But here’s where things get weird. These supposedly unmarriageable, childlike men-the men who are couch-surfing in dirty t-shirts, wasting their days on the Internet, or maybe just not pulling in enough cold, hard cash to impress the upwardly mobile ladies in their midst — are still apparently good enough to date.
They’re also still good enough to live with, and, crazier yet, good enough to father a child or two (although “father,” perhaps, is accurate only in the biological sense of the word). “A child born to an unmarried mother, once a stigma, is now ‘the new normal,’ The New York Times reported in a 2012 front page story,” Rosin notes, “as more than half of births to American women under thirty occurred outside marriage.”
This new breed of woman, profiled repeatedly in The End of Men, is exhausted, overtaxed, and barely keeping it together — and yet, in Rosin’s book and elsewhere, they’re repeatedly presented as somewhat empowered. “Many of these single mothers,” Rosin writes, “are struggling financially; the most successful are working and going to school and hustling to feed the children, and then falling asleep in the elevator of the community college,” but they’re still, at least, “in charge.”
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