“On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children’s apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off their games. One developer, a self-described ‘visionary for puzzles’ who looked like a skateboarder-recently-turned-dad, displayed a jacked-up, interactive game called Puzzingo, intended for toddlers and inspired by his own son’s desire to build and smash. Two 30‑something women were eagerly seeking feedback for an app called Knock Knock Family, aimed at 1-to-4-year-olds. ‘We want to make sure it’s easy enough for babies to understand,’ one explained.”

Read the full article here.

The Atlantic. April 2013.

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Read the full article here.

The New Republic. February 2013.

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“SPIEGEL: Ms. Rosin, the title of your book sounds like a declaration of war: “The End of Men.” What are you trying to say with that title?

Rosin: Ironically, it was a man, my editor at The Atlantic, who chose that as the title for my cover story of the same name for the magazine in 2010. The phrase stuck and became shorthand for the entire debate. It’s three short words, provocative and memorable. I thought about changing it when I wrote the book, but nothing else seemed as fitting. It’s as if I planted a stop sign in the ground and now the whole world is debating over it. Some people respond with anger, some with puzzlement, but the phrase definitely always evokes an emotional response.

SPIEGEL: You’ve certainly succeeded in being provocative — your thesis has ignited a heated debate in the United States. Yet men dominate politics and finance, they head at least 95 percent of the world’s wealthiest corporations, hold 82 percent of the seats in the US Congress and are paid significantly better than women for doing the same work. Isn’t it a bit premature to declare their end?

Rosin: Yes, of course. But what I’ve found is that there is an enormous shift taking place in our society. Suddenly there are all these young women who are better educated and earning more money than men their age. When young couples today decide to marry, they have very different expectations of one another than their parents did. And there’s even been change at the very top of the career ladder. People tend to underestimate that.”

Read the rest of the interview here.

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“How did The End of Men come about?

It started as a story I was writing for the Atlanticmagazine. I was following a small group of men through the recession and there was this one particular guy who was out of work and had split from his girlfriend. In my mind, I kept trying to get them back together and get him back to the place where he used to be in his life. Then one day I realised that he wasn’t going back to that place because there was no place to go back to. His ex-partner had taken over most of the roles that he used to play. That was when it first occurred to me that something very fundamental had changed.

I was also running Double X at the time, the women’s section of the online magazine Slate, which meant statistics about the changing situation in the workforce, in education, were coming at me every day. So the picture just clicked for me and it turned into this big story in the Atlantic with the headline, ‘The End of Men’. I didn’t choose that – my editor chose it – and, yes, it is harsh and provocative but it just stuck for me. It seemed right for this particular moment, so I kept it.

Are the gender wars an issue that has always preoccupied you?

No, not at all. I grew up in a working-class Israeli family, which was feminist only in its female-dominated structure. My mother was a powerful matriarch but it was a very traditional set-up: my father was a taxi driver and my mum took care of me and my brother. So I wasn’t steeped in the American feminist orthodoxy. I actually feel slightly miscast in this role on one side of the gender wars because I usually range quite broadly across American culture in the kind of reporting that I do.

But would you call yourself a feminist?

Yes, I would definitely call myself a feminist. That is an easy one for me. I think we should all call ourselves feminists.”

Read the full interview here.

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The full article is available at CNN.

“I almost always get asked the same question: How can it possibly be the ‘end of men’ when there are so few female elected officials — when men still hold the reins of political power?

It’s an excellent question. Until now, I’ve answered by pointing to statistical trends and future projections. Always, I ask people to take a leap of faith. But after this election, I feel like I am on so much more solid ground.

The women’s vote did not turn out to be historic in the way pundits predicted before the election. Yes, more women voted for President Obama, but not in record numbers. The gender gap was in fact a little smaller in this election than in 2008. Yes, women were important in certain states, but so were young people, African-Americans and Latinos, who, together, make up Obama’s new winning coalition. What’s more, women did not even constitute a unified vote. Married women tended to vote for Romney, while single women went for Obama.

What changed in this election was that women accumulated power in a calm and measured way, and began to look for the first time much less like outsiders to the political process.”

Read the full article here.

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 Here at Cipriani, New York, it does not feel like the end of men. There is the palm-frond-dotted balcony dangling over Wall Street. There are the imposing bank columns, evoking money and power for the literal-minded. There are the clusters of business-suited men gathering at tables.

Nonetheless, in her much-talked-about new book The End of Men, Hanna Rosin, an editor at the Atlantic and co-founder of Slate’s feminist site DoubleX, chronicles in colourful detail the faltering of masculinity in the US. She argues that the qualities traditionally associated with masculinity, such as strength and aggression, are no longer serving men well in the new economy. She writes that women are equalling and indeed surpassing men in the most rapidly growing areas of the economy, that they are flourishing more impressively at school, dominating in managerial positions and professional schools, and increasingly supporting families on their own. As she puts it, “Our vast struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest, is slowly becoming a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and women increasingly making all the decisions.”

…

I am sitting with Rosin, in her metallic sleeveless shirt, surveying the tables of men in suits. Even though I have known Hanna for more than a year, and she is in fact an editor of mine, we haven’t yet had a chance to sit down and talk about some of the ideas in The End of Men. We begin by looking out at the species in question.

Some of the men have taken off their jackets, scotches have been conjured. They seem not to know that they don’t run the world.

Read Roiphe’s full article here.

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“Predictably, there’s been a lot of reaction to your new book, The End of Men and the Rise of Women, which argues that the ground has shifted under men. What have been the biggest misperceptions you’ve heard about the book?

It’s been misunderstood as a straightforward feminist manifesto, as if we’ve achieved some kind of victory. There are some good and some less good things for women. Obviously, I like the opportunity for women, but other things are more difficult, like, they’re taking on more. This is not a triumphant, “The ladies have won.” The second thing is, what am I saying men have to become. I don’t want to say men have to become like women to be successful. I wasn’t clear enough about that.

For every argument you make about this shift away from male power, there have been counterarguments: men still dominate certain sectors like technology, and sexual violence is still a big problem, for example.
It’s only been going on for like 40 years, so I couldn’t say females have achieved total domination overnight. It happens in spotty ways. Partly, this is a workplace structure issue. We don’t take into account the fact that women are half of the workforce. We have to stop setting up the workplace as if there’s one parent at home. It doesn’t make any sense.

You’d said that reading about the “mancession” inspired the book. Was there a real-life moment when the idea rang true for you?
There’s a town I’d been vacationing in one year, and I realized there didn’t seem to be any men around. I met a woman named Bethenny in the supermarket, and she had a kid with this guy, Calvin. I spent all this time trying to help Calvin get a job. At some point I realized there was no life for him to go back to. It suddenly occurred to me, the world had changed. By the end of the book, he followed in Bethenny’s footsteps and decided to go to nursing school.”

Read more of the Q&A here.

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All the Single Ladies from Sixth and I Historic Synagogue on FORA.tv

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“Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.

Sure!

I know that the impetus for the book was your article in The Atlantic in 2010, so you’ve been talking about this subject for a while. How do you feel about being associated with this particular book for so long, since it’s really made a big impact and people have a lot of strong feelings about it — is that something you’ve thought about a lot?

No, not before I started it…the title is something that came out of my Atlantic story, I didn’t write the original title, but then it became assciated with the article over time and it’s become a shorthand for it. It’s a blessing and a curse — a blessing because it’s brought the book a lot of attention, but it’s a curse because it doesn’t exactly reflect what’s in the book, so it’s complicated in that way. And no, I’m much more comfortable as a reporter than I am as a sort of ideologue, and personally my style is much more to report stories than to write and hammer at them, so that’s been kind of funny.

Did you have any idea that the book would blow up the way that it did?

No, definitely not when I was writing the article and then it did get all this attention. When I started writing the book I thought ‘Oh, well, it’s all already been said…’ I mean, I expected that people would respond strongly because the title is very provocative, but I think that people react to different parts of it and that’s part of what gives it a long life, because people are interested in the marriage part and the sex part and the work part.

Do you find the reaction can be kind of negative because the title is so provocative, and sort of implies that there can only be one gender on top?

I think there are definitely people who read the title and are turned off by it, and you know, how could they not be?”

Read the full interview here.

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“After completing your book, did you consider changing your parenting tack in order to raise sons who not only do right by themselves but also do right by women (particularly after you worked on your ‘hookup culture’ chapter)?

My concern about raising my sons has more to do with teaching them to meet whatever demands school places on them without making them frustrated or miserable or think they have to be just like girls. I try to be realistic — I can’t make my sons into people they’re not. I think the ‘William wants a doll’ fantasy of the ’70s is a proven failure. But I can’t put my head in the sand and pretend that school does not demand a level of organization and verbal acuity that doesn’t come 100 percent naturally to them. So I try and teach them to cultivate the skills they have — to nurture their inner secretary, as I put it. One example is I make a list for my son that he reads every morning of what he needs to do — put his lunch in his backpack, remember his PE shoes, etc. — in the hopes that eventually he’ll internalize those organization skills.

As for the hook-up culture, I won’t teach my sons and daughters differently on this front. Young people are aiming for different kinds of connections than I had, ones that aren’t crude but aren’t entirely settled, either. But at their best they are respectful. Here is what one woman I interviewed told me. As a guiding principle, I think it’s not half bad:

‘We want a relationship of freedom — the freedom to be there for each other and available sexually when it suits the both of us, and also emotionally when it suits the both of us. We want it to be fun and maybe involve some dates and long talks over coffee. But we certainly don’t want these ‘relationships’ to be entered into with an expectation of long-term, or to get in the way of the other important things in our lives. Compatibility isn’t even all that important. Amusement, affection, affirming attention, sexual fulfillment, the ever-elusive ‘fun’ — that’s what we’re after. We (both women and men) are putting ourselves first. Some might call that selfish; we call it smart and independent and secure.’”

Read the full interview here.

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