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

his steady girlfriend, a kitchen full of nice appliances, a car in the garage, a bullmastiff. But this steady accumulation oflife’s comforts has only uncovered for him how uncomfortable he actually feels.
    At the moment, his girlfriend, Clare, makes more money than he does. Not very much more—something on the order of $15,000—plus she has significant student loans to pay off, and he has a modest family inheritance. And he’s well aware that in the future, when they have children, the seesaw may very well tip in the other direction. But the difference is enough to unsettle him. “As a generation of educated urban men who never knew a world where our female peers didn’t outperform us in almost every meaningful category, we’re in the middle of a long, uncertain process of negotiating a new male-ness,” he wrote me. “Money is inextricably part of that process, even for those of us who really like that our partners are successful.”
    David couldn’t care less about concepts like “head of the family” or “patriarchal authority.” He finds the word “breadwinner” funny and thinks the idea of a single “provider” is very “my baby takes the morning train.” Clare is a passionate second-wave feminist who earnestly counts the number of female executives in every office, and David is all for that. He gets that the powerful white dude in a suit, à la Jack Donaghy on
30 Rock
or the boss on
The Office,
only exists as a person behind layers of irony and self-parody. And yet he can’t seem to allow himself to cross over to the other side, where gender roles are interchangeable and it makes no difference who wears the pants. When he passes the happy dad at the playground at midday, he shudders. “Yeah, he haunts me,” David confesses. “It doesn’t matter how Brooklyn-progressive we (urban, educated men born after 1980) are, we still think he’s pitifully emasculated. I’m progressive and enlightened, and on an ideological political level I believe in that guy. I want that guy to exist. I just don’t want to
be
that guy.”
    David’s unease with the changing roles of marriage leaves himstuck in this dead space, where the only momentum comes from the aggressively malignant mutations of his own ambivalence. Some of his friends are in the process of buying their girlfriends rings, but he can’t yet bring himself to do it, although he knows that the clock is ticking and one day soon he will relent. The money, you see, has come to symbolize something, some far-off, free-fall, emasculated future he can’t bear to contemplate. When they have kids, will she suggest that he cut back his hours or work four days a week? When they need a bigger car, will she pay for it? He is reminded of these fears several nights a week in what he considers the recurring ritual of public humiliation: The waiter puts the bill on the table and slides it closer to him. His girlfriend reaches for her wallet. It makes sense that she should pay and yet she senses some horror in him, and so they just stare at each other, and it’s a “slow drip of torture every time.”
    With the money David’s grandparents left him, he and Clare recently went house hunting. They found a nice little airy loft they both liked and moved pretty quickly into purchase mode. But in each conversation they got “bogged down in the specifics.” Who would get the loan? How would they split the down payment? The mortgage? How would the equity accrue? At one point David tried to maneuver so the house would be entirely under his name, even though that would mean significantly worse terms for their loan. His girlfriend began to feel that he was going to extensive lengths not to be entangled. They talked and fought for months. They lost the loft, and now they have to try again.
    The men of David’s generation have been primed by TV shows and movies, or maybe their mothers, to accept that a doctor or lawyer or novelist or even the president can be male or female