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Hello, and welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, March 17th. This is the Little Prince edition. I'm Hannah Rosen, the co-editor of Slate's Double X, and I'm here in the Washington, D.C. studio with the lovely double X editor Kate Julian. Hi, Kate. Hello. And we are joined in New York by Double X managing editor Jessica Gross. Hi, Jess. Hi, guys. Today, we are going to talk about three topics. The first is the crisis of manhood and the wave of new books and articles about the sad state of men in America today. The second, we're going to talk about the Pink Academy and all girls preschool, which has renewed the debate about single-sex education.

And finally, we are going to talk about the royal wedding, and particularly a new Vanity Fairpiece, about the very middle-class middleton's who are about to become royalty.

So let's start with manhood.

I am, of course, implicated in this because of my Atlantic story, The End of men, but there's been a wave of books. I counted about five or six on my own bookshelf that have come out in the last few months about the end of men. And the one that's gotten some attention is Kayeimowitz's manning up. And so we have to answer for ourselves, why is this a moment in which we are questioning

American manhood? What on earth is going on now? We've known for a long time that working

class men have been losing their jobs, that women have been doing in education. So why did we all

decide culturally en masse that this is the moment when we're going to declare the end of American

manhood and the rise of American femaleness. Jess, can you talk a

little bit about Kay Heimowitz's book and what you thought about it and especially what her

argument is in this book? Sure. Well, I mean, I think what triggered it this time was the recession and

that all those male jobs were lost. So I think that that's why in this moment we're seeing all these books,

like, what is the publishing cycle, a year and a half? So just to get that question out of the way.

That and Hannah's article. And Hannah's article. It's so weird. I'm reading all these books.

And I'm like, they must have slipped in a reference to Hannah Rosen. Every one of them is like,

as Honor Rosen says, men are toast. Exactly. So Hemelitz's book,

she explicitly says that she's focusing on upper middle class men, which is really funny because

upper middle class men are the ones for whom the end of men does not really apply. I mean,

there was a good men project article by Alex

Hurd that was refuting the Heimowitz, and he used the statistics that, you know, when you're

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