Book Review: The End of Men?

Battle Hymn of the Slacker Father

In the battle of the sexes, the losers have been middle-class families.

By Carol Tavris

Back In the 1970s—the olden days, when women were said to suffer a "fear of success" that was keeping them out of careers, and when there was no women's bathroom near the U.S. Senate chamber (it arrived in 1993; congresswomen in the House got theirs last year)—I interviewed the great anthropologist Marvin Harris. "Male supremacy," he said, "was just a phase in the evolution of culture." It would end in the 21st century, he predicted, because its two bolsters—women's inability to control fertility and the need for men's physical strength in war and work—would be gone.

The End of Men

By Hanna Rosin
Riverhead, 320 pages, $27.95

I never imagined, in that time before female generals and in vitro fertilization, that I would live to see his prediction fulfilled. But it is fast coming true, with a swiftness that can be hard to comprehend until someone makes us see the larger picture. That is what Hanna Rosin does in "The End of Men."

Anyone who has lived through decades of popular books about gender, arguing about "who started this," "who's worse off," who's up, who's down, who can have it all and who can have only 62% of it all (whatever "all" even means), may be amused by the melodramatic title. But this provocative book is not so much about the end of men but the end of male supremacy. In much of the world, from South America to South Korea, from Iceland to India, from villages to urban centers, in desperately poor countries as in affluent ones, what Iceland's prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, calls "the age of testosterone" is ending.

Consider: In 2010, young American women had a median income higher than that of their male peers in 1,997 out of 2,000 metropolitan regions. In Brazil, one third of married women earn more than their husbands. Women are the majorities in colleges and professional schools on every continent except Africa; in Bahrain, Qatar and Guyana, women are 70% of college graduates. The more education and better jobs that women get, the more they narrow their marriage chances: They have to marry down, marry late, or not marry at all. Indeed, Ms. Rosin shows, the average age of marriage is rising: Even across Asia, it is now 32. Divorce rates are skyrocketing; births are declining and out-of-wedlock births increasing. The whole planet is becoming Sweden.

Ms. Rosin avoids the journalistic habit of doing "spotlight interviews" with individuals selected to support the writer's hypothesis, a practice she knows is misleading. Instead, her argument is based on substance and scholarship: She starts from data, then turn to interviews to illuminate the human effects of these world-wide changes. She spoke with demographers, social scientists, educators and gender-studies scholars. She traveled widely, examining the lives of rich and poor alike. She went to modest Midwestern universities and community colleges as well as to high-powered business schools. She went to Seoul, to see how in merely one generation South Korea has shifted from being "one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world" to a nation of "manic superwomen," where parents prefer daughters to sons. Everywhere she finds women improving their lives through education and determination, raising the bar for what they want from a man and not sticking with him if they don't get it.

Women's equality once seemed so elusive that few of its advocates paused to predict how men would respond if it actually arrived. Sure, some dinosaurs would sulk in their cave, some would respond with violence, some would daydream about a nonexistent past when women knew their place and a rape victim couldn't get pregnant. But, overall, surely, the march was steady onward, with men benefiting as much as women from women's higher status and education?

Ms. Rosin makes us face the uncomfortable evidence that many men are engaging in a sit-down strike. In macho cultures, such as those of Spain, men import poorer, more traditional women from other countries to marry. In Japan, Ms. Rosin reports, men are causing something of a national crisis because of their indifference to dating, marrying and even having sex.

Here in America, many men have dialed down their ambitions, and not simply in response to a loss of job opportunities. Although three-fourths of the jobs lost in the recent recession were in fields that are overwhelmingly male (including construction, manufacturing and finance), the same number of new ones emerged in health fields, service industries and teaching. Yet surprisingly few men are entering these areas or seeking the education they would need to do so. "Our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest," writes Ms. Rosin, "is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and home, and as women make all the decisions."

The result, Ms. Rosin painstakingly shows, is virtually a reversal of the psychological landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. Then, men wondered why they should give up freedom and sex for marriage, child care and the burden of financial responsibility; now it is women asking that question. Then, men complained of clinging, freeloading wives; now Ms. Rosin hears repeatedly from women that, in the words of one executive, women should "be very careful about marrying freeloading, bloodsucking parasites." Then, it was women who tamped down their aspirations, knowing the objective unlikelihood of attaining them; now it's the men who have "fear of success" and a "why bother?" attitude. Then, if women had casual sex it was to keep the guy happy; now many have casual sex for their own pleasure and to keep from being derailed from their career goals with something "serious."

The great strength of Ms. Rosin's argument is that she shows how these changes in sex, love, ambition and work have little or nothing to do with hard-wired brain differences or supposed evolutionary destiny. They occur as a result of economic patterns, the unavailability of marriageable men, and a global transformation in the nature of work.

In tracing the big picture, Ms. Rosin inevitably omits considerable nuance and exceptions. Of course countless men are desperate to work and egalitarian marriages thrive all over the world. But in America, Ms. Rosin believes, such relationships are largely another perk of privilege; they mainly exist among the affluent 30% who have a college degree and whose division of earnings between husband and wife shift from 40-60 one year to 80-20 another, as both parties pursue their individual goals. Yet, she writes, even among men with egalitarian sympathies, many seem "haunted by the specter of a coming gender apocalypse." Why is that? she asks one young man. "It's because our team is losing," he said.

In that reply is the problem—and its solution. Ms. Rosin believes that the "end of men" can be averted if men "expand the range of options for what it means to be a man." The author provides heartening examples of couples and companies that are doing just that. (Even one oil drilling company she describes has transformed its work culture from having the "baddest roughnecks" around—and the worst safety record—to a culture of reciprocal help and cooperation.)

"Ultimately," Ms. Rosin says, "the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women." This great truth is often lost in the two predominant portrayals of men in contemporary popular culture: preposterously muscled action men who save the planet and childish, beer-drinking lads who just want to save themselves. Between the brawn of the past and the boy of today, we await the man of tomorrow. One who will realize that, for the well-being of all, men and women need to see themselves as being on the same team.

Gentlemen, start your engines.
—Ms. Tavris, a social psychologist, is the author of "The Mismeasure of Woman" and the co-author, with Elliot Aronson, of "Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me)."

A version of this article appeared September 8, 2012, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Battle Hymn of the Slacker Father.