Free Men by Laura Kipnis

only in passing), is that these new jobs women are procuring aren’t especially high-paying. The dirty little economic secret of the last forty years is that the job market played women off against men to depress everyone’s pay. 1 Which is to say (though Rosin doesn’t) that the real winners when it comes to the influx of women into the job market during this period have been our capitalist overlords. Still, why assume, as Rosin seems to, that it means the overlords should get to dictate the terms of the social bargain?
    This is why I’d like to suggest—returning to the juicing epidemic and my own propensity for situational ethics—that playing by the rules of whatever industry currently employs you may once have been a premise with some moral force, but now it’s just obtuse. That’s how you get rooked. If women are more employable these days because bosses like how well we play by the rules, allow me a moment of appreciation for some good old-fashioned rule-breaking of the sort men have had more opportunities to perfect, as emblematized by the long parade of big-time juicers ritually hung out to dry in the media.
    Take Major League Baseball star pitcher Roger Clemens (indicted for perjury and obstruction of Congress after his testimony denying steroid use), cyclist Lance Armstrong (stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping), the embattled A-Rod, or any other sports world miscreant of your choice. But I’m also thinking of juicers closer to my own professional neck of the woods, namely authors of factually dubious memoirs such as James Frey, publicly indicted for lying about his past in his 2003 bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces . To refresh your memory, Frey was the former junkie who produced a swaggering account of self-destruction, criminality, drug addiction and valiant recovery, though it turned out that he’d made up a lot of the best parts. This is supposedly verboten in the memoir-writing business, though the perimeters of the genre have been (as with doping, until recently) selectively observed at best. Or there’s Mike Daisey, the political monologist who massaged some of the details in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, his theatrical piece about the gruesome labor conditions at Apple’s Chinese manufacturing plants, saying (when exposed) that it was dramatic license.
    Like Clemens and the rest, Frey and Daisey illicitly boosted their games too, by employing prohibited substances—not anabolic steroids or EPO, but fictional experiences in supposedly nonfiction genres. Now, none of these guys is any sort of prince, apparently: Clemens is, by all accounts, a major jerk; Armstrong lied about doping for years while suing and maligning anyone who tried to tell the truth; and about A-Rod, the less said the better. Frey was given to bouts of eye-rolling braggadocio and self-regard, and let me add that I was never a fan of his writing despite thinking he’d been turned into a scapegoat for the publishing industry, which has always talked out of both sides of its mouth about memoir factuality, especially when it comes to commercial blockbusters. As for Daisey—well, he trades on liberal guilt, which is the worst thing I can find to say about him. Let’s leave him aside.
    They may be problematic characters, but none of them were talentless schlubs either. No one got where he did on sheer fakery. What they did was augment the talents they had to stay competitive. The aging Clemens wanted to eke out a few more playing years—a few more wins, maybe a World Series, before being tossed out to pasture. Frey, an aspiring writer, wanted to publish a novel, which he submitted to seventeen publishers. No one would buy it, though when he mentioned that it was based on his own life, he got offers—an unknown recovery memoirist is a more commercial prospect at the moment than an unknown first-time novelist, even when it’s basically