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

women are left fighting for small spoils. The players are in high demand and hard to pin down. The losers are not all that enticing. Neither is in any hurry to settle down.
    In the dating market, erotic capital works in a slightly different way. A woman’s sexuality has social value, and she trades it for other things she wants. In the old days the exchange was fairly obvious.Women traded sex for security, money, maybe even social and political influence. Because they had no other easy access to these things, it was imperative they keep the price of sex high so they had something to bargain with. Now women no longer need men for financial security and social influence. They can achieve those things by themselves. So they have no urgent incentive to keep the price of sex high. The result is that sex, by the terms of sexual economics, is cheap, bargain-basement cheap, and a lot more people can have it.
    When sex is cheap, something funky happens to the men. More of them turn into what sociologist Mark Regnerus calls “free agents.” They sleep with as many women as possible, essentially because they can. They become allergic to monogamy. “What motivation exists for men to be anything besides the stereotypic ‘take what you can get’ kind of man?” asks Regnerus in
Premarital Sex in America
. “Not a lot.” The new equation doesn’t leave women vulnerable exactly, but it may leave them less than satisfied. “Erotic capital,” Regnerus writes, “can be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and all the sex she wants, but it can’t assure her love and lifelong commitment. Not in this market.” It’s no accident that the girls-gone-wild culture rose up at the same time women started to dominate college campuses. Katie, one of the interviewees in Regnerus’s book, summarizes her experience in the new marketplace thus: “I felt like I was dating his dick.”
    What exaggerates this dysfunction and gives it a grand scale is the chronic oversupply problem. In their 1983 book
Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question
, two psychologists developed what has become known as the Guttentag-Secord theory, which explains what happens when gender ratios are skewed. Societies where men outnumber women tend to be less egalitarian, but women are held in high esteem. The roles of mother and wife are highly respected, andrates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are low. In societies with more women, men have the candy-store attitude. They want the Twizzlers and the Jujubes. They become promiscuous and can’t be relied on to settle down. The women, in turn, stop relying on them, and focus on making their own way. In our society overall we don’t have more women than men, but in certain segments of society it plays out that way—the average state school, the rising middle class. In those places the women can be ready for marriage while the men are still playing video games. Thus the cycle continues, and
Cosmo
sells magazines in perpetuity.
    The result is that the women suffer through a lot of frustrating little dating battles. But it’s the men who are losing the war. On the cover of
Guyland,
Michael Kimmel’s 2008 anthropology of the new young American man, the four guys seem to be caught in the midst of some delirious frat boy cheer. The four hundred boys/men he interviews, all between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six, tell Kimmel that they party hard and hook up with lots of women. The three pillars of their lives are “drinking, sex, and video games.” They watch a lot of Spike TV and a lot of porn, on their laptops, their desktops, and their phones. They mostly hang out with one another. At frat parties they hook up with actual women, but for the most part, the women represent a threat to their way of existence. The recurring anthem he comes across is “Bros before hos.” The difference between them and the women, though, is that they are more likely to get stuck in Guyland, fail to graduate, and then