Imagine growing up in the '80s and '90s with a college-educated, working father and a mostly stay-at-home mother. While this nuclear family structure was experiencing some decline in those decades, it is all that the child living it has ever known. Dad is the breadwinner; mom the nurturer. Father the philosophical and ambitious role-model; mother the practical and loving source of support.

Now visualize that child becoming a teenager and attending college in the new millennium, graduating in precisely four years and becoming self sufficient. Imagine that child was female. Having become secure in her ability to provide for and take care of herself, she starts to look for companionship, but meets man after man who does not quite fit. Craving the companionship of someone who can be a steady protector, while also matching her level of education and ambition, she might find a sensitive and talented man with a drinking problem, or a strong silent type with no life direction, but no man who embodies strength with intelligence and manliness with respect.

While the modern female has done everything to make herself desirable in the the workplace and the dating pool, today she finds that it's now the men who aren't measuring up. All the things modern woman has striven to be and all the opportunities she and her forbears fought to obtain may be putting her at an unfair advantage. Not just unfair to men, but unfair to herself.

I don't think this kind of experience is uncommon to women now. As a generation of females who has been encouraged to reach our highest heights, the consequences of those leaps and bounds are only now coming to light. In The Atlantic's “The End of Men” article, statistics are used to back up these anecdotal experiences. “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.”

Once, every boy was expected to become a man with the ability to provide for a family, and be a stable anchor amid the whims of his wife and children. A girl was expected to learn the arts of home and hospitality, and become a doting mother and wife. While expectations of women have been clearly, if imperfectly redefined, men's new role in society is left hazy, as though the entire gender has had the rug pulled out from under them. In a relatively short period of time, men have been expected to adjust to a world in which the things that traditionally made a man a man are no longer necessary. Now that the male gender has the freedom to not become breadwinners, what are they to do? The modern woman knows she is expected to do it all; have children, be successful in her career, all the while maintaining her feminine charms and nurturing capabilities.

But neither women nor men seem to know what that new role for males is. The relatively rapid shift of the female role in society has left women more than capable of functioning alone, but still yearning for the manly provider and protector. With women at this level of proficiency, men are expected not just to match up, but to exceed a female's capabilities. This idea incidentally seems to define exactly why “Twilight” is so phenomenally popular among women. The only way for a man to remain appealing to the capable modern female is to become literally supernatural. If this is the case, as seems to be demonstrated by 75% female sperm selection requests in a new clinical trial, then it may be time to more clearly define a realistic new role for men, level our expectations of them, or they'll just have to catch up.

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The End of Men, The Atlantic