Well, my brief was men. How have men responded to the fact that this has gone from, as James Brown sang in 1964, a man's world, as he said, to a woman's nation? What does that mean? What does it mean for men? How have men responded? How does the media focus on those responses differ from the very quiet changes that men have really undergone?
The reality is that these changes are here, they are permanent, they are not going to go away. Women are not going to wake up tomorrow morning and say, you know, this voting thing is really a drag, let's stop serving on juries, and we don't want to go to professional school or work outside the home. It's not going to happen. So the question for men is, how are we going to respond to this? how are we going to deal with this? Are we going to be dragged kicking and screaming into this future, or are we going to say, well wait a minute, let's just see what's here for us--what's here for men.
And my argument is that, despite the media focus on all the angry men, all the angry white men, and all the TV talk shows and radio shows that focus on men and as the new, whining victims of reverse discrimination, that most men are actually quietly accommodating themselves to this. And you know why? Because it's in their interest to do so. Because their families are more supported when both parents work, their children feel better, their children are doing better, they're happier. It turns out that the more equality women have, the better it is for men. And my focus at the end of my chapter was on the very quiet way that men are accommodating themselves within the context of their relationships by doing more housework, and especially more child care than any generation ever.