Are Men Obsolete? — detailed summary

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Are Men Obsolete?

Hanna Rosin, Maureen Dowd, Caitlin Moran, and Camille Paglia, 2014. This short book grew out of a public debate around a deliberately provocative motion: Are men obsolete?

The format is adversarial rather than synthetic. Hanna Rosin and Maureen Dowd argue for the motion, mainly by saying that the old male role is losing its economic and social necessity. Caitlin Moran and Camille Paglia argue against it: men are in trouble, but male trouble is not the same thing as male uselessness.

The volume includes interviews before the debate, the main speeches and rebuttals, and after-the-fact commentary by Christina Hoff Sommers and Stephanie Coontz. It is therefore less a single argument than a map of disagreement among women about what is happening to men.

Editorial commentary →

Hanna Rosin: the economy no longer guarantees men a place

Rosin develops the argument associated with The End of Men. Industrial economies rewarded physical strength, stable male employment, and the provider model. Postindustrial economies reward education, communication, service work, flexibility, and dealing with people much more heavily.

Women, in her account, adapted faster. They entered higher education and occupations where physical strength offers little advantage. Significant groups of men, meanwhile, have struggled to fit the new economy.

Rosin does not literally argue that biological males are unnecessary. “Obsolete” is a deliberately sharp description of an old male function. If a woman can earn, educate herself, and support children, a man no longer gains an automatic family role merely by bringing home a wage.

At the same time, Rosin acknowledges the problem of absent fathers and unstable families. Female economic independence does not make fathers meaningless to children. Her point is that men need a new source of value in a world where the old economic bargain is no longer guaranteed.

Maureen Dowd: women changed faster than men

Dowd’s case is more cultural and satirical. Her material is dating, male confusion, and the mismatch between rapidly changing female expectations and slower changes in male behavior.

Women gained education, careers, sexual freedom, and economic independence. Men, in her telling, did not receive an equally clear new script. The old “I provide, you depend” model works less often, but nothing universally accepted replaced it.

Dowd describes men caught between old and new expectations. Women may no longer want an authoritarian patriarch, yet can still expect initiative, confidence, competence, and recognizable masculine energy. A man is meant to be modern without becoming sexless or passive.

Her answer to the motion is therefore cultural rather than literal: men have not disappeared, but many male habits and scripts look outdated beside women who changed faster.

Caitlin Moran: half of humanity is not obsolete

Moran rejects the motion immediately. She argues as a feminist without wanting women’s liberation to depend on contempt for men.

Her first correction is class. “The end of men” sounds most plausible among educated professionals, where women can often earn as much as men. But enormous amounts of physical, technical, dirty, and dangerous work remain male-dominated and remain necessary to everyday life.

Moran also insists on ordinary attachment to men: fathers, sons, brothers, friends, and partners. A feminism that can only describe women as men’s victims and men as women’s problem loses contact with how people actually live.

She accepts that masculinity is in crisis. Her answer is to help rebuild a workable male role rather than celebrate male failure.

Camille Paglia: civilization still uses male energy

Paglia makes the most aggressive case against the motion. She argues that much modern feminism discounts biology, sexual difference, physical risk, and the male contribution to material civilization.

She objects to enjoying complex infrastructure while treating men as historical leftovers. Construction, heavy industry, energy, transport, repair, warfare, and dangerous physical work remain heavily male.

Paglia links male contribution not only to manual work but to risk, invention, competition, and large-scale building. She does not claim women are incapable of these things. Her argument is that society cannot depend on traits more common among men while simultaneously teaching contempt for masculinity itself.

She also rejects purely social explanations of sex difference. Male and female sexuality have biological foundations in her account, and persistent average differences do not vanish because a political theory dislikes them.

Rosin versus Paglia: adapt the man or revalue the man?

The deepest conflict in the book is between two explanations of male trouble.

Rosin sees an economy in which the traditional male lost an automatic advantage and must adapt. Paglia sees a culture that stopped valuing male traits while continuing to consume the results of male labor.

One explanation says men are failing to fit the system. The other asks whether the system is failing to recognize men.

The same tension appears in education. For Rosin, women’s educational gains show successful adaptation to new opportunities. For Paglia, boys’ relative decline raises the question of whether schools themselves have become less compatible with boys.

Men as partners rather than functions

All four participants, in different ways, acknowledge that the old bargain between the sexes has broken down.

Female economic dependence can no longer be the main glue of a couple. But removing dependence does not answer why men and women should build a life together.

Rosin wants men to become more flexible and more involved in care. Dowd searches for a new attractive masculinity. Moran refuses to treat men as defective women. Paglia wants male difference and contribution taken seriously again.

Their answers differ, but the underlying question is the same: what value do men and women give each other once necessity alone no longer holds the pair together?

Christina Hoff Sommers

Sommers reads the debate through the situation of boys and young men. She rejects the temptation to celebrate female progress while treating male educational and social decline as comic relief.

She is closest to Moran’s humanism and Paglia’s defense of male difference. In her view, problems facing boys are not proof that women’s equality went too far. They are problems in their own right and deserve direct attention.

Stephanie Coontz

Coontz resists a zero-sum war of the sexes. She accepts real male difficulties, especially around education and economic stability, but warns against explaining them simply as the result of women winning.

Class inequality, labor-market restructuring, and family instability matter heavily. A prosperous educated man and a poor man live in very different opportunity structures, so the category “men” can conceal as much as it reveals.

Coontz accepts the need for a new male role while rejecting the idea that women’s gains automatically produce men’s losses.

What remains after the debate

The book deliberately produces no unified answer.

It captures a moment when the old male contract is no longer self-evident and the new one has not arrived. Women need not depend economically on men. Men do not receive a role merely for being male. Yet societies still depend on fathers, partners, male labor, and men capable of building stable lives.

The sharper question after the book is therefore not “are men necessary?” but “what male role can be useful to society, desirable to women, and worth living for men themselves?”