Is Macho Really Dying? Our Jury Is Out

Foreign Policy writer Reihan Salam argues in The Death of Macho: “The great shift of power from males to females is likely to be dramatically accelerated by the economic crisis, as more people realize that the aggressive, risk-seeking behavior that has enabled men to entrench their power—the cult of macho—has now proven destructive and unsustainable in a globalized world.”

In this densely worded, long article Salam argues that men can adapt or fight an evolving reality. On a global level, we may see North American and Western European adapting and Russian and Middle Eastern Men resisting, in Salam’s vision.

Hard-hitting language is short on pleasantries in this look at gender relations of the future. The Death of Macho tells us that the demise of macho is not a cyclical correction. Tempting, but wrong, according to Salam. Refusing to paint a rosy picture of the coming years, Salam ends his detailed treatise on the future of men:

This is not to say that women and men will fight each other across armed barricades. The conflict will take a subtler form, and the main battlefield will be hearts and minds. But make no mistake: The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender. We have no precedent for a world after the death of macho. But we can expect the transition to be wrenching, uneven, and possibly very violent. A