The End of Men(struation)

Victoria Robertson wants men and women to start thinking big.

This piece is part of a special series on the End of Gender. This series includes bloggers from Role/Reboot, Good Men Project, The Huffington Post, Salon, HyperVocal, Ms. Magazine, YourTango, Psychology Today, Princess Free Zone, The Next Great Generation, and Man-Making.

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What do you get if you cross a highly articulate, intelligent woman with a book deal?  Answer: Hannah Rosin sensationalist essay ‘The End of Men’. Add fuel to this fire in the form of a struggling economy in which many men are either worried about their current job or about how to simply get one, and you get a heady mix of mild hysteria and a healthy book sales projection.

The main thrust of Rosin’s argument is that “the economies of a new era are more suited to women” and that these economies require female-dominant social attributes, such as “social intelligence”, “open communication”, and “the ability to sit still and focus”.

The ring of these smug social attributes that I am supposed to share with my fellow women resonates as I try to pull my thoughts together for this article; so far I have failed on all three. The reason? I am menstruating.

This means that although I am mustering up every ounce of focus from the very tip of my big toe, I am failing miserably. I am overwhelmed by an urge to google pictures of cute puppies.

Our family has been considering getting a dog for many months, but somehow today I woke up with an inexplicable desire to call up breeders and ask them to email me pictures of their litters. Two whole hours after shutting myself away in my office ‘to write,’ I trot upstairs with a picture of a Springer doodle on my laptop and implore my husband (who is building wardrobes in a manly and purposeful way) to “Look at the puppy!! No, ACTUALLY LOOK AT IT!! LOOOOOOK AT IT! I think we should get it. Today”.  He looked me dead in the eye, “Your period is due.”  Disgusted, I humpfed back down the stairs, completely letting my side down on the social intelligence front.

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He was, of course, right and although it pains me to snitch on my sisters, I am at least going to live up to the ‘open communication’ attribute I am supposed to have and call it like it is: there are a few days in the month when a fog descends on the female brain and we are not ourselves.

This doesn’t mean that we cannot be brilliant and clever and successful but it does mean that we are sometimes vulnerable, unable to sit still and lacking in focus. Just like men, in fact.

Men, however, don’t see a lack of focus or ‘goofing off’ as a bad thing and that is, actually, a good thing. They inherently seem to understand that sometimes doing less is more.

A few months ago I went on my son’s school field trip to see an exhibition on the ‘Dramatic Story of the Discovery of Insulin’ at the New York Historical Society. No prizes for guessing that the seventeen nine-year-olds present were somewhat under whelmed by the ‘drama’ in old film reels showing animal parts being pulverized into insulin extractions.

What was dramatic, however, was watching the differing reactions of the boys and girls. For the majority of the exhibition, the boys appeared distracted and fidgety. They lay on the floor, flopped over benches, rubbed their eyes, and fiddled with their shoe laces. The girls, on the other hand, paid rigid close attention to everything, such sincere attention that one girl fainted. Meanwhile, the boys were making spit bubbles.

The boys, however, had a few surprises up their sleeves for the Q&A session. Whilst the girls stood mute, wallowing in their mutual emotional reaction to the brutal realities of early medical breakthroughs, the boys asked many sparky questions that showed an incredible understanding of what they had just seen. Asking questions about further breakthroughs that allowed scientists to make insulin in laboratories showed the kind of social intelligence Rosin claims men, and boys, lack.

As I watched the kids on the subway journey back to school, it became clear to me what a necessary part boys play in education. At times throughout that day, the girls had a tendency to become intense, the boys, however, brought them out of themselves, got them to laugh with and at each other.  The boys managed to get the most out of the day whilst still not taking themselves or everything too seriously. They allowed themselves to ‘goof off’ and make space for big thinking.

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Apply this to the world of work. Rosin’s modern workingwoman is portrayed as a humorless matriarch, slim enough to fit in a pencil skirt and smart enough for a PhD in Over Achievement. We’ve all met this woman during post-grad or at work; hell, I’ve been her. Just as at school, she is focused and driven, if a bit too intense.  Is she, however, the answer to the prayers of the new era’s economy?

According to Rosin, janitors, computer engineers, nursing, healthcare, childcare, and food preparation will dominate the new economy. Women, she argues, are naturally adept at all but the first two and will therefore beat men to all the jobs with one bat of their eyelashes and a flash of their boringly earnest resumes.

If this really is the ‘new economy’ then both men and women alike are in serious trouble, as not one of these ‘female-friendly’ sectors will provide a single ounce of stimulus to the ailing economy.

What our economy needs is ingenuity, creativity and daring; more engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists thinking the unthinkable and making the unmakeable; more people who stop trying so damn hard to be good and start daring to think big; more men and women who have the ability to ponder the progression of modern medicine while blowing the perfect spit bubble.

—Photo Stan Dominguez/Flickr