Salon.com > Amanda Fortini http://www.salon.com Mon, 28 May 2012 00:30:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The Annie Oakley of American politics http://www.salon.com/2009/11/20/sarah_palin_annie_oakley/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/20/sarah_palin_annie_oakley/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:35:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/11/19/sarah_palin_annie_oakley Sarah Palin’s ascent, not unlike Barack Obama’s, is an American story. The hockey mom becomes the mayor who becomes the governor who becomes the national candidate. She’s a folkloric character: Annie Oakley, Horatio Alger and Gatsby in one. Even her florid self-mythologizing is an accepted cultural tradition. She is the girl from the sticks who made it big. She is a pragmatic, can-do feminist who’s convinced, as she told Oprah, that an American woman can have it all but that “some things might have to be put on the back burner.” Say what you want about Palin or her positions (and, in the past, I have), it takes scrappiness and guts to strike back at the old-boys' network that anointed you by publishing a book, so soon after the campaign, detailing your frustrations and disillusionments. We might want to take a long breath before discounting her. As Gwen Ifill recently said on "This Week": “You can not underestimate the degree that women will be drawn to her story.” We don’t hear many real-life fairy-tales of American female success, which makes the few that exist intrinsically compelling.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/20/sarah_palin_annie_oakley/feed/ 80 Little darlings http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/high_glitz_child_pageant_slideshow/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/high_glitz_child_pageant_slideshow/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:11:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/11/08/high_glitz_child_pageant_slideshow Among the many questions raised by photographs of child beauty pageant contestants, there is the question of how we are to view them. Are these images art or exploitation? Creep show or camp? The little faces spackled with makeup, the hair poufed and shellacked, the fake tans, fake teeth (called "flippers," they mask baby teeth), fake nails and, often, fake smiles -- all of it seems so jarring on toddlers and tweens. Looking at these pictures, shot by Los Angeles-based fashion photographer Susan Anderson and recently published in a book called "High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants," you can’t help feeling unsettled. The mind knows these are very young girls, and yet the eerie effect of all the cosmetics and correctives is to create the illusion of child-women far older than their actual years. Several seem to be on the cusp of middle age, as though they should be shaking a martini rather than twirling a baton. The mind keeps mentally adjusting, attempting to square the disjunction between tiny bodies and unnaturally mature faces. “Freaky,” said a man standing back to examine the photos at the Los Angeles opening. “It’s not right."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/high_glitz_child_pageant_slideshow/feed/ 110 Have attitudes toward women gotten worse? http://www.salon.com/2009/10/27/lipman_feminism/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/27/lipman_feminism/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:26:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/10/26/lipman_feminism On Sunday in a New York Times editorial titled "The Mismeasure of Woman," former Portfolio editor in chief Joanne Lipman -- whose magazine folded six months ago, almost to the day -- argued that women have been toiling under the collective delusion of progress. We have fooled ourselves by defining our gains "too narrowly." We have focused on the "numbers at the expense of attitudes." Lately, there has been a lot of noise about the Shriver Report, with its cheerful pronouncement that, in 40 percent of families, women are the primary breadwinners; about the "He-cession" that has hit men harder than women (hardly positive news, but certainly thought-provoking); about Pelosi and Clinton and Sotomayor and the 17 female senators and 74 women in the House. But none of that is indicative of the actual state of the female union, not when (as Lipman points out) Hillary Clinton can still be mocked for her "cankles" and Keith Olbermann can call Michelle Malkin "a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it." "In recent years," writes Lipman, "progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/27/lipman_feminism/feed/ 71 Why Lucinda Rosenfeld wasn’t “blaming the victim” http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/lucinda_rosenfeld_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/lucinda_rosenfeld_2/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/10/19/lucinda_rosenfeld Last Monday, as we have already covered, DoubleX "Friend or Foe" advice columnist Lucinda Rosenfeld (who, full disclosure, I know socially and professionally) angered her readers -- and the blogosphere -- by telling a letter writer who said she was drugged at a concert and later ended up alone in the emergency room that she could not expect her two “best friends” to come to the hospital while she recovered.

The reaction was white-hot and furious. To say people did not agree with Rosenfeld is to put it mildly. Commentators shared stories of going to the hospital with their friends. “I cabbed her over to the ER and waited for her parents to show up,” one man wrote of a woman he didn’t even know, whom he’d found in her underwear in a stairwell, “and I didn’t even think twice about doing it. AND I AM KIND OF AN ASSHOLE.” The question was not open to debate: Every commenter was a good person who would go to the hospital -- no matter what, no questions, no caveats -- and Lucinda Rosenfeld was a shit. She was also a shit for her blame-the-victim stance, which many felt veered uncomfortably close to the sort of “mentality we’re so used to hearing and striking down when it comes to rape,” as Samantha Henig wrote, in an apology of sorts, posted on DoubleX.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/lucinda_rosenfeld_2/feed/ 31 First blood: Introducing “menstrual activism” http://www.salon.com/2009/10/06/menstruation_moment/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/06/menstruation_moment/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/10/06/menstruation_moment Every woman has one. Not what you're thinking -- that too, yes, but I am referring to a menstruation horror story. A bright blood stain blooming on the back of white jeans, a first period that has the audacity to arrive during gym class or one that colors a yellow swimsuit red while you are waterskiing with your grandfather, as happened to Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, the editor of "My Little Red Book." (Back in January, Rebecca Traister wrote a smart piece that talked about Nalebuff's collection of first-time stories, whose contributors include Erica Jong, Gloria Steinem and Jacquelyn Mitchard.) But does the embarrassment many women feel arise from a negative cultural stance toward menstruation? And do we need a concerted effort to address it?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/06/menstruation_moment/feed/ 43 The Facebook divorce http://www.salon.com/2009/09/29/facebook_divorce_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/29/facebook_divorce_2/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:08:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/09/29/facebook_divorce “We are getting a divorce. It has been in the works for a while now,” Lauren, a 36-year-old mother of two who resides in a small town outside of Austin, wrote on her Facebook page at the beginning of July, about her husband of 13 years. (Lauren is not her real name.) She was commenting on a response -- a single, stunned “Huh?” -- to the change in her relationship status. “Lauren went from being ‘married’ to being ‘single,'” read the dry, cold, unsympathetic recitation of fact. The infamous little broken-heart icon, the fixture you hope that, like some medical alert bracelet, you will never have to wear, fluttered up to hang alongside it. This is how life’s big moments unfold on Facebook: Epic emotions are reduced to emoticons.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/09/29/facebook_divorce_2/feed/ 48 The bambino in winter http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/cold_weather_babies/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/cold_weather_babies/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/09/25/cold_weather_babies As if wintertime weren't bleak enough, the future for those born during this season just got darker. Studies have shown that babies with birthdays in December, January or February have poorer health, attain fewer years of education, receive lower wages and die at an earlier age than those with birthdays in the spring, summer or fall. As Kasey Buckles and Daniel M. Hungerman, professors of economics at the University of Notre Dame, point out in "Season of Birth and Later Outcomes: Old Questions, New Answers," a National Bureau of Economics Research paper published in 2008, there exists a solid body of research that has shown season of birth is associated with a host of undesirable outcomes: autism, schizophrenia, dyslexia, shyness, suicide risk and severe menopause. (Currently doing the rounds at various conferences, the paper received a smattering of attention earlier this year and was discussed this week in an article in the Wall Street Journal.) Children who arrived in the winter are, perhaps not surprisingly, even said to be "less lucky" than their peers. Since luck was self-reported, however, it may rather be that winter babies have gloomier outlooks. Maybe all those years of indoor birthday celebrations -- no pool parties, relay races or scavenger hunts -- begin to take a toll.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/cold_weather_babies/feed/ 44 They are cougars, let them roar http://www.salon.com/2009/09/23/cougar_town_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/23/cougar_town_2/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/09/23/cougar_town What’s in a name? Would that which we call a cougar by any other name still be as controversial? With "Cougar Town" debuting tonight on ABC -- a show that Heather Havrilesky has already tarred and feathered, calling it "a comedy that's at once insipid, noxious, offensive, and just plain bad" -- discussion of the trendy term has reached a new pitch. Late last month, the first National Single Cougars Convention was held in Palo Alto, Calif.; it featured a Miss Cougar America Contest, in which one woman was crowned queen of the, um, jungle. And in an article masquerading as a memo in Tuesday's Washington Post, staff writers Monica Hesse and Ellen McCarthy address “all the single ladies of a certain age,” urging them to stop calling themselves cougars. To Gloria Navarro, the newly crowned Miss Cougar America, they write, “Love that spirit, Gloria. But we’re asking it to end. Not the dating of younger men. Please, date the younger men! But using the world ‘cougar’? How ‘bout you don’t.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/09/23/cougar_town_2/feed/ 56 America’s tabloid sweetheart http://www.salon.com/2009/09/17/jennifer_aniston/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/17/jennifer_aniston/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:17:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/09/17/jennifer_aniston Why do we love Jennifer Aniston? It's hard to count the ways.

The woman best remembered as the perky, fluttery Rachel Green on "Friends" has done little of note since the show ended in 2004. The promise of her 2002 performance in Mike White’s "The Good Girl" -- in which she played a supermarket cashier suffocated by her staid life, a kind of modern-day Madame Bovary figure -- was never realized. Instead, one of the most famous actresses of our day has been stuck in a rom-com rut, portraying the same character over and over: quirky, adorable women who are always unlucky in love, the most recent example being Eloise, a florist who falls for a widower self-help guru, in "Love Happens," opening on Friday. Though several of her films have been box-office successes ("Marley & Me," "He’s Just Not That Into You"), they have also been critical flops. In her one meaty role in recent years, as the pothead Olivia in Nicole Holofcener’s "Friends With Money," she was miscast -- too young to play alongside Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack, the one false note in an otherwise on-pitch film. Her gifts as an actress are in no way commensurate with the enormousness of her fame. Her major career accomplishments, to put it bluntly, are a rigorously toned body and a vast constellation of tabloid magazine covers.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/09/17/jennifer_aniston/feed/ 120 Is Diane Sawyer a “newsmommy”? http://www.salon.com/2009/09/04/diane_sawyer_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/04/diane_sawyer_2/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/09/04/diane_sawyer Following the Wednesday announcement that Diane Sawyer would soon occupy the solo anchor seat relinquished by a retiring Charles Gibson on "World News Tonight," commentators were quick to weigh in. There has been talk of the entrenched, possibly apocryphal rivalry between Sawyer and her temperamental opposite, Katie Couric, advice to Sawyer not to take the job, with its aging, diminishing audience and gossip that Gibson is “livid” Sawyer was chosen to replace him. Yet perhaps the strangest response came from the feminist site Feministing, where writer Courtney Martin, after fretting whether Sawyer “would receive the same kind of scrutiny Couric has,” lamented the fact that Sawyer, like Couric, fits into a “newsmommy model.” The networks, writes Martin, apparently select “women who are non-threatening, aka maternal, for the top positions so as not to freak out viewers still not used the idea that women can be assertive, independent, and -- gasp -- childless.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/09/04/diane_sawyer_2/feed/ 16 My evil iPhone http://www.salon.com/2009/08/24/hate_my_iphone/ http://www.salon.com/2009/08/24/hate_my_iphone/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:33:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/08/24/hate_my_iphone Not long ago, I would have confessed, with the shame that some people feel over having had multiple spouses, that I have been the owner of multiple iPhones. As with any bad union, there is a story behind each one's demise. My starter phone lasted for a little more than a year, until the battery got old and the phone, which had never behaved well, really began to act up. The next one wasn't around long: I dropped it; it shattered. My third, a fussbudget sort, got a little bit damp and refused to work. Now, I am on my fourth iPhone, whose screen cracked weeks ago, and which plagues me daily with its many bugs and quirks and connectivity issues. But the thought of yet another trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar ("the Smartass Bar," as one friend calls it) fills me with the sort of deep, skeletal exhaustion and existential dread I might feel were I told I had to attend couples counseling for a fourth go-round. I'd rather not deal with it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/08/24/hate_my_iphone/feed/ 220 Eat pray equivocate http://www.salon.com/2009/08/21/eat_pray_vacillate/ http://www.salon.com/2009/08/21/eat_pray_vacillate/#comments Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:21:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/08/21/eat_pray_vacillate Fairy-tale weddings, searching for Prince Charming, or even for Mr. Big: It all seems so 1990s. These days, it's women, not men, who are reluctant to commit to marriage -- with those who have committed regretting having done so -- and they're writing about it all over the place. Earlier this summer, Sandra Tsing-Loh, in an essay about her divorce, came out against the "companionate marriage" in the Atlantic Monthly. Cristina Nehring blamed such bloodless arrangements for the bankrupt state of romance in "A Vindication of Love." Only the profoundly unhip Caitlin Flanagan defended the institution in Time. (The upshot of her un-sexy argument? It's for the kids.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/08/21/eat_pray_vacillate/feed/ 21 Seeing is deceiving http://www.salon.com/2009/08/05/plastic_surgery_fortini/ http://www.salon.com/2009/08/05/plastic_surgery_fortini/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:06:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/08/05/plastic_surgery_fortini If you thought altering your nose or augmenting your breasts was a private, individual decision, think again. In a paper published in the July issue of the Journal of Evolution & Technology and discussed yesterday on the New York Times "Idea of the Day" blog, doctoral candidate Kristi Scott argues that undergoing cosmetic plastic surgery -- nose jobs, boob jobs, chin augmentation and the like -- allows us to "cheat our naturally predetermined appearances." This is to say, "what we see on the outside is not necessary what we are going to get on the inside, genetically speaking." The problem with this kind of genetic subterfuge boils down, as Social Darwinism always does, to the question of survival of the fittest (or unfittest, as the case may be): "Without these self-identified unwanted physical attributes," Scott writes, "people who otherwise might not have been perceived as desirable mates for procreation" -- the genetic untouchables -- "allow themselves to be perceived as desirable enough to pass on their genes." The genetically flawed but surgically corrected person may mate and reproduce, passing on an "undesirable' attribute" -- small breasts, say, or enormous ears, drooping eyelids or a crooked nose. Without surgery, this person may have been too ugly to attract a partner, and the altered attribute would likely not have been replicated.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/08/05/plastic_surgery_fortini/feed/ 50 Why we can’t stop looking http://www.salon.com/2009/07/24/peep_diaries/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/24/peep_diaries/#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:24:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/07/24/peep_diaries If you, like me, are somewhat private by nature, you are often made uneasy by our exceedingly confessional society, one in which friends upload photos of all things personal — kids, wild weekends, dark adolescent years — tweet their every move, or allow people to track those moves with a handheld device. Last winter, I argued with a close friend about her plan to post an unattractive photo of me on Facebook. I thought it was my prerogative to ask that the photo remain where it was — in her camera. She thought I was being narcissistic and precious, that I should get over myself. (Or, failing that, just “untag” it.) Last fall, I hired a young woman to help me transcribe an interview, the contents of which I’d hoped would remain confidential, and she wrote about it on her blog. Then my mother began a campaign of cyber-stalking, pointing to my Facebook status updates (“Amanda is driving to the desert”) as proof that I had time to come home for a visit. In the age of cyber-expression, privacy has become a near-impossible luxury.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/24/peep_diaries/feed/ 14 Obama’s disaster in denim http://www.salon.com/2009/07/20/mom_jeans/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/20/mom_jeans/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/07/20/mom_jeans Last week, President Obama jumped the shark. Or so you might conclude from a trip through the blogosphere. His teleprompter crashed, creating a clattering reminder that he might not be the natively gifted speaker of his campaign’s mythology; he threw a short, wimpy pitch at the White Sox game, and got the name of the ballpark wrong (“Cominsky Field”), too. But the presidential gaffe that garnered the most attention was his wearing of “mom jeans” in public. “We can finally stop talking about the first lady’s penchant for showing off her toned arms,” wrote Ellen Warren in a widely disseminated Chicago Tribune article (“Was President Barack Obama wearing ‘mom jeans’?”) “and the national conversation can turn to something substantive: her husband’s unflattering, baggy blue jeans.” An article on EW.com was arguably more charitable, or at least less feminizing, calling the pants “dad jeans.” Wrote Tanner Stransky, “I suppose President Obama is indeed a father, so we should allow him such a strike against humanity…But my oh my. I wasn’t ready to see him in such an ill-fitting pair of what look like 501s.” Newsday picked up the story and offered readers a chance to weigh in with an opinion poll: "Mom jeans or not?" “I’m not sure they were ‘Mom’ jeans, but Michelle shouldn’t have allowed this to happen,” reads one option.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/20/mom_jeans/feed/ 36 The fairy godmother fallacy http://www.salon.com/2009/07/13/teen_image/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/13/teen_image/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:14:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/07/13/teen_image Teenage girls, self-conscious creatures since the beginning of time, are taking a distinctly of-the-moment approach to their age-old adolescent woes. They are hiring -- or prevailing upon their anxious, doting parents to hire -- image consultants. According to a recent Washington Post article, those who make a living crafting the self-image of others have seen a sharp rise in clients who are “high-school age” or younger. For these teenage sophisticates, image consultants play the role of sartorial guru: “personal shoppers, closet cullers, and makeup advisers.” It’s like one of those reality-show makeovers, with the teenage client as the object of transformation.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/13/teen_image/feed/ 22 Inside the biggest, weirdest funeral ever http://www.salon.com/2009/07/08/inside_jackson_memorial/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/08/inside_jackson_memorial/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:16:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/07/08/inside_jackson_memorial On a warm, overcast early morning in downtown Los Angeles, the 8,000-plus lucky souls who won tickets to Michael Jackson's memorial donned the requisite wrist gear -- glittery hospital bracelets -- and began to swim through the sea of police officers stationed around the Staples Center. This was not your usual summer-day crowd dressed in T-shirts and flip-flops but a somber bunch shrouded for mourning in black suits and heels and skirts. They had come to pay respects to their hero.

Arriving at the venue, the loose procession began to splinter, with some heading into the building, some signing a graffiti wall set up for the anticipated emotional outpouring and others preening before the network and cable media, which had assembled on a catwalk raised slightly above the pavement.

Though much of the crowd appeared to be middle-aged -- at least three attendees told me they were "the same age as Michael" (that's 50, by the way) -- the streets were filled with plenty of young people who would not have been alive to witness the phenomenon of the Jackson 5 or even "Thriller."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/08/inside_jackson_memorial/feed/ 88 Sarah Palin, one tough mama http://www.salon.com/2009/07/07/palin_motherhood/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/07/palin_motherhood/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/07/07/palin_motherhood

Reuters/Shannon Stapleton

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin hugs her son Trig at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Sept. 3, 2008.

While delivering her bizarre, meandering, apparently self-penned resignation speech this weekend, Sarah Palin stood, as she nearly always had during her ten months in the spotlight, with her family at her side. Even as she articulated -- Palin-style -- her manifestly odd desire to avoid the jet-set antics of most lame-duck governors, there seemed another reason, another five reasons, in evidence: her children.

"This decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life -- my children, where the count was unanimous … well, in response to asking: 'Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children's future from OUTSIDE the governor's office?' It was four 'yes'es and one 'hell yeah!,' " she said in her strange, not-quite-clear idiom. But entirely clear to anyone watching the ongoing Sarah Palin circus is that her family has been almost unremittingly under siege, the butt of countless jokes since she first declared her candidacy. On Saturday, with her brood gathered once again around her, it seemed implicit that she was leaving, at least in part, to protect them.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/07/palin_motherhood/feed/ 202 Boobs, bulimia and breakups http://www.salon.com/2009/07/03/confessional_writing/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/03/confessional_writing/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:18:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/07/03/confessional_writing Have you heard? According to a recent article in the Guardian, there is a “new and very weird” genre of writing on the rise. This is called “female confessional journalism.” To diagnose the troubling trend, writer Hadley Freeman marshals as evidence a Daily Mail article in which the author chronicles the vicissitudes of her fake breasts (the result of botched surgeries and several "encapsulations"), and another article, also from the Daily Mail (a publication Jezebel has cleverly dubbed the “Daily Fail”), in which the author writes with commendable if discomfiting honesty about her pathological obsession with thinness. (Anna N. of Jezebel, in a post praising Freeman’s “very smart piece,” fills out the trend by adding playwright Zoe Lewis’ recent lament at having chosen career over family, and Lori Gottlieb’s now-infamous exhortation to settle for a less-than-perfect man.) “A female journalist describes his or her obsession with her weight/breast/ageing face/food or alcohol problems/inability to have a happy relationship,” writes Freeman. “These are tales of daily woe. It concludes with the writer still sufficiently unhappy to be commissionable for another very similar piece.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/03/confessional_writing/feed/ 51 The Great He-cession http://www.salon.com/2009/06/26/death_macho/ http://www.salon.com/2009/06/26/death_macho/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:27:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/06/26/death_macho What centuries of feminist protest didn't accomplish, the global recession will. So argues Reihan Salam in "The Death of Macho," an article recently in Foreign Policy magazine. Salam writes that today's "Great Recession" has not only done away with "the macho men's club called finance capitalism," but will -- with 80 percent of domestic job losses sustained by men, and, by the end of 2009, 28 million men out of work worldwide -- also result in "a collective crisis for millions of working men across the globe." This "he-session," as economists and bloggers have begun to call it, has created a backlash that will result in nothing less than a new world order: one in which electorates will respond by voting women into power, male-dominated fields like construction and manufacturing will shrink, and predominantly female sectors -- education, healthcare, social services -- will expand. Men, unemployed and undereducated, will be forced to adapt to this woman-friendly world, or they will end up "surly, lonely, and hard-drinking" -- or worse, "historically obsolete." Bleak, indeed. Get ready, Salam warns, for the death of macho.

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