The problem with the way we discuss gender is that it tends to be "Let's sympathize with women" or "Let's sympathize with men." Stephen Marche More Quotes by Stephen Marche More Quotes From Stephen Marche We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are. Stephen Marche contradiction novel world The wilderness within us is actually the best part of us. Stephen Marche wilderness Only idiots or snobs ever really thought less of 'genre books' of course. There are stupid books and there are smart books. There are well-written books and badly written books. There are fun books and boring books. All of these distinctions are vastly more important than the distinction between the literary and the non-literary. Stephen Marche smart stupid fun The first things that babies can notice is sex; the first thing that you can tell about a person when you see them walking down the street is their gender. Stephen Marche baby sex firsts Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time. Stephen Marche mainstream-culture cities art One thing you can say about Trump is that he is not a traditional patriarch. He has a wife who's not even in the White House. And you could say the same of Duterte in the Philippines and of Putin. They're parodies of masculinity. They're hyper-masculine, but they're also totally unsure of their masculinity, and they parade it around. Stephen Marche wife white house You have two things happening: You have the cultural and economic reality of men falling apart and traditional masculinity falling apart. Stephen Marche men reality fall You cannot have an advanced economy while holding women back from the workplace. Stephen Marche economy workplace In economies in which women work, men and women in relationships make about the same amount of money, or women make more. Women are 40 percent of breadwinners in America, and that number's been rising. Stephen Marche numbers men america The more money women make, the less violence, the less sexual crimes against women. Everything horrific and misogynistic declines. But then what you're dealing with here is "What does it mean to be in love with people who are your equals?" And that's a very beautiful thing that we should cherish, but it's also incredibly tough in some ways. Stephen Marche beautiful mean people Culture is always the echo of economic realities; that's what Marx teaches. Feminism is a clear example of that. Stephen Marche feminism echoes reality We're in Trump times - we're in the time this misogynist hate clown is the leader of the free world, and when Putin has made abusing your wife legal, and transgender bathrooms have just been disallowed in school. There are all these political setbacks. And there's no question that those setbacks are very real and need to be treated as civil-rights issues. Stephen Marche hate real school The research points pretty clearly to the rise of companionate marriage, and I just think it's going to keep being popular, for the very simple reason that it's basically the only way to afford a family life in the 21st-century in advanced economies. It's one of the major reasons for the spike in income inequality. Surgeons used to marry their secretaries. Now they marry other surgeons. Stephen Marche simple way thinking Almost all the voices in history have been men, but on this one question of gender, men don't talk about it. This has nothing to do with women; it has to do with men. Stephen Marche gender voice men Women become breadwinners, men become caregivers. That's the birth of intimate marriage. Stephen Marche caregivers birth men Look at The Iliad, there's all this stuff about men loving children. The King of Sparta was the most brutal warrior of ancient Greece, and the only thing he liked to do was horse around with kids when he was back from slaughtering. One thing that feminism revealed is that being a distant patriarchal figure was not something men wanted to be. They want to be more involved in the lives of their children, and you can see that once they're allowed to have that connection, they crave it. Stephen Marche horse kings children Marriage is this black box which is the key to all social and political problems; the family is the unit. Stephen Marche black political keys Men's gender problems cause them a lot of suffering. There is a massive spiking suicide rate in middle age for men and a cultural attitude to male friendship that is destructive. Stephen Marche suicide attitude men Men are enforced into a kind of silence about their gender; they're supposed to not think of it as a performance. That's the definition of manliness - that it's not a performance; it's being yourself, authentic. Whereas women have understood gender as performance. Men have not yet made that quantum leap, or rather they're making it in many ways, they're not thinking about it. Stephen Marche being-yourself men thinking Men talk about masculinity through sports and clothes. They don't talk about gender, they talk about LeBron James and whether it's okay to wear lipstick and eyeliner. They're not getting to the question at hand, which is, "What does it mean to be a man when the traditional values of masculinity are eroding incredibly rapidly?' Stephen Marche sports men mean
