The Decline of Men

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Chapter One

The mood in the sumptuous ballroom at Cipriani Wall Street was exultant. An all-female jazz band had played during the reception, and the crowd of several hundred of New York's movers and shakers at the "Women Who Make a Difference Gala," hosted by the National Council for Research on Women, were tucking into their grilled lamb chops and sipping wine, all paid for by the evening's sponsor, Goldman Sachs. Then it was time for Dina Dublon, a member of the board of directors at PepsiCo, to introduce one of the evening's honorees: Steve Reinemund, PepsiCo's chairman. His successor, an Indian-born woman named Indra Nooyi, had just delivered a glowing video testimonial, carried on giant screens throughout the room, and now it was time for Reinemund to get his award. In her introduction, Dublon noted that Reinemund, one of the most powerful and respected men in American business, was the first man to ever receive this award, adding that he was "part of our No Man Left Behind policy." Reinemund graciously went along with the joke, saying that he was very glad not to be left behind. The mostly female audience laughed appreciatively.

The sad fact, however, is that men—as individuals, as a group, as a gender—are being left behind. Around the table, the suddenly pensive diners traded stories about men they knew who had lost their jobs or their marriages, or both, and were now basically idle, taking up golf or the piano, writing that novel, doing nothing. The women spoke about brothers, sons, nephews, and husbands. "It's weird how everyone has a story like this," remarked a female executive from a Fortune 100 company. "There's definitely something going on."

What's going on is a seismic shift in the current status and future of American men that reaches from before the moment of conception until after their death. No one can say exactly when it began, but the change was well under way by the time noted genetics expert Jenny Graves was asked by a reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation if men were heading for extinction.

"The future of the Y chromosome is certainly at risk," said Graves, a professor of comparative genomics at the Australian National University. "We've been looking at the Y chromosome in lots of different animals, so we were able to tell where it came from and where it's going . . . . The Y chromosome of course is what makes men men—if you've got a Y you're male. But the Y chromosome's actually derived from the X. It's just a pale shadow of its once glorious past as an X chromosome."

Some 300,000 years ago, when the Y chromosome was equal in length to the X chromosome, it had 1,400 genes on it. Today the Y contains a paltry 45.

The shrinking Y chrome has prompted Graves and other scientists to grimly suggest that the Y chromosome—the genetic code for the male gender—may be gone altogether in around 10 million years. Never mind that in 2003 a forty-person team of scientists led by David Page of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that the Y chromosome actually has an elaborate backup system with as many as seventy-eight genes, and that it seems to have the ability to morph and grow and quite possibly survive. For researchers like Jenny Graves the demise of the male gene apparently can't come soon enough. When asked to pinpoint how long it would take the Y chromosome to disappear, she replied: "Now, of course, it could be tomorrow. In fact, there could be . . . right now there could be a tribe of humans somewhere that have already lost their Y."

Are Y guys about to become X men? Males may indeed be genetically hardwired to fail, but not for the reason that Professor Graves suggests.

The truth is that men may be doomed, not because of their genes, but because of their brains. Or, to be more precise, the innate biology of males may be increasingly at odds with the modern world that they inhabit. In fact, the very qualities that have helped men succeed for so many years may actually be a contributing factor to their current difficulties.

A growing body of scientific evidence attests that men are chemically predestined to share not only certain -gender-- specific physical traits but also a host of social, emotional, and behavioral attributes that are so different from those of women as to render them almost a separate species.

The classic male virtues—physical strength, aggression, self-sufficiency, resolve—that were so useful in agrarian and industrial societies, are increasingly out of date in a postmodern world where networking, cooperation, and communication are key. In other words, are men—or at least the traditional ideal of masculinity that has till now defined the American male—in danger of becoming obsolete? Are men at the beginning of a long, downhill slide to oblivion? And is it possible that the slippery slope begins to tilt against them even before they are born, and continues to skew the arc of their entire lives, through an undereducated childhood, an underemployed adulthood, and on to an unnecessarily premature death? As the ground beneath them rumbles and shifts, are men changing too little or too much? And how did they get into this mess in the first place?

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Excerpted from The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving up, and Flipping off His Future by Guy Garcia
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