Are men obsolete?
One bad mistake the administration made in trying to return Iraq to civilization, according to Kenneth Pollack, was to disband the Iraqi Army. Why? Because, says Pollack, a widely respected Middle East expert, the last thing you want to do is let loose in the land a bunch of armed men trained only in mayhem. Iraq, of course, has special problems, but there is a larger lesson here. Not just in places on the margins of the medieval, but even in America, men are a perennial and perhaps deepening problem. To be sure, men--like women--aren't all alike. They vary greatly in the degree of their aggressiveness, need to dominate, and so on. Still as the social scientists say, certain "central tendencies" characterize the sexes, and in recent weeks, both Business Week and CBS's 60 Minutes have featured stories on the mounting maladies of maleness. "From kindergarten to grad school," Business Week reports, girls now outperform boys in grades, admissions, student government, and extracurricular activities. "Women are rapidly closing the M.D. and Ph.D. gap and make up almost half of law students," the magazine says. Meanwhile, boys dominate in such dubious categories as remedial education, stimulant-drug prescriptions, and suicide.
School isn't life, of course, and boys may well find their footing as they progress through the labor markets, especially at the higher reaches where daring, assertiveness--and connections--can pay off big. After all, at least for a few centuries, men have found productive niches in industrialized society, building roads, bridges, and communication networks, and founding (and periodically bilking) massive conglomerates, while contributing to the sciences, arts, and humanities. But even during these periods of industrial growth, the great majority of the male species contributed far more muscle than mind to the commonweal.
Exporting men's work. And now, in our globalized economy, many of those jobs in factories, mines, and repair and maintenance shops are fast disappearing, fleeing to foreign shores. "Manufacturing continues to hemorrhage jobs," said National Association of Manufacturers President Jerry Jasinowski recently, as he noted the 34th consecutive month of job losses in the sector, losses that extend well beyond the assembly line. A new NAM study by economist Joel Popkin points out that manufacturers now account for nearly two thirds of all private research and development and averaged twice the productivity gains of their sectors in the past two decades. But 83 percent of U.S. jobs are now categorized as "service providing." While many of these require the spatial and mathematical skills at which males still excel, the great bulk rely on the sort of diligent, low-ego, cooperative effort at which females traditionally shine.
All of which prompts the question: What shall we do with all the men? Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, was surprised when his son, a software developer, said he was considering buying a snow-removal company out west. "They can't move the snow to India," he explained. But at best that's a seasonal occupation. Sports and entertainment are other possibilities, but to make a living at them requires rare skill. Leisure is an option for those of independent means--or with productive helpmates. But women tend to excel even in non-market domains, at least at such harmless pursuits as flower arranging, shopping, and, of course, child rearing.
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