Have Men Changed?

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As I crisscrossed the country this summer giving talks and reading from my new book, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, women in Birkenstocks, girls in flip flops, and ageless ladies with open faces asked me thoughtful questions about feminism, future and past. And in every audience, there he was, too. Often sitting alone, sometimes with his girlfriend, a brave young son of feminism invariably wanted to know what a new generation’s feminism had to say to a new generation of men.

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself of late. Because I’m gripped by the flipside of that question too: Women have changed so much over the course of the past four decades. Have men?

Not according to my mass culture consumption this summer. Remember August’s headlines? “Men Opt Out of Housework after Marriage.” “Men Prefer Younger Women.” Ah, yes, boys will be boys. Books I read on planes—The Last American Man and The Dangerous Book for Boys—temper their nostalgia for that time when boys were boys with reflection on what it means for boys to lose that unmediated relationship with the great outdoors. On television, I noted a far less self-aware nostalgia for the traditional masculine ways of yore. An ad for AMC’s new series, Mad Men, glamorizes a time “when men were men, and women were skirts.” On ABC’s Men in Trees reruns, men are well, in trees. On NBC’s Age of Love and on the bazillionth season of ABC’s The Bachelor, men continue to paw their way (er, sensitively, now?) through a bevy of over-eager, sad-eyed beauties. The movies that most stayed in my mind—from the Hollywood blockbuster Knocked Up to the indie “mumblecore” Hannah Takes the Stairs—were, among other things, male fantasies in which the geek got the blonde.

Back from tour, the question of whether men in real life have changed has become
personal as I contemplate marriage and parenthood with my new mate. Late(ish) in life—I’m 38, he’s 46—we’ve decided to try for a child. As much as we can, we aspire to bring the egalitarianism that characterizes us now into this next stage of our relationship. But I’m keenly aware of just how hard this is to do.