Lamest ‘Ideas’ Issue Ever To Hit The Newsstands
When we think innovation we think: powerful ideas. For all the talk about how American ingenuity—and our ability to innovate—will solve the myriad, complex and seemingly impossible problems we face, you see little evidence of that in the new issue of The Atlantic. The “Ideas Issue” with it’s oh-so-clever 14 and ¾ Most Powerful Ideas of the Year, is possibly the lamest “ideas” magazine ever to hit newsstands. What a bunch of disappointing nonsense.
From Ky Rissdal (host of NPR’s Marketplace) whining about how well-intentioned green marketing is doing squat to solve the huge problem of climate change—the “idea” here is It’s Too Easy Being Green (is that actually an idea?)–to the oh-so-yesterday “idea” from Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute that Information Wants To Be Paid For (rather than free, as was Stewart Branch’s mantra at the dawn of the Internet Age), these ideas are non-ideas. They are clever headlines. Just look at Deficits Matter or Boredom Is Extinct. Really? Extinct? I’ve got a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old four days into summer vacation who can make mincemeat out of that claim.
Perhaps most disappointing in this issue is Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men: How Women are Taking Control of Everything.” Rosin is one of my favorites usually but this article is just a collection of study and survey statistics interspersed with quotes from feminists Rosin either knows (I can’t think why else she would mention Katie Rophie) or admires. The whole thing feels, well, lazy. Why is it to get a sense of how women are outpacing men in so many aspects of life—employment, college, overall having-your-shit-togetherness–Rosin visits only Kansas City, deciding somehow that city should be the poster child.
She quotes Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress (who I have interviewed before and admire), which is clearly a left-leaning organization, but we hear nothing from a think tank that might oppose her premise. (And I say this as a card-carrying liberal feminist.) The studies feel old (2007, 2008) the books she quotes are dated (1991, 2007, and the movie Office Space from 1999), even the trends she cites have already been well-covered (“mommy track” morphing into “flex time.”)
By the end you’re completely unconvinced any of the progress we’ve made as women—hitting the 50% mark in the labor force last year, slowly increasing our numbers in the C-suites of America, and our heightened presence in law schools and MBA programs—has substantively changed much, except for the fact that now middle-class women don’t seem to have much need for husbands.
Rosin hammers home her points, at the end of the piece, with the recap of a commercial from the Superbowl for a Dodge Charger, where the male characters lament having to put the toilet seat down and carry their wives/girlfriends’ lip balm. Is this really supposed to be damning evidence that the tide is turning? Because my ex-husband kept the seat up, and so does my son. And no one but me carries my lip balm. I think women may be on the way up, but—unfortunately–we’ve got a way to go before we take over the world.
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Love that received wisdom. This is why I rarely read the elite magazines; filled with Big Names opining when no one would dare say anything sufficiently radical as to budge their seat at that table.
…middle-class women don’t seem to have much need for husbands… The antidote for this dilemma has been obvious for the last few decades: Make yourself more useful. Doing repairs is not enough. Men need to help with what were traditional woman’s roles like cooking cleaning, laundry, and the mundane child care tasks. When women whisper to my wife that she is “lucky” to be married to a great cook who also cleans the kitchen after meals, I roll my eyes. Men who come home from work “needing fed” took juvenile to me.
Also: What is it about men that pisses the left off so much?
I certainly agree with your assessment of the Atlantic issue. For additional evidence of Rosin missing the mark with her article, the online version of the article contains a video of the Rosin-Platz family discussing the merits of boys v. girls. Can you say “marital strife passed off as intellectual discussion”? I can’t think of one good reason to include it, but maybe that’s because I’m a boy.
Forgot the link.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
Thanks Caitlin. Totally true that one in this issue budged anything, that’s for sure.
I read this article after a friend of mine posted the link in response to a Maureen Dowd column I posted on Facebook (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/opinion/09dowd.html) on the targeting of young women and girls on college and high school campuses by hyper-aggressive, and frankly misogynistic, young men. He saw Dowd’s piece as man-bashing and I saw it as simply another indication of clueless parents who haven’t taught their boys to respect women.
To me, Rosin’s premise was completely off: it’s not that men aren’t needed by women anymore, it’s that the traditional, manufacturing based jobs held mostly by men are going away and we need to figure out how to retrain these guys to be more mindful of education and be productive in an information-based society. It’s not that they can’t do these things; it’s that in a lower middle class mindset, guys “work with their hands”. Baloney. Times are changing and they need to change with it. That’s like inner-city African-American and Latino kids saying education is for white people. Upper middle class and affluent men have always been on the white collar path because the money is where your brains are, not your brawn.
So why set up a false dichotomy and pitting men against women? Are educated women going to try to find partners who match their education level and their expectations for splitting the household chores? Absolutely. So unless guys want to be alone and jobless for the rest of their lives, they need to get with the program.