THE DEATH OF MACHO?
The Death of Macho - By Reihan Salam | Foreign Policy:
Reihan Salam, who I usually associate with The Atlantic writes for Foreign Policy this week with a very provocative essay that argues that the major transformation underfoot because of the global recession is a reconfiguration of gender relations. I'll just skip to a few key money 'graphs he puts out:
"the most enduring legacy of the Great Recession will not be the death of Wall Street. It will not be the death of finance. And it will not be the death of capitalism. These ideas and institutions will live on. What will not survive is macho"
"The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender."
I'm curious to see what reactions will be to this argument. While I think Salam makes several leaps in analysis with insufficient data to really prove his point, I agree with some of the basic tenets of his argument, namely that if male power is in decline (whether domestically or globally), this will create moments fraught with both potential and peril. Whether that will be the defining *conflict* of the 21st century is harder to say though there's no shortage of examples to suggest that, in local pockets, the fight for gender equality is being met with violent resistance by men unhappy with the idea of a loss of their (unearned) privilege.
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