Free The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

breadwinner, said, “I’m a little envious of the old days, where women weren’t expected to go out and make a living on par with men. I just feel it’s unfair that women are in a position where there is a ton of pressure to do both things.”
    Mostly, though, I discovered that the roles do not just reverse. I did not talk to a single breadwinner wife who has entirely ceded the domestic space. This is true even if the woman is working two jobs.It’s true even if the woman makes considerably more money than the man, and it’s true even if she has a stay-at-home husband. In over three-quarters of the couples in my survey, either the woman did more child care and housework, or they shared equally. This is modern Plastic Woman at her most voracious, taking up ever more space until she explodes: “I HATE HATE HATE the annual ‘what should a stay-at-home mom make??’ tripe that comes out around Mother’s Day,” said Dawn, a software engineer and mother of three who has been the primary breadwinner “forever.” “I have to do the same house/child-care work, AND if I lose my job, my whole family is fucked.”
    Over the last thirty years, women have started to work considerably more hours than they once did, without easing off on child care. In fact, the opposite has happened. In 1965 women reported doing an average of 9.3 hours of paid work a week and 10.2 hours of child care. Now women not only do an average of 23.2 hours of paid work a week, but they do
more
child care—13.9 hours. The hours in a woman’s week have not expanded, and mostly women have made up for it by shaving off time in other areas—housework, personal grooming and, tragically, free time, which women claim less of now than they ever did. But mostly what the time-use surveys confirm—for the United States and many other Western countries—is a vision of every woman as a slowly expanding and jealous colonial empire, refusing to cede old territories as she conquers new ones.
    Men, meanwhile, are moving into new areas much more slowly than women. Over the same period of time, men have decreased their average work hours per week from 46.4 to 42.6. And their child care hours have upped from 2.5 to only a modest 7. Despite decades of self-help literature imploring men to explore their nurturing sides, the stay-at-home dad remains a rare phenomenon. Only 2.7percent of Americans in the latest census count themselves as full-time stay-at-home dads, although that does not count single fathers or part-time dads. In fact, one picks up an overwhelming note of reluctance, resistance, and in some cases revolt against the new regime. One man I spoke to aggressively belittled his wife, forged her name on checks, and wasted her fortune, all over jealousy about her professional success. Another got his revenge in the bedroom. After he lost his job, he confessed to forcing his wife to have more violent sex than she was comfortable with, to make up for his feeling of impotence elsewhere.
    In more traditional or more macho cultures, the concept of the alpha wife goes down even harder. In Spain, marriages with foreigners have gone up to about 20 percent of all marriages. High-achieving women in Spain marry progressive men from Belgium or Switzerland, while Spanish men seek out wives from Ecuador or Colombia. In South Korea and Japan, men from rural towns, and more recently even cities, are importing brides from poorer Asian countries with more traditional notions of marriage.
    But even in the West it’s hard to avoid the latest crisis of macho. The 2010 sitcom season was populated by out-of-work husbands, meek boyfriends, stay-at-home dads, killer career wives, and a couple of men who have to dress up like women in order to get a job. For the first time, a slew of new sitcoms were shot with the premise that women go out to work while men stay home to take care of the house, stock the refrigerator with low-fat yogurt, or pretend to be taking care of the baby while