Will talking about men vs. women ever get boring? Not likely. Over atEsquire, Stephen Marche has published a piece called “The Contempt Of Women.” Drawing on various sources -- from anigh unavoidable Girls reference to a somewhat unexpected takedown of FiftyShades Of Grey -- Marche attempts to get a bead on the perpetual motion machine thatis gender dynamics. Right now, claims Marche, “contempt for men is whatordinary women understand.” Apparently everything from your beloved HBO tocommuters’ Kindles are slagging on guys for being guys! Wait -- what? Is this new?And, more importantly, should we be offended? No, and no. It’s good tobe a man in 2012. Despite all the talk about how increasingly shitty and Sisyphean it isto be a man, the world keeps serving up new wonderful experiences that make masculinity great.Contempt? Not from where we’re sitting. To us, Michelle Obama referring toher husband as “just a man” isn’t a sign of domestic insurrection but away of relating to voters. Lena Dunham’s male characters in Girlsaren’t any more one-dimensional than Mrs. Ari and Sloane were. We haven’t readFifty Shades of Grey -- it’s pretty deep in the queue, to be honest -- and,frankly, whatever contempt-mongering is in there, we’re not too worried about it.Allow us to elaborate. It’s still summer. We played soccerduring lunch today, and we came back to the office more or less dripping with sweat, andno one said a word. Not even the boss. Why? Because he was playing, too. Hotwomen are abundant, and they’re out wearing sundresses, as they will be next summer,too (that is, if their contempt doesn’t get the better of them). Flirtingis alive and well. Love him or hate him, Aaron Sorkin’s writing another season ofThe Newsroom. Have you seen any of the summer blockbusters?They’re pretty much directly inside our wheelhouse, regardless of how good theyactually are. Men are wearing hats again, and balding men are celebrating(quietly) across the land. Hands-on fatherhood is the future, but we stillmostly get to do the fun stuff. Do we even need to mention the video gameindustry? We could go on, but it’ll start to get boring. Marche refersheavily to Hanna Rosin’s forthcoming book, TheEnd of Men and the Rise of Women. In her article in the Atlantic, on which the book is based, Rosinpresents a host of data suggesting that, economically and socially, men are fallingbehind. We’re not buying it from either Marche and Rosin, because wedon’t believe that we’re engaged in a zero-sum game with women. Women’ssuccess is simply not our failure. Our success does not mean the undermining of women. We actually had to read Marche’s piece twice to get his actual point, whichis buried at the very end. After all the talk about women’s contempt, he seems toactually abandon that thesis, as though it had merely been bait for controversy-hungryreaders. Basically he’s not so much pitting men against women but smart men against“idiots”:“There's a crisis for idiots. The Tucker Maxes ofthe world are doomed. That's not the end of men. It's the beginning."Theimplication here is that men have allowed women to overtake us, as Rosin describes,because we’ve allowed stupid men to dominate the discourse. We’re notconvinced. First, doofus men have always been popular, long before George W. andFamily Guy. As far back as Jackie Gleason on The Honeymooners and evenfreakin’ Gilligan, stupid men have been a source of great entertainment withoutundermining where men stood in the workplace or in politics. Why is this suddenly theundoing of male intelligence? Men have always been awesome at making fun ofthemselves. If women have made progress, it’s not because stupidmen have held back the entire male species; it’s because women have earned it.Marche and Rosin are right that competition for jobs is incredibly heated with womenmaking up more than half the applicant pool. No doubt, it was easier in 1950 because therewere fewer resumes floating around. And we agree that it will be the smart men, not thedoofuses, who will ascend as our economy continues to suck. But was that evernot the case? Perhaps back in the 1940s of Aaron Sorkin’s fantasies, smart mendidn’t have to work as hard because there were fewer obstacles to the top. Dumb guysmight have had it easier back then. But if today’s dumb men are held in contempt bywomen (to loop in Marche’s other line of thinking) you’d better believe theywere back then, too. The only difference is that we didn’t hear about it, becausewomen were more or less taking care of the kids, not writing scripts. Smart,competent men may have to work harder to get hired than they used to, but complainingabout that amounts to complaining about the weather. Get an umbrella. Invest in cleanenergy. Look around you. The view is great from here. And regardless of whatever gains orlosses go down in the big gender tug of war, that’s not likely to change. Continue Reading

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