Surly, lonely, and hard-drinking men, who feel as though they have been rendered historically obsolete, and who long for lost identities of macho, are already common in ravaged post-industrial landscapes across the world, from America’s Rust Belt to the post-Soviet wreckage of Vladimir Putin’s Russia to the megalopolises of the Middle East. If this recession has any staying power, and most believe it does, the massive psychic trauma will spread like an inkblot.
A New Model of Manhood
How will this shift to the post-macho world unfold? That depends on the choices men make, and they only have two.
The first is adaptation: men embracing women as equal partners and assimilating to the new cultural sensibilities, institutions, and egalitarian arrangements that entails. That’s not to say that all the men in the West will turn into metrosexuals while football ratings and beer sales plummet. But amid the death of macho, a new model of manhood may be emerging, especially among some educated men living in the affluent West.
Economist Betsey Stevenson has described the decline of an older kind of marriage, in which men specialized in market labor while women cared for children, in favor of “consumption” marriage, “where both people are equally contributing to production in the marketplace, but they are matching more on shared desires on how to consume and how to live their lives.” These marriages tend to last longer, and they tend to involve a more even split when it comes to household duties.
Not coincidentally, the greater adaptability of educated men in family life extends to economic life, too. Economist Eric D. Gould found in 2004 that marriage tends to make men (particularly lower-wage earners) more serious about their careers—more likely to study more, work more, and desire white-collar rather than blue-collar jobs. This adaptation of men may be the optimistic scenario, but it’s not entirely far-fetched.
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. There are plenty of precedents for this. Indeed, men who have no constructive ways of venting their anger may become a source of nasty extremism; think of the KGB nostalgists in Russia or the jihadi recruits in search of lost honor, to name just a couple. And there are still plenty of men in the West who want to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” These guys notwithstanding, however, Western developed countries are not for the most part trying to preserve the old gender imbalances of the macho order this time around.
Instead, the choice between adaptation and resistance may play out along a geopolitical divide: 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.
Look at Russia, where just such an effort has been unfolding for the past decade. Although there are 10.4 million more Russian women than men, this hasn’t translated into political or economic power. After the Soviet collapse, the ideal of women’s equality was abandoned almost entirely, and many Russians revived the cult of the full-time homemaker (with Putin’s government even offering bonus payments for childbearing women). But Russian men, floored by the dislocations of the Soviet collapse and a decade of economic crisis, simply couldn’t adapt. “It was common for men to fall into depression and spend their days drinking and lying on the couch smoking,” Moscow writer Masha Lipman observes. Between their tremendously high rates of mortality, incarceration, and alcoholism and their low rates of education, only a small handful of Russian men were remotely able (or willing) to serve as sole breadwinners.
This left Russia’s resilient women to do the work, while being forced to accept skyrocketing levels of sexual exploitation at work and massive hypocrisy at home. A higher percentage of working-age women are employed in Russia than nearly any other country, Elena Mezentseva of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies has found, but as of 2000, they were making only half the wages that Russian men earned for the same work. All the while, Putin has aided and abetted these men, turning their nostalgia for the lost macho of Soviet times into an entire ideology.
