by Hanna Rosin
The Bem test is the standard psychological tool used to rate people on how strongly they conform to a variety of measures considered stereotypically male or female: “self-reliant,” “yielding,” “helpful,” “ambitious,” “tender,” “dominant.” Since the test started being administered in the mid-1970s, women have been encroaching into what the test rates as male territory, stereotypically defining themselves as “assertive,” “independent,” “willing to take a stand.” A typical Bem woman these days is “compassionate” and “self-sufficient,” “individualistic,” and “adaptable.” Men, however, have not met them halfway, and are hardly more likely to define themselves as “tender” or “gentle” than they were in 1974. In fact, by some measures men have been retreating into an ever-narrower space, backing away from what were traditionally feminine traits as women take over more masculine ones.
For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have attributed this rigidity to our being ruled by adaptive imperatives from a distant past: Men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, a trait that shows up in contemporary life as a drive to either murder or win on Wall Street. Women are more nurturing and compliant, suiting them perfectly to raise children and create harmony among neighbors. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order.
But for women, it seems as if those fixed roles are more fungible than we ever imagined. A more female-dominated society does not necessarily translate into a soft feminine utopia. Women are becoming more aggressive and even violent in ways we once thought were exclusively reserved for men. This drive shows up in a new breed of female murderers, and also in a rising class of young female “killers” on Wall Street. Whether the shift can be attributed to women now being socialized differently, or whether it’s simply an artifact of our having misunderstood how women are “hardwired” in the first place, is at this point unanswerable, and makes no difference. Difficult as it is to conceive, the very rigid story we believed about ourselves is obviously no longer true. There is no “natural” order, only the way things are.
LATELY WE ARE STARTING to see how quickly an order we once considered “natural” can be overturned. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions. Men in ancient Greece tied off their left testicle in an effort to produce male heirs; women have killed themselves (or been killed) for failing to bear sons. In her iconic 1949 book The Second Sex, the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir suggested that women so detested their own “feminine condition” that they regarded their newborn daughters with irritation and disgust. Now the centuries-old preference for sons is eroding—or even reversing. “Women of our generation want daughters precisely because we like who we are,” breezes one woman in Cookie magazine.
In the 1970s, the biologist Ronald Ericsson came up with a way to separate sperm carrying the male-producing Y chromosome from those carrying the X. He sent the two kinds of sperm swimming down a glass tube through ever-thicker albumin barriers. The sperm with the X chromosome had a larger head and a longer tail, and so, he figured, they would get bogged down in the viscous liquid. The sperm with the Y chromosome were leaner and faster and could swim down to the bottom of the tube more efficiently. The process, Ericsson said, was like “cutting out cattle at the gate.” The cattle left flailing behind the gate were of course the X’s, which seemed to please him.
Ericsson had grown up on a ranch in South Dakota, where he’d developed his cowboy swagger and mode of talking. Instead of a lab coat, he wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, and doled out his version of cowboy poetry. The right prescription for life, he would say, was “breakfast at five thirty, on the saddle by six, no room for Mr. Limp Wrist.” In 1979, he loaned out his ranch as the backdrop for the iconic Marlboro Country cigarette ads because he believed in the campaign’s central image—“a guy riding on his horse along the river, no bureaucrats, no lawyers,” he recalled when I spoke to him. “He’s the boss.” He would sometimes demonstrate the sperm-selection process using cartilage from a bull’s penis as a pointer. In the late 1970s, he leased the method to clinics around the United States, calling it the first scientifically proven method for choosing the sex of a child.
Feminists of the era did not take kindly to the lab cowboy and his sperminator. “You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” said Roberta Steinbacher, a nun turned social psychologist, in a 1984 People profile of Ericsson. Given the “universal preference for sons,” she foresaw a dystopia of mass-produced boys that would lock women in to second-class status while men continued to dominate positions of control and influence. “I think women have to ask themselves, ‘Where does this stop?’” she said. “A lot of us wouldn’t be here right now if these practices had been in effect years ago.”
Ericsson laughed when I read him these quotes from his old antagonist. Seldom has it been so easy to prove a dire prediction wrong. In the 1990s, when Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys. The gap has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, he has said, the ratio of preference is now as high as two to one. Polling data on Americans’ sex preference in offspring is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls. But the picture from the doctor’s office unambiguously does. A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently awaiting clinical approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent. The women who call Ericsson’s clinic these days come right out and say, “I want a girl”; they no longer beat around the bush. “These mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn’t have, brighter than their sons, even,” says Ericsson, “so why wouldn’t you choose a girl?” He sighs and marks the passing of an era. “Did male dominance exist? Of course it existed. But it seems to be gone now. And the era of the firstborn son is totally gone.”
Ericsson’s extended family is as good an illustration of the rapidly shifting landscape as any other. His twenty-seven-year-old granddaughter—“tall, slender, brighter than hell, with a take-no- prisoners personality”—is a biochemist and works on genetic sequencing. His niece studied civil engineering at the University of Southern California. His grandsons, he says, are bright and handsome, but in school “their eyes glaze over. I have to tell ’em: ‘Just don’t screw up and crash your pickup truck and get some girl pregnant and ruin your life.’” Recently Ericsson joked with the old boys at his elementary school reunion that he was going to have a sex-change operation. “Women live longer than men. They do better in this economy. More of ’em graduate from college. They go into space and do everything men do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way—these females are going to leave us males in the dust.”
The shift is apparent not only in the United States, but in many of the world’s most advanced economies. For several centuries South Korea constructed one of the most rigid patriarchies on the planet. Many wives who failed to produce male heirs were abused and treated as domestic servants; some families prayed to spirits to kill off girl children. Now that preference for firstborn sons—or any sons—has vanished. Over the last few years the government has conducted a national survey of future parents, asking, “If you found out you were pregnant, what sex would you want your child to be?” In 2010, 29.1 percent of women said they preferred a boy as their firstborn child, and 36.3 percent said a girl (the rest answered “no preference”). For men, the gap was even higher, with only 23 percent choosing a boy and 42.6 percent a girl. It took an imaginary third child, after two hypothetical daughters, for people to say they’d prefer a boy, and then by only a tiny margin.
From a feminist standpoint, the recent social, political, and economic gains of wome
n are always cast as a slow, arduous form of catch-up in the continuing struggle for gender equality. But a much more radical shift seems to have come about. Women are not just catching up anymore; they are becoming the standard by which success is measured. “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” is a phrase that resonates with many parents of school-age sons and daughters, even if they don’t always say it out loud. As parents imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl than a boy that they see in their mind’s eye.
Yes, the United States and many other countries still have a gender wage gap. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of power are still dominated by men. But given the sheer velocity of the economic and other forces at work, these circumstances are much more likely the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration. Dozens of undergraduate women I interviewed for this book assumed that they very well might be the ones working while their husbands stayed at home, either minding the children or simply looking for work. Guys, one college senior remarked to me, “are the new ball and chain.” It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.
In the year since I wrote the story in The Atlantic magazine that inspired this book, I have been called a radical feminist for trumpeting women over men and an antifeminist for suggesting that the struggles are over for women. I am neither of those things, but my findings do herald both straightforward progress for women on some fronts and tremendous headaches on others. Women like Bethenny—my friend from the town of vanishing men—have a kind of ambiguous independence right now. They are much less likely to be in abusive relationships, much more likely to make all the decisions about their lives, but they are also much more likely to be raising children alone. It’s a heavy load. One reporting experience that lingers with me is waking up a woman in the elevator at a community college in Kansas City. Between floors one and four she had fallen asleep, so hard had she been working to get her degree, hold down a night job, and raise three kids.
Among the college-educated class, ambivalence comes in the form of excess choice. Educated women take their time finding the perfect partner, seeking out creative, rewarding jobs, and then come home and parent their children with homeschooling intensity. Their lives are rich with possibilities their mothers never dreamed of. And yet in most surveys women these days are not more likely to rate themselves happier than women did in the 1970s. Choice creates its own set of anxieties—new spheres to compete in and judge yourself wanting, a constant fear that you might be missing out.
Men today, especially young men, are in a transition moment. They no longer want to live as their fathers did, marrying women they can’t talk to, working long hours day after day, coming home to pat their kids on the head absentmindedly. They understand that the paternal white boss, like the one on The Office, has now become a punch line. But they can’t turn away from all that because they fear how power and influence could be funneled away from them: by wives who earn more money than they do, jobs with less prestige, tedious Tuesday afternoons at the playground. There are plenty of opportunities for men. Theoretically, they can be anything these days: secretary, seamstress, PTA president. But moving into new roles, and a new phase, requires certain traits: flexibility, hustle, and an expansive sense of identity.
I started this book thinking that we were heading into a woman’s world, and that this world would reflect some set of “womanly values” as defined by the Bem test—“tender,” “yielding,” “compassionate.” But by the end of my research I became less convinced that what has happened to women and men reveals or is the result of any such fixed values or traits. Assuming a world run by women is more “tender” seems to me, again, just a story we tell ourselves to make the current massive upheavals in gender roles seem tamer and more predictable, when they are anything but: more like revolutionary, potentially exhilarating, and sometimes frightening, but altogether inevitable. So the least we can do is to see them clearly.
HEARTS OF STEEL
SINGLE GIRLS MASTER THE HOOK-UP
On a mild fall afternoon in 2011, I sat in a courtyard with some students at Yale to ask about their romantic lives. I had read many accounts of how hook-up culture in college unravels women, and Yale seemed like a good place to explore. A few months earlier, a group of mostly feminist-minded students had filed a Title IX complaint against the university for tolerating a “hostile sexual environment on campus.” The students specifically cited an incident in 2010 when members of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon stood outside freshman dorms chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” The week before I arrived, a letter ran in the paper complaining that the heart of the problem was “Yale’s sexual culture” itself, that the “hook-up culture is fertile ground for acts of sexual selfishness, insensitivity, cruelty, and malice.”
Tali, a junior and a sorority girl with a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure, told me that freshman year she, like many of her peers, was high on her first taste of the hook-up culture and didn’t want a boyfriend. “It was empowering, to have that kind of control,” she recalls. “Guys were texting and calling me all the time, and I was turning them down. I really enjoyed it!” But sometime during sophomore year, she got tired of relationships just fading away, “no end, no beginning.” Guys would text her at eleven P.M., “wanna hang out?” but never during the day. Like many of the college women I talked to, Tali and her friends seemed much more sexually experienced and knowing than my friends at college. They were as blasé about blow jobs and anal sex as the one girl I remember from my freshman dorm whom we all judged as destined for tragic early marriage or a string of abortions. But they were also more innocent. When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she said, “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen yogurt place.”
Given the soda-fountain nostalgia of such an answer, a follow-up occurred to me: Did they want the hook-up culture to change? Might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror. Reform it, maybe, teach women to “advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never. Even one of the women who had initiated the Title IX complaint, Alexandra Brodsky, felt this way. “I would never come down on the hook-up culture,” she said. “Plenty of women enjoy having casual sex.” Or as Claire Gordon, a Yale graduate and lawsuit supporter, put it when I asked if she’d like to turn back the clock on the hook-up culture, “Compared to an egalitarian sexual wonderland, the situation is not good. But compared to when girls are punished for any sexual experience before marriage, it’s much better.” Gordon was already out of college and working so could see her way to the future: “Women just need a little time, to figure out what they want and how to ask for it.”
The young women seemed instinctively to understand a remarkable fact about the age they were living (and sometimes suffering) in: Despite the particular heartaches of the college dating scene, despite the hand-wringing about our oversexualized culture and our saturation in porn, despite the warnings conveyed by reality shows such as Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant, the underlying dynamics between men and women these days point to a different story. Young women are more in control of their sexual destinies now than probably ever before. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s transformed women’s behavior, but in some ways the changes of the last thirty or so years have been just as profound.
The era has little in common with the free love, naked in Central Park kind of sexual abandon. Instead, what makes it stand out is the new power women have to ward off men if they want to. By certain measures young people’s behavior can even look like a return to a more innocent age. Teenagers today are far less likely than their parents were to have sex or get pregnant. In 1988, half of boys aged fifteen to seventeen reported having sex; by 2010 that number fell to just under
a third. For teenage girls, the numbers dropped from 37.2 to 27 percent, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Teen pregnancy rates dropped 44 percent after peaking in 1991, and reached a record low in 2010.
One of the great crime stories of the last twenty years is the dramatic decline of sexual assault. Rates are so low in parts of the country—for white women especially—that criminologists can’t plot the numbers on a chart. “Women in much of America might as well be living in Sweden, they’re so safe,” says criminologist Mike Males, a researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. The most dramatic declines occurred in acquaintance rape. Those changes particularly are directly related to women’s recent economic success. When women were financially dependent on men, it was much harder for them to leave an abusive relationship or situation. But now women who in earlier eras might have stayed in such relationships can leave or, more often, kick men out of the house, argues Males. “Girls,” says Males, “have achieved a great deal more power. And that makes them a lot harder to victimize.”
At a time when people stay single longer, independent, college-educated women such as Tali run through a long sexual arc. The early years can be a struggle—more so than they were when chivalry prevailed. With marriage on the far-distant horizon, both men and women are less likely to commit and therefore less likely to behave (or even pretend) like they might want to. At some point in my interviews with college students, I always asked the women, “If a man sleeps with you and then doesn’t acknowledge you the next day in class, is he a jerk?” (That was the understanding when I was in college.) But most of the women I spoke with just laughed, or gave me a puzzled look, as in, Don’t lots of guys do that?
Books about the hook-up culture tend to emphasize the frustration that results from such a dynamic: “A lot of them just want to hook up with you and then never talk to you again . . . and they don’t care!” one woman complains to Kathleen Bogle in Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus. “That might not stop you from [hooking up] because you think ‘This time it might be different.’” From her interviews with seventy-six college students, Bogle also deduces that the double standard is alive and well. Men tally fuck points on the bulletin board of their frat houses. Women who sleep with too many men are called “houserats” or “lacrosstitutes” (a term derived from women who sleep with several guys on the lacrosse team) or are deemed “HFH,” meaning “hot for a hook-up” but definitely not for anything more. Hook-up culture, writes Bogle, is a “battle of the sexes” in which women want relationships and men want “no strings attached.”