The End of Men and the Rise of Women (6 page)

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.

T
HEORETICALLY
, 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 war. 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.”

T
HE 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.”

Individual women tend to become more sexually adventurous as they date more. They adapt their behavior quickly to match the expectations of family, peers, church groups, a move to a new country where sexual mores are different. Studies of older women show small cohorts that masturbate much more with age, whereas men’s masturbation rates almost always stay constant over a lifetime. Women can go cold after a breakup and then become passionate when they meet someone new. Men’s sexual desire is defined by what Alfred Kinsey called “no discontinuity in total outlet.” Their appetite stays constant. If they do not have a girlfriend, they masturbate
to make up the difference. Women fall in love with women, and then with men again. Studies of swinger culture in the 1970s, for example, showed that women entered the subculture with gusto, and were much more experimental in it than men.

The modern-day index to women’s sexual plasticity is anal sex. More women have tried it, and tried it repeatedly, than ever before. In 1992, 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried it, and now, at the upper end of that bracket, the number is 40 percent. Many people would assume that this increase reflects new lows in the chivalrous standards as men force their porn fantasies on real live mates. But as
Slate
writer William Saletan points out, the data doesn’t support that view. Women who had anal sex were far more likely to report having had an orgasm during their sexual encounter—more even than those who received oral sex. There are lots of possible explanations—women who are willing to try anal sex trust their partners more; orgasms relax women, so they are willing to try anal sex; sexually adventurous women are willing to try anything. But whatever the explanation, the general conclusion is that advances in sexual openness are, in fact, advances.

Baumeister, who teaches at Florida State University, is prone to brilliant, sweeping theories on an unusually wide range of subjects. In this case he traces the implications of his findings across global cultures and back in time. In years past, and in many cultures still, women’s sexual malleability has made them vulnerable to coercion and control, either by an individual man or a patriarchal culture; say, mullahs in Afghanistan. But it also makes women adaptable to changing circumstances, and able to take advantage when sexual mores change. When a space opens up for them to do something new—like a fifteen-year space when they are no longer required to
get married or have children or otherwise live at the mercy of men but can live as they please—they will move into it.

Thus we have landed in an era that’s produced a new breed of female sexual creature the world has never witnessed before, one who acknowledges the eternal vulnerability of women but, rather than cave in or trap herself in the bell jar, instead looks that vulnerability square in the face and then manipulates it in unexpected, creative, or crazy ways. It’s no accident that the most popular fictional heroine of the last decade is Lisbeth Salander—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—a pale waif who was sexually abused as a child but, instead of cowering or attending support groups, spends her adulthood beating up scary men.

Sometimes the new kind of woman takes her revenge not with a knife but with excellent comic timing. In the fall of 2010, Duke senior Karen Owen became momentarily famous when her friends leaked her pornographic PowerPoint presentation, which described her sexual exploits with thirteen Duke athletes, whom she identified by name, skill, and penis size. (“While he had girth on his side, the subject was severely lacking in length.”) In Owen’s hands, scenes of potential humiliation got transformed into punch lines. (“Mmm tell me about how much you like big, black cocks,” number six, a baseball player told her. “But, I’ve never even hooked up with a black man!” she told him. “Oh . . . well, just pretend like you have,” he responded. “Umm ok . . . I like big, black . . . cocks?”)