The End of Men response

The Atlantic's "The End of Men" is one of the longest and most powerful pieces we've read. Not powerful in the same sense as "The Peekaboo Paradox" or "Can You Say Hero?", but merely staggering in its scope, its presentation of facts, and its workmanlike (workwomanlike?) style. It's clearly a trend piece, but it has a lot more oomph than the Gideon Bible piece we read for Tuesday, partly because of its length but more so because of its content.

The lead is both a scene-setting/anecdotal lead but also a historical one. It doesn't put us right there with the sperm racing each other in the present tense, but it provides enough color that the summary is fleshed out enough to be interesting and entertaining. It also lets us meet the cowboy biologist and we really get to know him through the descriptions and quotes we're offered.

The nut graf is a bit ambiguous to me but seems to come in the 8th paragraph, starting with "Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind." This paragraph gets at the broader heart of the matter than any of the anecdotal grafs before it. It explains the broader societal shifts toward a preference for females and, more importantly, why that shift has begun. If I can roll the 9th paragraph in with it, you have pretty much all of the information that the article will expand upon.

The rest of the article's incredible length expands on the trend and points to numerous examples and ways in which women are perhaps the better-off sex in today's world and the world of the future. It intersperses this by taking us into scenes -- the men's support group, the community college, the sorority house -- but it keeps hitting us with more facts and figures as well. It creates an almost exhausting feel, not because the material is boring but because there's just so much overwhelming evidence (at least in this reporter's estimation, we don't hear much from studies done to prove the opposite) that women are the gender of forever and that men need to pull their acts together.

The style remains consistent throughout, but it's worth noting the revisiting of the lead towards the end. At this point in the reporter's arguments, the cowboy rogue seems so radically out of step with the world that his reintroduction, and the reporter calls attention to that. The kicker is as humorous as it is harrowing -- or maybe that's my testosterone speaking.