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“ This is a man’s world,” sang James Brown in 1964, with a voice both defiantly assertive and painfully anguished. He starts off proudly, with a litany of men’s accomplishments: men made the cars, the trains, the electric lights, and the boats that carried the loads and took us out of the dark. Men even made the toys that children play with. But lest he encourage a bit of smug self-satisfaction, Brown changes course at the end of the song. “But it would be nothing . . . without a woman or a girl.” Without women, Brown ends, men are “lost in the wilderness . . . lost in the bitterness . . . lost, lost,” his voice trailing off in both confusion and despair. This essay is about that wilderness forty-five years later—a wilderness in which some men today are lost, others bitter, and still others searching for new forms of masculinity amid what they believe is the excessive feminization of American society and culture—not because of the absence of women in their lives that Brown noticed but rather, ironically, because of their increased presence . At work and at home, in private and in public, women’s increasing equality has been an issue to which men have had to respond. How have men responded? While some have noisily and bitterly protested, and some continue to fight a rear-guard action to undo women’s gains, most American men have simply continued to go about their lives, falling somewhere between eager embrace of women’s equality and resigned acceptance. Across the globe, of course, it still is pretty much a man’s world. Men still control the overwhelming majority of the world’s material, social, and cultural resources. Still, the massive changes in both economic and social life and the 15 1 Has “A Man’s World” Become “A Woman’s Nation”? Men’s Responses to Women’s Increased Equality in the Twenty-first Century This chapter is a revised version of an essay originally published in The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, edited by Heather Boushey and Ann O’Leary. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2009. REFRAMINGS 16 status of women around the world have eroded the easy assumption that it was and would always be a man’s world. So if, as this essay’s title suggests, the United States is becoming “a woman’s nation,” then as women’s equality proceeds, as more and more married couples are both working full-time, what has happened to men? How are men responding to women’s increased equality? In this essay, I’ll argue that even if the United States is not quite yet “a woman’s nation,” it is just as surely no longer only a man’s world. Declaring America to be “a woman’s nation,” while deliberately provocative , does underscore a significant trend of the gradual, undeniable, and irreversible increase in gender equality in every arena of American life—from the public sector (economic life, politics, the military) to private life (work-family balance, marital contracts, sexuality). Women have successfully entered every arena of public life, and today many women are as comfortable in the corporate board room, the athletic playing field, the legal and medical professions, and the theater of military operations as previous generations of women might have been in the kitchen. And they’ve done it amazingly fast. It is within the last half-century that the workplace has been so dramatically transformed that the working world depicted in the hit TV show Mad Men looks so anachronistic as to be nearly unrecognizable. For both women and men, these dramatic changes have come at such a dizzying pace that many Americans are searching for the firmer footing of what they imagine was a simpler time, a bygone era in which everyone knew their place. The transformation of American public life announced by these changes in women’s lives has, of course, had a profound impact on the lives of American men—whether or not they recognize it. Indeed, these changes have reverberated to the core of American manhood. Some of the responses received disproportionate media coverage than their number might have warranted. But a guy changing a diaper or drying a dish is far less mediagenic than a bunch of Wall Street bankers drumming as they bond around a bonfire, or some enraged divorced dad dressed up as Batman and scaling some state capitol building to promote “fathers’ rights.” I...

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