Ann Friedman of TAPPED tackles yet another troubled essay by Hanna Rosin appearing, this time, in a cover(!!!) story for The Atlantic. Friedman nails Rosin’s problem here (emphasis mine)

It’s disappointing that, despite a history of sharp observations about gender and 5,000 words to work with, Rosin makes the same oversight as all of the other hand-wringing articles about the state of the American male. She thinks the problem is men; really, it’s traditional gender stereotypes. The narrow, toxic definition of masculinity perpetuated by Rosin and others — that men are brawn not brains, doers not feelers, earners not nurturers — is actually to blame for the crisis.

Unlike some other chroniclers of the so-called decline of masculinity, Rosin acknowledges men are not biologically predisposed to jobs that require strength and aggression, just as women are not biologically destined to be better thinkers and caregivers. Yet her underlying assumption is that the growth industries we currently consider to be “women’s work” (nursing, home health care, food service, child care) will always retain that designation. Maybe it’s just my feminist idealism talking, but I fail to see why these “nurturing professions,” as Rosin dubs them, must forever be the province of women. Not once does she posit what would happen if we stopped writing articles that reinforced the stereotype that men are best suited to the manufacturing and finance sectors.

She said it here.

This is another reason, by the way, why I feel so strongly that feminism benefits men. In practice freeing ourselves by “challenging traditional gender roles” has, well, traditionally meant freeing women by challenging their roles. Since I think it’s fair to say women have been held further under water it made sense that that would be a priority. But for such challenges to be complete it’s also really critical to challenge the gender roles that hold men under water as well. Rosin, rather startlingly, continues to soak herself in the notion that the constraints of women’s roles were artificial but that the constraint on men are somehow real.

On the one hand you maybe can’t blame her — it’s a very widely held misunderstanding. And one that really wouldn’t have been obvious to someone who’s framework dated back to mainstream feminism of the 1970s. On the other hand… as Friedman says it’s not like Rosin’s a newbie when it comes to grappling with gender stereotypes. I’m going to blame it on the deep, abiding, and very difficult to overcome notion that men are the “reference normal” against which anyone else must be a variation. In this case it’s showing up in the form of compared to the standard-male baseline everyone else is making progress.

If you instead start looking at men not as a baseline but as just one more demographic all sorts of new questions, and answers, and challenges, and resolutions become possible.

Via Jessica Valenti’s tweet.