It has been the subject of widespread speculation, mostly by women, since Hanna Rosin penned her opus to the decline and fall of the modern male, The End of Men. And at times it would appear to have merit, given the lack many men tapping Hanna on the shoulder and saying something like, “Unlike your husband, David Plotz, I still have a pulse and an opinion on the matter.”
This set me to thinking, which admittedly can be a dicey proposition, about whether this is indeed the End of Men, especially since so many of them haven’t noticed that they have been given their notice.
Typical male that I am, desperately clinging to my white male privilege, I decided to come up with a list of five reasons why we know this is not the End of Men. I mean, aside from the several odd billion of them that are still taking up room on the planet. Feel free to add to the list. That is, if you are silly enough to think your opinion still matters.
Top Five Reasons We Know That This Is Not The End Of Men:
5. You are reading this. Unless someone handed this to you on a piece of papyrus, inked with a mixture of lampblack and gum, then the only way you are going to know this is not the End of Men is because men envisioned, designed and created the technology that women like Rosin use, without understanding, to tell you that the men don’t fit in the modern scheme of things. Oh, the papyrus, lampblack and gum? Pretty sure that was men, too, but who’s counting?
4. You are reading this with the lights on. Of course, men discovered, then figured out how to produce, store and distribute electricity, but that was a long time ago. We got bored and moved on to other things like how to produce, store and distribute electricity to billions of people so that it brings light and runs tens of thousands of different appliances that men conceived, designed, invented, produced and placed in hundreds of millions of homes, largely for the convenience of women whose understanding of how they got there is limited to “amazon.com.” That too, by the way, was invented by men.
3. You are not up to your knees in shit. There is a secret world under cities; one of endless pipes, tanks, pumps, drainfields and the like. It is why we can have good, clean water coming into our homes, and the really yucky stuff just sort of goes away, courtesy of the men that conceived, designed, built and maintain these systems right under our noses. Yes, they actually need to be maintained. I don’t mean that someone needs to come round once a month and read a meter. I mean that the entire water delivery and sewage infrastructures have to be regularly inspected, repaired, updated and improved. It is really nasty, arduous and often dangerous work, and it is done almost exclusively by men. If that were not happening, we would all be constantly be foraging for water, at least until we caught something and died.
2. Hanna Rosin has the right to say this is the End of Men. It is still the dark ages in some parts of the world, but where free speech flourishes, so do stupid ideas. We get to blame men for that, too, since they conceived of, fought for and died protecting the idea of freedom of speech to begin with. They are still the ones maintaining it with their lives, by the way, despite the fatuous claims of Pentagon and Pandagon.
I know, free speech is not always what it should be, and it has perhaps some unintended consequences. For instance, we live in a culture now governed by a patriarchy made up of mostly white males who rule over women and mercilessly rig the game to men’s advantage, and at the same time men are obsolete, finished, kaput and otherwise Ended. All of this is pretty much according to the same people talking first out of one side of their mouth, the out of the other, to a population of people who nod like bobble-head dolls to both versions of reality. It is pathetic, indeed embarrassing, but bad ideas are still better than no ideas (in most cases). I am betting the architects of freedom, men by the way, would agree with this, even if reluctantly.
And the number one reason why we know this is not the End of Men?
It is precisely because most of them can’t and won’t be bothered to say squat to Hanna Rosin. Oh, there are always guys like me, writers who like saying squat to people like Hanna Rosin. But for the most part today’s man is busy doing one of two things. He is either busy with his daily life, irrefutably proving that any notion of the End of Men is retarded, by doing things like maintaining the world and everything in it. Or, he is busy being as oblivious to the inner workings of human survival as Hanna Rosin — and not giving a damn what she thinks.
To be even more frank, a lot of the latter group are starting to take a look at what modern women have become and figuring out that Hanna Rosin and women like her can be replaced with a dishwasher, a Panini press and a fleshlight – all on the cheap due to the ingenuity of men.
End of whom?
It is not men. Men are doing pretty much the same thing they have done since they invented cuneiform, figured out that 2 + 2 = 4 and accepted that civilization often means brutal sacrifice – from them. In fact, scarcely a thing has changed in the world of men except that they have improved the world to the point that more of them can stay as unblemished and leisurely as most women.
But what of the world of women? The real world of women. Well, that has changed drastically. It has become a ruse to imitate being in the world of men. We have raised two full generations of paper pushers and phone answering commuters who are still loathe to get their hands dirty (while demanding equal pay), and a gaggle of really obnoxious social commentators to tell us that all this means that men are being replaced.
It is not deceit. It is ignorance. How can you know that men are still here and still, I mean this literally, running the world, when you don’t have a freaking clue how the world is actually run?
It is easy enough to see. If you have never been behind the wheel of a semi, blistered your hands for a living, walked into a burning building, or fought back your gag reflex as you wade through human filth to put bread on the table and ensure that disease does not spread through your community, then it might be easy to start thinking the world really runs on smart phones, word processing programs and lunch break at the food court.
Now, of course there are a very small number of women who actually have ventured into the world of men, outside that of the corner office. But you can bet they are not the ones talking about how irrelevant men have become. They are too busy actually being like men to give two shakes about the likes of Hanna Rosin.
Bless Hanna’s pointed little head. I would normally give her an “E” (well, maybe lower case) for effort. It is understandably easy to see all the women who dominate the labor force’s soft spots and to think that is the world. You can’t know what you never see. But Hanna had to have seen something when she grew up in Queens with a father who drove cab for a living.
Or maybe she didn’t see him either.
Still, one has to think that she might pause someday to recognize that when she turns the heat on that there are not magic “heat bunnies” pushing warm air into her Manhattan apartment, and that clean water actually does not originate in her tap.
It’s men, Hanna. Always was. And the end of them is the end of you.
End of Whom You Say?
