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You are here: Home / Organizing & Resistance / Fables Of The Reconstruction / The New York Times Owes Me A Bottle Of Aspirin

The New York Times Owes Me A Bottle Of Aspirin

by Tom Levenson|  September 3, 20127:39 pm| 69 Comments

This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Our Failed Media Experiment

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…to cover all the analgesics I’ve had to consume after reading Hannah Rosin’s piece“Who Wears the Pants in This Economy?” that made the cover of yesterday’s magazine.

I’m not going to do a full fisking; life is too short, mine and yours.  But sacro semolina, FSM! did my head hit the desk more than once.

The overarching complaint I have is the relentless anecdotage which Rosin and her editors permit themselves.  Rosin’s stated thesis is actually a familiar fear-trope in certain circles:  women are taking over, and their men are left more or less unmanly as a result.

Rosin defends this claim by profiling three couples (and one of their children)  in a small southern town, Alexander City, Alabama, in which the loss of the paternalistic (i.e., anti-union) manufacturing company left the men in her story in need not just of a job, but a “manly” one.

The women in the three couples do better, and in each case have become the lead earners for the household.

That’s the slender trail Rosin walks to stake this claim:

As the usual path to the middle class disappears, what’s emerging in its place is a nascent middle-class matriarchy, in which women like Patsy pay the mortgage and the cable bills while the men try to find their place.

As I say, I’m not going to parse all five magazine pages devoted to this upteenth example of the Times Magazine diving into the drained shallow end of the pop-sociology pool, but just to give you a small share of my pain, let’s look at a couple of things.  First, consider Rosin’s conclusion:

As the economy fails to fully recover, it’s unclear what will happen to traditionally male or female jobs generally. Some sectors seem undeniably strong: health care, for example, and technology, although there aren’t many tech jobs in places like Alexander City. Manufacturing survives mainly in new and highly specialized forms. Local government jobs, especially ones in low-tax states like Alabama, have gone through severe cuts in the last decade and are unlikely to be cut much further. Jobs like Patsy’s, which rely on federal financing, could be vulnerable given the current political fixation on budget cuts. An important quality for anyone trying to survive in this economy is one that Reuben, in his own limited way, is trying to embody — the one that seems to come more easily to his wife — the capacity to “remake myself again, find my new niche.”

In other words:  “Move along.  Nothing to see here.”

Seriously. We wade through several thousand words of achingly conventional writing* only to find out nothing that’s been said for the last several pages generalizes to that emerging “middle class matriarchy” bravado with which we began?

Onwards.  One thing that I hate that turns up in a lot of contemporary journalism, especially in pieces reaching for some big-think conclusion, is the mishandling of claims of academic knowledge and authority.  And here I am duly pissed off: in a brief passage Rosin notes that the loss of manufacturing jobs over the last decade, points to stronger employment numbers for sectors in which women predominate, and then quotes MIT economist Michael Greenstone asserting that the alleged capacity of women to better adjust to a changing economy is “a first-order mystery” for social scientists.  Greenstone, Rosin tells us, is not merely a professor, but also “director of the Hamilton Project, which has done some of the most significant research on men and unemployment.”

Well, maybe. I don’t want to slag an MIT colleague, (or anyone with a stray quote in someone else’s piece), the more so as I have no idea what the context of that quote may be.  But I do want to point out that whatever Greenstone said or meant, Rosin’s straining her bargain withe reader on two grounds here.  First, Greenstone does not self-identify as an employment economist, nor a student of gender issues from an economics perspective.  Here’s an abridgement of his self description:

His research is focused on estimating the costs and benefits of environmental quality…Greenstone is also interested in the consequences of government regulation, more generally.

His bibliography confirms the direction of his research — essentially nothing on the issues Rosin’s raising.  But still, how about the Brookings Institute’s Hamilton Project, allegedly a hub for the study of gender and employment.  Really? This place:

The Hamilton Project offers a strategic vision and produces innovative policy proposals on how to create a growing economy that benefits more Americans. The Project’s strategy reflects a judgment that long-term prosperity is best achieved by fostering economic growth and broad participation in that growth, by enhancing individual economic security, and by embracing a role for effective government in making needed public investments.

You look what actually comes from that talking shop —  its policy analysis and/or thought pieces — and you do indeed see some on employment (including a recent one co-authored by Greenstone on the impact of public sector job losses).  You do not find what Rosin asserts, a strong thematic engagement with men and unemployment.  So when Rosin asserts as fact that “women are generally more willing [than men]” to display the kind of flexibility required of the modern labor market, ready for “going to college or getting some job retraining.,” I answer, “maybe.”  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  And I still don’t after reading this article, if I want more than Rosin’s say so.

And that leads me to my other 30,000′ problem with this piece.  I don’t believe its premise, that there is indeed a major shift in employment and income moving from a male advantage to a female one.  Her argument has two components:  one that the long decline in manufacturing employment is producing a fundamental shift away from “male” jobs to female ones, with social consequences; and that this recession has exacerbated that shift.  The implications drawn from the experience of the recession is simply wrong, or at least vastly more complicated than this article implies.  Here’s the Wall St. Journal on the question of whether or not this is a woman’s or a man’s recession:

Looked at another way, since the recession began, the number of male workers has fallen 4.6% while the number of female workers has declined 2.7%. Since Mr. Obama took office, both figures are down by 1% or less.

So — at the start of the recession men took a greater hit than women, and now the labor situation for both has recovered to a roughly equal (and not good enough) level.

Where’s the great trouser trade there?  Major changes in the American workplace are indeed going on; they are and will have all kinds of effects on people’s lives, plans, relationships and all the rest.  Maybe there really is some fundamental specifically gender-based shift going on that isn’t simply down to the long pressure to put women’s opportunities and pay on equal footing with that of men.  But a piece — a cover! — at one of America’s handful of top venues that reduces all this down to unsupported forebodings about the enveloping advance of matriarchy doesn’t add anything useful to the conversation.

Enough already.  (I seem to write that in almost every piece, don’t I?) Just one more thought:  Rosin seems to me to have taken the easy way out through this entire piece.  The profiles themselves aren’t bad, and as a look at what happens when hard times hit in certain families, among folks of a certain age, in certain places, they’re fine.  She fails in her reach for grander significance, for a general statement about the way we live now.  She stopped before she was done…and to make matters worse, there are hints even within her piece that had she dug more deeply, she’d have found that the story that wanted to be told wasn’t what she set out to write.

At the same time, if Rosin is at fault for not thinking hard enough, then her editors are at least equal partners in folly here.  This was a freaking cover piece, and they should have realized something wrong when the last character to enter Rosin’s piece, the daughter of one of the women ascending to this alleged matriarchy, implicitly snorted at its entire premise.  The question was what it means when women take the economic lead in families.  This young woman, 19 years old, just laughed.  Of her step-father’s view of appropriate gender roles, she said, “that’s so cute, it’s gross.”

Heh.

*This post isn’t about Rosin’s skill as a word slinger.  But still, sometimes style does reveal substantive flaws.  For example: “Being a self-sufficiency coordinator involved a maternal touch, like encouraging single mothers to continue their education, obtain prenatal care and find reliable child care.”  Uh, huh? “a maternal touch” is about as cliched (and condescending) a way you can describe a women in a service or caring job.  And look at how we are supposed to recognize that quality in this woman: her ability or obligation to advise her clients to do all that stuff only a mother would think of — like stay in school or to get their check ups.  No mere father, nor unchilded person of either gender could ever master that.  Right?

Images:  J. M. W. Turner, Dido Building Carthage, 1815.

Kazimir Malevich, Unemployed Girl, 1904.

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Reader Interactions

69Comments

  1. 1.

    SteveinSC

    September 3, 2012 at 7:45 pm

    We’re all in Charlotte. It’s rocking.

  2. 2.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 3, 2012 at 7:46 pm

    Nice touch with the Dido….

  3. 3.

    SiubhanDuinne

    September 3, 2012 at 7:47 pm

    “Who Wears the Pants in this Economy?”

    Not John Griffin Cole, that’s for damn sure.

  4. 4.

    Joshua Norton

    September 3, 2012 at 7:48 pm

    Who Wears the Pants in This Economy

    NO MORE PANTS STORIES!

  5. 5.

    Comrade Dread

    September 3, 2012 at 7:49 pm

    My wife made more money that I did for a while. I was happy that we had more money, not moping and pissing because I wasn’t the top moneymaker.

    Sweet flippin’ Buddha, folks, if your identity is tied into how much money you make, maybe it’s time to sell it all and give it to the poor and embrace a monastic lifestyle.

    Or… you know, see a therapist. Either or.

  6. 6.

    Tom Levenson

    September 3, 2012 at 7:50 pm

    @SiubhanDuinne: The internets will be delivered to you shortly.

  7. 7.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    September 3, 2012 at 7:52 pm

    I have had a good job for the last 14 or so years. Granted I have not had a pay raise since 2005 due to the fact that my boss has to pay an increasing amount for my health insurance despite the fact that there have been no claims since 2004, yet my premiums go up 20% every year. I remember every day how fortunate I am to actually have a job. However at this point I am thinking that I could survive on unemployment for a couple of months and then find something else. I can’t keep going backwards.

  8. 8.

    Bex

    September 3, 2012 at 7:54 pm

    Trees, even ones of the correct height, died for this?

  9. 9.

    Bex

    September 3, 2012 at 7:54 pm

    Trees, even ones of the correct height, died for this?

  10. 10.

    SiubhanDuinne

    September 3, 2012 at 7:56 pm

    Rosin’s stated thesis is actually a familiar fear-trope in certain circles:  women are taking over, and their men are left more or less unmanly as a result.

    I havent even clicked on the link yet, but I remember this meme/trope from 40 years ago, at the dawn of the Second Feminist Wave (aka “Women’s Lib,” ::choke and barf::). Familiar indeed.

  11. 11.

    jon

    September 3, 2012 at 7:57 pm

    The Crisis of Masculinity is an overdue death of privilege. Can’t come soon enough, really.

    I await the stories about young people who can’t make it on those same jobs the middle-aged people consider a downgrade and young people would consider a good start. If they could get one.

  12. 12.

    mamayaga

    September 3, 2012 at 7:58 pm

    Hasn’t the movement of jobs from manufacturing (“men’s jobs”) to service (“women’s jobs”) been going on a lot longer than the Great Recession? The current economy has perhaps accelerated the change, but those men’s jobs have been marching off to China in both good times and bad for several decades now.

  13. 13.

    J

    September 3, 2012 at 7:59 pm

    not to mention this, which might require something stronger than aspirin

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/business/tony-hayward-former-bp-chief-returns-to-oil.html?pagewanted=all

  14. 14.

    lamh35

    September 3, 2012 at 8:02 pm

    Ya’ll gotta watch this video!

    This is why people be hatin’ on Obama, he’s just too damn cool for the haters…lol!

    Watch the 2012 Democratic National Convention Live on BarackObama.com Hosted by Kal Penn

    It’s why I think this President has so much of the youth vote down. Now we just need to get those youths to the polls and OfA are on it!

  15. 15.

    jl

    September 3, 2012 at 8:03 pm

    @Joshua Norton:

    It is my understanding that BJ blog etiquette demands frewuent ridicule of Cole and DougJ. Don’t get in your quota and you are banned.

    For those who do not like pants, as a suggestion, some one needs to start bugging Cole to post the two or three road trip pics of him smiling, that Cole claims exist.

    Where are they?

  16. 16.

    Bill Murray

    September 3, 2012 at 8:06 pm

    And that leads me to my other 30,000’ problem with this piece. I don’t believe its premise, that there is indeed a major shift in employment and income moving from a male advantage to a female one.

    I would guess that this seems like it’s happening because the jobs lost were higher paying ones in areas that had traditionally excluded women leaving the low paying jobs that the excluded woman ended up in.

  17. 17.

    arguingwithsignposts

    September 3, 2012 at 8:12 pm

    this upteenth example of the Times Magazine diving into the drained shallow end of the pop-sociology pool

    and yet they never seem to learn.

  18. 18.

    Mnemosyne

    September 3, 2012 at 8:12 pm

    Hey, here’s an idea — perhaps we, as a society, could stop feeding a message to boys and men that their gender identity depends on the job that they have and they can’t be “real men” unless they hold one of a small number of jobs that are slowly being eliminated from the marketplace as obsolete? Maybe we could teach them that their self-worth and identity doesn’t have to depend on making more money than their spouse?

    Crazy, I know.

  19. 19.

    jl

    September 3, 2012 at 8:13 pm

    RE the article, I wonder if it really represents all of the South. I took several trips to LA and MS to work on recovery from Katrina and I did not meet religious people with silly hang ups like these folks.

    Granted, this was near the Gulf Coast, and I met mainline protestant folks, black and white, not extreme reactionary Xtianists.

    I went to service, and Grown up Sunday School, even if I did not particularly believe or agree with everything that was said. But I will say that I met plenty of men who had traveled the world and all over the US, in military or for business, and who seemed just a curious as the women, many of whom had also traveled.

    There were certainly job problems and people who’s careers where in a mesa after Katrina, I do not recall lots of men who would freak out about education, or healthcare, as a ‘feminized’ careers. I met plenty of men who could find a lot of what they thought were useful and important things to do around home, after things got reconstructed but their careers were in limbo. I met no one who thought they were ‘idling’ because they were at home. They had the resources to find useful and important things to do.

    The article was pretty piss poor at explaining why problems with these men folk. A few sentences on women being more willing to go back for education, and some anecdotes about really narrow minded religious thinking that by itself was exacerbating what real problems exist.

    I have no doubt real problems with long term unemployed men, especially older men, exist. But the article gave just a few impressionistic assertions, no statistics to help us understand how bad a problem it is, and what populations in the US are affected.

    So, a anecdotal think piece about some narrow minded communities (or portions of communities) that seem narrow minded, bigoted and with few inner resources to deal with changing times. Not even sure it gives a representative pic of the South.

  20. 20.

    lamh35

    September 3, 2012 at 8:16 pm

    @lamh35:

    ETA: I’m betting this ad will be all over MTV,BET,VH1, ESPN and wherever dem damn kids today hang out

  21. 21.

    Roger Moore

    September 3, 2012 at 8:24 pm

    @jon:

    The Crisis of Masculinity is an overdue death of privilege.

    This. If we want real gender equality, we’re going to have to get used to the idea that women are going to out-earn their husbands about half the time, and that women-dominated careers can be just as remunerative as men-dominated ones.

  22. 22.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    September 3, 2012 at 8:28 pm

    Following John Cole and ABL on twitter is just so much fun, now ABL is ordering drinks in advance.

  23. 23.

    Amir Khalid

    September 3, 2012 at 8:29 pm

    The phenomenon of some husbands making less money than their wives is hardly new. Obama tells us the same thing happened with his maternal grandparents. A good deal of Bruce Springsteen’s oeuvre is about how it affected Douglas Springsteen and his relationship with Bruce.

    Rosin has focused on the wife coming up, husband going down anecdotes, without even asking whether they are representative of what is going on around the country. And like Tom Levenson says, there is reason to think they are not. I think she has basically missed the real story: the psychological effect on these men, who have lost not just jobs or careers but what they were raised to think of as something essential to their manliness. There are consequences here that Rosin hasn’t even thought to consider.

  24. 24.

    Anne Laurie

    September 3, 2012 at 8:31 pm

    One thing that I hate that turns up in a lot of contemporary journalism, especially in pieces reaching for some big-think conclusion, is the mishandling of claims of academic knowledge and authority.

    Overthinking, Professor Levenson. Rosin aspires to be the Jewish Maureen Dowd, but she was born without the humor gene. Her niche, therefore, has been selling “Bitchez Be Annoyin” articles to the glibertarians at Slate and the Atlantic, where the white male paying customers are always glad to find a semi-coherent woman writer who will agree that, indeed, women are annoying hormone sacks whose only goals are to emasculate their male betters while cutting each other up over pointless competition concerning expensive shoes, breast pumps, and their spoilt & even-more-annoying spawn. Migrating to the NYT is an upgrade for her, but it’s not coincidental that she’s published on the weekend when most readers won’t open their newsprint bundle except to pick out the back-to-school sales flyers — or maybe to light the charcoal grill.

    She’s Megan McArgle-Bargle without the simper, or the broken calculator.

  25. 25.

    MikeJ

    September 3, 2012 at 8:33 pm

    @Joshua Norton: To be fair, I thought the NYT story was pants. When you do as much media crit as they do here, you’ll read a lot about pants stories.

  26. 26.

    gelfling545

    September 3, 2012 at 8:35 pm

    @Mnemosyne: Gosh, that’s so crazy it just might work.

  27. 27.

    jl

    September 3, 2012 at 8:41 pm

    Can’t find much research that follows up after 2009, but below are representative conclusions. Men were hit harder than women both in job losses and finding new jobs with reimbursement comparable to previous work. But may not be as pronounced at the Shalit makes out in her (representative?) Southern communities.

    The Unemployment Gender Gap During the 2007 Recession

    Aysegul Sahin
    Federal Reserve Bank of New York

    Joseph Song
    Federal Reserve Banks – Federal Reserve Bank of New York

    Bart Hobijn
    Federal Reserve Bank of New York – Domestic Research Function; Leonard N. Stern School of Business – Department of Economics

    February 1, 2010

    Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Vol. 16, No. 2, February 2010

    Abstract:
    Women fared decidedly better than men during the most recent recession. By August 2009, the unemployment rate for men had hit 11.0 percent, while that for women held at 8.3 percent. This 2.7 percentage point unemployment gender gap – the largest in the postwar era – appears to reflect two factors: First, men were much more heavily represented in the industries that suffered the most during the downturn. Second, there was a much sharper increase in the percentage of men who – prompted, perhaps, by a decline in household liquidity – rejoined the labor force but failed to find a job.

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1582525

    Time Use of Mothers and Fathers in Hard Times: The US Recession of 2007–09
    by
    Günseli Berik
    University of Utah
    Ebru Kongar*
    Dickinson College
    June 2012
    ABSTRACT
    The recession precipitated by the US financial crisis of 2007 accelerated the convergence of
    women’s and men’s employment rates, as men experienced disproportionate job losses and
    women’s entry into the labor force gathered pace. Using the American Time Use Survey
    (ATUS) data for 2003–10, this study examines whether the recession also occasioned a decline
    in disparity in unpaid work burdens and provided impetus for overall progress toward equity in
    the workloads, leisure time, and personal care hours of mothers and fathers. Controlling for the
    prerecession trends, we find that the recession contributed to the convergence of both paid and
    unpaid work only during the December 2007–June 2009 period. The combined effect of the
    recession and the jobless recovery was a move toward equity in the paid work hours of mothers
    and fathers, a relative increase in the total workload of mothers, and a relative decline in their
    personal care and leisure time.

    http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_726.pdf

  28. 28.

    Anne Laurie

    September 3, 2012 at 8:43 pm

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I havent even clicked on the link yet, but I remember this meme/trope from 40 years ago, at the dawn of the Second Feminist Wave (aka “Women’s Lib,” ::choke and barf::).

    When “our boys” came home after WWII, there was a deliberate & quite successful government-education-media push to return all those self-reliant Rosies back where they belonged, to the kitchen/church/children. It was tried, less successfully, during Ford’s ‘Whip Inflation now’ stagflation, and again when Reagan wanted to give his big donors a tax-cut boost. And now, the GOP goes for one last bite at the rotten apple!

    Basically, whenever the economy goes bad, the Media-Village impulse is to blame it on uppity, emasculating women — because they have the pre-written scripts handy, and they know they’ll be paid for recycling them whether or not the “logic” and “statistics” actually have any basis in the real world. Lazy and cycnical, our Press Corpse.

  29. 29.

    Liberty60

    September 3, 2012 at 8:44 pm

    Part of me scorns this as yet another bit of hysteria mongering about loss of masculinity- it seems to pop up every couple years, or when bored editors get shafted by their ex-wives attorneys or something.

    But the cynic in me wonders if this is a new meme- instead of pitting blue collar white against the blacks who are supposedly taking their jobs and wimmin, there is a strategy to pit men against women in a scramble for the rapidly vanishing jobs.

    I’m just wondering if the target audience for this crap is an emasculated unemployed white collar husband who is seething and looking for someone to blame, and instead of Goldman Sachs the Masters Of The Universe , he spies his wife coming home with her paycheck.

  30. 30.

    Eric

    September 3, 2012 at 8:45 pm

    Lucky for families that women earn more than men for similar work…..oh wait…perhaps part of the shift (if there is a shift) is caused by cheapskate managers hiring a woman for less than the man. The lower the inherent skill the leas experence matters. Plus thanks to so many god fearing xtians shirking support obligations there are a lot of desparate single moms.

  31. 31.

    BGinCHI

    September 3, 2012 at 8:45 pm

    They came for the white breadwinners and I said nothing….

  32. 32.

    jl

    September 3, 2012 at 8:48 pm

    @jl:

    Oops, meant to type

    ” But may not be as pronounced at the Shalit Rosin makes out in her (representative?) Southern communities.”

    Not sure how that wrong name got into my head.

  33. 33.

    mclaren

    September 3, 2012 at 8:50 pm

    While the article may be poorly written, the facts on which its based are reflected by hard statistics. Let’s run through em:

    [1] “American women today are more likely to earn college degrees than men with women receiving 57 percent of all bachelor’s and 60 percent of all master’s degrees.”

    Source: Science Daily, 17 April 2012.

    [2] “Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of high school.”

    Source: Forbes, 28 June 2012.

    [3] Women are now a majority in the U.S. workforce. More women than men are managers in the American economy. During the current recession, men are disproportionately unemployed compared to women.

    Source: U.S. bureau of labor statistics.

    Conclusion?

    You can argue about the quality of her journalism, but the stats bear her claims out about women taking over for men economically. As for her assertions that “men are becoming unmanly” as a result, there aren’t any stats on that and no way I know of to measure such a claim, so it can’t be taken seriously.

  34. 34.

    arguingwithsignposts

    September 3, 2012 at 8:52 pm

    @mclaren:

    You can argue about the quality of her journalism, but the stats bear her claims out about women taking over for men economically.

    stay classy mcl

  35. 35.

    raven

    September 3, 2012 at 8:55 pm

    @Anne Laurie: The last book James Jones wrote was called “Whistle”. It’s the third book in his WWII Trilogy along with “From Here to Eternity” and the “Thin Red Line”. This book is about wounded Guadalcanal troops in the VA Hospital in Memphis and the women in there lives. The women have experienced the freedom that came from working in the war effort and they have no intention of going back. He died before he finished so someone else did but it’s a good read.

  36. 36.

    Anoniminous

    September 3, 2012 at 8:57 pm

    Rosin can kiss my butt.

    On to the important stuff …

    Could have used Isabel Bishop as visuals to illustrate.
    As well. Too. Also.

  37. 37.

    JoyfulA

    September 3, 2012 at 8:57 pm

    @jl: the smiling Cole pix are in the file cabinet with Romney’s tax returns.

  38. 38.

    lamh35

    September 3, 2012 at 8:58 pm

    all this dude does is lie. Has Paul Ryan ever met an exaggeration or half truth that he wouldn’t traffic in? Seriously callin ghim “Lyin Ryan” is too nice.

    Paul Ryan says 1.4 million businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2011 under Obama, actually the number is 47,806 http://nyti.ms/RBtl0f #DNC2012

    https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/statuses/242730125660131328

  39. 39.

    jl

    September 3, 2012 at 9:00 pm

    Just to add, if women, in the US have a somewhat better employment situation after the recession, but are more pressed for leisure and personal care time, seems like there are useful things the dudes could be doing with any of their free time, but they have decided it is not important to do that.

    And BTW, I recently spent a few days in what is probably one of the last homesteading and pioneering communities of the country. And while it has a very diverse political outlook, conservatives probably outnumber liberals. In talks with people I recalled that the people there do not seem to worry at all certain whole areas of life being ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’.

    So, believe it or not, both men and women were proud of prowess at, gardening, being able to teach, carpentry, killing and butchering livestock, knowing how to run a milk cow and get milk out of it, and evern holding a job.

    But, hey, GOP and Christianist reactionary dudes, when you turn a wholesome balanced view of work, money and homelife, and what is valuable in life, into an oppressive power game, turn around is a sad day for you, aint it?

  40. 40.

    Roger Moore

    September 3, 2012 at 9:12 pm

    @lamh35:
    Sounds as if he’s been borrowing McMegan’s calculator.

  41. 41.

    Tom Levenson

    September 3, 2012 at 9:38 pm

    For the record: I just blew up a comment that used a word that is for me an anti-Semitic dog-whistle. I do not ban folks at my place without extreme provocation (one in four or five years), and I have never touched a comment or commenter here. Until now.

    Don’t expect to do this again anytime soon, either. Just keeping an eye…

  42. 42.

    Beauzeaux

    September 3, 2012 at 9:52 pm

    @jl:

    Just curious. Who does the laundry, cleaning and childcare?

    All the things you cite are mostly “male” jobs that, of course, women can do as well as men. But who’s doing the traditionally “female” jobs? Are those also shared as a matter of pride in competence?

  43. 43.

    Liberty60

    September 3, 2012 at 9:54 pm

    @jl:
    What community is that? I am very interested in homesteading.

  44. 44.

    jl

    September 3, 2012 at 10:04 pm

    @Liberty60: It is last community in the sense that the original federal homesteaders from the late 50s and 60s are still running their homesteads. But I don’t think there are any places in the US where you can get a federal homestead anymore.

    It’s Alaska, and while federal homesteading is gone, there might still be state homesteading program going, though those are small acreage deals.

    But if you want to go check it out, and see what you might do, get up a long road trip from north of Anchorage through Matanuska Valley, through Palmer, Willow, down through Glennallen and on towards Valdez.

    Wasilla is in the northwest edge of this arc, but not representative. If you want to be a real estate agent, or open up a franchise, check out Wasilla.

    I think some homesteader communities still operating on Kenai too.

    Edit: If you want to try your hand at that lifestyle, my experience is that people there will be very friendly and helpful, though you will probably have to rent or buy or go into partnership with some one already up there now.

  45. 45.

    ibob

    September 3, 2012 at 10:05 pm

    @jl:
    This is representive of Alabama. I actually lived in Alex City(locals actually call it that) for two years and have lived in Alabama most of my life. What most people don’t realize is how strong the Baptist church andevangelical churches in general are in the state. These people truly believe the Bible is the literal word of God. This includes all the ideas about the gender roles, gays, race, science, etc. It is just not obvious if you are having a superficial conversation with someone. You may be having what seems like a normal, reasonable conversation with what seems like a normal, reasonable person until that person makes a comment about Obama being born in Kenya or being the anti-christ. All of a sudden the conversation on my end will just come to a full stop because until that moment I didn’t realise I was talking to a crazy person who really believes this stuff. This happens all the time and education makes no difference. I have been told by physicians that evolution is false and the earth is really 6000 years old. Oh, and I am going to hell if I vote for a Democrat.

  46. 46.

    Maude

    September 3, 2012 at 10:12 pm

    I couldn’t make myself read the article.
    There was an article.
    There was an article in the NYT about someone recently unemployed going to a food pantry. It was throw up bad.
    Look at the advertizing in the NYT and that does explain a lot.

  47. 47.

    Llelldorin

    September 3, 2012 at 10:19 pm

    @Tom Levenson: That was a dog whistle? I thought that was an anti-Semitic air-raid siren.

  48. 48.

    jl

    September 3, 2012 at 10:21 pm

    @Beauzeaux:

    Not sure that gardening and teaching are considered ‘male jobs’ anymore, by reactionary GOP standards.

    I’ve never wintered over, but I been told that people who do not have winter wage jobs work around the house at domestic chores, and typically these are the people who are doing outside work during the summer.

    And, from what I have seen a lot of the men can cook something besides burnt meat on the BBQ.

    Edit: having said that, I find it hard to believe that there is not still an imbalance between men and women in amount of housework done, but I don’t really know. I just know that the GOP and Xtianist obsession with power and money relations of wage and housework not much in evidence up there.

  49. 49.

    Yutsano

    September 3, 2012 at 10:21 pm

    @Tom Levenson: Wow. Kinda sorry I missed out on all the action there.

  50. 50.

    waratah

    September 3, 2012 at 10:25 pm

    I guess that the same people that are worried that women might be the high earners must be really worried that women as a whole could change elections with their vote.

  51. 51.

    The Pale Scot

    September 3, 2012 at 10:32 pm

    It’s not just the NYT, it’s Slate, Salon etc., there seems to be a cottage industry of jewish women “discussing” some problem some men might be having and how those problems might be affecting some women somewhere. It’s like watching “that show about nothing”. Slap together some dialog, convince some editor on it’s “timeliness”, collect check, email the script as written so far to the next con woman.

    PS In no way am I disparaging the TV show referred to.

  52. 52.

    someguy

    September 3, 2012 at 10:36 pm

    @mclaren:

    Who gives a fuck? If men are inferior as a group and this is what happens, so what? And there is evidence that men are the inferior sex in most intellectual respects; even with the rampant sexism in our society, men would be expected to perform at least equally to women in school and earning degrees. That 30% fewer men graduate high school, that nearly twice as many women than men earn college degrees, is pretty strong evidence that men can’t cut it.

    White male privilege, meet meritocracy. Sucks to be you. And quit the whining. Or “man up” as you like to say.

  53. 53.

    Mnemosyne

    September 3, 2012 at 11:46 pm

    @Liberty60:

    But the cynic in me wonders if this is a new meme- instead of pitting blue collar white against the blacks who are supposedly taking their jobs and wimmin, there is a strategy to pit men against women in a scramble for the rapidly vanishing jobs.

    If that’s the game, it’s a pretty old one — it dates to at least WWII, if not WWI (hell, if not the Civil War). Tough economic times usually lead to a backlash against women in the workplace.

    Problem is, the economy is no longer about women going into male-dominated fields as when women entered the workforce in WWII. Most of the new jobs and new fields opening up are “women’s” fields: service jobs, healthcare, education, etc.

    At least some of these unemployed guys could probably find good-paying new jobs if they were willing to, say, go to nursing school, but they won’t do it, because nursing is for guuuuuurls.

  54. 54.

    4jkb4ia

    September 3, 2012 at 11:52 pm

    I did not regret not reading that story at all. The story of our economy not creating jobs that are traditionally male is probably not told by the examples of three households. I was surprised, however, not to see any blog posts that called out the Valerie Jarrett story for sexism. Here is a woman, described as wearing designer clothes, whose greatest area of influence is issues that involve women and families, and close enough to the president that someone thought she was in effect the chief of staff. You could say that Jarrett was portrayed as the Eleanor Roosevelt that Michelle Obama is partly interested in being. I think the sexism was that Jarrett is supposed to have this very wide portfolio but women’s issues were the area where she was emphasized to have power.

  55. 55.

    Pen

    September 3, 2012 at 11:57 pm

    @someguy: Holy fucking hell. Please tell tell me the heavy lacing of misandry in that comment is you trying to troll and that you’re not really that stupid.

  56. 56.

    DW

    September 4, 2012 at 12:21 am

    @someguy: There’s the slight problem that the bulk of the gender gap in education is among poor and minority boys and girls. Middle and upper class white boys continue to hold their own in education. Harvard and Yale do not struggle to find qualified male applicants – that’s a problem for the low level colleges. If we accept that the gender gap is due to inherent male inferiority, then it must be due specifically to inherent African American and Latino male inferiority. I suppose we should toss in rednecks as well. You’re free to make that argument, but I would not.

  57. 57.

    DW

    September 4, 2012 at 12:35 am

    Rosin’s basic problem is that she’s trying to sell a book based on the thesis that we’re entering a glorious new matriarchal age and women are the heirs of the future. So she’s contorting all the data she can find to fit her thesis – otherwise there’s no reason to buy her book. There’s just a few problems.

    1. The recession has had two phases of job losses. The first was largely private sector and indeed hit men harder than women. That’s what Rosin is talking about. The problem is even as the private sector started adding jobs under Obama, state and local governments started shedding them. Most of those workers were in education, which means mostly women. So it’s a bit of a wash. The latest figures still show men with only slightly higher unemployment and significantly higher labor force participation. Note that this is the civilian work force and does not include the largely male military work force.

    2. The gender gap in achievement is largely due to poor performance by poor and minority boys. White upper and middle class boys are keeping up with their female peers.

    3. At the other end of the spectrum, female progress at the top ranks has been very slow. For example, female participation in state legislatures and Congress has increased but at a very slow pace – too slow to reach equality this century. It jumped up a little in 2006 and 2008 but fell back down in 2010. Similarly, top jobs in the private sector continue to be male dominated. Rosin should have interviewed her fellow Harvard classmates – but discovering the men doing much better than the women in public life and the astonishing low labor force participation rate for Ivy League women wouldn’t fit her narrative.

    All in all, at most you’re looking at a future where men continue to dominate the top ranks while women in the lower levels of society will have the dubious privilege of doing the lion’s share of both paid and unpaid labor. That’s not exactly Paradise Island.

  58. 58.

    Mnemosyne

    September 4, 2012 at 12:59 am

    @DW:

    Rosin’s basic problem is that she’s trying to sell a book based on the thesis that we’re entering a glorious new matriarchal age and women are the heirs of the future.

    I dunno — from what I’ve seen of Rosin’s other stuff, it seems more likely that her book is going to be about the dystopian hell-waste that will result when women are in charge. She’s far more Phyllis Schlafly than Gloria Steinem.

  59. 59.

    fuckwit

    September 4, 2012 at 1:00 am

    Let’s make broad-brush gender generalizations with no supporting data.

    Bullshit detector is already in the red just from that.

    It’s just fail all the way down.

  60. 60.

    suzanne

    September 4, 2012 at 2:04 am

    @Mnemosyne:

    Hey, here’s an idea—perhaps we, as a society, could stop feeding a message to boys and men that their gender identity depends on the job that they have and they can’t be “real men” unless they hold one of a small number of jobs that are slowly being eliminated from the marketplace as obsolete?

    Word. This. Concur.
    The answer to this conundrum is, as it is to so many others, IT’S THE FUCKING PATRIARCHY. I don’t really know from how many angles we need to examine this issue.
    Dudes are sad ’cause women make more money? But I thought we wuz lazy gold-diggers and feminism is a joke because no girl will talk to you unless you buy us drinks first?! PLEASE.

    I would just appreciate some coherency n the complaints.

  61. 61.

    Raven on the Hill

    September 4, 2012 at 8:59 am

    I looked up the Hamilton Project and, oh, man. Talk about creepy Democratic centrism. I haven’t dug much into their material, but here is some what Rosin is referring to.

    Yurgh.

  62. 62.

    Nutella

    September 4, 2012 at 9:41 am

    OP:

    if Rosin is at fault for not thinking hard enough, then her editors are at least equal partners in folly here. This was a freaking cover piece, and they should have realized something was wrong…

    The editors and the author are not being careless or sloppy here. They are quite deliberately fomenting hatred between men and women. Their corporate masters require them to do it and they do.

    @Liberty60:

    the target audience for this crap is an emasculated unemployed white collar husband who is seething and looking for someone to blame, and instead of Goldman Sachs the Masters Of The Universe , he spies his wife coming home with her paycheck.

    It’s been working really well lately when they pit the white part of the 99% against the brown and black part of the 99%. Most of Mitt’s fans are fired up to keep the people who are just below them economically down while failing to notice the 1% running off with everyone’s money.

    The more splits they can gin up like this the better off the MotUs are.

    Expect many more front-page articles like this.

  63. 63.

    Nancy Cadet

    September 4, 2012 at 10:52 am

    About the prestige of publishing in the NYT magazine: Like the NYT Book Review, the magazine sucks! I think the editors of both should be fired, and I suspect they’ve gotten their jobs by nepotism. Certainly there’s a cottage industry of publishing book excerpts from friends in the magazine, and otherwise a quality of research/writing/argumentation that would get an F in my community college writing classes.

    Though Ive been reading the Times since my high school days,(switching from my family ‘s working class/labor friendly Daily News in those bygone days) I’ve found the New Yorker magazine to have better long form journalism, and political commentary.

    What a waste of precious trees and bytes!

  64. 64.

    Randy P

    September 4, 2012 at 11:07 am

    I read it. I get the dead-tree edition on weekends.

    She picked a small manufacturing town in Alabama that lost its manufacturing. The main theme I picked up is “I am handicapped by my Southern upbringing so I cain’t feel like a man if my wife earns more than me.” Kind of an interesting cultural study but it didn’t have much to say to me personally. Our roles have swapped a couple of times over the years. I was a stay-at-home dad through my older daughter’s high school years, and I’ll always be grateful for those years.

    What was kind of interesting and sad was the baptist preacher talking about having to shift the interpretation of bible verses. The “man must be the breadwinner” stuff has been preached from the pulpit.

  65. 65.

    Joey Giraud

    September 4, 2012 at 12:29 pm

    It’s the PATRIARCHY!!!

    it’s all about gender identity

    lower wages is proof of sexist repression!

    Intellectual parrots.

    Can any of you conceive of the possibility that perhaps men and women may have some deeper, non-crotch differences? Differences not due to social training?

    Maybe, just maybe, a lot of men feel a need to prove their worth to a woman by winning some bread?

    And maybe a lot of women feel less a need to win bread because they can do the most important thing of all?

    Duh.

  66. 66.

    Lex

    September 4, 2012 at 1:02 pm

    Did anyone ask Hannah Rosin what percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs are female? Equity partners in large U.S. law and accounting firms? Stuff like that?

    Thought not.

  67. 67.

    Joey Giraud

    September 4, 2012 at 1:47 pm

    @Lex:

    Can anyone really find out just how much women really want high-stress, high-visibility jobs for the sake of some more money?

    Or how much social praise and status goes to women who make a lot of money?

    And how many men are willing to sacrifice their health and self-respect to do whatever it takes to get a huge paycheck?

    I’m no MRA, but the feminist indoctrination on display here is ridiculous.

  68. 68.

    John M. Burt

    September 4, 2012 at 2:00 pm

    In the 1970s, women earning more than their husbands was offered as one more example of dysfunction in the black community.

  69. 69.

    Lex

    September 5, 2012 at 3:54 pm

    @Joey: I’m not arguing that the figures should be 50/50. I’m arguing that those figures disprove Rosin’s thesis. Totally different thing.

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