bobbyw24
08-05-2010, 05:38 AM
The decline of the male economy — and of fatherhood — arises less from the empowerment of women than from the government’s usurpation of the family.
By Stephen Baskerville
In “The End of Men,” the cover story of the July/August Atlantic, Hanna Rosin describes “how women are taking control of everything.” Suggesting that “the economics of the new era are better suited to women,” Rosin believes the fair sex are winning the struggle for the survival of the fittest. In what is apparently cause for celebration, she writes, “three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men” in the ongoing Great Recession. “The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance.” She contends that the economic crisis “merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years.”
The Atlantic used the same issue to ask, “Are Fathers Necessary?” Pamela Paul cites a widely publicized study purporting to prove that fathers are harmful in rearing children and that lesbians do it better. The study is politics camouflaged as social science—its authors acknowledge that the parenting virtues they extol are defined “in part in the service of an egalitarian ideology.” Their message echoes Rosin’s: within the home, as in the national economy, men are unreliable at best and pathological at worst. The Atlantic assures us that the decline of men is the product of impersonal forces against which we are powerless to respond, even if we wished to—which apparently we do not.
Rosin, whose essay is #1 on the magazine’s “Biggest Ideas of the Year” list, certainly identifies an important trend. But the phenomenon she describes is the result not of inexorable social forces but of conscious political decisions. The end of men is the consequence of the most profound trend in public life today: the sexualization of politics and the politicization of sex.
The emergence of sexual politics has elicited strikingly little critical treatment. Yet it represents the most radical change in the nature of government in modern times. The economic effects are only symptoms. More far-reaching are the vast shifts in political power at every level. Feminist ideology pervades every item on the public agenda: not just “women’s issues” like abortion but everything from gun control (think of the “Million Mom March”) and DWI laws (Mother Against Drunk Driving) to foreign policy (Code Pink). “Women have the most to gain and the most to lose in the climate crisis,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed during the Copenhagen conference. “The impacts are not gender-neutral… . Women feel the consequences first.” Not an issue in public life has not been “gendered.”
The transformation of society wrought by sexual politics is most readily apparent where Rosin begins her article: with what she calls the “matriarchy” of the inner cities. Government policies produced this matriarchy: the men who are “increasingly absent from the home,” as Rosin writes, have been removed by welfare agencies and courts. The women are “making all the decisions” in inner-city households because the men have been forced out and government has usurped the role of father and husband, providing protection and income directly to the women and children. This produces in urban America not a “working class,” as Rosin terms it, but a class of government dependents whose living arrangements have been engineered by state officials.
As single motherhood spreads from the lower to the middle classes—among whom it is growing fastest—so does Rosin’s matriarchy. In the suburbs as in the cities, it is promoted by government machinery originally justified as helping the poor: child-care services, care for the elderly, public education, and publicly controlled healthcare.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/sexual-statism/
By Stephen Baskerville
In “The End of Men,” the cover story of the July/August Atlantic, Hanna Rosin describes “how women are taking control of everything.” Suggesting that “the economics of the new era are better suited to women,” Rosin believes the fair sex are winning the struggle for the survival of the fittest. In what is apparently cause for celebration, she writes, “three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men” in the ongoing Great Recession. “The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance.” She contends that the economic crisis “merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years.”
The Atlantic used the same issue to ask, “Are Fathers Necessary?” Pamela Paul cites a widely publicized study purporting to prove that fathers are harmful in rearing children and that lesbians do it better. The study is politics camouflaged as social science—its authors acknowledge that the parenting virtues they extol are defined “in part in the service of an egalitarian ideology.” Their message echoes Rosin’s: within the home, as in the national economy, men are unreliable at best and pathological at worst. The Atlantic assures us that the decline of men is the product of impersonal forces against which we are powerless to respond, even if we wished to—which apparently we do not.
Rosin, whose essay is #1 on the magazine’s “Biggest Ideas of the Year” list, certainly identifies an important trend. But the phenomenon she describes is the result not of inexorable social forces but of conscious political decisions. The end of men is the consequence of the most profound trend in public life today: the sexualization of politics and the politicization of sex.
The emergence of sexual politics has elicited strikingly little critical treatment. Yet it represents the most radical change in the nature of government in modern times. The economic effects are only symptoms. More far-reaching are the vast shifts in political power at every level. Feminist ideology pervades every item on the public agenda: not just “women’s issues” like abortion but everything from gun control (think of the “Million Mom March”) and DWI laws (Mother Against Drunk Driving) to foreign policy (Code Pink). “Women have the most to gain and the most to lose in the climate crisis,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed during the Copenhagen conference. “The impacts are not gender-neutral… . Women feel the consequences first.” Not an issue in public life has not been “gendered.”
The transformation of society wrought by sexual politics is most readily apparent where Rosin begins her article: with what she calls the “matriarchy” of the inner cities. Government policies produced this matriarchy: the men who are “increasingly absent from the home,” as Rosin writes, have been removed by welfare agencies and courts. The women are “making all the decisions” in inner-city households because the men have been forced out and government has usurped the role of father and husband, providing protection and income directly to the women and children. This produces in urban America not a “working class,” as Rosin terms it, but a class of government dependents whose living arrangements have been engineered by state officials.
As single motherhood spreads from the lower to the middle classes—among whom it is growing fastest—so does Rosin’s matriarchy. In the suburbs as in the cities, it is promoted by government machinery originally justified as helping the poor: child-care services, care for the elderly, public education, and publicly controlled healthcare.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/sexual-statism/