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Ten years ago, Hanna Rosins book, The End of Men, argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a feminized job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards, Rosin wrote.

The events of the past decadethe rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wadehave had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Cheerful slogans about the femaleness of the future have receded; the word patriarchy, formerly the preserve of womens-studies professors, has entered the common culture. Last year, in an article about womens exodus from their jobs during the pandemic, Rosin recanted her previous thesis and apologized for its tragic navet. Its now painfully obvious that the mass entry of women into the workforce was rigged from the beginning, she wrote. American work culture has always conspired to keep professional women out and working-class women shackled.

Men, especially conservative men, continue to wring their hands over the male condition, of course. (Tucker Carlson appropriated the title of Rosins book for a documentary, advertised this past spring, about plummeting sperm counts.) But feminist patience for twilight of the penis stories has run out. All that time they spend snivelling about how hard it is to be a poor persecuted man nowadays is just a way of adroitly shirking their responsibility to make themselves a little less the pure products of patriarchy, Pauline Harmange wrote in her 2020 screed, I Hate Men. More recently, the British journalist Laurie Penny, in her Sexual Revolution (Bloomsbury), notes the systemic underpinnings of such snivels: The assumption that oozes from every open pore of straight patriarchal culture is that women are expected to tolerate pain, fear and frustrationbut male pain, by contrast, is intolerable. Penny is careful to distinguish hatred of masculinity from hatred of men, but she nonetheless defines the fundamental political struggle of our time as a contest between feminism and white heterosexual male supremacy. In Daddy Issues (Verso), Katherine Angel calls for #MeToo-era feminists to turn their attention to long-overlooked paternal delinquencies. If the patriarchy is to be defeated, she argues, womens reluctance to criticize their male parents must be interrogated and overcome. Even the modern, civilized father must be kept on the hook, she recommends, and daughters must reckon with their desire for retribution, revenge and punishment.

The combative tone taken by these writers is hardly a surprise. One might argue that a movement currently scrambling to defend some vestige of womens reproductive rights can be forgiven for not being especially solicitous of mens sperm counts. One might argue that it isnt feminisms job to worry about how men are doingany more than its the job of hens to fret about the condition of foxes. But two recent books claim otherwise. A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice (Allen Lane), by the French historian Ivan Jablonka, and What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents (Allen Lane), by Nina Power, a British columnist with a background in philosophy, both contend that the drift toward zero-sum war-of-the-sexes language is a bad thing for feminism. Although their diagnoses of the problem are almost diametrically opposed, both authors make the case for a more generous and humane feminist discourse, capable of recognizing the suffering of men as well as of women. Hens, they acknowledge, have legitimate cause for resentment, but foxes have feelings, too.

Jablonkas dense, copiously researched book, which became a surprise best-seller in France when it was published there, in 2019, takes an ambitious, key-to-all-mythologies approach to its subject. Jablonka, who is a professor at the Universit Sorbonne Paris Nord, begins in the Upper Paleolithic, examining its mysterious, corpulent Venus figurines, and moves suavely across the millennia all the way to the successive waves ofmodern feminism. He has an eye for striking, often grim, detailsunder the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, a daughter might be killed as punishment for a murder committed by her fatherand relishes drawing parallels across eras. From ancient times to the present day, it seems, the central totems of masculinityweapons, locomotive vehicles, and meat (particularly rare meat)have remained remarkably consistent. Likewise, from the fall of Rome to the Weimar Republic, men have consistently attributed political disaster and cultural decline to the corrupting influence of feminine values.

Jablonkas thesis about how patriarchy arose is a fairly standard one. Paleolithic societies already had a sexual division of laborSpanish cave paintings from as early as 10,000 B.C. show male archers hunting and women gathering honeybut it was relatively benign. In the Neolithic era, with the advent of agriculture and the move away from nomadic existence, birth rates increased and women became confined to the domestic sphere, while men started to own land. From then on, each new development, be it metal weapons, the rise of the state, or even the birth of writing, further entrenched the power of men and the subjugation of women.

Until now, that is. Patriarchy has declined, according to Jablonka, but men remain caught in pathologies of the masculine, trying to live up to a symbolic role that doesnt reflect their reduced dominance. The result is an almost tragic level of alienation, he writes, and feminists, instead of mocking or dismissing male anguishthereby leaving men vulnerable to the revanchist fantasies of Tucker Carlson and his ilkshould recognize this moment as a crucial recruitment opportunity. Now is the time to convince men that their obligatory model of virility has immiserated them far more than it has empowered them. The masculinity of domination pays, but it comes at a high cost: an insecure ego, puerile vanity, disinterest in reading and the life of the mind, atrophied inner life, the narrowing of social opportunities... and to top it all, a diminished life expectancy.

Feminism has been slow to empathize and collaborate with men, Jablonka claims, because too many in the movement remain wedded to a Manichean world view of male oppressors and female victims. Some feminists are unreconstructed leftist types, who reject any evidence of womens progress as mystification designed to hide the persistence of male domination. Others are duped by a pro-women romanticism into believing that women are innately nicer and more progressive than men. Jablonka rejects this sort of essentialist thinking, which he says provides a spurious biological rationale for traditional gender roles. If women are naturally kinder and more nurturing than men, and if men are intrinsically imbued with a culture of rape, why bother trying to change the status quo? Testosterone and other androgens may have something to do with a male propensity for aggression, he concedes, but human beings are hostage neither to their biology nor their gender. Mens history of brutish behavior is the product of patriarchal culture, and only by insisting on the fundamental identity between men and women can feminism realize its proper aima redistribution of gender, in which new masculinities abound and the selection of any given way of being a man becomes a lifestyle choice.

Whats saved to the cloud gets printed in Hell.

Cartoon by Michael Shaw

To claim that masculinity is a patriarchal construct, however, is not so much an explanation as the postponement of an explanation. Who or what created the patriarchy? Evolutionary biologists maintain that our earliest male ancestors had an evolutionary incentive to maximize the spread of their genes by violently competing for, and monopolizing access to, women. Jablonka is eager to avoid such biological imperatives, but in doing so he reaches for a kind of just-so story that renders much of the history he has laid out beside the point. Patriarchy, he speculates, was motivated by simple resentment of womens wombs. Deprived of the power that women have, men reserved all the others for themselves, he writes. This was the revenge of the males: their biological inferiority led to their social hegemony.

Thus it is that successive patriarchal lites have spent the past several millennia shoring up their illegitimate rule, by defining manliness as a set of superior qualities denied to women. Not that Jablonka thinks there is only one, eternal masculine style; rather, all models of masculinity since antiquity have been mechanisms for asserting and imposing patriarchal power. The extroversion and swagger of the toreador look very different from the gallantry of the Victorian gentleman, which is, in turn, quite distinct from the laconic glamour of the cowboy, but they are all equally culpable expressions of the masculine-superiority complex.

More here:
New Feminist Considerations of Masculinity, Reviewed - The New Yorker

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