Issue #26, Fall 2012

Why (Some) Men Still Have It All

Working-class men may be doomed, but the ones who run the world are doing just fine.

The End Of Men: And The Rise of Women By Hanna Rosin • Riverhead Books • 2012 • 320 pages • $27.95

There is a chapter in The End of Men, Hanna Rosin’s compelling, provocative, but occasionally misleading new book, about what she calls the “new wave of female violence.” In it, she charts how women, in keeping with their increasing social prominence, are becoming more aggressive and even homicidal, and less likely to be victimized. It’s an example, she suggests, of her book’s broader subject—the way changing gender dynamics are remaking us in ways that once seemed inconceivable, upending the sexual hierarchy that’s prevailed for almost all of recorded human history.

Rosin opens the chapter with the story of Larissa Schuster, who ran a successful biochemical lab while her milquetoast husband, a registered nurse whom acquaintances described as “meek,” “timid,” and “accommodating,” took charge of their two children. At least he did until she murdered him by stuffing him in a barrel of acid, apparently because she was disgusted by his passivity but didn’t want to pay him alimony in the event of a divorce.

Women like Schuster, writes Rosin, “raise the broader unsettling possibility that, with the turnover in modern gender roles, the escalation from competitiveness to aggression to violence that we are used to in men has started showing up in women as well.” Later, she cites figures that appear to demonstrate that women have caught up to men as perpetrators of domestic violence. “Since the United States passed mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence in the late 1990s, arrest rates for women have skyrocketed, and in some states reached 50 percent or more of all arrests,” she writes.

In a rhetorical trick that Rosin uses throughout her book, she nods at feminists who argue that these figures are misleading, but suggests they’re in denial, mired in outdated assumptions about gender and power. “Our attachment to the notion of women as vulnerable runs deeper than politics, of course,” she writes. “It’s hard to fathom that women’s circumstance could shift something so fundamental as raw, physical power.” Rosin is a smart and skillful writer, and she constructs her arguments tightly enough that every time I doubted them, I wondered whether I was being blinkered by ideology.

Yet a bit of research shows that while the number of women killed by their partners fell between 1976 and 2005, killings of men by wives and girlfriends declined much more. “[T]he number of black males killed by intimates dropped by 83 percent, white males by 61 percent, black females by 52 percent, and white females by 6 percent,” according to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. It may be that women are now less likely to kill their partners because female empowerment has made it easier for them to get out of abusive relationships without resorting to homicide. Still, these numbers do not suggest that Schuster represents much of anything except a ghoulishly interesting anomaly.

Similarly, the arguments against Rosin’s reading of the domestic violence statistics aren’t as easily dismissed as she implies. In some cases, mandatory arrest laws lead police to detain both members of a couple when they can’t figure out who is at fault in an altercation. Because of such laws, people aren’t just being booked for punching, kicking, or stabbing a partner—they’re also being arrested for less severe infractions like shoving or throwing things. It’s still overwhelmingly women who are the victims of the most serious acts of domestic violence. According to the National Institute of Justice, a review of domestic violence research found that “more than 90 percent of ‘systematic, persistent, and injurious’ violence is perpetrated by men.”

It’s not Rosin’s responsibility to drag her readers deep into the methodological weeds on every point she makes. But a book heralding the incipient end of patriarchy has significant policy implications. So-called men’s rights activists, for example, have long argued that domestic-violence law is an outdated feminist boondoggle, and will likely be delighted to see Rosin helping them to make their case. More broadly, one of the biggest obstacles women face in fighting sex discrimination is the insistence that it’s no longer a problem, and that, if anything, men are now the ones who are oppressed. Thus it’s frustrating how frequently The End of Men, which has important, fascinating things to say about rapidly changing gender roles, elides or downplays the very real ways male power remains entrenched.

The End of Men grew out of a 2010 Atlantic article of the same name, which argued, often convincingly, that men are floundering in our post-industrial economy while many women are thriving. The book expands this premise, describing what Rosin sees as an epochal transformation in the sexual order. Her reporting, she writes, showed her that we had “reached the end of two hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back. Once I opened my eyes to that possibility, I realized that the evidence was everywhere, and it was only centuries of habit and history that prevented everyone from seeing it.”

This passage suggests why Rosin’s writing is at once so scintillating and, at moments, so maddening. A senior editor at The Atlantic and co-founder of DoubleX, Slate’s women’s blog, she comes across as a liberal feminist who prides herself on her lack of dogma and openness to findings that challenge progressive assumptions. Of course, those are things to be proud of, and they’re why most of what she writes is worth reading. But a love of the counterintuitive can, at times, become its own sort of orthodoxy. Sometimes the dull conventional wisdom—men are more likely to abuse their wives than vice versa—is true.

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Issue #26, Fall 2012
 
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Ben:

The fading relevance of doctrinaire feminism is demonstrated by the trumpeting of statistics like, "Women make up just 3.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 15 percent of equity partners at major law firms, and 16.8 percent of Congress." Most men, and most women, do not work and have no possibility of working, as a Fortune 500 CEO, an equity partner at a major law firm, or a congressperson.

What practical difference does the gender ratio of Fortune 500 CEOs make to the average person's life? Outside of the gender equivalent of proxy ethnic pride ("Go girl!"), why should the 99% of women care about the real or imagined barriers preventing their 1% "sisters" from attaining to the 0.01%? Or are we expected to fall back on the old trope that a world ruled by women would be more compassionate, as if the ruthless women who are capable of high-level success are qualitatively different than ruthless men?

Sep 12, 2012, 11:42 AM
Emily Booth:

Rosin has been expressing the sentiment behind this book for the better part of several years now.

(Funnily enough, in a recent article by Anna Louie Sussman at Reuters, Rosin admitted that the book was titled obnoxiously, and that her argument would have been easier to make if she chose to go with biologically deterministic explanations.)

As with most books like this one that has some good data, some not-so-good, and a vast muddle in the middle, it will take several months, if not a year or two, before enough intelligent readers have digested the proposition, determined if it makes sense in the real world, and provided us with reasoned responses in future articles and books.

Unfortunately for most of us, our attention span is not long enough to accommodate this lengthier time scale of argument and response, so we will wind up ignoring much of the matter.

Sep 12, 2012, 5:57 PM
Emily Booth:

@Ben: I understand your sentiment that it is of little consequence to the majority of us how the top leaders in business (or politics, entertainment, etc.) get to their positions.

Most (possibly all) of those in the 1%--regardless of gender--have gotten there with the aid of significant structural advantages (born rich, educated in the ways of power, prevented from failure by the socialized safety net woven for the hyper-rich out of the skin of the poor and the middle class).

Rosin uses these few examples, though, only to spice up the narrative.

The bulk of her data _does_ go to show that for the 99%, the shift towards women's accomplishments is destined to have a drastic impact on men's achievements.

I happen to agree that the inherent nature of capitalism assures us that once significant numbers of women achieve their place in the 1%, they will much more adhere to the practices of the privileged than they will ever adopt the stereotypical tropes of gender-common practices to change how those at the top act.

(Off-topic: Why on earth does it take 5 minutes for a comment to post on this site? The tech people who are maintaining this forum software and running its database should be ashamed that their technology is so backwards in this day and age. I wager one Greek drachma that you could find, in less than an hour's search on Craigslist, a capable programmer and database engineer to fix this problem for good.)

Sep 12, 2012, 6:10 PM

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