...or at least, that's what I imagine the future will look like, based on the cover article in the recent Atlantic. I read it, then emailed it to a friend who was going through a breakup, which probably wasn't the best idea. Oh well. Hindsight.
The thing that bothers me the most about this article is that it relies on a somewhat unproven (at least to me) idea that's been floating around like a bad smell for a while now, which is the idea of the "decline of men."
This is a concept I first came across in sixth grade. My middle school was an hour's drive from my house, and my Dad and I would drive to the bus stop and, once we'd arrived, huddle in the predawn dark and listen to Garrison Keillor. I believe that's where I first head about "Adam's Curse," a book by a professor at Oxford named Bryan Sykes. Sykes said that the Y Chromosome was becoming steadily shorter and more prone to abnormalities, and that eventually in the future men would die out altogether. The way Sykes told it, the end of men seemed no more than twenty years away. Nor did he seem to feel like the gradual extinction of his own gender was such a big deal, but I remember I spent a lot of time thinking about what this brave new world would be like and feeling somewhat anxious about it.
Since then, I've read about the "decline of men" in a lot of journals. In education, policymakers worry about the "decline of boys," who seem to attend school less than their female counterparts and even then don't seem to be achieving great results.
Bolick makes the "decline of men" one of the cornerstones of her article about the paucity of marriage options for single women in NYC. Her article opens with the following slug: "Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing)."
But the most interesting sentence, for me, was this: "To be sure...the majority of my personal experience has been with commitment-minded men with whom things just didn’t work out, for one reason or another."
In fact, Bolick began the entire essay with a story about how, in her late 20s, she once dumped a near-perfect man because she felt "something was missing." I kinda feel like her essay is really more of a reflection on how our generation, despite being profoundly educated, somehow still manages to miss the point when it comes to the bigger questions of life, love and family.
Bolick focuses so single-handedly on marriage that at times she reminds me of some of my well-meaning Indian relatives. (When I went back to the United States, many many people asked me, as any Indian-American can tell you, whether I'd "found someone." One time I cutely - and tiredly - replied "yes, myself," and everyone laughed but nobody really found it convincing.)
I feel bad for the guy whom Bolick dumped. My general impression, when I visited the United States this time, was that American dating doesn't seem to be a picnic for anyone, men or women, and that if women have to contend with men's "decline" then men also have to deal with women's "ascent," which seems - sometimes - to have propelled some of us right into an altogether alternate reality.
Bolick focuses on marriage and manages to exclude both dating and even romance, which is sad to me only because one of the great changes that the modern West made to the institution of marriage was to separate it from its brutally practical side. I grew up surrounded by arranged marriages and the culture was always one where talking about "love" would have induced polite fits of embarrassed coughing. At the same time, though, Indian poetry and music resounded with various suppressed longings. Some of my earliest memories include my parents playing tapes of "Meera bhajans," a series of love poems composed by a woman and set to music. Supposedly Meera's poems are dedicated to God, but when I was about 17 I began to wonder if this maybe wasn't the full story.
Indian matrimonial ads get spoofed the world over, with their predictable formula of "tall good-looking boy US-educated boy seeks Tamil Brahmin girl, age 22-26, reply to father at xxx" but it seems like Kate Bolick and her friends are secretly doing the same thing in their minds, cleaving to an ever more distant image of a man who fits an evolving but ultimately confusing set of criteria that may or may not have anything to do with happiness. In this case, of course, the "father" has been replaced by a cadre of high-earning and high-powered friends, many also single, who constantly confirm that a man should be x height and with y income and come from only a, b, or c colleges in order to be acceptable marriage material.
It's interesting to me, as an outside observer, how much the American popular discourse around young women today seems to have veered towards marriage. From the anti-hookup furor to the resurgence of retro dating manuals like "The Rules," from "He's Just Not that Into You" to Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him" to Bolick's article, which has apparently already been optioned for TV. Every week, it seems, brings a new article about how young women, stymied by the options newly available to them, still can't seem to find a man. The result has been to elevate a marriage certificate into some kind of necessary qualification for being a successful human being, along with having a steady and rewarding job, a degree from a good university and at least one artsy but not too bizarre hobby. In college my girlfriends would read aloud wedding announcements from the New York Times that elevated this lifestyle and included meet-cutes like "the bride and groom, both economists, graduated from Harvard but met in a cake decorating class."
No one wants to feel left out of anything, and there's something to be said for succeeding at conformity. But it's interesting to me how much American values seem to have shifted just in the past twenty years; and even more interesting how nobody else seems to find it interesting or even remarkable.
The thing that bothers me the most about this article is that it relies on a somewhat unproven (at least to me) idea that's been floating around like a bad smell for a while now, which is the idea of the "decline of men."
This is a concept I first came across in sixth grade. My middle school was an hour's drive from my house, and my Dad and I would drive to the bus stop and, once we'd arrived, huddle in the predawn dark and listen to Garrison Keillor. I believe that's where I first head about "Adam's Curse," a book by a professor at Oxford named Bryan Sykes. Sykes said that the Y Chromosome was becoming steadily shorter and more prone to abnormalities, and that eventually in the future men would die out altogether. The way Sykes told it, the end of men seemed no more than twenty years away. Nor did he seem to feel like the gradual extinction of his own gender was such a big deal, but I remember I spent a lot of time thinking about what this brave new world would be like and feeling somewhat anxious about it.
Since then, I've read about the "decline of men" in a lot of journals. In education, policymakers worry about the "decline of boys," who seem to attend school less than their female counterparts and even then don't seem to be achieving great results.
Bolick makes the "decline of men" one of the cornerstones of her article about the paucity of marriage options for single women in NYC. Her article opens with the following slug: "Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing)."
But the most interesting sentence, for me, was this: "To be sure...the majority of my personal experience has been with commitment-minded men with whom things just didn’t work out, for one reason or another."
In fact, Bolick began the entire essay with a story about how, in her late 20s, she once dumped a near-perfect man because she felt "something was missing." I kinda feel like her essay is really more of a reflection on how our generation, despite being profoundly educated, somehow still manages to miss the point when it comes to the bigger questions of life, love and family.
Bolick focuses so single-handedly on marriage that at times she reminds me of some of my well-meaning Indian relatives. (When I went back to the United States, many many people asked me, as any Indian-American can tell you, whether I'd "found someone." One time I cutely - and tiredly - replied "yes, myself," and everyone laughed but nobody really found it convincing.)
I feel bad for the guy whom Bolick dumped. My general impression, when I visited the United States this time, was that American dating doesn't seem to be a picnic for anyone, men or women, and that if women have to contend with men's "decline" then men also have to deal with women's "ascent," which seems - sometimes - to have propelled some of us right into an altogether alternate reality.
Bolick focuses on marriage and manages to exclude both dating and even romance, which is sad to me only because one of the great changes that the modern West made to the institution of marriage was to separate it from its brutally practical side. I grew up surrounded by arranged marriages and the culture was always one where talking about "love" would have induced polite fits of embarrassed coughing. At the same time, though, Indian poetry and music resounded with various suppressed longings. Some of my earliest memories include my parents playing tapes of "Meera bhajans," a series of love poems composed by a woman and set to music. Supposedly Meera's poems are dedicated to God, but when I was about 17 I began to wonder if this maybe wasn't the full story.
Indian matrimonial ads get spoofed the world over, with their predictable formula of "tall good-looking boy US-educated boy seeks Tamil Brahmin girl, age 22-26, reply to father at xxx" but it seems like Kate Bolick and her friends are secretly doing the same thing in their minds, cleaving to an ever more distant image of a man who fits an evolving but ultimately confusing set of criteria that may or may not have anything to do with happiness. In this case, of course, the "father" has been replaced by a cadre of high-earning and high-powered friends, many also single, who constantly confirm that a man should be x height and with y income and come from only a, b, or c colleges in order to be acceptable marriage material.
It's interesting to me, as an outside observer, how much the American popular discourse around young women today seems to have veered towards marriage. From the anti-hookup furor to the resurgence of retro dating manuals like "The Rules," from "He's Just Not that Into You" to Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him" to Bolick's article, which has apparently already been optioned for TV. Every week, it seems, brings a new article about how young women, stymied by the options newly available to them, still can't seem to find a man. The result has been to elevate a marriage certificate into some kind of necessary qualification for being a successful human being, along with having a steady and rewarding job, a degree from a good university and at least one artsy but not too bizarre hobby. In college my girlfriends would read aloud wedding announcements from the New York Times that elevated this lifestyle and included meet-cutes like "the bride and groom, both economists, graduated from Harvard but met in a cake decorating class."
No one wants to feel left out of anything, and there's something to be said for succeeding at conformity. But it's interesting to me how much American values seem to have shifted just in the past twenty years; and even more interesting how nobody else seems to find it interesting or even remarkable.
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