Are men finished?
That’s what Slate would have us believe — or at least it’s engaging the question. On Sept. 20, it will sponsor a live debate at NYU’s Skirball Center in New York with ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams and journalist Hanna Rosin (you may know her from her controversial Atlantic article last year, The End of Men), who will argue for the idea, while feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers and Men’s Health magazine editor-in-chief David Zinczenko arguing against it. 
According to Slate:
Women now earn the majority of college degrees. Men play video games. Women thrive in information-age jobs. Men go to prison. Women hold families together. Men watch football. … A modern, post-industrial economy that seems better suited to women than men has led many experts to wonder if men are being permanently left behind. Education and employment statistics point to a clear and growing dominance in women’s status at home and in the workplace. Are men primed for a comeback, or have the old rules changed for good?
As the mom of two boys, my head is spinning. And, I’m pissed. Just like I don’t want any girl to look at my sons as a meal ticket on a date or a ticket to a “good life,” I don’t want my boys to be reduced to sperm donors either. Men and fathers matter.
When men were earning the majority of college degrees, thriving in careers, holding families together (by supporting them), would they ever have asked if women are finished? I don’t think so. They may not have wanted us as bosses or even coworkers (back in the day and, in some places, even now), but they certainly wanted us, even if for nothing more than “pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen” — as the mother of their children and the person who kept the house in order. And most women wanted them to be breadwinners. And we still do. Otherwise we wouldn’t have books like Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped into the Romantic Dream — and How They’re Paying for It.
Despite the fact that women are earning big bucks nowadays, most of us still want and expect men to be the breadwinners. Women rarely want to “marry down” — we don’t even want to date down. And when we marry — or, more commonly in recent decades, live with someone — and start a family, we gals still weigh our options: stay at home, work part time or work full time. How many men have those options (willingly; of course, the recession has turned a lot of men into SAHDs)?
Society is swinging like a pendulum, from a patriarchal one to a matriarchal one. I imagine one day, we’ll get the balance right.
What bothers me most is that, after all these years of women fighting for equality, with all our demands that we have an “equal partner,” why wouldn’t we want to support men in their freedom, too — freedom to be stay-at-home dads, freedom to work part-time so they can maybe find the elusive work-live balance we women obsess about — instead of dooming them to obsolescence?
I happen to love men, and I certainly don’t want to live on a planet like the one in “Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women,” a campy ’60s sci-fi flick about a planet populated entirely by women (and some ugly lizard-like beasts because all sci-fi flicks have to have beasties). They sure liked it when a spaceship with men arrived!
Do you think men are finished?
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