The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin Read Free Book Online Page A

in the relationship. In Thailand, she figured, sex was so ubiquitous that “it becomes just like Burger King. ‘I’ll have a blow job with a side of sex, and an extra order of massage my balls.’” After they broke up, she had begun to wonder if his attitude about sex echoed her own at all, and whether she’d better start worrying about whether a certain kind of cheap sex wipes out the ability to be intimate.
    Her second inspiration came from an older woman she knew from an investment bank where she used to work, a woman she considered her mentor. She and this woman sat together at the computerone afternoon between trades, shopping for bags, chatting about their families—their families of origin, as the woman, though in her forties, had yet to marry. This was a woman Sabrina idolized, an incredibly successful trader who oozed erotic capital. “She is elegant, charming, and had a smooth, rich voice,” Sabrina says. Another young trader came over and asked about a certain bond, a bond they had already discussed. “Her eyes just hardened,” Sabrina recalls. “It was almost like they turned a different color. Her voice turned sharp and almost ugly. ‘Do not come over here wasting my time,’ she said to the guy. ‘We have already been over this.’ And then she turned to me, got all soft again, and kept chatting!”
    Lately Sabrina had been thinking about that insta–personality switch, about the dangers of being so plastic and malleable that you never settle into something solid and knowable. If you can move in the span of a head turn from bitchy to seductive, if you can turn your erotic capital on and off like an actress on a stage, “then maybe you don’t know how to stop acting. And that can’t be good for a relationship.” That’s when she decided that she did not want to be her idol exactly, if being her meant being forty and alone.

    T HEORETICALLY , a twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old woman with no children is at the top of the game. She is, on average, more educated than the men around her, and making more money. She is less restricted by sexual taboos than at any other time in history. None of her peers judge her for not being a mother; in fact, they might pity her if she were. In 2011, psychologist Roy Baumeister measured whether more gender equality matched up with less restrictive sexual norms. In a study of thirty-seven nations, the hypothesis proved true. More sex means a more feminist-mindedcountry. As the authors of the 2010
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
put it, “Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly female-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy.” Empowerment! Sexiness! What could be better? Sounds like an Erica Jong fantasy come to life! Neo-Amazonia, played out on soft memory foam instead of the jungle floor!
    And yet the single-girl memoirs of such high-achieving women are not exactly ringing with triumph. Eventually, they come to the same realization Sabrina did. “At twenty-seven and counting, we’re not really old old, but damn it, tell that to our uteruses (uterun, uteri?),” writes Helena Andrews in
Bitch Is the New Black
. “Tell it to our mothers, who want grandchildren so badly they can catch a whiff of dirty diapers in the night air . . . . Tell it to our hearts that are so tired of being broken that they’d rather stay that way than be fixed for a better smashing later. I’m telling you, it’s been rough—sorta.”
    Why is it so rough when it should be so good? The story is not the usual one, about women always at the mercy of men. These days the problem in the dating market is caused not by women’s eternal frailty but by their new dominance. In a world where women are better educated than men and outearning them in their twenties, dating becomes complicated. Men are divided into what the college girls call the players (a smaller group) and the losers (a much larger group), and the