"It is in taking [the line that what women were experiencing as a 'downturn' was a 'catastrophe' for men] that the myth of the 'mancession' most clearly links up to a larger narrative that, in its starkest expressions, presents a story of female ascendancy and male decline. Indeed, news reports of the mancession almost invariably come wrapped up in a bundle of statistics suggesting that women are outdoing men in all sorts of other 'historic' and 'unprecedented' ways, from higher numbers of college and post-graduate degrees to larger shares of consumer spending and growing importance, if not yet outright leadership, as breadwinners in the household economy. Men, in the zero-sum logic that underlies the larger narrative, are losing out, not just in terms of relative economic position, but in the sense of authority and, well, manliness that once anchored their sense of identity."—Alice O’Connor, in a great piece for AlterNet titled "The Recession's Hit Women Hard, but the Myth of the 'Mancession' Won't Die."
[H/T to Shaker Abra.]
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