‘The End of Men’: Talk all about it

The wife has written a book called “The End of Men.”

The husband, at his peril, is interviewing her in front of an audience.

Right now, the couple are talking about how men have a better shot these days at getting into private universities through gender-based affirmative action. Women are better suited to the demands and rhythms of higher education, the wife concludes in her book, and have taken disproportionate advantage of it — nudging men out of academia and, therefore, out of professional life.

The husband asks his wife: Don’t boys have virtues that should be nourished in a different way than girls’?

“You’re asking the whole world to change,” the wife says. The world in 2012 “requires a certain verbal acuity or organization. . . . You need to prepare the child you have for the world that exists.”

“Hmm,” the husband says, stumped. “All right.”

The chatty, brainy audience at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue ripples with laughter.

“Is anyone taking score here?” the wife asks, turning to the audience. “Is this like a wrestling match?”

“It’s a pro-wrestling match where you will get the victory,” the husband says, resigned to pitching softballs to his wife, who, after all, has books to sell.

The wife is Hanna Rosin, the former Washington Post reporter and current senior editor of the Atlantic. Her husband is David Plotz, the editor of Slate, which is owned by The Washington Post Co. Together, they are one of Washington’s media-centric, byline-famous couples who make their living off the perceptual scoop, the provocative-if-simplistic headline, the pithy turn of phrase that pinpoints the precise trajectory and velocity of the culture at any given moment.

Rosin’s “The End of Men and the Rise of Women” has all three. Its yellow jacket proclaims it a “once-in-a-generation book,” but this is not true. The overlapping generations of late baby boomers and early Gen Xers have written plenty about the erosion of modern masculinity and the rise of women. Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy published “The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family” in March, and four different books on the subject hit the market within weeks of one another in 2008.

For millennials who’ve grown up in a post-feminist world where gender is not only balancing but evolving rapidly, none of this is news.

No matter. The end of men! Read all about it. Or, rather, you have read all about it, namely in Rosin’s 2010 cover story for the Atlantic titled — wait for it — “The End of Men.” On Monday, the day before the Q&A at the synagogue, the Los Angeles Review of Books published “Is the Atlantic Making Us Stupid?,” a 5,600-word consideration of the magazine’s habit of shrink-wrapping genders and generations into cover stories with buzzy headlines. The most recent example was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which was shared a bazillion times via social media — the sole measure of success in journalism. Never mind that Slaughter’s and Rosin’s concepts chafe against each other (vive la deliberation) or that the Atlantic’s latest issue includes “The Cheapest Generation,” a business column on how millennials just aren’t spending money. Those lazy kids: not spending money they don’t have because older generations set the economy ablaze and danced around its pyre like punch-drunk lunatics.