"Kids these days!" is a time-honored narrative, not because it's true that things are on a constant downhill slide and each subsequent generation is worse than that last, but because it's a nice little fiction that makes older people feel better about aging. When we indulge in some "kids these days!" worrying, we get to take a break from thinking about our decreasingly athletic sex lives and our increasing obsession with bowel movements, and instead think about how we're so much better than those among us with bright futures and energy to spare. The problem is that the "kids these days" narrative is so often factually incorrect.

Take, for instance, this silly story from the BBC bemoaning the supposed downhill slide in role models for young men.

Modern-day superheroes promote a macho, violent stereotype for young boys, according to a US psychologist's study.

They differ greatly from superheroes of yesterday, who had a more vulnerable side, an American Psychological Association meeting was told.

The notion that pop culture in the past was somehow less sexist than it is now struck me as close to impossible. Then again, I watch a lot of Mad Men, which fills my head with crazy notions about how American society was way more sexist prior to the feminist movement. But to double-check my inclinations, I asked someone who actually reads comic books for his take on the subject. "That is ABSURD," he said, adding that superheroes didn't have some glorious feminist past, complete with vulnerability. But perhaps the researchers only meant that superheroes in 2009 were a teeny less vulnerable than the heyday of 2006. We don't know the frame of reference here.

There's also a bunch of hand-wringing about the evils of "slackers" as role models, making me wonder if they did part of this study in 1993, the official last time the word "slacker" was used unironically. The argument of the article is that young men are given a choice between "macho pig" and "slacker" as role models, and neither is very good.

They perhaps published this article at the worst possible time in pop-culture history, however, because it came out right as the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was released, a film about a slacker who also happens to be a superhero (granted, in a world where apparently everyone has super powers). Can we expect a flurry of articles about how kids these days will be ruined for life because they think they can grow up to shirk work but nonetheless bring fists of fury on their supernatural opponents? Will we start seeing arguments implying that sweet Michael Cera is secretly teaching young men to be sexists far beyond the imaginations of those who lived in an era when women were legally forced out of holding certain jobs?

Tags: boys, michael cera, slackers, superheroes

Jenny Sanford has been fairly quiet in the months since her husband, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, held that bizarro, totally captivating press conference admitting to an affair with his Argentinean sweetheart. She's broken her silence by giving an interview to Vogue, of all places. Sanford gets the standard Vogue treatment: an off-hand reference to her association with the Kennedys, the implication that she's so down-to-earth, despite the million-dollar view from her island abode. But what's really notable about the article are the retrograde notions Sanford has about her husband's dalliance:

Midlife aging is different for men than for women ... Mark is worried about what his next job is. He worries about making money, running for office again, his legacy. I know my legacy is my children. I don’t worry about that.

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with making your children your first priority. But the implication that all women are satisfied with having their children as their legacy, while men are not, is total nonsense. It's such nonsense coming from a woman like Jenny Sanford—a woman who was a successful investment banker and who ran her husband's campaign—it makes me wonder if she has an ulterior motive with presenting herself as a 50s throwback. Perhaps she's trying to save her husband's ailing career and her family's legacy.

Sanford makes many references to her faith and how she's forgiven her husband already. ("I am not in charge of revenge. That’s not up to me. That’s for the Lord to decide, and it’s important for me to teach that to my boys. All I can do is forgive.") Is Jenny Sanford trying to save her husband's rep with the Christian right, and ultimately reverse his political fortunes? Or am I overanalyzing?

Tags: Jenny Sanford, mark sanford, Vogue

Emily, I think Reihan Salam is onto something in his recent piece on the end of male power, in which he notes that the recession’s disproportionate impact on men resonates in the world of politics, where women are gaining ground (at least in places like Iceland) in a backlash against male financial mismanagement. Salam is right that the recession provides one more lens through which to observe global power’s shift from men to women; he’s also right that the backlash against men can spark a sometimes-violent secondary backlash against women in places where they gain economic and political power.

Though few people talk about it, the emergence of prominent female leaders in developing countries can often be a catalyst for the hardening of traditional gender roles and increased violence against women. This has been the case in Liberia, though it has been almost entirely overshadowed by the triumph of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist and Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state. Accurate figures on violence against women are hard to come by in Liberia, but when I visited last fall, aid workers and some women suggested it was rising, in part because of male dissatisfaction with the perception that women are now running the show. Liberian women suffered acutely during the 14-year civil war, when as many as three out of four women are thought to have been victims of sexual violence. After the war, women voted in droves for Sirleaf, yet her ascendance has only heightened the contrast between her situation and that of ordinary Liberian women. “Men feel very threatened by what’s happening,” an aid worker with Merlin, a medical NGO that works in Liberia, told me. “You can hear it around the offices, you hear it on the street, you hear it on the radio ... they feel women are being pushed into a higher position than them.”

When the West looks at Liberia now, it sees a shining example of functioning postwar democracy led by a strong, educated woman. But Liberian women see something else. “The men are saying, ‘The women are up, so the women want to control the men,’” a Liberian woman friend explained to me. She attributed this perception, in part, to the breakdown of her five-year relationship with the man she had planned to marry, who became increasingly frustrated by his inability to find a job in a place where the unemployment rate hovers around 80 percent (and that was before the recession set in). My friend, who runs a shop in a busy market, jettisoned her boyfriend after he beat her so violently that her eyes swelled shut. This woman is no pushover. She was a guerrilla field commander during the war. Now, she keeps a framed picture of her swollen face a few days after the beating to remind her not to forgive the man who did it.

Salam warns that the transition from male to female dominance will be “wrenching, uneven and possibly very violent.” I think the greatest danger for well-meaning observers in the West is a version of what legal scholar Deborah Rhode has called “the no problem problem”—the false sense of equality that can result from the rise of a few extraordinary women. As we celebrate women in developing nations who attain power, we shouldn’t lose sight of the many others left vulnerable by these changes. Change always hurts; in the short term, this particular change may well hurt women the most.

Tags: economy, ellen johnson-sirleaf, foreign policy, gender roles, he-cession, liberia

In Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam is predicting that male dominance will be a casualty of the economic downturn (or the he-cession, as he calls it, since more men than women are being laid off). He writes:

The great shift of power from males to females is likely to be dramatically accelerated by the economic crisis, as more people realize that the aggressive, risk-seeking behavior that has enabled men to entrench their power—the cult of macho—has now proven destructive and unsustainable in a globalized world.

What will follow is not a femitopia, but rather "surly, lonely, and hard-drinking men, who feel as though they have been rendered historically obsolete," and whose "massive psychic trauma will spread like an inkblot." It's possible that some of these men will adapt, by embracing what an expert Reihan quotes calls "consumption marriage." This is an even worse name than companionate marriage for about the same thing: marriages in which both spouses make marketplace contributions, ie work, and also share domestic responsibilities, presumably. Reihan predicts that men in the West will tend to adapt along those lines, while men in the East resist—creating a new fault line between societies (or rather, reinforcing an existing one). Reihan also acknowledges that women still bear more than their share of the burden of poverty, lack of benefits, and unemployment. And here's his closing, sweeping thesis:

As women start to gain more of the social, economic, and political power they have long been denied, it will be nothing less than a full-scale revolution the likes of which human civilization has never experienced.

This is not to say that women and men will fight each other across armed barricades. The conflict will take a subtler form, and the main battlefield will be hearts and minds. But make no mistake: 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. We have no precedent for a world after the death of macho. But we can expect the transition to be wrenching, uneven, and possibly very violent.

This is the kind of deliberately provacative argument that we're all trained to poke holes in. But at the moment, I'm still digesting. Could the recession really topple traditional sex roles to anything like this degree? My own reporting, all U.S. based, has made me skeptical. In the past, periods of unemployment have produced a lot of men who sit around the house rather than chip in with the dishes and the kids. On the other hand, there's some suggestion, or at least hope, that this downturn could be different in that sense. But could the tradeoff for a more egalitarian West really be a more dangerous East teeming with surly ex-macho predators? Thoughts?

Photograph of Japanese men protesting automaker layoffs by Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: economy, foreign policy, gender roles, he-cession