Back when the lads made a killing and the lasses made a pittance, it made sense - economically, at least - to “specialize” within a household consisting of a working husband and a wife, and maybe children. In “A Theory of Marriage,” published in 1973, he introduced the notion that a shrinking male-female wage gap reduces the value of wedlock to women. But a vanishing wage gap also has side effects, as the late Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics, famously explained. In general, that’s a good thing, of course, as it leads to fair rewards - equal pay for equal work. This bifurcation in prospects for men and women translates into a shrinkage in the wage gap that traditionally favored men. In economies where robots are used a lot, blue-collar men therefore find it harder on average to keep or find good employment, whereas women on balance fare better. And here women appear to have a statistical edge. That’s not me throwing stereotypes around that’s hard statistics.īy contrast, jobs in the service sector, and especially those where “people skills” are prized, aren’t threatened by robots at all, at least not yet. And those workers are overwhelmingly men. With automation, the losers are the blue-collar manufacturing workers who used to do what the robots now take care of. But even good things aren’t usually good for everybody. They make production more efficient and, therefore, all of us better off. Consider, for example, how one particular vector of change is slamming into masculinity: the automation of manufacturing with robots.
Reunification and its discontents may be a unique situation, but it appears that there’s something more general about modernity that can undermine and threaten manhood. For decades after reunification in 1990, eastern women moved west or married western men, leaving many of the region’s males single, frustrated and alienated. Some experts in Germany use the exact same phrase - a “crisis of masculinity” - to describe the situation of men in what used to be communist East Germany. Educators are pondering ways of strengthening the “yang spirit” - as in the masculine-ish yang that complements the more feminine yin force in Taoism.
In China, the government worries about a “masculinity crisis,” as the nation’s boys allegedly become effeminate, whatever that might mean nowadays. And about 70% of those who died were men. The US, for example, just counted record numbers of deaths from drug overdoses - more than 100,000 in one year and roughly double the number in 2015. The reality for many of those who aren’t necessarily alpha males is bleaker. But how many real-life men have an inner 007 to channel? If you happen to be James Bond, you take this flux in stride and effortlessly turn - via a few intermediary incarnations - from the Sean Connery version of manhood into the more vulnerable and complex Daniel Craig variety. Many men are feeling unmoored, for better or worse. The world is changing faster than ever and, with it, so are notions of masculinity. But it’s often no picnic being male either.
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