Laural Merlington

The End of Men Laural Merlington

"The End of Men," Hanna Rosin's 2010 cover story for the Atlantic, was one of those conversation-starting articles that come along once or twice a year, still surfacing in everything from the season's sit-com lineup to online chatter more than a year after it appeared. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women is one of those thunderbolts of a book on gender relations that come along once or twice a decade; with it, Rosin joins Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, and others who have completely reset the conversation we have about men and women. By every measure – success in school, earning, health, and home – women are leaving men in the dust. The effects of this new reality – on men especially, but therefore also on marriage, children, and every other aspect of personal and public life - are profound, for good and for ill. Drilling deep into the research, ranging across the country – sometimes across the globe – to capture women and men from all walks of class and culture doing and saying surprising and revelatory things, and bringing to bear her own smarts and fearlessness as an observer and interpreter of sexual politics, Rosin shakes us free of entrenched mythology to reveal the radically different way men and women today work, learn, earn, spend, marry, have sex, even kill. Her landmark book shows how and why the social order we thought was immutable has turned upside down, and how, regardless of gender, we can both adapt to it in the present and channel it for a better future.