Three Cheers for Men's Lib

The End of Men: and the Rise of Women

 

by Hanna Rosin

Isbn 978-1594488047

 

Riverhead  320p

Of the many benefits of eBooks, perhaps the greatest is that I was able to avoid walking around with a book whose bright yellow cover proclaims the title The End of Men.  Despite the publisher’s PR campaign, Hanna Rosin is hardly the first person to observe that traditional gender roles and cultural assumptions about gender are changing as fast as rumors about the next iPhone.  She is, however, the first to write a book that is both well researched and well written. 

The book is packed with statistics that will make any Y chromosome carrier stand up and notice.  She explores trends in employment (of the 15 jobs of the future, men dominate in only two), education (women have surpassed me in college graduate rates and post-graduate degrees earned) and even reproduction (surrogacy is way bigger than a couple of sitcoms about gay couples.)  In the workplace, the schoolroom and even the most primal of human endeavors, reproduction, women are leaving men in the dust or finding us just plain superfluous. 

Rosin is hardly the caricature of the angry bra-burning feminist that so terrifies the “traditionalist” wing of American nut-baggery.  She is a mom (the book is dedicated, with an apology for the title, to her son) and a wife.  She is not an angry anything really.  Rosin comes across in her prose as what she is; a gifted writer who has noticed a trend in our culture, researched it and written a very readable book.  It is her precision in thought and non-anxious tone that appealed to me as a reader.   Rosin is not particularly celebrating the demise of men or celebrating the rise of women over men.  Instead, she paints a picture of excited anticipation of what this change in cultural gender roles and norms might mean.

Rather than spending time mourning the corpse of the dead and dying old-style “dude,” Rosin explores questions about what this new future means for us today.  How do you raise boys who are able to live culturally in this in-between time and yet ready to embrace this new world?  How do you raise girls prepared to take on this more central and powerful role in the world when the corner office is still just too far off and the glass ceiling just too low for so many of them?  These are big questions for a culture that has been so defined by variants on the macho persona for manhood. 

As a man, I have no trouble with the demise of the Mad Men, ass-slapping, martini drinking, bringing home the bacon, man of the house model of manhood.   Well, I would like to keep the martinis as a souvenir perhaps.  The idea that this cultural construction of what it means to “be a man” is fading into history is, in my humble opinion, a good thing.  I see this as less the end of manhood and more the beginning of men’s liberation.  If a man feels called to be a stay at home parent that should not be a culturally unusual thing.  If a man feels called to put his career on the backburner as his spouse’s career takes off, that should be a sign that he is a loving spouse and not a wimp.  The best thing that has happened to men in history may be the end of men dominating history.

The End of Men is a worthwhile read and Hanna Rosin is to be congratulated for tackling a politically and socially awkward topic with a well written and thoughtfully constructed book.  She sold me.  Three cheers for manhood 2.0!

 

Four Down...

The Guardian recently published an article about a list of ten books named the ten most difficult books ever written.  The compilers of the list (for the literary website the Millions) looked for "books that are hard to read for their length, or their syntax and style, or their structural and generic strangeness, or their odd experimental techniques, or their abstraction".  The lucky final ten are, in no particular order:

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
The Phenomenology of Spirit by GF Hegel
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardsom
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
Women and Men by Joseph McElroy

Personally I would have had Infinite Jest, Portnoy's Complaint, Gravity's Rainbow, Go Down, Moses and anything by Dickens (not because his work is difficult but because it is so mind numbingly boring) on the list.

Looking at the list I realized that I have read four, avoided one and never heard of the other five.  So as a thought experiment (and a new and creative way of avoiding working on my dissertation) I have decided to read the six I have not yet read before the end of the year. 

I started with Nightwood.  It is wierd and the prose is pretty bizarre but it is not what I would call one of the ten most difficult books ever written.  But then maybe I just don't get it.

In the bullpen warming up, A Tale of a Tub.

Sex, God and Hyperbole

Sex and God at Yale:

Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad

 

By Nathan Harden

ISBN 978-0-312-61790-5

 

Thomas Dunne Books  301p

 

Nathan Harden has written what might have been an important book.  The recent Yale graduate and self-appointed proclaimer of all things wrong at America's third oldest university stumbles onto matters of truly great importance in modern academia.  Unfortunately these occasional glimpses are surrounded by Harden's puritanical tantrums about "Sex Week", political correctness and very bad art.

Between his mini-tantrums, Harden draws the reader's attention to some questionable events at Yale.  Among them, lifting up a hardcore porn producer as a model of entrepeneurism, corporate sponsorship of "Sex Week" by a sex toy company and the disconnect between classroom antics and institutional disapproval of student behavior that mirrors the same sort of boundary pushing.

 

One of the most under-recognized yet potentially dangerous trends of the last quarter century is the rise of fundamentalist agnosticism on university campuses.  Recalling one particular event during his years at Yale, Harden writes about an incident surrounding the invitation of a controversial conservative Christian speaker.  Several student groups protested the invitation on the grounds that the speaker was insufficiently inclusive in his worldview.  In the name of inclusivity, his point of view was excluded.  One of the most important roles university and college campuses play in a free society is being a place of near absolute freedom in thought and study.  As some of the more abused aspects of liberalism begin to collapse in on themselves, principles of inclusion and academic freedom have been reduced to the laughable paradox that declares that one voice must be silent in the name of letting every voice be heard.  This is perhaps most evident in the case of traditional (or even non-traditional) religious voices.  The prevailing view is that reason and revelation are somehow incompatible in an academic community.  The irony that this is the case at the alma mater of Jonathan Edwards is surpassed only by the fact that this sort of secular fundamentalism is the mirror image of the very religious fundamentalism it claims to be resisting.

 

As he paints his picture of today's Yale, Harden also draws the reader's attention to the very real dangers of allowing a pervading cultural ideal of consumption and materialism to define how two people interact intimately.  The comodification of sex and the elimination of any vocabulary of virtue or morality about sex reduces intimacy to the mere exertion of power or control.  Recalling several dubious events on the Yale campus, Harden demonstrates how this reductionism has led to women (and one must assume men at least occasionally) being dehumanized.  The claim that this is the result primarily of extreme feminist ideas is not persuasive.  But that the creation of an environment frequently defined by a victim economy and reductionist sexual ethic has led to troubling patterns of behavior is.

Much of Harden's book is boilerplate contemporary social conservative talking points about moral decay and the "good old days."  Overblown prose aside, there are glimpses of some important and worthy topics for debate and discussion in and about the modern university campus. 



Jerusalem: the Biography

Jerusalem: the Biography

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

 

                I was not sure what to expect from a book written as a biography of a place.  In some ways, Jerusalem: the Biography is a typical history of a city written for a mass audience. In other ways, it really is a biography; it is the story of the life of Jerusalem.

                Montefiore traces the story of Jerusalem from the earliest recorded periods in its history.   Unlike many books about the city, he goes beyond the struggle between the three Abrahamic faiths to look at how the many civilizations and uncivil rulers who have held Jerusalem over the last several millennia have shaped the personality of the city.  The book gives a sense of the layers and layers of complexity that make Jerusalem unique among all world cities.  

                Much of what he includes in the book is standard undergraduate history class fare.  I found myself skipping some sections that were not much more than a skimming over what I got in a sophomore class on Middle Eastern history or a seminary Old Testament survey class.  But between the less enlightening sections are stories of personalities and events that make the book well worth the read.  From villainous courtesans to maniacal local rulers to eccentric millionaires bent on recreating Eden in God’s city, the lesser known parts of Jerusalem’s history give Montefiore’s prose the feel of a real biography.  Some are humorous, others are downright disturbing.  Taken together, they make Jerusalem more than ancient stone structures and barren hillsides.

                Jerusalem: the Biography is not the best or most probing book on the history of Jerusalem, but it is certainly one of the most entertaining.