Forex Tutorial: What is Forex Trading?

What Is Forex? The foreign exchange market is the "place" where currencies are traded. Currencies are important to most people around the world, whether they realize it or not, because currencies need to be exchanged in order to conduct foreign trade and business. If you are living in the U.S. and want to buy cheese from France, either you or the company that you buy the cheese from has to pay the French for the cheese in euros (EUR). This means that the U.S. importer would have to exchange the equivalent value of U.S. dollars (USD) into euros. The same goes for traveling. A French tourist in Egypt can't pay in euros to see the pyramids because it's not the locally accepted currency. As such, the tourist has to exchange the euros for the local currency, in this case the Egyptian pound, at the current exchange rate.

 The need to exchange currencies is the primary reason why the forex market is the largest, most liquid financial market in the world. It dwarfs other markets in size, even the stock market, with an average traded value of around U.S. $2,000 billion per day. (The total volume changes all the time, but as of August 2012, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) reported that the forex market traded in excess of U.S. $4.9 trillion per day.) One unique aspect of this international market is that there is no central marketplace for foreign exchange. Rather, currency trading is conducted electronically over-the-counter (OTC), which means that all transactions occur via computer networks between traders around the world, rather than on one centralized exchange. The market is open 24 hours a day, five and a half days a week, and currencies are traded worldwide in the major financial centers of London, New York, Tokyo, Zurich, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Singapore, Paris and Sydney - across almost every time zone. This means that when the trading day in the U.S. ends, the forex market begins anew in Tokyo and Hong Kong. As such, the forex market can be extremely active any time of the day, with price quotes changing constantly. Spot Market and the Forwards and Futures Markets There are actually three ways that institutions, corporations and individuals trade forex: the spot market, the forwards market and the futures market.

The forex trading in the spot market always has been the largest market because it is the "underlying" real asset that the forwards and futures markets are based on. In the past, the futures market was the most popular venue for traders because it was available to individual investors for a longer period of time. However, with the advent of electronic trading, the spot market has witnessed a huge surge in activity and now surpasses the futures market as the preferred trading market for individual investors and speculators. When people refer to the forex market, they usually are referring to the spot market. The forwards and futures markets tend to be more popular with companies that need to hedge their foreign exchange risks out to a specific date in the future. What is the spot market? More specifically, the spot market is where currencies are bought and sold according to the current price. That price, determined by supply and demand, is a reflection of many things, including current interest rates, economic performance, sentiment towards ongoing political situations (both locally and internationally), as well as the perception of the future performance of one currency against another. When a deal is finalized, this is known as a "spot deal". It is a bilateral transaction by which one party delivers an agreed-upon currency amount to the counter party and receives a specified amount of another currency at the agreed-upon exchange rate value.

After a position is closed, the settlement is in cash. Although the spot market is commonly known as one that deals with transactions in the present (rather than the future), these trades actually take two days for settlement. What are the forwards and futures markets? Unlike the spot market, the forwards and futures markets do not trade actual currencies. Instead they deal in contracts that represent claims to a certain currency type, a specific price per unit and a future date for settlement. In the forwards market, contracts are bought and sold OTC between two parties, who determine the terms of the agreement between themselves. In the futures market, futures contracts are bought and sold based upon a standard size and settlement date on public commodities markets, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. In the U.S., the National Futures Association regulates the futures market.

Futures contracts have specific details, including the number of units being traded, delivery and settlement dates, and minimum price increments that cannot be customized. The exchange acts as a counterpart to the trader, providing clearance and settlement. Both types of contracts are binding and are typically settled for cash for the exchange in question upon expiry, although contracts can also be bought and sold before they expire. The forwards and futures markets can offer protection against risk when trading currencies. Usually, big international corporations use these markets in order to hedge against future exchange rate fluctuations, but speculators take part in these markets as well. (For a more in-depth introduction to futures, see Futures Fundamentals.) Note that you'll see the terms: FX, forex, foreign-exchange market and currency market. These terms are synonymous and all refer to the forex market.

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How to choose a forex broker?

With almost a $4 trillion average daily turnover in the global foreign exchange market and many technical and fundamental techniques to help you predict the market, forex is a great way to make money in the comfort of your own home. But with hundreds of forex brokers out there how to you know which one to choose? Here are some key points you should consider: MT4 and Streamster Platforms Platforms Trading forex online is performed through a platform. One of the most internationally recognized and widely used platforms is MetaTrader 4 (known as MT4). MT4 allows many currency pairs, indexes, commodities and other futures to be traded, and assist traders by performing technical analysis at the click of a button. Trade on mobile, tablet and PC However if you are new to trading then a simplified platform may be more useful. AGEAprovides an excellent platform, Streamster. Like MT4, Streamster beside forex offers many CFDs (indexes, commodities) but has the advantage of being more user friendly, requires no deposit (some company require thousands of dollars in deposits to use MT4) and you get a $5 reward to trade with immediately. Furthermore, you can trade using your android phone or tablet PC! No deposit and$5 free reward Deposits (Investment needed) As mentioned above, many companies require deposits when opening a live trading account. The reason for this is to protect the Company if you start losing heavily. Most MT4 accounts require a deposit of around $500. At AGEA, however, you can open an MT4 account from as little as $10! There are three different levels of accounts; even the top account – Standard – requires only a $100 deposit. And remember Streamster requires no deposit! Charges Most likely you are trading not for fun but to make money. The higher you’re trading costs are, the harder it will be for you to make profit, so charges are a key factor when choosing a broker. Forex brokers generally only charge commission on Straight-Through-Processing (STP) accounts. This is where your trade is passed onto another broker and the introducing broker just receives a commission.

AGEA has institution-level low spreads However on other accounts (such as AGEA’sStreamster, MT4 Cent and MT4 Standard) no commissions are charged. One of the key areas, therefore, that differentiates brokers is the spreads. Spreads are the different between the bid and ask price of an instrument. Let say you buy an instrument and sell at exactly the same ask price, you would still make a small loss as the broker will make the bid price slightly lower than the ask price. AGEA has institution-level low spreads on MT4 because we do not add any commission or mark-ups to the prime brokerage rates, and we choose the brokerage with the lowest spreads. Virtual Desk It is important that you practice trading before you go live, especially if you are new to trading. Most brokers will provide you with a virtual desk with virtual money for you to trade with, so you get to trade without the risk of losing money. But, of course, you also can’t make money just by trading on the virtual desk – except at AGEA! Win $100 trading on AGEA’s Virtual Desk – No investment required! AGEA runs a competition which rewards the trader who makes the highest virtual profit on the virtual Streamster desk. The reward is $100 and can be used to trade on your live desk or withdrawn. All traders receive $5 when they open an account with AGEA to trade on the live desk, so again you could make money without investing any! 24 hour, multilingual support Support Whether you are technology pro or not, you may sometimes need some help. AGEA has a dedicated, high quality, 24 hour, multilingual online support channels. You can chat directly with one of their assistants at any time and they will be sure to help you in any way they can. Conclusion If you are serious about making money then you need to reduce your costs and make sure you have the right tools to learn and to trade. AGEA offers a multitude of platform accounts, learning tools, and full time support all at institutionally low prices! New to forex? Learn more at AGEA

The End of Men

EARLIER THIS YEAR, WOMEN BECAME THE MAJORITY OF THE WORKFORCE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN U.S. HISTORY. MOST MANAGERS ARE NOW WOMEN TOO. AND FOR EVERY TWO MEN WHO GET A COLLEGE DEGREE THIS YEAR, THREE WOMEN WILL DO THE SAME. FOR YEARS, WOMEN’S PROGRESS HAS BEEN CAST AS A STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY. BUT WHAT IF EQUALITY ISN’T THE END POINT? WHAT IF MODERN, POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY IS SIMPLY BETTER SUITED TO WOMEN? A REPORT ON THE UNPRECEDENTED ROLE REVERSAL NOW UNDER WAY— AND ITS VAST CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES

By Hanna Rosin

IN THE 1970s the biologist Ronald Ericsson came up with a way to separate sperm carrying the male-producing Y chromosome from those carrying the X. He sent the two kinds of sperm swimming down a glass tube through ever-thicker albumin barriers. The sperm with the X chromosome had a larger head and a longer tail, and so, he figured, they would get bogged down in the viscous liquid. The sperm with the Y chromosome were leaner and faster and could swim down to the bottom of the tube more efficiently. Ericsson had grown up on a ranch in South Dakota, where he’d developed an Old West, cowboy swagger. The process, he said, was like “cutting out cattle at the gate.” The cattle left flailing behind the gate were of course the X’s, which seemed to please him. He would sometimes demonstrate the process using cartilage from a bull’s penis as a pointer.

In the late 1970s, Ericsson leased the method to clinics around the U.S., calling it the first scientifically proven method for choosing the sex of a child. Instead of a lab coat, he wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, and doled out his version of cowboy poetry. (People magazine once suggested a TV miniseries based on his life called Cowboy in the Lab.) The right prescription for life, he would say, was “breakfast at five-thirty, on the saddle by six, no room for Mr. Limp Wrist.” In 1979, he loaned out his ranch as the backdrop for the iconic “Marlboro Country” ads because he believed in the campaign’s central image—“a guy riding on his horse along the river, no bureaucrats, no lawyers,” he recalled when I spoke to him this spring. “He’s the boss.” (The photographers took some 6,500 pictures, a pictorial record of the frontier that Ericsson still takes great pride in.)

Feminists of the era did not take kindly to Ericsson and his Marlboro Man veneer. To them, the lab cowboy and his sperminator portended a dystopia of mass-produced boys. “You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” Roberta Steinbacher, a nun-turned-social-psychologist, said in a 1984People profile of Ericsson. “There’s no question that there exists a universal preference for sons.” Steinbacher went on to complain about women becoming locked in as “second-class citizens” while men continued to dominate positions of control and influence. “I think women have to ask themselves, ‘Where does this stop?’” she said. “A lot of us wouldn’t be here right now if these practices had been in effect years ago.”

Ericsson, now 74, laughed when I read him these quotes from his old antagonist. Seldom has it been so easy to prove a dire prediction wrong. In the ’90s, when Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1. Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls. But the picture from the doctor’s office unambiguously does. A newer method for sperm selection, calledMicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.

Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation,he is no longer the boss. “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,” he says—a change the MicroSort spokespeople I met with also mentioned. At first, Ericsson says, women who called his clinics would apologize and shyly explain that they already had two boys. “Now they just call and [say] outright, ‘I want a girl.’ These mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn’t have, brighter than their sons, even, so why wouldn’t you choose a girl?”

Why wouldn’t you choose a girl? That such a statement should be so casually uttered by an old cowboy like Ericsson—or by anyone, for that matter—is monumental. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions. Men in ancient Greece tied off their left testicle in an effort to produce male heirs; women have killed themselves (or been killed) for failing to bear sons. In her iconic 1949 book, TheSecond Sex, the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir suggested that women so detested their own “feminine condition” that they regarded their newborn daughters with irritation and disgust. Now the centuries-old preference for sons is eroding—or even reversing. “Women of our generation want daughters precisely because we like who we are,” breezes one woman in Cookie magazine. Even Ericsson, the stubborn old goat, can sigh and mark the passing of an era. “Did male dominance exist? Of course it existed. But it seems to be gone now. And the era of the firstborn son is totally gone.”

Ericsson’s extended family is as good an illustration of the rapidly shifting landscape as any other. His 26-year-old granddaughter—“tall, slender, brighter than hell, with a take-no-prisoners personality”—is a biochemist and works on genetic sequencing. His niece studied civil engineering at the University of Southern California. His grandsons, he says, are bright and handsome, but in school “their eyes glaze over. I have to tell ’em: ‘Just don’t screw up and crash your pickup truck and get some girl pregnant and ruin your life.’” Recently Ericsson joked with the old boys at his elementary-school reunion that he was going to have a sex-change operation. “Women live longer than men. They do better in this economy. More of ’em graduate from college. They go into space and do everything men do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way—these females are going to leave us males in the dust.”

Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed. Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other. And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide. Over several centuries, South Korea, for instance, constructed one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world. Many wives who failed to produce male heirs were abused and treated as domestic servants; some families prayed to spirits to kill off girl children. Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, the government embraced an industrial revolution and encouraged women to enter the labor force. Women moved to the city and went to college. They advanced rapidly, from industrial jobs to clerical jobs to professional work. The traditional order began to crumble soon after. In 1990, the country’s laws were revised so that women could keep custody of their children after a divorce and inherit property. In 2005, the court ruled that women could register children under their own names. As recently as 1985, about half of all women in a national survey said they “must have a son.” That percentage fell slowly until 1991 and then plummeted to just over 15 percent by 2003. Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.” The same shift is now beginning in other rapidly industrializing countries such as India and China.

Up to a point, the reasons behind this shift are obvious. As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest. And because geopolitics and global culture are, ultimately, Darwinian, other societies either follow suit or end up marginalized. In 2006, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development devised the Gender, Institutions and Development Database, which measures the economic and political power of women in 162 countries. With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success. Aid agencies have started to recognize this relationship and have pushed to institute political quotas in about 100 countries, essentially forcing women into power in an effort to improve those countries’ fortunes. In some war-torn states, women are stepping in as a sort of maternal rescue team. Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, portrayed her country as a sick child in need of her care during her campaign five years ago. Postgenocide Rwanda elected to heal itself by becoming the first country with a majority of women in parliament.

In feminist circles, these social, political, and economic changes are always cast as a slow, arduous form of catch-up in a continuing struggle for female equality. But in the U.S., the world’s most advanced economy, something much more remarkable seems to be happening. American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye.

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.

Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.

The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. Last year, Iceland elected Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of state, who campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, and who vowed to end the “age of testosterone.”

Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment. Dozens of college women I interviewed for this story assumed that they very well might be the ones working while their husbands stayed at home, either looking for work or minding the children. Guys, one senior remarked to me, “are the new ball and chain.” It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: in the long view, the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.

In his final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the changing gender dynamics of Béarn, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The eldest sons once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Béarn. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city. They occasionally returned for the traditional balls, but the men who awaited them had lost their prestige and become unmarriageable. This is the image that keeps recurring to me, one that Bourdieu describes in his book: at the bachelors’ ball, the men, self-conscious about their diminished status, stand stiffly, their hands by their sides, as the women twirl away.

The role reversal that’s under way between American men and women shows up most obviously and painfully in the working class. In recent years, male support groups have sprung up throughout the Rust Belt and in other places where the postindustrial economy has turned traditional family roles upside down. Some groups help men cope with unemployment, and others help them reconnect with their alienated families. Mustafaa El-Scari, a teacher and social worker, leads some of these groups in Kansas City. El-Scari has studied the sociology of men and boys set adrift, and he considers it his special gift to get them to open up and reflect on their new condition. The day I visited one of his classes, earlier this year, he was facing a particularly resistant crowd.

None of the 30 or so men sitting in a classroom at a downtown Kansas City school have come for voluntary adult enrichment. Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal. This week’s lesson, from a workbook called Quenching the Father Thirst, was supposed to involve writing a letter to a hypothetical estranged 14-year-old daughter named Crystal, whose father left her when she was a baby. But El-Scari has his own idea about how to get through to this barely awake, skeptical crew, and letters to Crystal have nothing to do with it.

Like them, he explains, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical “white picket fence”—one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. “Well, that check bounced a long time ago,” he says. “Let’s see,” he continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. “But you ain’t none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she’ll call 911. How does that make you feel? You’re supposed to be the authority, and she says, ‘Get out of the house, bitch.’ She’s calling you ‘bitch’!”

The men are black and white, their ages ranging from about 20 to 40. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to. Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical. “Who’s doing what?” he asks them. “What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It’s toxic, and poisonous, and it’s setting us up for failure.” He writes on the board: $85,000. “This is her salary.” Then: $12,000. “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?” A murmur rises. “That’s right. She’s the man.”

Judging by the men I spoke with afterward, El-Scari seemed to have pegged his audience perfectly. Darren Henderson was making $33 an hour laying sheet metal, until the real-estate crisis hit and he lost his job. Then he lost his duplex—“there’s my little piece of the American dream”—then his car. And then he fell behind on his child-support payments. “They make it like I’m just sitting around,” he said, “but I’m not.” As proof of his efforts, he took out a new commercial driver’s permit and a bartending license, and then threw them down on the ground like jokers, for all the use they’d been. His daughter’s mother had a $50,000-a-year job and was getting her master’s degree in social work. He’d just signed up for food stamps, which is just about the only social-welfare program a man can easily access. Recently she’d seen him waiting at the bus stop. “Looked me in the eye,” he recalled, “and just drove on by.”

The men in that room, almost without exception, were casualties of the end of the manufacturing era. Most of them had continued to work with their hands even as demand for manual labor was declining. Since 2000, manufacturing has lost almost 6 million jobs, more than a third of its total workforce, and has taken in few young workers. The housing bubble masked this new reality for a while, creating work in construction and related industries. Many of the men I spoke with had worked as electricians or builders; one had been a successful real-estate agent. Now those jobs are gone too. Henderson spent his days shuttling between unemployment offices and job interviews, wondering what his daughter might be doing at any given moment. In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.

Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation. Many of the new jobs, says Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “replace the things that women used to do in the home for free.” None is especially high-paying. But the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men.

The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits. Theoretically, there is no reason men should not be qualified. But they have proved remarkably unable to adapt. Over the course of the past century, feminism has pushed women to do things once considered against their nature—first enter the workforce as singles, then continue to work while married, then work even with small children at home. Many professions that started out as the province of men are now filled mostly with women—secretary and teacher come to mind. Yet I’m not aware of any that have gone the opposite way. Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success. Teaching schools, eager to recruit male role models, are having a similarly hard time. The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men have shied away from some careers women have entered. As Jessica Grose wrote in Slate, men seem “fixed in cultural aspic.” And with each passing day, they lag further behind.

As we recover from the Great Recession, some traditionally male jobs will return—men are almost always harder-hit than women in economic downturns because construction and manufacturing are more cyclical than service industries—but that won’t change the long-term trend. When we look back on this period, argues Jamie Ladge, a business professor at Northeastern University, we will see it as a “turning point for women in the workforce.”

The economic and cultural power shift from men to women would be hugely significant even if it never extended beyond working-class America. But women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast. A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood. Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the 1970s.

Office work has been steadily adapting to women—and in turn being reshaped by them—for 30 years or more. Joel Garreau picks up on this phenomenon in his 1991 book, Edge City, which explores the rise of suburbs that are home to giant swaths of office space along with the usual houses and malls. Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringe of the old urban areas.” As Garreau chronicles the rise of suburban office parks, he places special emphasis on 1978, the peak year for women entering the workforce. When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable. The 1999 movie Office Space was maybe the first to capture how alien and dispiriting the office park can be for men. Disgusted by their jobs and their boss, Peter and his two friends embezzle money and start sleeping through their alarm clocks. At the movie’s end, a male co-worker burns down the office park, and Peter abandons desk work for a job in construction.

Near the top of the jobs pyramid, of course, the upward march of women stalls. Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities, and most of us can tick off their names just from occasionally reading the business pages: Meg Whitman at eBay, Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, Anne Mulcahy and Ursula Burns at Xerox, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo; the accomplishment is considered so extraordinary that Whitman and Fiorina are using it as the basis for political campaigns. Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and the number has never risen much above that.

But even the way this issue is now framed reveals that men’s hold on power in elite circles may be loosening. In business circles, the lack of women at the top is described as a “brain drain” and a crisis of “talent retention.” And while female CEOs may be rare in America’s largest companies, they are highly prized: last year, they outearned their male counterparts by 43 percent, on average, and received bigger raises.

Even around the delicate question of working mothers, the terms of the conversation are shifting. Last year, in a story about breast-feeding, I complained about how the early years of child rearing keep women out of power positions. But the term mommy track is slowly morphing into the gender-neutralflex time, reflecting changes in the workforce. For recent college graduates of both sexes, flexible arrangements are at the top of the list of workplace demands, according to a study published last year in the Harvard Business Review. And companies eager to attract and retain talented workers and managers are responding. The consulting firm Deloitte, for instance, started what’s now considered the model program, called Mass Career Customization, which allows employees to adjust their hours depending on their life stage. The program, Deloitte’s Web site explains, solves “a complex issue—one that can no longer be classified as a woman’s issue.”

“Women are knocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when their talents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day,” writes David Gergen in the introduction toEnlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership. What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. But psychological research has complicated this picture. In lab studies that simulate negotiations, men and women are just about equally assertive and competitive, with slight variations. Men tend to assert themselves in a controlling manner, while women tend to take into account the rights of others, but both styles are equally effective, write the psychologists Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, in their 2007 book, Through the Labyrinth.

Over the years, researchers have sometimes exaggerated these differences and described the particular talents of women in crude gender stereotypes: women as more empathetic, as better consensus-seekers and better lateral thinkers; women as bringing a superior moral sensibility to bear on a cutthroat business world. In the ’90s, this field of feminist business theory seemed to be forcing the point. But after the latest financial crisis, these ideas have more resonance. Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.

We don’t yet know with certainty whether testosterone strongly influences business decision-making. But the perception of the ideal business leader is starting to shift. The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered hidebound. The new model is sometimes called “post-heroic,” or “transformational” in the words of the historian and leadership expert James MacGregor Burns. The aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative. The model is not explicitly defined as feminist, but it echoes literature about male-female differences. A program at Columbia Business School, for example, teaches sensitive leadership and social intelligence, including better reading of facial expressions and body language. “We never explicitly say, ‘Develop your feminine side,’ but it’s clear that’s what we’re advocating,” says Jamie Ladge.

A 2008 study attempted to quantify the effect of this more-feminine management style. Researchers at Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland analyzed data on the top 1,500 U.S. companies from 1992 to 2006 to determine the relationship between firm performance and female participation in senior management. Firms that had women in top positions performed better, and this was especially true if the firm pursued what the researchers called an “innovation intensive strategy,” in which, they argued, “creativity and collaboration may be especially important”—an apt description of the future economy.

It could be that women boost corporate performance, or it could be that better-performing firms have the luxury of recruiting and keeping high-potential women. But the association is clear: innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery.

IF YOU REALLY want to see where the world is headed, of course, looking at the current workforce can get you only so far. To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools, where a quiet revolution is under way. More than ever, college is the gateway to economic success, a necessary precondition for moving into the upper-middle class—and increasingly even the middle class. It’s this broad, striving middle class that defines our society. And demographically, we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by women.

We’ve all heard about the collegiate gender gap. But the implications of that gap have not yet been fully digested. Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. “One would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.”

This spring, I visited a few schools around Kansas City to get a feel for the gender dynamics of higher education. I started at the downtown campus of Metropolitan Community College. Metropolitan is the kind of place where people go to learn practical job skills and keep current with the changing economy, and as in most community colleges these days, men were conspicuously absent. One afternoon, in the basement cafeteria of a nearly windowless brick building, several women were trying to keep their eyes on their biology textbook and ignore the text messages from their babysitters. Another crew was outside the ladies’ room, braiding each other’s hair. One woman, still in her medical-assistant scrubs, looked like she was about to fall asleep in the elevator between the first and fourth floors.

When Bernard Franklin took over as campus president in 2005, he looked around and told his staff early on that their new priority was to “recruit more boys.” He set up mentoring programs and men-only study groups and student associations. He made a special effort to bond with male students, who liked to call him “Suit.” “It upset some of my feminists,” he recalls. Yet, a few years later, the tidal wave of women continues to wash through the school—they now make up about 70 percent of its students. They come to train to be nurses and teachers—African American women, usually a few years older than traditional college students, and lately, working-class white women from the suburbs seeking a cheap way to earn a credential. As for the men? Well, little has changed. “I recall one guy who was really smart,” one of the school’s counselors told me. “But he was reading at a sixth-grade level and felt embarrassed in front of the women. He had to hide his books from his friends, who would tease him when he studied. Then came the excuses. ‘It’s spring, gotta play ball.’ ‘It’s winter, too cold.’ He didn’t make it.”

It makes some economic sense that women attend community colleges—and in fact, all colleges—in greater numbers than men. Women ages 25 to 34 with only a high-school diploma currently have a median income of $25,474, while men in the same position earn $32,469. But it makes sense only up to a point. The well-paid lifetime union job has been disappearing for at least 30 years. Kansas City, for example, has shifted from steel manufacturing to pharmaceuticals and information technologies. “The economy isn’t as friendly to men as it once was,” says Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education. “You would think men and women would go to these colleges at the same rate.” But they don’t.

In 2005, King’s group conducted a survey of lower-income adults in college. Men, it turned out, had a harder time committing to school, even when they desperately needed to retool. They tended to start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust. Mothers going back to school described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner.

The student gender gap started to feel like a crisis to some people in higher-education circles in the mid-2000s, when it began showing up not just in community and liberal-arts colleges but in the flagship public universities—the UCs and the SUNYs and the UNCs. Like many of those schools, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, a full research university with more than 13,000 students, is now tipping toward 60 percent women, a level many admissions officers worry could permanently shift the atmosphere and reputation of a school. In February, I visited with Ashley Burress, UMKC’s student-body president. (The other three student-government officers this school year were also women.) Burress, a cute, short, African American 24-year-old grad student who is getting a doctor-of-pharmacy degree, had many of the same complaints I heard from other young women. Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other’s rooms, while girls crowd the study hall. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away. “In 2012, I will be Dr. Burress,” she said. “Will I have to deal with guys who don’t even have a bachelor’s degree? I would like to date, but I’m putting myself in a really small pool.”

UMKC is a working- and middle-class school—the kind of place where traditional sex roles might not be anathema. Yet as I talked to students this spring, I realized how much the basic expectations for men and women had shifted. Many of the women’s mothers had established their careers later in life, sometimes after a divorce, and they had urged their daughters to get to their own careers more quickly. They would be a campus of Tracy Flicks, except that they seemed neither especially brittle nor secretly falling apart.

Victoria, Michelle, and Erin are sorority sisters. Victoria’s mom is a part-time bartender at a hotel. Victoria is a biology major and wants to be a surgeon; soon she’ll apply to a bunch of medical schools. She doesn’t want kids for a while, because she knows she’ll “be at the hospital, like, 100 hours a week,” and when she does have kids, well, she’ll “be the hotshot surgeon, and he”—a nameless he—“will be at home playing with the kiddies.”

Michelle, a self-described “perfectionist,” also has her life mapped out. She’s a psychology major and wants to be a family therapist. After college, she will apply to grad school and look for internships. She is well aware of the career-counseling resources on campus. And her fiancé?

 MICHELLE: He’s changed majors, like, 16 times. Last week he wanted to be a dentist. This week it’s environmental science.

ERIN: Did he switch again this week? When you guys have kids, he’ll definitely stay home. Seriously, what does he want to do?

MICHELLE: It depends on the day of the week. Remember last year? It was bio. It really is a joke. But it’s not. It’s funny, but it’s not.

Among traditional college students from the highest-income families, the gender gap pretty much disappears. But the story is not so simple. Wealthier students tend to go to elite private schools, and elite private schools live by their own rules. Quietly, they’ve been opening up a new frontier in affirmative action, with boys playing the role of the underprivileged applicants needing an extra boost. In 2003, a study by the economists Sandy Baum and Eban Goodstein found that among selective liberal-arts schools, being male raises the chance of college acceptance by 6.5 to 9 percentage points. Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has voted to investigate what some academics have described as the “open secret” that private schools “are discriminating in admissions in order to maintain what they regard as an appropriate gender balance.”

Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, in Ohio, let this secret out in a 2006 New York Times op-ed. Gender balance, she wrote back then, is the elephant in the room. And today, she told me, the problem hasn’t gone away. A typical female applicant, she said, manages the process herself—lines up the interviews, sets up a campus visit, requests a visit with faculty members. But the college has seen more than one male applicant “sit back on the couch, sometimes with their eyes closed, while their mom tells them where to go and what to do. Sometimes we say, ‘What a nice essay his mom wrote,’” she said, in that funny-but-not vein.

To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.” At times Delahunty has become so worried about “overeducated females” and “undereducated males” that she jokes she is getting conspiratorial. She once called her sister, a pediatrician, to vet her latest theory: “Maybe these boys are genetically like canaries in a coal mine, absorbing so many toxins and bad things in the environment that their DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.”

Clearly, some percentage of boys are just temperamentally unsuited to college, at least at age 18 or 20, but without it, they have a harder time finding their place these days. “Forty years ago, 30 years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.”

Since the 1980s, as women have flooded colleges, male enrollment has grown far more slowly. And the disparities start before college. Throughout the ’90s, various authors and researchers agonized over why boys seemed to be failing at every level of education, from elementary school on up, and identified various culprits: a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers (Christina Hoff Sommers); different brain chemistry (Michael Gurian); a demanding, verbally focused curriculum that ignored boys’ interests (Richard Whitmire). But again, it’s not all that clear that boys have become more dysfunctional—or have changed in any way. What’s clear is that schools, like the economy, now value the self-control, focus, and verbal aptitude that seem to come more easily to young girls.

Researchers have suggested any number of solutions. A movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys. Some people think that boys should be able to walk around in class, or take more time on tests, or have tests and books that cater to their interests. In their desperation to reach out to boys, some colleges have formed football teams and started engineering programs. Most of these special accommodations sound very much like the kind of affirmative action proposed for women over the years—which in itself is an alarming flip.

Whether boys have changed or not, we are well past the time to start trying some experiments. It is fabulous to see girls and young women poised for success in the coming years. But allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men’s-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge. Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat.

WHAT WOULD A SOCIETY in which women are on top look like? We already have an inkling. This is the first time that the cohort of Americans ages 30 to 44 has more college-educated women than college-educated men, and the effects are upsetting the traditional Cleaver-family dynamics. In 1970, women contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2 percent, and four in 10 mothers—many of them single mothers—are the primary breadwinners in their families. The whole question of whether mothers should work is moot, argues Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “because they just do. This idealized family—he works, she stays home—hardly exists anymore.”

The terms of marriage have changed radically since 1970. Typically, women’s income has been the main factor in determining whether a family moves up the class ladder or stays stagnant. And increasing numbers of women—unable to find men with a similar income and education—are forgoing marriage altogether. In 1970, 84 percent of women ages 30 to 44 were married; now 60 percent are. In 2007, among American women without a high-school diploma, 43 percent were married. And yet, for all the hand-wringing over the lonely spinster, the real loser in society—the only one to have made just slight financial gains since the 1970s—is the single man, whether poor or rich, college-educated or not. Hens rejoice; it’s the bachelor party that’s over.

The sociologist Kathryn Edin spent five years talking with low-income mothers in the inner suburbs of Philadelphia. Many of these neighborhoods, she found, had turned into matriarchies, with women making all the decisions and dictating what the men should and should not do. “I think something feminists have missed,” Edin told me, “is how much power women have” when they’re not bound by marriage. The women, she explained, “make every important decision”—whether to have a baby, how to raise it, where to live. “It’s definitely ‘my way or the highway,’” she said. “Thirty years ago, cultural norms were such that the fathers might have said, ‘Great, catch me if you can.’ Now they are desperate to father, but they are pessimistic about whether they can meet her expectations.” The women don’t want them as husbands, and they have no steady income to provide. So what do they have?

“Nothing,” Edin says. “They have nothing. The men were just annihilated in the recession of the ’90s, and things never got better. Now it’s just awful.”

The situation today is not, as Edin likes to say, a “feminist nirvana.” The phenomenon of children being born to unmarried parents “has spread to barrios and trailer parks and rural areas and small towns,” Edin says, and it is creeping up the class ladder. After staying steady for a while, the portion of American children born to unmarried parents jumped to 40 percent in the past few years. Many of their mothers 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.

Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, the head of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project.

Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men. But Edin thinks the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach. “I want that white-picket-fence dream,” one woman told Edin, and the men she knew just didn’t measure up, so she had become her own one-woman mother/father/nurturer/provider. The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African Americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare.

As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”

American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.” The American male novelist, meanwhile, has lost his mojo and entirely given up on sex as a way for his characters to assert macho dominance, Katie Roiphe explains in her essay “The Naked and the Conflicted.” Instead, she writes, “the current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.”

At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.” Up in the Air, a movie set against the backdrop of recession-era layoffs, hammers home its point about the shattered ego of the American man. A character played by George Clooney is called too old to be attractive by his younger female colleague and is later rejected by an older woman whom he falls in love with after she sleeps with him—and who turns out to be married. George Clooney! If the sexiest man alive can get twice rejected (and sexually played) in a movie, what hope is there for anyone else? The message to American men is summarized by the title of a recent offering from the romantic-comedy mill: She’s Out of My League.

In fact, the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980s, and no one knows why. High-profile female killers have been showing up regularly in the news: Amy Bishop, the homicidal Alabama professor; Jihad Jane and her sidekick, Jihad Jamie; the latest generation of Black Widows, responsible for suicide bombings in Russia. In Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, the traditional political wife is rewritten as a cold-blooded killer at the heart of an evil conspiracy. In her recent videoTelephone, Lady Gaga, with her infallible radar for the cultural edge, rewrites Thelma and Louise as a story not about elusive female empowerment but about sheer, ruthless power. Instead of killing themselves, she and her girlfriend (played by Beyoncé) kill a bad boyfriend and random others in a homicidal spree and then escape in their yellow pickup truck, Gaga bragging, “We did it, Honey B.”

The Marlboro Man, meanwhile, master of wild beast and wild country, seems too far-fetched and preposterous even for advertising. His modern equivalents are the stunted men in the Dodge Charger ad that ran during this year’s Super Bowl in February. Of all the days in the year, one might think, Super Bowl Sunday should be the one most dedicated to the cinematic celebration of macho. The men in Super Bowl ads should be throwing balls and racing motorcycles and doing whatever it is men imagine they could do all day if only women were not around to restrain them.

Instead, four men stare into the camera, unsmiling, not moving except for tiny blinks and sways. They look like they’ve been tranquilized, like they can barely hold themselves up against the breeze. Their lips do not move, but a voice-over explains their predicament—how they’ve been beaten silent by the demands of tedious employers and enviro-fascists and women. Especially women. “I will put the seat down, I will separate the recycling, I will carry your lip balm.” This last one—lip balm—is expressed with the mildest spit of emotion, the only hint of the suppressed rage against the dominatrix. Then the commercial abruptly cuts to the fantasy, a Dodge Charger vrooming toward the camera punctuated by bold all caps: MAN’S LAST STAND. But the motto is unconvincing. After that display of muteness and passivity, you can only imagine a woman—one with shiny lips—steering the beast.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/

What Is a Man?

At a party recently —gas lamps, meat on a fire, music piped in delicately from a distant computer — I watched a four-year-old boy drop his pants in a corner of the yard and take a leak. No one blinked. Boys do this in the darkling night. The kid seemed to take in the ocean view as he threaded the darkness with his piss. Afterward, pants still clumped in the grass, he glanced over his shoulder, as if looking for help. His mom stood and went inside.

The pulling up of the pants seemed to fall to the father, but he didn't move off his forkful of salad. In just a tick, the mother reemerged, toilet paper in hand. "There's some disagreement on this. She wants him to wipe after he pees," he sighed, shrugging into a what-can-you-do gulp of wine. The men chorused up a protest.

"I know," the dad said. "Right?"

"I've always thought it must be a kind of freedom, that shake thing," one woman said.

"Tap," a man interjected.

"Whatever," she said, looking right at the father. "You have to tell her: Men don't wipe. You have to be sure he has that freedom."

"I've tried," he said. "There's disagreement. She's his mom. She wants him to sit down, too." More moans. Drunken consternation hung strong as the stink of citronella.

That's when a little guy at the end of the table, a motocross enthusiast nursing several new tattoos on his mostly already tattooed legs, nasaled out the following: "I sit down. Always have." This was roundly hooted down, but he stuck by it. "It's quieter that way, too." This from a guy who rides a wound-up motorcycle that's louder than a full-sized industrial band saw.

The woman grinned and looked us over, one by one, man by man: "Standing up to pee," she said. "Without that, what do you guys really have?"

My father, an immigrant and a self-made man, had no interest in sports, no time to watch Little League games when I was a boy. But sports seemed to dominate everything the kids at school talked about, and I knew myself to be wildly uninformed. To make it, I needed to have an opinion about this stuff. So one day, at my mother's suggestion, I made a study out of the sports page from theRochester Times-Union. I read three stories. Twice. Gleaning only three facts: Vince Lombardi was coaching the Redskins now. Muhammad Ali and Cassius Clay were in fact the same person. And the Yankees had lost a twin bill the night before. I memorized that: Lombardi/Redskins. Clay/Ali. Yankees/twin bill. Except for the fact that I thought "Twinbill" was a person's name, it worked. I had something to say. Boys listened. Eventually, men did, too.

But at the end of last year, I made two fairly careful calculations: a) I've put close to forty thousand hours into sports since then, and b) with or without sports, I am indubitably a man. So around then, I quit. Cold. No SportsCenter, no football, no late-night West Coast basketball. Nothing. I didn't know the Super Bowl matchup until two days before the game, when a friend wrote on Facebook that he feared an "ugly game" because both teams would be wearing yellow pants. I declined invitations, backed out of parties, stayed away from the television. I still don't know who made up the Final Four or what Barry Bonds was so happy about when I caught a flash of him on a soundless flat-screen during the free breakfast at a Hampton Inn. (Skinny though, right?)

In the end it was good for me to give up — radically, ungradually, firmly — this one element of me as man. I gained things — more time, more writing, more space in my head. I never would have believed how little it cost.

And it made me wonder, What else? In what fancy fashions had I deluded myself with the natural congratulations of the gender? I felt certain there must be other ways I'd co-opted my true self. So I decided to consciously strip away the man from me and see what was left. The expectations of men persistent in the world around me? Out. All that which I'd been taught? Out. My own eccentricities? Parsed for maleness, then left behind.

To be clear: This was not about acting more like a woman. And I wasn't out to discover my femininity. I've got that, and it would stay where it was for the duration. (Which is to say, safely housed in an inexplicable enthusiasm for the movie Notting Hill.) Yeah, yeah, there's some man in every woman, some woman in every man. I came up with a far simpler equation for finding the essence of a man: Ignore what you've learned, leave behind the truths that ride the rungs of the double helix, and give up the pretense that being a man matters. In short, subtract.

Manners. Rituals. Habits. That stuff was easy to quit. There's no in-the-marrow instinct to hold a door, stand up, or step aside for women. It was easy enough to lay back, keep my distance, avoid doorways and other happenstance meetings with them. Plenty of guys do that every day, guys who don't recognize that the utter lack of necessity may be why it's so fun to engage in a constancy of manners. I couldn't just ignore women; I had to ignore habit.

One afternoon I stood in front of the town library, waiting for a local real estate agent to open the exterior door for me, me with my single book in my hand. She tugged the door indifferently. At the inner doors of the lobby, I waited again. This is where quid pro quo might have kicked in, but I just stood there. We said nothing out loud. She looked at the latch, and in turn I looked at it. We regarded each other until she tilted her head as if I were some sort of mysterious outpatient. After one more beat, she hammered the push bar on the door. "You gotta be kidding me," she hissed as she leaned in to hold the door. I proceeded.

I said "Thanks," which allowed her the impunity to shoot me a withering look. All I did was wait for her to act first. Of course, women open doors. My girlfriend outdoes me in this regularly.

At the door of a dry cleaner, a storefront church, a wing joint, an Indian restaurant, a coffee shop, a sporting-goods store — I timed my arrival at the door to coincide with the arrival of a woman. I arrived at the door a man. I gave that up when I made a point of expecting the door to be anybody's business but my own. Seventy-five doors, held by seventy-one different women. Only one refused, because my silent theater of expectation freaked her out. She turned on her heel and left. I chased after her to explain. "Oh, that makes sense," she said of my experiment. "Did you smack your lips like that on purpose, too?"

I asked: What other parts of the male costume should I take off? Everyone, man or woman, had an agenda: Watch less porn. Watch no porn. Don't defend porn. Walk faster. Don't strut. Eat at the same pace as the person you're with. Don't dress up. Dress up more. Don't take the best parking space. Use a handkerchief. Don't try to be first in everything. Don't stare at women. Don't fart. Step out of the room to fart. Don't assume that women don't fart. Ask for directions. Don't give directions — for anything — unless asked specifically. Don't let yourself get angry. Let your anger out. Don't be sarcastic. Don't scratch yourself. Be sure you sit down every time you're in the bathroom. And don't read while you're sitting there.

Me, I've always been the type to read in the bathroom. My father did, too — he favored John McPhee. I like comic books, but I'd read the fine print on my auto-club card before I'd sit there with my hands on my knees. I don't know what women do in there, but they don't read. When I asked my girlfriend, she just said, "I don't linger." None of the women I asked admitted to any reading. And I asked nineteen.

So I went thirty-four days without reading in the bathroom, sitting every time. I didn't linger, that's for sure. One day I realized I was thinking about the texture of the plaster on the wall opposite the toilet. So. There I was reading the walls. They needed attention. I could hand-sand that, I thought, use a little joint compound. I could get rid of those chips and that stupid nail hole very easily. Piss after piss, the sight of the nail hole started to hack me off. I never fixed it, however.

I never fixed one damned thing. No running toilets, no disposals in need of a broom turn and a reset. As for labor, I worked only to forget the strength I had, moved nothing, volunteered to carry not one thing, and shoved no part of the world out of my way in order to make myself comfortable. Still, I discovered that all around me, the people in my life got on with things. Nothing stopped happening when I stopped playing my part. Sometimes I felt as if I had disappeared.

In the mornings, I like to walk with my girlfriend's daughter to McDonald's, where we eat oatmeal and drink coffee before school starts for her, the workday for me. I see various townspeople there — an auctioneer I used to know, a welding teacher, retired farmers. Every once in a while I see a young research psychologist from the university going over his notes for class. One morning I asked, "If you were trying to give up being a man, what's one thing you would stop doing?"

"I don't know," he said. "There are a lot more commonalities than there are differences. Gender isn't all that simple."

Academics! Always qualifying. I was fully aware that there was a rough edge to my mission, that my investigation was confined to my own presumptions, my quantitative research limited to bumping into him and his egg biscuit on a Tuesday. Rakish clown that I was, I thanked him and excused myself.

"What are you up to?" he asked.

I told him. He looked away for a minute, into the back of his own eyes.

"You have to stop masturbating," he declared.

Done, I told him. That part I'd figured on my own. Score one for private science. "There's a lot of evidence that that may be the biggest gender difference," he said. "It's really unequivocal."

"Why?" I asked.

"You're the investigator," he said. "You tell me."

Bah. Who needs a theory about a mechanical fact? It was like asking why a conveyor belt carries things.

"If what you need is actionable behavior," he said, "you could smile more. Look around. You'll see it: Men very rarely default to a smile." It was easy enough to note in the men in that McDonald's — the blank daydream, the occasional scowl, the attentive reading of the business section.

I smiled then. Pushed up the corners of my mouth, drawing my teeth forward, inflating my cheeks beyond their stage-three morning puffiness. He looked at me dourly. It felt unnatural, I told him. I did not look like me.

"That's just evidence," he said. "The lack of a smile is part of your identity as a man. Smile more." I tried again. "Better," he said. I tried again. "Not so good."

He thought of something else: "You could change the way you use eye contact."

I'd thought I had this one knocked. Eye contact was a form of domination, an assertion. A male tool, I assumed. To be less of a man, I'd need to make less eye contact, start looking down, or away. Right? "Not really," he said. It was just the opposite. "The fact is, men generally look away, but women hold eye contact. They look straight into the speaker's eyes and feed them lots of encouragement."

"Get outta here," I said. But I looked over at a table full of women, with their crisscrossed stares. Son of a bitch if they weren't looking right at one another.

"I always tell my female students, If you want to drive your boyfriend crazy, just don't look at him for a day," he said.

He had one more tip for me. "Sit smaller," he said. "Take up less space, keep your legs crossed, don't spread your arms. Don't take over a space. Men tend to sit 'big.' " In the fairly empty restaurant, I pulled my shoulders in, collapsed my form. "Yeah," he said. "Small."

I walked home smiling so broad that I felt the wind blowing through my teeth. That was a first. Later that day people told me they saw me, said I looked great. Soon everywhere I went, I smiled — slightly at first, then more boldly. Cars stopped, rides were offered. People pulled me aside to say I had lost weight and to ask my opinion on something.

The eye-contact thing didn't always work for me — which is to say it worked too well. I stopped bulldozing conversations and used eye contact to urge people along. I gave people room to talk. But all it did was make people look at me longer, make strangers think I was genuinely interested in their opinion on Charlie Sheen, the overuse of plastic water bottles, or the looming government shutdown. Still, once I stopped worrying about appearing smart, I realized that as it turns out, my friends are pretty goddamned smart themselves.

And just for the record: sitting smaller? Sucks. This I could not do. I crossed my legs, kept my elbows against the balloon of my gut, narrowed my shoulders till my clavicle ached, holding a nameless yoga pose without any benefits. None.

A week later, I saw the psychologist again.

"I've been trying to forget my penis," I told him. "On Tuesday I thought about it twenty-three times. Look, I kept a chart."

He raised his eyebrows.

"Is that a lot?" I asked.

He shrugged. But I knew the answer: It's not a lot. This far in, I knew a lot of answers. I had reformed a lot of habits.

You can't forget your penis.

Friday is garbage day. How the hell does garbage pile up for three weeks? Men take the garbage to the street. I prefer a cloudless night.

Someone once told me that men should be able to cook. When I was in fifth grade at Francis Parker School No. 23 in Rochester, New York, I was taught that men should be able to cook eggs by the time they lived "on their own." The same ditto sheet said women should learn "a little tennis." Sure, I mastered eggs quickly enough. And from there: lasagna, eggplant, roast turkey, spinach soufflé, scallops. Now I stopped cooking those eggs. Then I stopped cooking. Because no one should cook unless they like to cook. (And it's none of my affair, but if I were a woman, I'd quit the tennis right away.)

As a man, I've never ordered for a woman. Now I allowed my girlfriend to order for me. But only once. A half Caesar salad ended that.

Someone told me that men don't know how to load a dishwasher. That one turns out to be true. I taught myself by watching eHow.

I drank water while taking pills rather than dry swallowing them. I followed the directions on labels precisely.

I hefted nothing, threw nothing — no bag, no strap, no small child — over my shoulder.

I ceded the left side of the car. I was no longer the presumptive driver. I didn't walk to the driver's side, tried not to grab the keys when we left the house. Understand, I like driving. In most situations, I feel I should be driving. But when I didn't drive, I was no less safe. Okay, maybe slightly less safe. I was also a lot more logy and less self-aware.

At restaurants, I did not grab a single check. In fact, I made a point of not touching the check until the other person had read it. Only then did I offer to pay. I meant it, but not one person let me. They owned the check once they touched it.

I went home to visit my mother. I chose the passenger seat of her car on the ride home from the airport. Small. At her house we fell into her rhythm, as we tend to, talking to her dog; eating entirely too little from the snack bowls she uses, each about the size of a contact lens; having one drink at precisely five o'clock.

I told her about my experiment. Of all people, I had her pegged as the one who might see the change as an essential loss. She'd trained me as a boy, urged me, then pushed me to be a better man. I used the conversation to demonstrate the change. I fell out of my patterns: interrupted less often, watched her eyes to see if she had more to say, stopped trying to grab the last word. That weekend, I ate my food more slowly than she did, asked whether my "outfit" was okay before we went out, even obeyed her tiresome backseat driving without complaint.

Once, she had taught me elements of a man — to be curious about others, to tuck in my shirt, to wear a belt, to offer a steady elbow on icy sidewalks. It took forever. Man or no man, I owed her what I was. So now I resisted my impatience while showing her how to search for my son's music on YouTube. The Internet continues to confound her, but rather than asserting the truth as a man saw it — that there was nothing to be afraid of — I simply asked her why. Why did clicking around make her tremulous and weak when I knew her to be stronger than anyone gave her credit for? "Oh, I can't stand all the wandering," she said. "There's no direction." Once, I would have urged her to change, I would have pressed her to man up, worked to be her coach, teacher, even her role model in Googling. But that was the fascism of the man in me, the insistent belief that limitations are weaknesses.

That night when we went to dinner, I drove and she started in with the directions even as I pulled out of the driveway. "Back out and turn to the right," she said.

My mother lives on a dead-end street; there's only one way to go. This kind of thing used to piss me off, used to feel for all the world like somehow she doubted me. I stopped the car and gave her a plaintive "Mom." She laughed and held her palms up. I considered my options — a rational appeal, a plea to stop, a little sarcasm maybe, or some stinging slight. But I knew what she was doing now. Out here she had a firm sense of direction, the very thing she missed on the Internet. I had relied on that in her for decades. Why would I give that up so easily? So as I drove, I simply started repeating the legs of the journey as she declared them.

"Turn left, then move quickly to the right."

"Turn left, then move quickly to the right."

"Be careful, because people don't watch for the turn."

"Be careful, because people don't watch for the turn."

Eventually she asked, "Are you making fun of me?"

I told her no, just that I'd heard what she said. That I was listening now.

At this moment, if there is any one tangible thing that makes me a man, it is this: I have only one pair of shoes. Black ankle-high loafers. I bought them on eBay two years ago. Kenneth Cole. Size 12. I thought they might be a little big, but either I grew into them or they shrunk to fit me. Reliable, sturdy, vaguely absolute. I do not want for shoes. For men shoes are singular.

Before I tried giving up the manly arts, I was familiar enough with the catalog, broadly signified. I watched sports, built fires, committed to memory various trivia regarding movies, war, sex, architecture, oceanography, baseball, football, and golf. I learned to grill a good steak. I developed an excellent sense of direction, made myself a good driver at all speeds. I tried to understand the way things work. I coveted cars, chased tail, craved a better office. I hungered for a threesome. I grew a beard. I liked it.

I hated my feet, my belly, my weak throwing arm, my runt of a penis. I took any work I could get: I hung Sheetrock, cleaned dumpsters, tended bar, waited tables, sprayed kudzu, carried buckets of hot pitch, mowed lawns, and worked as a janitor. From the very start, I sensed that the world was a reflection of my own state of being. When the Yankees lost, my life was sunk. When the Redskins won, I knew something good was in the offing. I stood when women arrived at the table, held doors for them, tried my best to let their wishes take precedence. I learned to like beer, then gin, then whiskey. I knew well enough how to fish, play cards, and perform at the batting cage, without being particularly great at any of it. I rationalized, insisted, argued. I deferred, I lied, I cheated — then worked to back down on all that. This somehow made me more certain, so that when something irked me — steroids, religion, parking-lot attendants — I argued as if I were the sole cipher to the existence of the thing. Through all this, I outdrank, outworked, outfucked anyone against whom I could benchmark myself. I tried, anyway. Over time, I learned to forget the need to urinate, sometimes for eight hours at a time. I could always catch a ball, even when I had to dive for it. I could lift a man and carry him over my back. I still can do all that.

I am a man. And in this way I was made man. I did it. My father did it. My mother did it. Just a man. Not the man. Not the best man, certainly. Man. It was in men when I was born. Or it welled up. I stumbled on some of it. I measured it in what I did and the way I did it. I liked that and rarely stepped off.

I was at a spa with my girlfriend, sitting in the bar, waiting for her to come down from the room, she having just succeeded in keeping me from masturbation yet again. As she approached the table, looking dizzying and sweet, I reminded myself not to stand because of the experiment, then took another look. The hell with this, I thought. I stood up, happily, rightly. The experiment was over.

We each had a drink, then another, and wine at dinner. Eventually, there was coffee, and there came a moment when I excused myself to go to the men's room. I walked out into the lobby, made a couple of turns and pushed on a door, which unexpectedly opened to the outside. The bathroom was just behind me, up the hall. I thought about it, then propped open the door just a crack and jogged up a hill, toward a small parking lot, then beyond it.

The moon was out, and just past the parking lot I came to a large open field, out of direct sight of anything or anybody. It was here I took a piss. Standing. I put my hands on my hips, and looked up at the moon, and thought what men get to think when they stand and piss in a great open space with a great open view — rightly, wrongly, often, or only once in a while — they think: I'm a man, and this is a pleasure of those darkling nights. Why would anyone ever want it any other way?