If this represents a nightmare scenario for how the death of macho could play out, another kind of threatening situation is unfolding in China. The country’s $596 billion economic stimulus package bears a far stronger resemblance to a New Deal-style public-works program than anything the U.S. Democratic Party has devised. Whereas healthcare and education have attracted the bulk of U.S. stimulus dollars, more than 90 percent of the Chinese stimulus is going to construction: of low-income homes, highways, railroads, dams, sewage-treatment plants, electricity grids, airports, and much else.
This frenzy of spending is designed to contain the catastrophic damage caused by the loss of manufacturing jobs in China’s export sector. The Chinese Communist Party has long seen the country’s 230 million migrant workers, roughly two thirds of whom are men, as a potential source of political unrest. Tens of millions have lost manufacturing jobs already, and so far they’ve proved unwilling or unable to return to their native provinces.
Just as the housing bubble in the United States was a pro-male policy, China’s economic trajectory over the past two decades is deeply tied to its effort to manage the threat posed by the country’s massive male migrant population. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Yasheng Huang has argued that while the first decade after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms saw tremendous economic growth and entrepreneurship in the Chinese hinterlands, the next two decades have seen a marked decline in the economic prospects of rural China coupled with a concerted effort to promote the rapid development of China’s coastal cities. State-owned enterprises and multinational corporations enjoyed generous subsidies, tax abatements, and other insider deals, and in return, they employed millions of migrants. The trade-off exacerbated China’s internal migration, as millions of men fled rural poverty in search of short-term urban employment, but after the Tiananmen Square uprising, Chinese elites welcomed it as a way to stave off urban unrest.
Today, however, it’s hard to see how Chinese leaders can safely unravel this bargain. Matters are made worse by China’s skewed population—there are 119 male births for every 100 female—and the country has already seen violent protests from its increasingly alienated young men. Of course, it’s possible that China will constructively channel this surplus of macho energy in the direction of entrepreneurship, making the country a global source of radical innovation, with all the military implications that entails. More likely, if the nature of China’s stimulus is any indication, Beijing will continue trying to prop up its urban industrial economy—for if this outlet for macho crumbles, there is good reason to believe that the Communist Party will crumble with it.
ILLUSTRATION BY AARON GOODMAN FOR FP
BARBARA LUTTERBECK/GETTY IMAGES
Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America Foundation.
You know, the victorious chest thumping of this article would be a lot more credible if we didn't have things like ALIMONY still on the books. Are women delicate helpless flowers needing private welfare from men (i.e. alimony), or are they full citizens? When these laws are fixed, perhaps we can then take claims of this brave new world more seriously.
"The first is adaptation: men embracing women as equal partners"
It is hard for men to embrace women as equals because men's relationship with women is goverened by sex. And in sex, women are subserviant to men.
Me thinks me smelLs burning Testosterone !
Like it or not....
Squawk as you must .....
The Feminine influence grows ever robust.
Brilliant article ! Smarts a bit !
The decisions that led to this recession were not the result of leaders in the financial sector having a Y chromosome. To suggest that is not only sexist, but unthoughtful. It was not risk taking but people blindly accepting a new financial order that led to this recession. Imagine if the SEC and other government bureaucracies were not less ballsy but more ballsy- playing their proper regulatory role? Wouldn't we be in better shape? (This is not meant to be a sexist comment. I believe that women as well as men can be ballsy.)
This article claims we're in a "he-cession" and then throws in the fact that more women than men are in fact unemployed. What should we make of that? The men who are unemployed- construction workers and the like- are looked at as possible sources of violence. Meanwhile the women are cast as victims of the system.
Finally, its unclear why the author does not see the stimulus's lack of job creation within the construction sector as a fault- especially when our country has real infrastructure needs. We should be spending the money on people that are actually doing stuff- not government bureaucracies and health care aimed at keeping the sick alive a few extra months.
The Chinese are doing the right thing with there stimulus money- actually investing in the country- and if we don't do the same we will come out of this recession much weaker.
Think that macho can be defeated? Think again.
Would love to believe this article. And for the most part, I do. Women are climbing the ranks, and the macho male philosophy is proving destructive. We are coming to the conclusion that not only can women do the jobs that men do, like finance, but they can also add something critical to it. Perhaps male risk and aggression needs to be counterbalanced by female nurturing and preservation. We can probably agree on these points.
But as far as a lasting, global, revolutionary shift? Fat chance. Macho men dominate for a reason. The bottom line is that in our Darwinian state, the strongest and the most apt to kill, dominate, and subdue their enemies will win. We cannot escape this fact. We might enjoy an egalitarian period for a time, but eventually, a backlash will occur. And yes, it will be violent. Yes, there will be rape and battery and abuse. And yes, the macho will win. There is no way around it.
Unfortunately for the US there do not seem to be any credible female alternatives in politics. Pelosi, Boxer, Feinstein, Waters, Hillary, on the left; Palin on the right – just XX versions of the XY clowns.
Sad.
NOT SO FAST!!! All you communists and feminists who gloat over the “he-session” and the plight of thousands (or millions) of white-collar and blue collar men losing jobs and being hectored by now bread-earner wives, and dream about the coming so-called women-ruled world! You celebration is a bit premature.
Of all the articles that made fun of former-bank-exec alpha males and exhorted out-of-work men to do more housework (what does it have to do with recession?) and declared without much supporting evidence that more women in power is the only way out of this recession, that continued to adorn the liberal press in recent months, this lengthy article on the Foreign Policy magazine may be the most virulent, vitriolic, male-hating article that you can find.
One thing I found it that, although this is common to all the poke-fun-at-alpha-male articles, how come if men are losing jobs, or on the receiving end of misery, there is no outcry to help these men, and target the help and assistance specifically to them, but instead what they all do is to make fun, and call for the end of alpha-male culture? Imagine, if 80% of all the job losses are on women, do we make fun of their excessively emphatic nature of these women? NO. They are either still poor, vulnerable victims of this recession (oh, I though this was ‘he-session”?) or the demographic group destined to take control of the world as Reihan Salam seems already so firmly convinced of.
In the face of all the facts, some extreme feminists and the United Nations (itself taken over by extreme feminists) even assert that “The economic and financial crisis puts a disproportionate burden on women…”
….Unbelievable…with this kind of logic and one-sidedness, maybe you can say that white Aryan German suffered disproportionately under Nazi rule for whatever reason you can make up….(for example, being made to look a corroborator of Nazi or did not take action against Nazi, etc…)
"Brad Barber and Terrance Odean memorably demonstrated in 2001, of all the factors that might correlate with overconfident investment in financial markets—age, marital status, and the like—the most obvious culprit was having a Y chromosome."
Risky or over confident investment is called risky and overconfident when it failed, but would have other names when it succeeds. (lie wise, prescient, etc.) Of course not all risky behaviour succeeds -by definition they won’t, and they are more likely to fail than to succeed, but it is precisely those risky or overconfident investment, or business entrepreneurship that build the foundation of today’s developed society and business –imagine if all the world is dominated by risk-averting, empathy/estrogen-plenty women in the late-19 th and early 20h century for example -then we’d still be writing our mails with pen under candlelight, and bartering goods at roadside (unpaved) makeshift small market. (note: this may be green’s ideal world)
"Soon after, tiny, debt-ridden Lithuania took a similar course, electing its first woman president: an experienced economist with a black belt in karate named Dalia Grybauskaite. On the day she won, Vilnius’s leading newspaper bannered this headline: “Lithuania has decided: The country is to be saved by a woman.”
An economist experienced in “penis competition” of male-dominated investment banking? A black-belt in karate? What does this additional, seemingly irrelevant information supposed to convey? That she is also a macho? Then shouldn’t she be “banished” also? Well, we can let women handle countries like Iceland and Latvia whose economic catastrophe will have minimal impact on global economy. Their economy is in such shambles (hit the rock bottom already and couldn’t be worse) that you can probably install chimps as their heads of state and still see their economies recover after a while. Although I’m sure that if their economy recover even a tiny bit (of course it will), feminists will attribute all the success to women’s unique style of governing and innate superiority in politics and economy.
"Then, however, there’s the other choice: resistance. Men may decide to fight the death of macho, sacrificing their own prospects in an effort to disrupt and delay a powerful historical trend."
What? Which historical trend? Where is it?
Much of the second half of the article is not so much about an analysis of current economic crisis, or how males allegedly contributed to it, but simply a blueprint for bringing about their fantasized version of women-controlled world.
In the end, the author notches up ante, this is not only about current economic crisis, and introduce a new paradigm for the coming conflict.
According to her, the Clash of civilization was wrong - author was male, of course-, no, “The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender."
It may sound funny, but on this last point, I agree with her. Gender will be the axis of global conflict. Western gender feminists, who based their Marxist’s class conflict, in which there is an inherent conflict between two classes until one conquer the other, will continue to vilify, blame, poke fun at, and attack males, and current political, social, economic and cultural institutions as based on patriarchy.
Men in the west who choose "resistance" have another option: convert to, and embrace,radical Islam. I predict this will be a growing trend, as traditional Christianity is perceived to be weak and unwilling to fight for what it values.
It's not something I look forward to....
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