I
found the End of Men article interesting, but I don’t really agree with the
thesis. The author seems to believe that our modern economy is uniquely suited
to women, and that the reign of men as the “dominant sex” has ended. But it
seems to me that there is far more evidence to the contrary. First of all, the
current wage gap doesn’t exactly suggest that women are far ahead of men. Women
are paid around 70% of what men are paid, numbers that aren’t exactly
consistent with a society in which women occupy a higher place in the hierarchy
of genders. Furthermore, for all Rosin’s claims of women providing for their
families over men, 53.2% of the workforce is male. If men are working more and
making more money for their work, Rosin’s claim that women are becoming the
dominant economic power seems impossible. Pop culture, which both affects and
is a reflection of America as a whole, is similarly dominated by men. The
majority of movies feature more male characters and certainly more male
speaking lines than female, and women are often featured in roles that draw
largely from outdated stereotypes. Music is similarly filled with stereotypes
and questionable ideas about the roles of men and women in society. Again, if
men are making more money and working more than women while being reflected in
a much more positive light in pop culture, it seems near-impossible that women
are the dominant sex.
A
much more realistic argument is that we, as a society, have come much closer to
the equality of men and women. The workforce being almost 47% female is a
reality that would have been near incomprehensible in the past, and the fact
that we can and do have discussions about the role of women in pop culture
would have been similarly hard to grasp. But saying that it’s the “End of Men”
is simplistic and implies that there’s no more work to be done, or even that
work needs to be done to help men out. That’s just not the case.
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