Cathy Young Asks if The Patriarchy is Dead
And does Feminism deserve to survive it?
When writer Hanna Rosin recently published an article on Slate.com stating that "the patriarchy is dead," much of the feminist response amounted to "burn the heretic!" New Republic editor and blogger Nora Caplan-Bricker accused Rosin of "mansplaining"—the femosphere's pejorative term for supposedly obtuse and arrogant male arguments on gender, apparently now also applied to female dissent—and being the patriarchy's unwitting tool. Ironically, the feminist tendency to shoot the bringer of good news was the very topic of Rosin's essay, adapted from the new epilogue to the paperback edition of her book, The End of Men. With a view of the uproar, Cathy Young asks if, in fact, patriarchy is dead, and if feminism deserves to survive it.
