The Role Of Men

September 19, 2012

Interview with Hanna Rosin, author of the book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women

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Mike Carruthers:
Men’s roles have certainly changed over the past few generations and continue to do so.

Hanna Rosin:
I do feel that this is a transition moment where the boys and the men don’t necessarily have a role model they don’t like the sound of we all need to be feminized now – no man wants to hear that.

Hanna Rosin, author of the book The End of Men, says pop culture certainly doesn’t serve up a lot of good role models for men. 

For women it always does; Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown you always have sort of a woman to look to as your model but you look at the imagine of a man that is in anyway domesticated and for basically the entire history of the sitcom that man has been a complete idiot.

Women are making great strides in education and in the workplace and in some ways they are surpassing men, however…

I think we still have a long way to go in getting more comfortable with women being powerful and on the other end I think we have a long way to go for men to be more comfortable in domesticated roles. So, if we as a society could reach a point where we see a dad in the playground at 3 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon and we do not have the thought, “What’s wrong with that guy?”

But some traditional roles will likely never change.

And I think there are things that are really visceral and hardwired that have to do with man as protector. I hear this no matter where I go in urban progressive places and southern more conservative places it’s always ultimately the man is the person we rely on to protect us.