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

watching a hockey game. “Women are taking over the workforce. Soon they’ll have all the money, and the power, and they’ll start getting rid of men,” laments one character in a new show called
Work It
. “They’ll just keep a few of us around as sex slaves.”
    For the last few years, romantic comedies, sitcoms, and advertising have been producing endless variations on what Jessica Grose at
Slate
dubbed the “omega male,” who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (like Ben Stone in
Knocked Up
and many of director Judd Apatow’s other antiheroes), a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s
Greenberg
), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he is haunted by the idea that he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s perpetually bitter character in
Greenberg
, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”
    In decades past, the cinematic loser had a certain broken nobility (Norm on
Cheers
); he may have been out of a job and disappointing his wife, but ultimately his man cave, with its dim lights and its endless procession of amber mugs, contained as much warmth and heart as the most lovingly dysfunctional family. The women on
Cheers
with any ambitions were presented as denatured and destined for failure, and wound up folded back into the bosom of the bar. But in the new era the rules are reversed: The man cave is what has to get sacrificed. Ben Stone lives with his three yo-yo friends running a porn site while collecting some sort of disability payment. He is a lovable degenerate, and his girlfriend is shrill and obsessed with success. Still, Ben loses in the end, and in the final montage we have shots of him as a modern, happy playground dad. So it goes in the new era of on-screen marriage. The men are almost always more endearing than their significant others, but that does not get them very far anymore. In the epic battle of the sexes, they now have to wave the white flag and cross over to the woman’s world if they want any hope of a good life. To win, they have to submit.
    Of all the days in the year, one might think, Super Bowl Sunday should be the one most dedicated to the cinematic celebration of macho. The men in Super Bowl ads should be throwing balls and racing motorcycles and doing whatever it is men imagine they could do all day if only women were not around to restrain them. Instead, in a 2010 ad that has come to best represent the modern state of gender relations for me, four men stare into the camera, unsmiling, not moving except for tiny blinks and sways. They look like they’ve been tranquilized, like they can barely hold themselves up against the breeze. Their lips do not move, but a voice-over explains their predicament—how they’ve been beaten silent by the demands of tedious employers and enviro-fascists and their women. Especially the women. “I will put the seat down, I will separate the recycling, I will carry your lip balm.” This last one—lip balm—is expressed with the mildest spit of emotion, the only hint of the suppressed rage against the dominatrix. Then the commercial abruptly cuts to the fantasy, a Dodge Charger vrooming toward the camera, punctuated by bold all caps: MAN’S LAST STAND. But the motto is unconvincing. After that display of muteness and passivity, you can only imagine a woman—one with shiny lips—steering the beast.

    D AVID G ODSALL describes himself as “adapting pretty well to the new world order.” The twenty-nine-year-old Vancouverite is not like one of those blue-collar guys who are just “humiliated and fucked in this new economy” because they can’t retool and go to college and find a new profession. He has a master’s degree and a job, as an editor at a Vancouver city magazine. He has an apartment he shares with