On
A RADIO SHOW ONE
morning last year, a female
professor at a well-known
university tossed off the
thought that if men are just
going to hang out with their
pals at the bar every night,
women will take a pass on
having kids with them. She didn’t cite any
studies, and she almost certainly didn’t
know any men who fit that description.
But it didn’t matter. • Casually disparaging
the entire male gender is not only the last
socially acceptable prejudice, it’s a national
pastime. Later I asked friends to name a
few things men do well, and the answers
ranged from “Leave the toilet seat up” to
a flat-out “Nothing.” Men have become a
necessary evil—and maybe not all that
necessary, once artificial sperm moves
out of the lab and into a uterus. At the
same time, women have become so
disproportionately admired by both sexes
that psychologists call this phenomenon
the “women are wonderful” effect. • And
Lord knows they are. But I was hoping
one of my friends would pipe up to say
that men and women aren’t really all that
different, and that both do plenty of things
well. Feminists used to say something
along those lines for the purpose of
moving women into jobs traditionally held
by men. So you would hardly expect them
to argue now that men are a defective or
inferior gender—unless they have completely forgotten how destructive it
was when such things were said about
women. • And yet that has somehow
become the default assumption for society
at large: When boys raise their hands in
class, they draw more attention to themselves than girls do, so they need
to be ignored. Boys are disruptive in school, so they need to be medicated
(and they are: almost three times as often as girls). Boys drop out more
and fail to attend college or grad school at the same rate as girls, so let’s
forget them and focus on helping the girls. Young men are more likely to
be aggressive and violent, so instead of spending money to educate them,
we should spend it to lock them up (especially if they are black, a group
that’s seen its incarceration rate rise to five times what it was 20 years
ago). Above all, men are defective as fathers. So 38 percent of kids are now
born to single moms, up from about 11 percent in 1970. And hardly anyone
acts as if this is a catastrophe in the making, even though the numbers are
much worse in low-income homes where kids (and moms) need dads
most. When marriages end, custody of the kids still goes to the mother
eight times out of 10. Because conventional wisdom says Dad is a bum.
Over the past 25 years, the social sciences “have done a really good
job of cataloging the things men do badly—men and depression, men and
violence, men and drugs—and very little on the other side,” says Matt
Styling: Brian Boyé, fashion assistant: Laura McCarthy, grooming: Scott
McMahan/Redken Men/Agent Oliver; Calvin Klein suits and ties, Tommy
Hilfiger shirts, Tie Bar tie bars
