Are Men Obsolete? — nobody asked the men

This page is the Patriarchy editorial view, not the debate summary.

“Are men obsolete?” Nobody asked the men

The book asks whether men are obsolete.

Four women debate it.

Two more women comment afterward.

That is almost a perfect miniature of the male question. Man becomes the object under examination: whether he is needed, whether he adapted enough, what emotions he should display, what role he should perform. He can be defended, criticized, modernized, and redefined without being given a seat at the table.

That does not make the book useless. It makes the structure itself revealing. The volume gives us four common female ways of interpreting male trouble.

Rosin: the man must catch up with the system

Rosin sees something real: education and work changed, and many men did not fit the new arrangement well.

But her frame tends to make the system the benchmark and the man the lagging component.

Female success in education is read as adaptation. Male failure is read as a demand for men to change.

Our education section starts from a different rule. When girls fall behind, institutions look for barriers. When boys fall behind, institutions too easily turn the gap into a description of the boys themselves.

Adaptation matters. Before rebuilding the man to fit the system, test the system against the man too.

Dowd: women changed, so men have to qualify again

Dowd makes the asymmetry even clearer. Female advancement is treated as settled progress, after which men need to discover how to become sufficiently interesting again.

That resembles the modern marriage market. Women no longer need a man economically, but expectations around male initiative, status, competence, confidence, and masculine presence did not vanish with female dependence.

The result can become: the old female obligation disappears; the old male exam remains, and a new exam is added on top.

A man should be strong but not controlling, assertive but never intrusive, successful but not treat money as leverage, emotionally available but still stable and attractive.

Women are entitled to preferences. The problem is pretending that this bundle of preferences is a neutral new social norm men simply owe the world.

Moran: a man is a person, not a function

Moran does something the other positions often forget: she stops discussing men as a social function.

Men are fathers, sons, brothers, friends, and partners. Huge amounts of physical and technical work still rely on them. Women’s liberation does not require male humiliation.

That matters more to our library than her ideological label.

A man does not need to justify his humanity through usefulness. He is a person before he becomes a provider, worker, soldier, or partner.

But usefulness should not become invisible merely because society is accustomed to receiving it.

Paglia: society loves the result and mocks the source

Paglia attacks another blind spot.

A modern city can forget how much difficult, dangerous, dirty, and technical work happens outside the professional office. Electricity arrives, water flows, waste disappears, roads are repaired, emergencies are handled — and the labor becomes almost invisible precisely because the system works.

Then the culture can start describing masculine difference as obsolete.

Paglia is useful because she puts the material world back into gender politics. Equality cannot be measured only through prestigious occupations and executive suites. Count the bottom of the social pyramid too.

Her own risk is romanticizing “male energy” into something close to civilizational mythology. We need a simpler claim: if duties and risks remain disproportionately male, male roles cannot be declared obsolete merely because female economic dependence declined.

The old contract is dead. There is no new one yet

Rosin is right that the old contract has broken.

Paglia is right that male difference did not disappear with it.

Moran is right that male trouble should not become permission to despise men.

Even Dowd inadvertently reveals another fact: women changed their own social role faster than they changed their expectations of men.

The missing piece is a new contract between the sexes.

That is where the book ends and our project begins.

What we keep

First: female economic independence does not make men unnecessary. It removes one bad foundation for a union: dependency.

Second: male underperformance cannot automatically be explained as defective men. Check education, labor markets, and cultural expectations too.

Third: you cannot preserve the demands of traditional masculinity, remove reciprocal female duties, and call the result equality.

Fourth: male labor often becomes invisible precisely because infrastructure works.

Fifth: a new male role must be worthwhile not only for women and the economy, but for men themselves.

Why read it

Are Men Obsolete? is useful because it lays four familiar reactions to male decline on the same table:

adapt;
become attractive again;
you are still needed and loved;
stop pretending male difference vanished.

Our answer starts elsewhere.

A man should not have to prove his right to exist by how conveniently he serves a new social order. A workable contract must count his rights, duties, contribution, and interests at the same time.

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