Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic article, “The End of Men“, has ignited an interesting discussion on the Right blogosphere. As summarized by the invaluable Laura Wood, the article basically claims that masculine virtues are obsolete in today’s business world, and that men can only be useful to their employers to the extent that they approximate the behavior of women. I would not find this surprising, given that the feminist project for the past half-century, with its equation of “freedom” and “career”, has been to obliterate the natural feminine personality type and replace it with the perfectly-pliable-employee-and-consumer personality type, a person designed to fit into a corporation rather than a family. Probably these denaturalized women do make good employees and even business leaders. Another article in the same issue of the Atlantic argues that men are also worthless as parents, except insofar as they sucessfully ape women. The claim is that there is no distinctly paternal role of any value. Again, I am not surprised by this conclusion, given the author’s presumed hatred of the type of transcendently-grounded authority that fathers represent.
Mrs. Wood points out an important asymmetry here: no prominent male journalist has ever claimed that women are completely useless, the way these female journalists have just claimed about men.
Meanwhile, over at Alternative Right, Jack Donovan argues that men will never become obsolete; people who think they will are ignoring the abiding necessity of manual labor:
Is the environment that makes female dominance possible truly sustainable? Is this “postindustrial society” inevitable? Many seem to think it is, though it seems almost childishly naïve to imagine a whole world run by female “knowledge workers” who conduct polite meetings in air conditioned offices.
Who will build the offices, manufacture the air conditioners, install the ventilation systems? Who will slaughter the animals that supply the leather for those fashionable new designer heels? Who will run and unload the ships that bring the gourmet coffee? The whole world cannot become a “postindustrial” suburban shopping mall. The reason it seems so in America is because we outsource so much of the dirty work to other nations. Our manufacturing jobs aren’t just disappearing into thin air, they’re going somewhere. American shoppers rely on an industrial economy that exists somewhere.
We haven’t quite reached that Jetsons future where robots make robots who make and do everything for us. And if it were just around the corner, would we really want that future?
Donovan notes that the feminist idea of finding personal fulfillment through a career is unrealistic, since few careers provide that sort of reward:
Early feminists must have imagined how exciting and fulfilling a “career” would be for women, compared to the seemingly mundane work of running a household and rearing children. For a minority of professionals and members of the hip, jet-setting “creative class,” that may be the case. But how exciting and fulfilling is having a career, really, when you’re an accounts payable clerk or a middle manager or a customer service representative? How rewarding is your work when it entails navigating through a series of policies and scripts at some bank, or cell phone company, or retail chain?
Finally, I note that I anticipated this issue several months ago in my essay “Female intellectual superiority and male dignity“. In this essay, I take a position similar to Donovan’s: men will only be respected if manual labor is respected and rewarded. I begin with an admission that women are intellectually and tempermentally better suited than men to intellectual persuits as well as to child raising, while men are better suited for manual labor. A healthy society needs to value and utilize both the intellectual superiority of women and the physical superiority of men.
Filed under: Best of the Web this Week, Gender roles |
Throne and Altar 
You’re ignoring the entirety of human intellectual history. If women were better suited to these pursuits, some enduring civilization would have discovered that fact. Show me a female Newton, Turing, Beethoven, Erdos, Churchill …. heck, a female William Safire or Bill Buckley …. and we’ll talk. Baring that, I will continue to stare at you as I would a lunatic barking at the moon.
If you can find me even one woman who reads the Economist weekly I would marry her in a minute. I have not met any woman of intellectual depth although they are great at being indoctrinated by the liberal regime for years and rule following enough to succeed at any career. Intelligence sure is there as well as pragmatic use of it, but rare is a woman that is interested in knowledge for its own sake, and this mostly in one field of endeavor that is personally connected in some way and minimal at most. The intellectual life is hardly the calling of women. Women like intelligent men for one reason only, for the status and comforts it provides as well as the practical use he can put it to get some things done. Women as a rule are not intellectual. Their intelligence is perfect for the modern economy, since it can be solely directed in their narrow venue, since they are not interested in anything else, including their own subject, just the end goal.
I wish this was not true, but intellectuals and philosophers (includes theologians), who are the only ones worthy of being titled with the proper use of the intellect if not necessary for monetary gain, and that is generalist interest in the entire world with knowledge extracted from all fields in proportion to their ability to provide insight and understanding into reality in its totality.
A woman, no matter if she is a PhD in Economics, is hardly interested in any intellectual stimulation after work, including Economics itself. Women dislike intellectual men because they mostly want to be entertained. This is a highly ridiculous post unconnected to truth. Women are great for any job requiring technical knowledge that can be put to practical use to benefit others, but not knowledge that once synthesized makes a person have a great mind that can see all.
Women are excellent drones of a very high caliber, but do not have a mind that can possess wisdom. Almost zero intellectual curiosity but plenty personal curiosity. Btw, I love women and have no trouble with them, but to be charming to them one has to minimize intellect and maximize emotional and fun topics. The exception is so rare as to the prove the point, and usually, they are of a masculine bent.
Women want fun and personal relations, not wisdom and understanding. Perfect for work where knowledge is totally for the benefit of others and actually detracts from your self.