Hugo Schwyzer responds to Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men“ with a little history — something you’d think Rosin, and probably her editors at The Atlantic, would also have been aware of. (Emphasis mine.)

As Michael Kimmel and others have shown, masculinity has always been “in crisis”. Generations of American men have complained of feeling “emasculated” by assertive women (read Rip Van Winkle sometime); a century ago, social conservatives fretted that co-education would make men irrelevant. The one constant from generation to generation is the keen anxiety that masculinity is fragile, perpetually at risk, always in need of protection from the encroaching and emasculating effects of luxury, intellectualism, and feminism.

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Men are not weak. I make that case over and over again. But there’s a corollary to the myth of male weakness: the myth of male inflexibility. It suggests that unlike women, men are too rigid to adapt to a changing culture. It suggests that extricating oneself from the straitjacket of traditional masculinity is more difficult than escaping the corset of traditional femininity. And whether this incapacity is consciously feigned or sincerely believed, it’s rooted in a myth rather than a reality. If feminism alone can’t get men to develop their own emotional and vocational dexterity, then we can be certain that the inexorable realities of global economic patterns will accomplish the task. It has always been that way in the past, and will surely be so again.

He said it here.

Quick question: You know how to tell that gender is highly constructed? Walk into a room full of people from different walks of life and ask “what does it mean to be a man?”

The funny thing, as I’ve mentioned… occasionally, is that for all the talk of us men being masters of all we survey and top dogs and just all that natural superiority business it’s kind of funny how the folks most likely to proclaim male supremacy also happen to be most likely to see men as weak, inflexible, hormonal (testosterone), plus nasty brutal and short, and consequently, most in need of “protection” of their privileges and entitlements. In other words anti-feminists have far more contempt for men than feminists ever have, and certainly more than feminists ever will.

What Hanna Rosen would be doing hanging around on the same conceptual crowd with those guys escapes me.

One more wonderful point from Hugo: Masculinity’s already highly adaptable, and adapted, if you’re just willing to stop listening to the stories and start looking at history.

In the 1800s, farmers and blacksmiths had to become office clerks and factory workers; they were forced indoors (into a traditionally female space). And they coped, mostly by adapting themselves to new economic and social realities.

I mean c’mon, we’re big boys, we’ve always been big boys, we don’t need the anti-feminist training wheels, and for all anti-feminists swear we’ve never been able to we always have.