Declaring the Death of Macho Worldwide

Macho is finished. So says Foreign Policy magazine: “The death throes of macho are easy to find if you know where to look.”

Power is shifting to women from men: “The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. … It will be gender.” In some places, the change will be put to good use. In others, it may cause even violent social upheaval, writes Reihan Salam, a fellow (sic) at the New America Foundation, in Foreign Policy.

This shift has been developing for time, but Salam writes that the final blow has come: “The great shift of power from males to females is likely to be dramatically accelerated by the economic crisis, as more people realize that the aggressive, risk-seeking behavior that has enabled men to entrench their power—the cult of macho—has now proven destructive and unsustainable in a globalized world.”

Exhibit 1: The “he-cession” that is eliminating men’s jobs at a vastly disproportionate rate in the West and especially the US, as traditionally macho jobs like construction evaporate but health care and public sector jobs remain.

Exhibit 2: Men are falling behind women in education even as the low-knowledge jobs that survive are increasingly subject to outsourcing amid globalization. There will soon be 50% more female college graduates than male ones.

Not just employment is changing: so is leadership, amid economic crisis, women are increasingly taking charge of governments (Iceland, Lithuania).

So what to do with all these men whose time has come and gone? Salam says men must either adapt, “embracing women as equal partners and assimilating to the new cultural sensibilities, institutions, and egalitarian arrangements that entails”, or resist, “sacrificing their own prospects in an effort to disrupt and delay a powerful historical trend”.

Adaption suggests a new form of manhood, with more equalized marriages both economically and in terms of family life (such marriages, by the way, seem to last longer).

In terms of global policy implications, Salam sees men’s decision splitting geopolitcally: “While North American and Western European men broadly—if not always happily—adapt to the new egalitarian order, their counterparts in the emerging giants of East and South Asia, not to mention in Russia, all places where women often still face brutal domestic oppression, may be headed for even more exaggerated gender inequality. In those societies, state power will be used not to advance the interests of women, but to keep macho on life support.”

Exhibit 1: Russia, where the Soviet “ideal of women’s equality” (his words) was jettisoned and the government and society have sought to restore macho economics … only now more women are working but for about half of what men make.

Exhibit 2: China, whose effort to preserve its economy is based on construction as the more female-populated export industry in order to avoid unrest brought on by un- and underemployed men, especially migrant workers.