We’ve let go of the silly notion that all women are hardwired to nurture rather than compete. What some of us are still not seeing is that men are every bit as adaptable.
Pundits have labeled it the “mancession,” as manufacturing jobs in male-dominated industries disappear across the country. Articles in national magazines predict the “end of men.” Conservatives and men’s rights activists worry that boys and men are unable to connect with an educational curriculum aimed at encouraging girls, and are falling even further behind in the battle to develop the skills needed to succeed in the new economy.
To believe the media, men are floundering in this confusing and unstable new era. While the effects of the worst economy in 80 years have impacted all of us, the consensus is that men have been hit harder and will have a harder time recovering from that hit. But is that really true? Maybe the real problem isn’t an economy and an educational system that supposedly favors “feminine” skills. Maybe the real problem is our belief that men can’t adapt as easily to change.
Maybe the real problem is the myth of male inflexibility.
Hanna Rosin explains:
What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more-nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?
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(The bold emphasis is mine.) I appreciate that Rosin, unlike many pop psychologists, admits that she’s merely speculating here. As she knows, there is no irrefutable evidence that evolution has rendered men ill-suited for our rapidly transforming economy. But one thing we do know with certainty is that beliefs can shape reality. And if ever there were a self-fulfilling prophecy in American life it just might be the idea that men can’t adapt as quickly to changing circumstances as women can.
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Nearly 200 years ago, as the industrial revolution began to transform America from a rural to an urban society, politicians and pastors worried about the impact on men. What would happen, the pundits fretted, to the “heroic artisans” of agrarian society, the shoemakers and the blacksmiths, as their crafts became irrelevant? As so many surnames show, trades were passed from father to son for generations. Nineteenth-century industrialization brought that ancient practice to a rapid end. How could men adapt, some wondered, when their very names and identities were linked to one specific inherited task?
You already know the answer. Men adapted just fine. As Michael Kimmel (who coined the term “heroic artisan”) has shown in his classic Manhood in America, Americans simply created a new ideal: the “self-made man” who made his living with his wits and his creativity rather than careful devotion to the craft of his forefathers. The sons of village shoemakers moved to cities, to factories and offices, and dreamed of climbing to great riches. While few made it to the top, almost all were forced to develop skills (both intellectual and physical) that would have astonished their grandfathers.
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If there’s anything exceptional about America, it’s the legendary capacity of its inhabitants for self-reinvention. We’ve seen it most clearly with the women’s movement of the past five decades. Women are now CEOs and war fighters, having moved almost seamlessly into male-dominated professions for which they were presumably unprepared from an evolutionary standpoint. We’ve let go of the silly notion that all women are hardwired to nurture rather than compete, because we’ve seen so many excellent counter-examples. What some of us are still not seeing is that men are every bit as adaptable.
The much-celebrated “slacker dudes” who populate Judd Apatow movies and their mother’s couches aren’t displaced auto workers, confused by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China. They’ve famously made it clear that they find traditional masculinity unsatisfying (even if many are hooked on hyper-macho video games like Call of Duty or Black Ops). As their sisters and girlfriends will often attest, these guys are more articulate about their feelings and their passions than men of earlier generations. What they’re missing isn’t the ability to transform—what they’re missing is the inspiration, ambition, and encouragement to go out into the marketplace and match their skills to the changing demands of our transforming economy.
At Pasadena City College, where I’ve taught since 1993, our famous nursing program has seen a slow but steady rise in male applicants. We recently hired our first male professor of early childhood education, and he reports that the number of young men interested in teaching little kids has risen steadily. (This isn’t just anecdotal evidence; it’s backed by data. The number of men teaching pre-school and kindergarten in the U.S. rose by 33 percent between 2004 and 2009, though the overall percentage remains in single digits.)
In her reply to the Hanna Rosin piece in the Atlantic, Ann Friedman wrote at American Prospect:
The best man for the job just might be a woman, or so the 1970s slogan went. It’s long past time we also acknowledge that the best woman for the job might just be a man.
The myth of male inflexibility suggests that unlike women, men are too rigid to adapt to a changing culture. It suggests that extricating oneself from the straitjacket of traditional masculinity is more difficult than escaping the corset of traditional femininity. And whether this incapacity is consciously feigned or sincerely believed, it’s rooted in a myth rather than a reality. If feminism alone can’t get men to develop their own emotional and vocational dexterity, then we can be certain that the inexorable realities of global economic patterns will accomplish the task.
—National Guard photo/Flickr
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Read more Men at Work:
Dacus Thompson: Career Changers
Tim Donnelly: In Defense of Dating Your Coworker
Ted Cox: 11 Rules for Working Out of a Coffee Shop
Brian Stuart: Working for the Woman
Hugo Schwyzer: The Myth of Male Inflexibility
Mark Oppenheimer: Life Lessons From My Alcoholic Boss
John Olympic: What It’s Like to Work in Walmart Hell
Tom Matlack: The Illusion of Success
Morra Aarons-Mele: How to Work From Home
Ryan O’Hanlon: Meet America’s Oldest Minor Leaguer
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The whole work debate of how the job market change is impacting men represents the need men have to find a new way to define themselves – it use to be through work – now it is who there are. Men need to find an intrinsic definition or self orientation for themselves. Not so much what we do, but who we are being.
John D. I think the folks who say the patriarchy hurts men too should try to square that with the NOW move to avoid helping men. Is NOW part of the patriarchy?
Shouldn’t some feminists who claim to be fair and humane and all the stuff be discussing it? Naw, that’s crazy talk.
Change is coming Richard, You have to remember that the entertainment industry has to be seen as on the “cutting edge” or the counter-culture. The more feminist organizations are seen to be as part of the “powers that be” the more edgy and counter-culture will men’s issues seem. There is already a lot of bleed over into mainstream media of men’s rights issues. Tyra Banks and other daytime shows have had episodes on abusive women. My wife watches Private Practice a show that is (what I see as) a very female-centered show like ER that had an episode about a… Read more »
It probably didn’t help the situation when NOW declared that the government shouldn’t be helping “burly men” and had a closed door meeting with Obama in which he agreed to re-direct 41% of the $800 billion stimulus from manufacturing and construction (which had shed millions of jobs) to education and medicine which was almost unscathed from the recession. I thought feminism is here to help men too? Would somebody care to explain how increasing men’s greater unemployment disparity to women’s helps those unemployed men (or their wives/families?). Clearly the leaders of NOW thought that they could blatantly broadcast the sentiment… Read more »
Glad. You know what I’m missing? How do you know this? More to the point, who are you that I should believe you?
Glad.
My loss because I do not accept a judgment of me by somebody who has no idea who I am and is adamantly proof against facts?
You must be somebody important.
Your loss because you are missing out on a important part of life, I think.
Hey, I don’t believe there is such a thing as good men. But I do believe men have an obligation to take on other men and clean up the damage worldwide that men do every day— from the oil spills in the Gulf, to the hundreds of thousands of girl children aborted within patriarchy… men change? Are you kidding? They haven’t changed, don’t intend to change and aren’t good. I don’t know what they are, not human for the male dominated damage ecologically, not human as they dominate whole industry that are destroying the planet, not human as they mass… Read more »
What a bigoted little pig yopu are, aren’t you? Blaming men for the oil that women consume – quite the moral judge aeren’t you? Speaking of harm to the planet… “But I do believe men have an obligation to take on other men and clean up the damage worldwide that men do every day”… what obligation do you you think women have to prevent other women form covering the planet with their consumerist spawn? “I don’t know what they are, not human ” What a disgusting troll you are, deciding who is and isn’t human. I suppose since men are… Read more »
Go crawl back into the radfem hole you came out of. Yuck.
-Signed, a third wave feminist.
Glad. As I said, you do your implying without a clue, without even wishing you had a clue, about somebody you’ve never met. The question about my wife being a nice lady is that, if I were a butthead or otherwise a trial, her female friends, or her married couple friends, wouldn’t be so willing to visit for a weekend or so. They’d be willing for her to visit them. Without me. I resist something you said about me? I think pretty anybody would be wise to resist what you said about them. Are you some kind of mindreader that… Read more »
Whatever. Your loss.
Glad. You imply that most men, the unreconstructed type that form the unenlightened majority, cannot engage, cannot have a verbal conversation, cannot guess reasonably well another’s state of mind, don’t know how to ask for what they want, don’t respect another’s needs and questions, etc. Wrong again. I get hostile to things with “fem” in the name because they generally include stereotyping guys like me without having, or apparently needing, a clue as to whether or not they’re correct. IOW, hostile right back. Come to think of it, you’re only presuming that a friendly-seeming relationship with a woman is actually… Read more »
“You imply that most men, the unreconstructed type that form the unenlightened majority, cannot engage, cannot have a verbal conversation, cannot guess reasonably well another’s state of mind, don’t know how to ask for what they want, don’t respect another’s needs and questions, etc.” No, I don’t imply this of “most men.” I imply that YOU don’t ask questions, listen to the answers, and instead think you can read other people’s thoughts/feelings, etc without asking them about them. In two posts now you have resisted acknowledging this about yourself. Everything may be fine with your “nice lady” wife and your… Read more »
I admit to being reactionary to Hugo’s writing usually. I often knee-jerk my way into sarcasm in reponse to his articles, justified or not. In this case, I think he’s made a great point. There’s no reason to assume that men are somehow less flexible than women. There’s no reason to assume that men are going through a difficult time today because they are incapable of changing or adapting to new circumstances. If there are ways that recent developments benefit women more than men (assuming for the moment that’s the case), that’s not happening because women are more flexible or… Read more »
Glad.
Can’t be friendly with women without being a feminist? Do you have to explain on an nourly basis that you’re a feminist?
No, I don’t have to ask. The women seem to be friendly right back. I know, I know, it’s a vital survival technique without which they’d all be murdered.
Thing is, you need to think about what this all looks like from the outside. Nuts, is what it looks like.
Yes, you do have to ask to know whether another person sees a relationship as “friendly.” It’s JMO (other feminist-identified women or men may disagree) but, no, you don’t have to identify as a “feminist” to be friendly with women. You do, however, need to be able to interact with people and not to be hostile to things with “fem” in the name. You do need to learn to engage in verbal conversation, both learning to ask for what you want, and to respect the answers you get, whatever they are. You have to get out of the fantasy that… Read more »
After reading about myself — or those similar to me in age, gender and ethnicity — as a “Beached White Male” in Newsweek the other day, I was delighted to come across someone who sees it a little more my way. Go “the boys”!
Glad.
Sorry about “femfriendly”. I took that to mean “friendly with feminists”.
Most guys I know are friendly with women without agreeing with feminists.
In fact, your last paragraph describes nearly every man I know. So I guess this is not only redundant, superfluous, unnecessary, but ‘way late to the party.
A useful discussion does not create a straw man or haul out a stereotype, demolish it, and then claim to have accomplished something.
I guess you’d have to ask the women whether they consider these men you know “friendly” with them, not just the men.
One of the greatest articles about masculinity and their way of being. Thank you so much for sharing.
Women wanted change. We got sick of being treated like sex objects and slaves in the work place. We didn’t want to rely on men for anything. We worked to change the world, and we moved into jobs where men attacked us, sexually harassed us, raped us and treated us like dirt…. Walmart is facing the biggest sex discrimination lawsuit in the history of the U.S. this year 2011. The male dominated Supreme Court (there has never been any other kind in this country) will probably rule in favor of white male christian patriarchy – Walmart. What do I see… Read more »
Danny. Somebody has to provide. Or not, depending on whether you’ve got an in with the government. Men have had the tools, physically speaking, to do pre-mechanical providing better than women. Reading Brokaw’s autobio. Seems the women’s help with the physical stuff didn’t annoy the menz. But the belief that men should provide did not mean they were not allowed to do other things or were emotionally incapable of doing them. That’s the myth. The myth of the nearly-fatally-flawed, the damaged man, who needs the insights of femfriendly men. How’s irrelevant, unnecessary, redundant, and superfluous sound? Just found it. Heinlein:… Read more »
“femfriendly men”
That’s the whole point; if you can’t be friendly with women then you are still caught in the myth, no?
There is an alternative: That you need not be so hostile to women and can even be friendly with women. Can learn to share earning and parenting not “somONE has to provide.” Can learn to empathize. Can learn to dialogue rather than argue, demean and condescend to others. Can learn from men whom women like. Can learn from women.
Danny. Somebody has to provide. Yes somebody has to do the providing and for ages its been the belief that men are supposed to do the external providing and women are supposed to do the internal providing. But the belief that men should provide did not mean they were not allowed to do other things or were emotionally incapable of doing them. That’s the myth. And as Hugo as much says that myth is an active force that manisfests in the form of people thinking that a man has his place and woman has her place. As in some of… Read more »
Calling something a “myth” implies that a lot of people believed it.
That needs to be demonstrated.
But it does allow the writer to pretend to be addressing something nobody else thought of.
Frequently, very few people believed it, whatever it was.
Lousy technique.
Its demonstrated by the fact that for ages men have been expected to fill the role of the provider.
And I have to disagree that only a few people believe.
What they’re missing isn’t the ability to transform—what they’re missing is the inspiration, ambition, and encouragement to go out into the marketplace and match their skills to the changing demands of our transforming economy. And calling them slackers and mocking their interests and hobbies does not inspire or encourage them. It is understandable that feminist position is to put men down, however, that does not resolve the problem. If men want to work in labor, I do not think the solution to the problem of shrinking construction jobs is to tell men to teach 5-year-olds. That kind of simplistic perspective… Read more »
I think the idea is that US businesses will no longer be able to disrespect men who follow through on work/family balance issues when there is a critical mass of men who are engaged with the economy and their families. For men who are unfamiliar with them, learning self-awareness, relational skills, negotiation skills, parenting/nurturing/mentoring skills, will add to any other marketable skills the man has and will not only serve him in getting to have and be part of a family but also in the workplace.
Motivation comes in part from self-awareness and emotional availability.
A cushy job. How laughable. I find my job as a writing center tutor more exhausting than I found my job working at a dog kennel! Unlike my job here, I didn’t have to think so hard at the kennels. I had a task list I needed to do, got it done, and didn’t have to use much of my brain to think about what to do next. But my job as a writing center tutor requires me to think through various scenarios and how to fix those scenarios, of which there is no formula for. I don’t have to… Read more »
The majority of men who lost their jobs in the last two years did not work in dog kennels. Many of them worked in factories or in the construction industries. Those jobs require a lot of mental work along with physical work. Those jobs also require years of experience, which is actually the major contention for men. They learned a set of skills that are now useless. It is ridiculous to assume anyone could easily pick up a new set of skills in a few months and go back to work. The other contention is that the skills are useless… Read more »
Dog kennel? Headaches? Really? Those are your barometers for a “hard job”? Come back when you face a realistic threat of ending up in a wheelchair just for going to work.
So yes. Your job is cushy.
Adapt or die, right? And why shouldn’t men adapt to professions like nursing, pre-school teaching. But for some odd reason people sometimes look at them askance. But why? If a man can pass an RN program, he can deal with women’s parts. It’s a no brainer to me. Yet I’m glad you address it and reinvigorate the conversation. Status, wealth, where we live and how we form families: it’s all changing. And for the better. Great piece of writing, Hugo.
Here in Norway, which came second on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index in 2010 (http://www.peacewomen.org/portal_resources_resource.php?id=1049) it turns out that the labour marked is very gender segregated. Men and suprisingly too a larger degree women choose traditionally careers in fields dominated by their gender. Men at a higher rate than women educate themselves on fields which are currently domminated by the other gender. I.e. there has been a larger change in how many men educate themselves in the health and social science sector than women who educate themselves in for instance construction. The latter have only minute changes… Read more »
Good article. I was very annoyed with Rosin’s article, which was both inarticulate (I think the title should have been “The End of Patriarchal Men”) and somewhat snarky, vindictive and revenge-oriented, as the quote above indicates. The last forty years have indeed seen a remarkable shift to sex/gender equality. Yet, the “status quo” reinforcers of evolutionary psychology, with its simplistic conjectures and attempts to reinforce the past, religion, and politicians of both parties (the GOP by patronizing and exploiting in the home, failing to acknowledge work/family balance issues and overvaluing the military and undervaluing education and health care; the Dems… Read more »
I was not suprised by Rosin’s article. She opined in an earlier piece that breast feeding holds a woman back professionally. In the Atlantic’s online edition, she’s in a video accompanying the end-of-men piece in which she proudly states her belief that “girls rule.” She clearly thinks the only thing wrong with winner-take-all capitalism is that the typical winner isn’t a woman. I’m all for men and women branching into work that was heretofore done by the opposite sex. But that won’t stop the growing employment crisis of the former First World. “Hit the books and make a plan,” is… Read more »