The end of men? We need to put an end to that

A decade seems to be about the time it takes society from being warned about a coming trend to recognising that 10 years ago would have been the ideal time to act. On Friday, more than a decade after the publication of her book The End of Men in 2012, Hanna Rosin will be the keynote speaker at the annual Women in Media national conference. The decision to offer her the stage marks an important turning point in gender politics.

The End of Men – subtitled And the Rise of Women – diagnosed a trend that was becoming quite clear. In Western post-industrial economies, many men were losing their jobs, as well as their sense of self and purpose. Meanwhile, the new jobs created by economic change were in healthcare, education and office work – roles that require less physical strength and more communication and social intelligence, in which women typically outperform men.

Rosin used the terms “Plastic Women” and “Cardboard Men” to describe the way women were able to easily adapt to the new roles being created, while men were stuck with a rigid and outdated concept of masculinity. Unable to find a place in the new, less physical jobs market, men were becoming increasingly sidelined. Meanwhile, women were thriving in the new roles, and choosing to live without the encumbrance of a man who contributed neither domestically nor economically.

The reaction to Rosin’s book was swift and defensive when it was first published. Rosin told The Guardian at the time that “feminists don’t like the argument because they say it makes it seem as though women have totally won and there isn’t anything more to worry about, even though I actually don’t feel that way at all”.

It turns out that the author and journalist was just ahead of her time in recognising what she calls “a separate stream of history” trending in the wrong direction.

“I saw a large swath of men falling behind in society,” she tells me on a call in advance of her visit to Australia. “The economy is shifting, and they’re not adapting or catching up. One of two things could happen. Gender roles could become more flexible for these men, or all hell breaks loose. And guess what happened?”

What happened is that the world went on its merry way, righteously and rightfully crusading against the poor behaviour of men who had exploited patriarchal structures, and forgetting about the little boys who’d done none of it. Masculinity was categorically branded toxic. Female columnists were sickened and paralysed with fear when they found themselves pregnant with boys.

Unsurprisingly, this environment only increased male alienation. A tide of male anger and distress swept the US and seeped out into other post-industrial countries through the social media manosphere. Boys and young men looking for a positive sense of self found Andrew Tate instead.

“It’s just become a backlash and rage,” Rosin says. “The rigidity never went away. There was no bending at all. Somehow we skipped the part where men could ask for help finding their place in the modern world and went straight to the angry victim phase. There is a missing space that we need to fill in.”

Rosin recoils at the idea that it is somehow up to women to fix things for men. But clearly if “we” – society, or whoever “we” are collectively – had given more thought to the trends that she had identified when the book was first published, some misery might have been avoided.

Polarisation in the US, Rosin suggests, is at least in part a politicised response to social dislocation.

“Traditional gender roles – that ‘men are men’ and ‘women are women’, the trad wife trend – stuff like that just came roaring back. It didn’t ease. It got harsher.”

These rigid delineations harm men more than women, in the long run. When women began to do jobs that men had done before, they became considered female jobs, in which men could no longer see themselves.

“In Dickensian times,” Rosin says, “all the secretaries were men. Then the secretaries become women – the typing school era. It became a more caretaking, maternal role. And the status and salaries immediately dropped. Caring is forever associated with femininity and is forever paid less.”

This reminds me of Virginia Tapscott’s thesis in her soon-to-be published book All Mothers Work, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Until we recognise that caring is intrinsically valuable, whether it is delivered in the home or outside of it, it will remain low-status and underpaid.

These roles were originally undervalued because women did them. If it was men who were doing the undervaluing, they are paying for it now. “In a lot of the towns that I wrote about, where the factories had gone away,” Rosin tells me, “the one industry that’s thriving is always healthcare. So an obvious thing would be to go to community college and be a nurse.” But the men there can’t seem to imagine themselves in these jobs.

The obvious conclusion is that care work, paid and unpaid, should be accorded the status it deserves. We’re talking about how to ensure men are not left behind, but women would ultimately benefit.

A decade seems like an awfully long time to spend trying to figure that out. And perhaps we’re only talking about The End of Men again because Rosin’s new podcast, We Live Here Now, focuses on the fallout from male alienation, in the form of political polarisation, rather than the cause.

Women in Media general manager Kym Middleton emphasises that the organisation hosting Hanna Rosin is most concerned with getting women ahead. I think they might just have hit on the best way to do that, for the long haul. Let’s call it “The End of the End of Men”.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.