens of books have circled around or near the concept, but none had actually made a persuasive, research-grounded argument until Hanna Rosin's The End of Men and the Rise of Women. The book begins with a somewhat expected girl-powered farewell to male power. The American middle class, she writes, "is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and as women make all the decisions." Her numbers make a case: Women now have half the jobs in the American workforce. Three quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the recession belonged to men. Of the top fifteen growth industries in America, twelve are almost exclusively the preserve of women. In the postindustrial economy, men's physical strength becomes more or less irrelevant. And women are also setting the groundwork for the curve to continue: "Women now earn 60 percent of master's degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and about 44 percent of all business degrees," writes Rosin. Three years ago, more women than men earned Ph.D.'s.
URL:
http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/contempt-of-women-0912
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