James Victore

Published in the September 2012 issue

In the constantly progressing and deteriorating and rapidly revolving kaleidoscope of misunderstanding and disgust and hunger that constitutes gender relations in the twenty-first century, a new gesture has emerged to define us: the sneer, the female gaze of contempt.

Is Lena Dunham the new Candace Bushnell or the new Kevin Smith — or, somehow, both?





Feminine contempt is suddenly everywhere, subtly and invidiously panoramic, in public life and in private life, in the bedroom and on television and in bookstores and on the campaign trail. The sexuality of the moment is all about contempt. In Lena Dunham's hit show Girls, which has succeeded so admirably in providing American critics with a moment of convenient generational definition, the men are pitiable and grotesque. Whether rough or tender or vanilla, they fail. In Sex and the City, the women commoditized men, often in the most banal way, but at least they liked what the men had to offer: cocks and money and status and sometimes even support. In Girls, sex is to be endured, the subject of a shivering, melancholy fascination. Fifty Shades of Grey — the best-selling book series of the year — is a letter from the country of sexual abjection. There have been a million books by a million writers about women who like to be slapped around, but Fifty Shades of Grey is new insofar as it interiorizes the sadomasochism and cleverly inverts it. Fifty Shades of Grey is a book devoted to the following thought: Jeez, can you believe how gross this guy is? Anastasia Steele, despite her classy name, is the kind of woman who says "jeez" in bed a lot. "Jeez" — the world's most potent boner-killer.

Eventually, the sexual always morphs into the political. Contempt for men has become so widespread and acceptable that it's a commonplace for politicians' wives. Michelle Obama loves to describe her husband's morning breath and struggles with smoking and failure to put away his socks. Her pull quote: "He's a gifted man, but he's just a man." Got that, boys? You can be editor of the Harvard Law Review, first African-American president, director of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, loving husband and father, and an innovator of "absorption marijuana ingestion" to boot, but in the end "just a man." Michelle uses that hokey line because it inevitably provokes warm ovations and knowing laughter. The wife of the British prime minister, David Cameron, has borrowed the technique, moaning about how Cameron "makes a terrible mess" when he cooks and can be "quite annoying." This is what the political operatives call "humanizing the candidate": Contempt for men is what ordinary women understand.

He's Just a Man: This is one of the key lines in American politics over the past two decades. It originated in Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man: Tammy stands by her man because "after all, he's just a man." Hillary Clinton refused to be Tammy, and for refusing to be Tammy, to be the half-smiling long-suffering wife, she was vilified. Every First Lady afterward has learned the lesson. You have to be Tammy, shaking your head in amusement and sorrow at your no-good, too-good man.





There's a well-developed intellectual expression of contempt for men, too, encapsulated in the idea of the "masculinity crisis" — men are doomed, in this argument, by their own inherent natures to flounder in the emotionally complex, predominantly social postindustrial world. Dozens of books have circled around or near the concept, but none had actually made a persuasive, research-grounded argument until Hanna Rosin's The End of Men and the Rise of Women. The book begins with a somewhat expected girl-powered farewell to male power. The American middle class, she writes, "is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and as women make all the decisions." Her numbers make a case: Women now have half the jobs in the American workforce. Three quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the recession belonged to men. Of the top fifteen growth industries in America, twelve are almost exclusively the preserve of women. In the postindustrial economy, men's physical strength becomes more or less irrelevant. And women are also setting the groundwork for the curve to continue: "Women now earn 60 percent of master's degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and about 44 percent of all business degrees," writes Rosin. Three years ago, more women than men earned Ph.D.'s.

The Glass Cellar: One of the real triumphs of American men over the past thirty years is that they've never taken to gender-based political activism. The arguments have been there to make: There's a "glass cellar" in the American workforce (men work almost all of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs), male life expectancy is much lower than female life expectancy, and so on. But a politics of male resentment is virtually nonexistent. Organized whining remains, for the overwhelming majority, unmanly.





This isn't because men are inherently stupid or broken. The most interesting sections in The End of Men show that in the portions of the country where, through culture and money, something like equality between the sexes is being achieved, the differences between them collapse. Women's biological clock? Unmarried young men aspire to have children more than unmarried young women do. The violence of male sexuality? In parts of the United States, rapes have declined to such a low number that they can't be charted. Feminine compassion? Violent crime among women is spiking to an unprecedented degree. That old La Leche League idea that once women were in power there would be no more wars? Women in power are not meaningfully different from men in power. When a reporter asked Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, what she would tell Greeks suffering under austerity policies, she replied, "Pay their taxes." That's how much compassion you can expect from female political leaders.

As women on television have become smarter and more powerful with every passing year, culminating in Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, the men on television become dumber and grosser and more useless. Homer Simpson becomes stupider every year. In one episode of Family Guy, Peter Griffin is actually declared "mentally retarded." The reason Phil Dunphy calls his philosophy of parenting "peerenting" is that his intellectual development remains at around the age of twelve.

President Bush could not remember ever having made a mistake, and claimed that his greatest moment in office was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound fish in his lake in Texas. How many guys like that do you know?





And how do men react to these statistics and the contempt that accompanies them? They ignore the statistics and laugh at the contempt — they are American men, after all. President Bush was proud of being small-minded, proud of being ornery, taking the maximum number of vacation days possible, proud of never traveling, not knowing other languages, and just in general not knowing and not caring. He fit neatly into a pattern with the other recognizable men on television. In advertising, the lumpen male idiot is the go-to. Other versions of male self-loathing are more sophisticated. The best and most refined comedians of the moment all take it for granted that the masculine is inherently the stupid, the obese, the miserable, the lazy, the selfish. Take Louis C. K. — his hatred for his own hungers is his best material. Much of Daniel Tosh's material, both on his show and on tour, is about men's selfishness, irresponsibility, and general grossness. Extreme pornography, the avoidance of fatherhood, and Stone Age sexism are defining traits. Male self-hatred is the comic cliché of the moment — the L. A.-is-like-this-but-New-York-is-like-that, white-people-drive-like-this-but-black-people-drive-like-that, what's-with-the-peanuts-in-airplanes of the moment: Can you believe how gross men are? Male comedians go to this safe material for the same reason they do anything: for the approval of women. Rather than resist the contemptuous gaze of women, they have learned to share it.

But men are better at getting jobs: It's true, as Rosin points out, that men lost three quarters of all jobs during the recession, but they're gaining them back at a rate of seven to one over women.





This willful idiocy cannot help but change. No one aspires to be unemployed and living out of his car, and the message of Hanna Rosin's book is this: That's what will happen to these men. There are always going to be stupid men in the world, but the ignorant and insensitive, the uninterested and uncaring, will have no place in it. I suppose I should feel compassion, or some kind of weird gender loyalty, for the guys who can't figure this out. In all honesty, I don't. There is no masculinity crisis.

There's a crisis for idiots. The Tucker Maxes of the world are doomed. That's not the end of men. It's the beginning.

It is weird, and somewhat embarrassing, that The End of Men was written by a woman. It's as if The Feminine Mystique had been written by a guy named Fred.





As for the gaze of contempt, it is no doubt transient. Contempt is one of the world's great pleasures — look at France — but ephemerality is one of its dominant features. The girls in Lena Dunham's creation are just figuring out that it's hard to be independent and need other people, and that it's hard to find somebody to screw whom you also like. To find somebody you want to screw and you like and you respect? Nearly impossible. But it's been nearly impossible forever. Much easier just saying "jeez."

There's a reason the show is called Girls rather than Women.

Trends Don't Make a Matriarchy

Statistics showing the rise of women and fall of men are sobering, but Rosin is really only pointing out trends — when and if and how they translate into real-world power is vague. And as she concedes, women account for only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 17 percent of members of Congress, and 20 of the 180 heads of state. Matriarchy? Really? No. The world's leading exporter of absurdity has shown the way: Women in Saudi Arabia earn more than half of all undergraduate and doctoral degrees — then they have to be driven to their jobs.

The Self-Hating Woman: In a comedy world dominated by self-hating men, bless the rare self-hating woman.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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