Breadwomen
14th April 2012
Five or six years ago, my mother and I sat in a darkened theater talking about a couple we knew. The wife was an executive with Ivy League degrees. The husband had some nebulous part-time job, but mostly he stayed home with the kids. What, I wondered, does he have that’s attractive to her? There was a pause. Sperm, my mother replied.
Life in post-feminist America — the Sensitive New Age Guy is the new black (not that he’s actually Black, you understand — not that there’s anything wrong with that — that’s just a metaphor).
Male underemployment, the surge in women’s economic fortunes and the decline in marriage swirled into a meme in 2010, when an article in The Atlantic asked, “What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women?” The next year, the magazine ran a long essay in which the writer observed that the pool of those considered “traditionally ‘marriageable’ men” — the highly educated, the financially secure — was “radically shrinking.”
After decades of being hammered by the Alan Alda demographic, that’s hardly surprising.
Finding women worrying that men feel emasculated by them more than men actually feel that way, she suggests that these women are more invested in preserving conventional gender roles. That’s one explanation. But it could just as easily mean that the men in question didn’t want to tell a reporter they felt emasculated.
I’m wondering how they’ll fix that pesky problem of the fact that women still, you know, have to have the babies. But I’m sure that some woman in a laboratory somewhere is working on it.
April 16th, 2012 at 12:50
What I can’t figure out is why any man with any sense would want to be married to a Modern Woman (TM). From what I can see, such women are trained from the cradle that men are evil and must be abused and denigrated at every possible opportunity. Who would want to put up with that from a martial partner, from either side?