Think about it.. "sectors" like education, healthcare, and social services (as well as lawyers, doctors, politicians, etc) all exist as fundamentally parasitic (or at best symbiotic) components of society.

Resource production (farming, mining, fishing, oil pumping, solar energy producing, nuclear power plants, recycling, etc), manufacturing, energy production and research are where value is actually created. Consumption (food, durable goods, disposable goods, energy) are where value is destroyed.

Pretty much everything else is just people shaking each others' hands in exchange for shiny tokens. So to the extent we move toward an economy dominated by those sectors, we'll be gradually becoming poorer. Any other outcome is magical thinking, relying either on a perpetual motion machine (in which case the value producers who own the machine will hold ultimate power) or a juvenile understanding of cause and effect.

very few men are attractive enough to generate REAL interest in any case, and once social changes brought out into the open what women really think of men and made it possible for women to manage on their own men were/are obsolete anyway. A domestic slave bringing in half the income that a woman has to placate (a little) to maintain her lifestyle and get help with the kids isn't really much, if any, better off than a guy who is openly considered totally useless (men can never do as good a job of being women as women can so they ARE totally useless in a world where men have no essential function that only they can perform). The only difference is the level of delusion.

When all the men are gone from the office, who is going to deal with insects and spiders?

Who is going to connect your keyboard and monitor to your computer?

Who is going to install the latest version of Windows?

You will all be sorry then.

HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THOSE MACS?

Well, there still are the insects and spiders.

You will be Sorry. So very sorry when you don't have us to deal with that.

Yeah, that's right.

Who the hell is John Guilt?

I would take analyses that find declines in male employment, male-dominated fields, and male economic power as unmitigated good for women--or likely to lead to the death of macho--with a shaker of salt. In previous recessions that cut hard into male-dominated fields, the upshot has included an increase in violence against women, campaigns to get women out of the workplace, and a cultural obsession with "restoring" masculinity. It could really go either way--or more likely, the usual two steps forward, one step back.

You actually READ the articles?

That must be as painful as being an English teacher in high school reading student's papers.

Maybe they are just writing for other teenagers.

It really can only go one way except maybe in the very short term in some backward places. Once women can take care of themselves and their kids there is no way to enforce any of the attempts to enhance the role and status of men and reduce that of women that you refer to. It is physically impossible. Women, IN THE ABSENCE OF ECONOMIC OR SOCIAL NECESSITY, can't be blackmailed into acting against their own interests to get men to like them (and men like women no matter what they do anyway).

This is silly.

While conventional wisdom maintains that every aspect of our cultural and societal trends and tendencies can be explained through a feminist-perspective study of the fall of the Roman Empire, the REAL theoretical abstraction that predicts our future is deconstructionism as applied to the military-industrial complex.

You see, when we discuss "defense" as a society, it's crucial to elucidate the distinction between the "defense" signifier and the referent of modern warfare. The extrapolation requires a bit more depth than is practical here, for obvious reasons, but it is only through highly-abstract theory and impenetrable jargon that hu(wo)mankind can effect meaningful social-institutional change.

(Please buy my forthcoming book.)

Amanda, love your articles, especially the analysis of love and romance - didn't comment in that thread but I love the way you look beyond the obvious and 'flip the script' if you will to get at the deeper meaning.

One quibble with the article however- the presidential primaries were well before the housing bubble burst so they aren't any evidence either way in such an analysis. (Certainly the writing was on the wall but all mainstream media outlets and just about everyone else was doing their best to ignore it- such is the nature of bubbles...) Concern about the economy at that time was on a different level- there was discussion of repealing the tax breaks and restructuring but there was no crisis and the credit default meltdown began in earnest in October 2008 when people took a look at the house of cards and it collapsed.

The other thing about argument you are analyzing is that even if this were the case - and I agree the prism is gendered and reductive – but even if it was true at least in we would see something occurring like the author discusses we could also pretty much bet on a resulting backlash of macho. The same sort of backlash that followed the entry of women into the workforce and returned them to the kitchen after WWII, the same sort of backlash that followed women entering some of those professional class jobs in the seventies and eighties for just a couple of examples.

The forward movement of progress and expanding rights and access to people is not a straight line. It always follows the two steps forward one step back path and sometimes there are steep curves away from the road. But the good news is that the general direction and momentum are going the right way.

Anyway, love your work- keep it up!

women aren't more peaceful but they are more rational about the use of military force. VERY VERY few wars started by female rulers are lost by them. It is true that there have been relatively few female rulers but there have been some and even when you take into account the smaller sample the analysis holds up.