“The End of Man” draws social indicators from a variety of sources from the increased desirability of baby girls, more effective managerial styles and skills of female managers, and disproportionate over-achievement of female college graduates to support her argument that men is in a crisis of becoming underdogs.
Wells, seems to me this assessment is pretty biased. The coming of age of female inroad into education and professional career does not necessarily imply a decline of men, not unless you assume gender segregation as the only stratifying unit. Race and nationality complicates the picture. Women as a group fare better than men, but women is not a unitary, undifferentiated group. What about the 18-year-old single mum waiting in line for welfare service? Does she fare better than the 35-year-old bachelor with a professional career? Is it meaningful and fair to use gender as a watershed marker?
Wells, seems to me this assessment is pretty biased. The coming of age of female inroad into education and professional career does not necessarily imply a decline of men, not unless you assume gender segregation as the only stratifying unit. Race and nationality complicates the picture. Women as a group fare better than men, but women is not a unitary, undifferentiated group. What about the 18-year-old single mum waiting in line for welfare service? Does she fare better than the 35-year-old bachelor with a professional career? Is it meaningful and fair to use gender as a watershed marker?
Perhaps there are reasons to take this over-generalized pattern more seriously as a social warning, as my friend who sent me the article insisted. Well I am not so sure about this caveat. I am skeptical because gendered symbols of our time cannot be rigorously ascertained without comparison with the past. It is easy to assume that everything that happen right in front of us at this moment as we see it is unique and unparalleled, while it is actually our ignorance of the cosmic vastness and our over-celebrated dignity that we are seeing.
So I checked some sources on the changing gender wrestling in the US and it appears that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an essay titled "The Crisis of American Masculinity" in 1958, describing a parallel sign of emasculation that he observed in the postwar America where "women are marching toward expanding their domestic forces and seizing domains likes a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive, are hardly able to hold their own and gratefully accept assignments from their new rulers." The military narrative in the late 50s is astonishing but not quite alien to a non-resident alien in the 21st century. The fear of emasculation, the presumption of male supremacy, the heroic virility in the inscription of manhood are familiarized by the present generations.
So back to the original proposition, I guess I'm not sure if the effeminate symptom of our time does not carry any remnants from the past, if it was ever such an ubiquitous, trans-sectorial issue occurring at all social fronts.
So I checked some sources on the changing gender wrestling in the US and it appears that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an essay titled "The Crisis of American Masculinity" in 1958, describing a parallel sign of emasculation that he observed in the postwar America where "women are marching toward expanding their domestic forces and seizing domains likes a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive, are hardly able to hold their own and gratefully accept assignments from their new rulers." The military narrative in the late 50s is astonishing but not quite alien to a non-resident alien in the 21st century. The fear of emasculation, the presumption of male supremacy, the heroic virility in the inscription of manhood are familiarized by the present generations.
So back to the original proposition, I guess I'm not sure if the effeminate symptom of our time does not carry any remnants from the past, if it was ever such an ubiquitous, trans-sectorial issue occurring at all social fronts.
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