excerpts from articles in this issue

Don’t Believe the Male Hype

By Marcus Cooper

In recent years there has been much written about the changing attitudes of women, as it pertains to dating. Specifically, that the recent changes in economic power and professional autonomy have resulted in women making different choices when it comes to dating and coupling. It is often reported as the “perplexing” dating arena that contemporary heterosexual males find themselves in as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close.

The gist, for those of you not intimately familiar with this topic, is that, as women have moved into the workforce in larger numbers, they have seen a corresponding increase in their incomes and professional opportunities; hence, they no longer desire men to “take care of them”.

(Patriarchal implications of power require a different skill-set than killing things and paying bills.)

There is even an inordinate amount of statistical data that indicates that this directly affects the type of man that women are attracted to and are encouraged to sleep with. Suddenly, having a Corvette and an expense account does not lure as many possible dance partners as it has in most of the post-war period. This is, of course, reported in the Male side of the aisle as a “loss of Power” and many men lament the passing of earlier times when their fathers and grandfathers “had it made”.

As a heterosexual, meat-eating, sports-car-driving, beer-drinking male, I take offense not only to the implications of many of the articles originating in the Feminist world, but also the rabid, knee-jerk reaction of Male magazines and Male conventional wisdom. There is a major aspect of this discourse that has, until now, been largely suppressed.

The Generation X male is quite different from his Greatest Generation and Baby Boomer counterparts. Most obviously, because Generation X has the distinction of being the first in U.S. history where more than 50% of the occupants were reared in a single-parent household – which a woman was the head of, more than 60% of the time