The End of Men and the Rise of Women

by Hanna Rosin

  Of course, these shifts in the power dynamic do not mean that men and women just cleanly switch roles on the dating scene. In the very first episode of Sex and the City, aired in 1998, Carrie Bradshaw asks in her column if a woman can get laid like a man. The answer, delivered barely ten minutes into the episode, is not exactly, and that is still largely true. With sex, as with most areas of life, women tend to preserve a core of their old selves—romantic, tender, vulnerable—even while taking on new sexual personas. The women at business school no longer needed a man to support them, but that didn’t mean they didn’t want one. And years of practice putting up their guard made it hard for them to know when to let it down. As Meghan Daum writes in My Misspent Youth, her memoir of single womanhood, the “worst sin imaginable was not cruelty or bitchiness or even professional failure but vulnerability.”

  I arrived at the business school during recruiting week, and I could see the strain it was causing the women who were already in relationships. One woman was dating a man who’d just gotten a job offer in London. She was willing to go to London, but he hadn’t asked her yet, and she wasn’t going to bring it up for fear of seeming too needy. In the meantime, she was putting off her own job offer to see how it all sorted out. This same situation was playing out between other couples, with Tokyo and San Francisco as potential backdrops. For these tough, ambitious women, the challenge was how to hang on to their hearts of steel for long enough that they seemed invulnerable, but not for so long that they missed their chance at happiness.

  I FIRST HEARD about Sabrina from her ex-boyfriend of nine months, a fellow business school student I met on the balcony at the party. I trusted him immediately because he did not resort to the kind of jerkoff party swagger I’d heard from some of his classmates: “I just don’t want to be tied down right now” or “Fuck marriage.” He was at least willing to entertain the theater of romance. “I’ve already found my dream girl,” he told me. “Six different times.” He was in love with Sabrina from the first night they hung out after a business school happy hour, he told me, although they didn’t sleep together, not for another two weeks. Once they did, he told me, it was a whole new experience for him. In bed she was her sublime, adventurous self: confident, aggressive, and totally comfortable asking for what she wanted; nimble and responsive and full of surprises, suggesting things he wouldn’t have thought to ask. She seemed to want it more than he did. “I was always the one to be in control in that scenario, so I wasn’t used to it,” he said. He kept describing her as “unique” and “one of a kind,” although they had broken up several months earlier. “You’ll see when you meet her,” he said, and so I sought her out.

  I tracked her down several days later in a classic single-girl-in-a-sitcom pose. Sabrina, who is thirty-one, was hanging out with a girlfriend, drinking wine and not eating the crackers and cheese on the table. In a few hours she was going to meet a guy she had just texted with, a trader they refer to as “the hot guy” she’d met at work that summer and slept with a couple of times. (After the second time, she’d texted him, “I’m just not feeling it” and—miracle—“he was cool with it. He didn’t take it personally.” So they still hang out occasionally as friends, even though they don’t have sex anymore.)

  But for the moment, the two women were talking about things they like: red wine, Lady Gaga concerts, Angela Merkel, and their favorite advice book of the moment, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, which advises women how to stop sabotaging their careers by being excessively deferential. Things they don’t like: short men; FDBs; men who, when you reject them, send texts saying “shouldn’t you be thinking about your eggs?” Also, their friend Anna, “who sits on the couch all day obsessing about finding The One”—that last phrase drips with sarcasm.

  Sabrina had met her share of Annas in business school, the girls who microanalyze every text and phone call, who wait, wait for the phone to ding or beep or pirouette out of their hands or whatever it does when they get a text from a boy. And who, when it doesn’t, when it just sits in their lap obstinately like a permanent stain, moan, “Why isn’t he texting me? What’s going on?” (this she says in a mock idiot-girl-who-reads-Cosmo voice). “Well, because we all need affection sometimes, and he just happened to get it from you that night,” she barked at the imaginary Annas. “Retard.”

  Did she ever wait by the phone? “Never. Never.” At least not since college, when she was not as good at reading the signals. “I started to think about it,” she said, lounging back on her friend’s couch, putting her socked feet up on the coffee table. “What do I need a man for? I don’t need him financially. I don’t need him to do activities. I have lots of friends here. So fuck it.”

  One problem I had with our conversation was the cognitive dissonance produced by the difference between the voice and the person: The distinctive thing about Sabrina is her effortless, natural beauty. It’s hard to describe her physically without resorting to Nancy Drew–era clichés such as “youthful” and “fresh.” She is half Asian, with creamy skin and long black hair and clear green eyes. On the day I met her she was wearing an outfit that Katniss, the heroine from The Hunger Games, might wear to go hunting: jeans and what looked like a boy’s flannel checked button-down shirt, with no makeup. (She made no wardrobe adjustments at all when it was time to meet “the hot guy” at the bar.) “In both cases I think I’m a hunter, a killer,” she said, musing on how her dating style echoed her favorite negotiating tactics.

  But my larger problem was my inability to judge how much of what she said was bluster and how much was real. And even if it was all real, whether Sabrina was an unusual case, or whether there was a little bit of Sabrina in every woman of this generation. I couldn’t say. But what I wanted to know was whether her years in the hook-up culture and on Wall Street had landed her in an extreme and untenable place.

  We’ve been taught that acting like a girl—even when we’re grown up—isn’t such a bad thing. Girls get taken care of in ways boys don’t. Girls aren’t expected to fend for or take care of themselves—others do that for them. Sugar and spice and everything nice—that’s what little girls are made of. Who doesn’t want to be everything nice?

  This is the diagnosis Lois Frankel makes in Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, one of Sabrina’s favorite books. The cautionary examples in Frankel’s book—the Susans and Rebeccas and Jills—are polite and accommodating. They work hard and they don’t play the office politics game. Mostly they wait around at work to be given what they want, just as Anna waits around for her phone to ring. Nice Girls is a business advice book, but Sabrina uses it as a dating guide, too, a primer on how to play in the big-city dating scene and never lose.

  Sabrina was twenty-three and just finishing college when she met a guy who looked like Justin Timberlake and “I totally lost my head. I was obsessed.” After less than a year they got engaged, and then he cheated on her. She was “miserable. Totally out of control, and I hated feeling totally out of control.” She vowed that she would never be “that sad miserable crawling thing again.” How did she do it? She put some distance between herself and sex. Sex was something apart from her, something “I could step back from and put in a box so I would never be overwhelmed again. It’s like, ‘I can’t be obsessing, I have shit to get done.’”

  From then on, Sabrina has scrutinized herself for any vulnerability and rooted it out. “We have sex, there’s that oxytocin floating around, we get attached, blah blah blah.” Or maybe it’s the way she was raised, by a Japanese mother who convinced her that she was supposed to make herself “easy to be around” and not talk too much around men. “There is always this little voice in your head saying, ‘This is not ladylike. This is not normal. Nice girls don’t do that. Nice girls don’t ask for raises.’ But then it’s like BAM! Smash it! ‘Nice girls don’t ask guys out on dates.’ BAM. Clear that! And then it’s gone.”

  After her disastrous college engagement to the Timberlake look-alike, Sabrina took a safer route.
She picked someone with whom she had less sexual chemistry but who was her friend, and within a year they got engaged. One day, at twenty-eight, she found herself sitting next to her fiancé, on a plane that was experiencing massive turbulence. As the plane shook she thought to herself, “I am not living the life I want to live. I am not dating the guy I want to date. I am engaged to a guy I don’t want to be engaged to.” She had by that time been working at banks for several years and had traveled all over the world and experienced turbulence dozens of times. But this time the plane was shaking so hard, she had imminent death on her mind. And she wasn’t thinking about the nice life she and her fiancé could have enjoyed together. She was thinking about herself in a house in Darien, Connecticut, cooking in the kitchen with kids at her feet, and feeling like a plane crash might be preferable. The plane landed safely, and shortly thereafter Sabrina broke off an engagement for the second time in her life. In the marriage market, twice fleeing the altar makes you the equivalent of the person who’s had a near-death experience and seen the white light. In other words, it makes you free, to text cute guys at eleven P.M. yourself and tell them to fuck off if you want to and forget about The One.

  Or does it? When I met her a few days later, Sabrina was in a different mood and thinking more about what she wanted from life. That business school boyfriend—the one I’d met at the party—had inspired a breakthrough for her. Before business school he’d lived in Thailand for almost a decade, and this part of his sexual history had become a source of anguish for her in the relationship. In Thailand, she figured, sex was so ubiquitous that “it becomes just like Burger King. ‘I’ll have a blow job with a side of sex, and an extra order of massage my balls.’” After they broke up, she had begun to wonder if his attitude about sex echoed her own at all, and whether she’d better start worrying about whether a certain kind of cheap sex wipes out the ability to be intimate.

  Her second inspiration came from an older woman she knew from an investment bank where she used to work, a woman she considered her mentor. She and this woman sat together at the computer one afternoon between trades, shopping for bags, chatting about their families—their families of origin, as the woman, though in her forties, had yet to marry. This was a woman Sabrina idolized, an incredibly successful trader who oozed erotic capital. “She is elegant, charming, and had a smooth, rich voice,” Sabrina says. Another young trader came over and asked about a certain bond, a bond they had already discussed. “Her eyes just hardened,” Sabrina recalls. “It was almost like they turned a different color. Her voice turned sharp and almost ugly. ‘Do not come over here wasting my time,’ she said to the guy. ‘We have already been over this.’ And then she turned to me, got all soft again, and kept chatting!”

  Lately Sabrina had been thinking about that insta–personality switch, about the dangers of being so plastic and malleable that you never settle into something solid and knowable. If you can move in the span of a head turn from bitchy to seductive, if you can turn your erotic capital on and off like an actress on a stage, “then maybe you don’t know how to stop acting. And that can’t be good for a relationship.” That’s when she decided that she did not want to be her idol exactly, if being her meant being forty and alone.

  THEORETICALLY, a twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old woman with no children is at the top of the game. She is, on average, more educated than the men around her, and making more money. She is less restricted by sexual taboos than at any other time in history. None of her peers judge her for not being a mother; in fact, they might pity her if she were. In 2011, psychologist Roy Baumeister measured whether more gender equality matched up with less restrictive sexual norms. In a study of thirty-seven nations, the hypothesis proved true. More sex means a more feminist-minded country. As the authors of the 2010 Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, “Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly female-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy.” Empowerment! Sexiness! What could be better? Sounds like an Erica Jong fantasy come to life! Neo-Amazonia, played out on soft memory foam instead of the jungle floor!

  And yet the single-girl memoirs of such high-achieving women are not exactly ringing with triumph. Eventually, they come to the same realization Sabrina did. “At twenty-seven and counting, we’re not really old old, but damn it, tell that to our uteruses (uterun, uteri?),” writes Helena Andrews in Bitch Is the New Black. “Tell it to our mothers, who want grandchildren so badly they can catch a whiff of dirty diapers in the night air . . . . Tell it to our hearts that are so tired of being broken that they’d rather stay that way than be fixed for a better smashing later. I’m telling you, it’s been rough—sorta.”

  Why is it so rough when it should be so good? The story is not the usual one, about women always at the mercy of men. These days the problem in the dating market is caused not by women’s eternal frailty but by their new dominance. In a world where women are better educated than men and outearning them in their twenties, dating becomes complicated. Men are divided into what the college girls call the players (a smaller group) and the losers (a much larger group), and the women are left fighting for small spoils. The players are in high demand and hard to pin down. The losers are not all that enticing. Neither is in any hurry to settle down.

  In the dating market, erotic capital works in a slightly different way. A woman’s sexuality has social value, and she trades it for other things she wants. In the old days the exchange was fairly obvious. Women traded sex for security, money, maybe even social and political influence. Because they had no other easy access to these things, it was imperative they keep the price of sex high so they had something to bargain with. Now women no longer need men for financial security and social influence. They can achieve those things by themselves. So they have no urgent incentive to keep the price of sex high. The result is that sex, by the terms of sexual economics, is cheap, bargain-basement cheap, and a lot more people can have it.

  When sex is cheap, something funky happens to the men. More of them turn into what sociologist Mark Regnerus calls “free agents.” They sleep with as many women as possible, essentially because they can. They become allergic to monogamy. “What motivation exists for men to be anything besides the stereotypic ‘take what you can get’ kind of man?” asks Regnerus in Premarital Sex in America. “Not a lot.” The new equation doesn’t leave women vulnerable exactly, but it may leave them less than satisfied. “Erotic capital,” Regnerus writes, “can be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and all the sex she wants, but it can’t assure her love and lifelong commitment. Not in this market.” It’s no accident that the girls-gone-wild culture rose up at the same time women started to dominate college campuses. Katie, one of the interviewees in Regnerus’s book, summarizes her experience in the new marketplace thus: “I felt like I was dating his dick.”

  What exaggerates this dysfunction and gives it a grand scale is the chronic oversupply problem. In their 1983 book Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question, two psychologists developed what has become known as the Guttentag-Secord theory, which explains what happens when gender ratios are skewed. Societies where men outnumber women tend to be less egalitarian, but women are held in high esteem. The roles of mother and wife are highly respected, and rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are low. In societies with more women, men have the candy-store attitude. They want the Twizzlers and the Jujubes. They become promiscuous and can’t be relied on to settle down. The women, in turn, stop relying on them, and focus on making their own way. In our society overall we don’t have more women than men, but in certain segments of society it plays out that way—the average state school, the rising middle class. In those places the women can be ready for marriage while the men are still playing video games. Thus the cycle continues, and Cosmo sells magazines in perpetuity.

  The result is that the women suffer through a lot of frustrating little dating battles. But it’s the men who are losing the wa
r. On the cover of Guyland, Michael Kimmel’s 2008 anthropology of the new young American man, the four guys seem to be caught in the midst of some delirious frat boy cheer. The four hundred boys/men he interviews, all between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six, tell Kimmel that they party hard and hook up with lots of women. The three pillars of their lives are “drinking, sex, and video games.” They watch a lot of Spike TV and a lot of porn, on their laptops, their desktops, and their phones. They mostly hang out with one another. At frat parties they hook up with actual women, but for the most part, the women represent a threat to their way of existence. The recurring anthem he comes across is “Bros before hos.” The difference between them and the women, though, is that they are more likely to get stuck in Guyland, fail to graduate, and then never move on. So entrenched is this universal frat boy culture that Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is coining a new disease to describe it: “social intensity syndrome.” Many young men these days, Zimbardo argues, are so awash in video games and porn that they cannot cope with face-to-face contact. Their brains, he says, become “digitally rewired” and no longer suitable for stable romantic relationships, especially relationships with “equal status female mates.”

  THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION did radically transform women’s attitudes and behaviors. The bedroom worked much like the workplace—women experimented, took on new roles, became more aggressive. They took advantage of whatever liberties society offered them. The problem is, it did very little to change men, who measure about the same in their sexual preferences and desires as they did in the early 1960s. This is the argument feminist Barbara Ehrenreich proposes in her 1986 book Re-Making Love. More recently, Baumeister put that theory to the test, but on a grander scale: Is female sexuality more transformable than male sexuality, or, in psychology speak, do women have more “erotic plasticity”? In a 2000 review of fifty years of literature, Baumeister concludes that they do. Male sexuality, he concludes, is “relatively constant and unchanging,” which suggests it is ruled by factors that are “rigid” and more “innate.” Female sexuality, by contrast, is “malleable and mutable: It is responsive to culture, learning, and social circumstances.”