Are men on the decline? In Hanna Rosin’s new book, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, she argues that as the world changed, women have adapted along with it, which has worked to their advantage – whereas men, she claims, have failed to adapt, to their detriment.
In this episode, I speak with Jennifer Homans, a historian and a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University, who published a review of Rosin’s book in the New York Times. She writes:
The End of Men”? This is not a title; it is a sound bite. But Hanna Rosin means it. The revolution feminists have been waiting for, she says, is happening now, before our very eyes. Men are losing their grip, patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching “the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era” in which women — and womanly skills and traits — are on the rise. Women around the world, she reports, are increasingly dominant in work, education, households; even in love and marriage. The stubborn fact that in most countries women remain underrepresented in the higher precincts of power and still don’t get equal pay for equal work seems to her a quaint holdover, “the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration.
In the second half of this show, I talk with J.A. Martino about the trouble with situating women’s liberation in ‘hookup culture’. J.A. is a feminist writer and choreographer who focuses on issues of gender performance, economics, and domestic labour. She wrote about Hanna Rosin’s vision of ‘hookup culture’ for Feminist Current recently.
