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February
Where have the good men gone?
No sooner did I put down Hanna Rosin’s
insulting
piece in Slate 
about stay-at-home dads (read our response to her
story here), than a friend of mine told me I’d
better go get a copy of this morning’s Wall
Street Journal—and I’d better sit down
before reading it. I was also advised to keep
firearms, blunt objects, and breakables out of
arm’s length as I dug in.
Click above
The cover story
“Where
Have the Good Men
Gone?”
is adapted from the forthcoming book Manning Up:
How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys. In
it, author Kay S. Hymowitz laments the fact that
men today refuse to grow up—and that’s
making it difficult for women to find a decent
mate.
“Women in their 20s are more likely than
men to be in grad school and making strides in the
workplace,” she writes. “In a number of
cities, they are even outearning their brothers and
boyfriends. Still, for these women, one key
question won’t go away: Where have the good
men gone? Their male peers often come across as
aging frat boys, maladroit geeks, or grubby
slackers.”
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts.
What are we to do? According to Hymowitz and the
WSJ, a key issue of gender in the 21st century is
men’s loserdom—and the desperate
situation in which they put single women.
Hymowitz seems to have thrown in the towel on
guys altogether. Here, the piece ends with this
uplifting bit of analysis:
“Relatively affluent, free of family
responsibilities, and entertained by an array of
media devoted to his every pleasure, the single
young man can live in pig heaven—and often
does. Women put up with him for a while, but then
in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a
husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get
the DNA without the troublesome man. But these
rational choices on the part of women only serve to
legitimize men’s attachment to the sand box.
Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway.
There’s nothing they have to do.
They might as well just have another
beer.”
For the men who are part of the Good Men
Project—guys fighting wars in foreign lands,
working diligently to be good dads, recovering from
economic hardship, striving to be loving spouses,
searching their souls trying to figure out what it
means to be a good man—the piece is one more
example of mainstream media portraying us in an
egregiously negative, quasi-sexist light.
Women are often described in the same universal,
equally pernicious stereotypes. But combating the
media’s outmoded, misogynistic logic
doesn’t mean putting up with dreck like this.
Why the free pass on a female writer’s
conclusion that the opposite sex is a bunch of
“aging frat boys, maladroit geeks, or grubby
slackers” who “might as well just have
another beer”?
None of this is to say that men can’t
always be working harder to be better husbands,
fathers, workers, and men. But women need to be
there for us, just as we need to be there for them.
So let’s work on this together—and leave
out the stereotyping.
About Tom Matlack
Tom Matlack is just foolish enough to believe he
is a decent man. He has a 16-year-old daughter and
14- and 5-year-old sons. His wife, Elena, is the
love of his life.
Source: goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-spreading-negative-stereotypes-about-men
Wall Street Journal,
February 18, 2011
©2011, Tom
Matlack
* * *
While all complain of our ignorance and
error,
everyone exempts himself. - John Glanville
Tom Matlack,
"I am a sucker for real-life heroes, particularly
the ones that get overlooked. My profile work grew
from my first published piece, THE RACE, which
describes my own life altering experience in an
athletic event barely worthy of the local paper.
Coaches and athletes in the sport of rowing were my
initial focus before expanding to mainstream sports
like professional basketball. Music, film, and
television have proven fertile ground for heroic
journeys of a different, but related, kind.
Finally, I have continued to write bits and pieces
of my own story in an attempt to inspire and
enlighten."
Thomas Matlack was Chief
Financial Officer of The Providence Journal until
1997. He was the lead investor in Art Technology
Group, which reached $5 billion in market
capitalization in 2001. He founded and ran his own
venture firm, started companies like American
Profile (sold to Disney for $260 million) and
Telephia (sold to Neilson for $560 million), before
turning to writing. His work has appeared in
Rowing News, Boston Common, Boston
Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine and
Newspaper, Wesleyan, Yale,
Tango, and Pop Matters.
In 2008, Matlack founded
www.TheGoodManProject.org,
with his venture capital partner James Houghton. He
has appeared on national and local television and
radio as well as print across the country. The fall
of 2009, Matlack led a non-conventional book tour
for The
Good Men Project that
started inside Sing Sing and ended in Hollywood
with a screening of THE GOOD MEN PROJECT
documentary film followed by a panel discussion
including Matt Weiner and Shepard
Fairey.
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