Review

Chronicling Lilith

The End of Men and the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Riverhead Books (Penguin Group), 2013
(336 pages, $17.00, paperback)

reviewed by Harriet Murphy

As the Catholic Church debates the future of the family and Pope Francis talks about deepening a theology of women, it is useful to remember that it was Karl Marx who called for the abolition of the family in The Communist Manifesto. His exhortation famously asked the proletariat to reject the bourgeois definition of marriage, which required women to defer to men's monopolization of the public sphere whilst they had preeminence in the private. One of the simple truths about revolutions, whether silent or bloody, is that they are always making incremental advances. Karl Marx, for instance, nowhere suggests that heterosexuality should be phased out, only that it should be relieved of its sacramentality and that women should be shifted out of the home into the
workforce.

Advance of the Fourth Wave

By the same token, the radical feminism that was first brokered by Marx's partner, Friedrich Engels, in the later The Origin of the Family is not dead, but has successfully gone forth and multiplied. Fourth-wave feminism is now installed as the new orthodoxy in schools and universities. It makes no distinction between popular and academic feminism. It assumes that men and women are gender-neutral. Its theological voice assumes that Galatians 3:28 literally means that Christ is the patron saint of gender neutrality, "there is no male and female" no longer being a reference to sacramental baptism but a metaphor for induction into a notional feminist FutureChurch. Many of its celebrity apologists are what critic Roger Kimball calls "tenured radicals" and, as such, are immune to the demands of a critical revision.

The ex-Catholic atheist Germaine Greer, for instance, of the University of Warwick and then Cambridge, published a book in 1999 asking for a revised definition of wholeness. But her thesis in The Whole Woman has since been replaced with that of the "disappearing woman." In 2013 Greer began a national lecture tour in Great Britain on "disappearing women," her talks recycling the charge that we only have token women in public life and claiming that there is still resistance from men. Although most of us can see that competence is the prerequisite for success at landing a good job, and that companies often bend over backward to be "inclusive," Greer still wants to make men responsible for what she dogmatically believes is the de facto erasure of real women. Though fabulously counter-intuitive now that women are highly visible in the professions, her conspiracy theory remains attractive to those allergic to the statistics, and, as of this writing, her tour is still not over.

Is there method in her madness? According to her, the absence of absolutely equal numbers across the board is the only marker, and in arguing this point, she censors the real discussion point, which is why feminists are always reluctant to consider the possibility that many women are not "in the public sphere" because they are happy to be at home with the family. Lacking a feminist magisterium, the celebrities all disagree with one another, and they all pretend their critics do not really exist. No Pope Joan seems able to blow the whistle and call the players to account. In the light of the latest tracts alleging men are obsolete, a disputatio is long overdue.

Sommers to Rosin

Hanna Rosin's is a case in point. Married and a mother, she is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, and sympathetic to the atheist feminist Christina Hoff Sommers in an alliance we need to understand. Sommers is the controversial ethicist and philosopher who now writes a weekly show called "The Factual Feminist" for the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism? (1994), which accuses women of betraying women, and she is now arguing for a new brand called Freedom Feminism (2013), which claims to want to break what she calls the "one-party system" represented by Greer.

The Factual Feminist has thousands of followers on YouTube and takes issue with feminist "facts." But undergraduates are not interested in her own facts, let alone her interpretations. Sommers is finding that at universities such as Georgetown, the authorities see her as a threat to health and safety for triggering high levels of anxiety in students who do not even want to enter into debate.

When Sommers first started to look at the casualties of feminist rhetoric and propaganda, she alleged there were five foundational feminist myths, among them inflated figures about sexual slavery, domestic violence, and college sexual assault. The Holy See disagrees with her claim, and is now leading a campaign to stop human trafficking (something then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio fought against like a lion in Buenos Aires). In 2014, the British Parliament voted on a new Modern Slavery Bill.

In The War Against Boys (2000) Sommers launched a new front in feminist warfare, on which Hanna Rosin clearly builds, with information on how "the culture" punishes little boys on the playground for not conforming to the new stereotypes of behavior, which anathematize old-fashioned male aggression.

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Rosin's book fits in with the shift of the discussion to boys. Purporting to demonstrate "the end of men" and the "rise of women," the 2012 book became a best-seller and is considered part of the new paradigm shift. Rosin is not interested in the playground or the new models for conditioning little boys, yet she proves evidence for the antidote to patriarchy about which feminists have complained since Karl Marx. Rosin says there is a contemporary revival of matriarchy. An increasing number of young women are happy to treat men as redundant; power outside the home is the quid pro quo for real emancipation from obsolete role models for women.

The March to Oblivion

Rosin also resists Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the evolutionary "end of history" because she believes, unlike Greer, that there is momentum for continuing change beyond Fukuyama's omega point, above all in the workplace, where women who adapt to the call to realize their human potential prove that the species is improving.

She claims that not only are sex and gender dissolving, but that class, too, is no longer a meaningful concept. The working classes have already rejected macho culture—increasing numbers of working-class women are willing to have illegitimate children and are pursuing educational opportunities in the hope that they will one day penetrate the higher echelons of the workforce. The decline of Christianity means there is no longer any social stigma attached to single parenthood, and feminism has successfully persuaded women that they no longer have to immerse themselves in traditional family life to obtain a sense of self-worth. Rosin argues that the middle-class trend is "the see-saw marriage," where a man and woman compete with one another. Popular culture features out-of-work husbands, meek boyfriends, stay-at-home dads, and killer career wives, she writes.

Sociologists are at sea. Some say that the family changes that have occurred over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, although, Rosin claims, it is not clear that they have been bad for women. But what Rosin regards as normality for women is for them to work and succeed outside the home, irrespective of the effects on themselves, children, and society. For her, female autonomy is an uncomplicated good. It does not matter to her that—assuming God, Christ, and the Church are part of an obsolete world order—she is arguing for an ambiguous use of personal freedom.

One chapter in this story goes East: Rosin looks at the effects of feminism in Korea, where patriarchal Buddhism has held back social progress, meaning the New Woman in Korea goes from one extreme of abject deference to men into a mimicry of Western norms (which, after all, evolved naturally out of Christianity). In this story, where Rosin has no cultural or religious literacy, she hedges her bets, and appears unsure of whether she thinks evolutionary progress is a good thing. She ends her book talking about "cardboard men" and "plastic women."

The End of Men is horrifying reading. The evidence for a new generation of sexually and erotically charged women (in a gesture to Marx, Rosin talks about "erotic capital"), who are militant about sex, independence, post-secondary education, work, success, and the professions, suggests a new barbarianism. I could hardly get past the first chapter of interviews with women who have "hearts of steel" or with single girls who have mastered the hook-up culture, become adept at promiscuity, and are allergic to monogamy. Yet Rosin also sketches their "eternal vulnerability," preserved in vinegar in a new kind of "bell jar" (Sylvia Plath).

Faithful Catholics, and many other Christians with them, believe St. John Paul II spoke for traditional Christianity when he referred to the feminine genius, the dignity and vocation of women, and a theology of the body. He valorized procreation and the family order, but also spoke of the rights of women, welcomed new opportunities for women outside the home, and was aware that there is no reason why women cannot exercise the same rationality as men. Yet nowhere does he assume that any of this requires the sacrifice of traditional femininity or masculinity, but rather that women and men alike are made in God's image. •