How to be a man in the first era in history that believes in gender equality? “The 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end,” wrote Hanna Rosin in The End of Men. Now we need a masculinist agenda, not to fight feminism but to help men adapt to it. Three recent books — Richard V Reeves’ Of Boys and Men, Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America and Joris Luyendijk’s Dutch book De zeven vinkjes (“The Seven Ticks”) — trace the outlines of a new masculinism.
There are now two kinds of men: those at the top who remain dominant, and those lower down who are struggling. At the top, 426 of the Fortune 500 companies had male CEOs as of March. White males from privileged backgrounds usually get to judge whether a candidate is the right “fit” and possesses “quality”, by which we often mean white-male attributes such as “experience” and “confidence”. We consider ourselves neutral, but suspect senior women of pushing female interests.
