'Plastic women, cardboard men'

Article here. Excerpt:

'I know a fiftysomething woman who went back to school last year. She needed a credential in order to get steady work, so she invested eight months and several thousand dollars to qualify as a personal care assistant. She cleaned toilets to help pay the tuition. The pay is low, but she’ll always be in demand. Her former husband (he’s the same age), meanwhile, has more or less dropped out of the economy. History seems to be repeating itself with their kids. Their focused daughter is a top university student with an eye on a good career. Their son dropped out of university in his first semester. Since then, he’s had a string of low-paying jobs. He has no plan.

Men of all ages are dropping out these days. Another friend, a woman in her 40s, has a soon-to-be-ex-husband who drove them into bankruptcy. He lost his job and can’t find more work and is about to move back in with his mother. My friend, who stayed home to raise their four kids, is now working double shifts to put herself through nursing school. In between work and school, she shops for food, feeds the kids and drives them to their lessons. The last time I saw her, she fell asleep sitting up.

As for thirtysomething women, many of them are building impressive careers while their men just coast along. They pay the mortgage, and the guys pay the utilities. Nothing wrong with that, if only the guys would pitch in more on the home front. But a lot of the guys turn out to be incredibly passive – like oversized knick-knacks parked in front of the TV.

The patriarchy is dead. The new world order is a matriarchy. And the guys can’t figure out where they fit in. As one university-educated urban male told writer Hanna Rosin, “All the things we need to be good at to thrive in the world we imagine existing 10 or 20 or even 50 years from now are things that my female friends and competitors are better at than me. Than us.”
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I’ve no idea how the new world order will play out. Ms. Rosin thinks more men will eventually catch on and find their places in it. Meantime, there’s one scene I can’t get out of my mind. It’s a village in the hills of Thailand that my husband and I visited a few years ago. The women did all the work – the child rearing, the farming, the cooking, the wood and water gathering, the long trek to town to sell their vegetables. The men sat around discussing politics and smoking opium. They didn’t seem terribly miserable; I guess they’d gotten used to it.'