Standup Guy Manhood After Feminism

THE BITCHFEST Sarah, Kate, and Alison--"downtown babes," they call themselves--share an overpriced two-bedroom apartment in a five-story Greenwich Village walk-up. A few years removed from the comforts and unreality of expensive campus life, they're all laboring at low-paying but much-coveted and challenging jobs. Sarah is a junior editor at a young women's magazine, Alison an assistant account manager at an ad agency, and Kate screens slush-pile manuscripts and composes dust-jacket copy for a major publishing house. On a recent balmy spring evening, they invited me to come by their apartment to gas about men--"a bitchfest," Kate promised. Kate is the daughter of an old professor of mine. Over the years I've watched her mature from quiet bookworm to glamorous high school athlete, and now into a sensible, accomplished young woman. I didn't see her much during her four years at Stanford, but since she graduated she's been over to cadge dinner several times. Like my own children, Kate, an honorary member of our family since her parents divorced and moved out of New York, often tells my wife and me more than we really want to know about her personal life. This is the awkward truth about boomer parents and their kids and the kids of their close friends: they confide in you as they do in their best buddies, perhaps more. Nothing is off-limits. Sometimes your ears burn. For a couple of years now, I've been hearing a troubling litany from Kate: men her age don't have a clue. Are they all gay or what? The only way she can get a date with someone who might be interesting is to ask him out, but then right away she's put him in a position of weakness--the last thing today's reticent guy needs. The only men who do have the courage to ask her out are hypermasculine throwbacks with Beatle boots, ape-drape haircuts, and an equally antediluvian attitude toward women. Kate's complaints echoed those I heard repeatedly at a women's magazine where I recently worked. The fecklessness of all men under thirty was attributed to a lack of "commitment"--just a fancy way, I suspect, of describing male fear and insecurity. Along with recent census figures that show startling increases in the number of women--and men--who remain single well beyond their usual reproductive years, the testimonials of all these women suggest that romance has fallen upon hard times. A lot of men, it seems, just aren't interested in getting the girl, or even pursuing her, which has always been an important challenge and defining accomplishment of manhood. I was hoping the downtown babes might have an explanation for the dearth of standup guys in training. I was also hoping to confirm a particularly troubling bit of information I'd picked up during interviews I'd done with other young women. After deploying their wiliest seductive powers over the course of an evening, some men, I'd heard, would at the crucial moment withhold sex, knowing their refusal delivered a more humiliating blow to their partner's ego than anything else they could do. If this were true, I figured, the ongoing gender war had reached a new low. Kate and her roomies are supremely attractive, bright, engaging, funny, and--dare I say without sounding lecherously middle-aged--sexy young women, not that any men who possess the "resume" they'd be interested in reviewing would necessarily agree. And since the resume men are all in hiding, how would they know? The resume men they have managed to meet, the downtown babes say, are hopelessly passive, squirrelly, in perpetual retreat, like the one my wife and I set Kate up with a couple of months ago. We suggested she arrange to meet the son of another friend of ours, who was on summer break from his job as a private-school teacher at a boarding school. She called him, of courseSegell, Michael is the author of 'Standup Guy Manhood After Feminism', published 2000 under ISBN 9780679783602 and ISBN 0679783601.