Culturebox: The New Girls

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culturebox The New Girls Fall TV is full of emasculated men. Does that mean it's also full of empowered women? By Jessica Grose Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011, at 3:43 PM ET For a while, it seemed as though this fall was going to be the season of the young-lady sitcom. 29-year-old comedian Whitney Cummings--the foulmouthed ingenue of many Friars Club Roasts--has two pilots about twentysomething women: Two Broke Girls (CBS) and Whitney (NBC). She stars in the latter. Elizabeth Meriwether, who is about the same age as Cummings, is behind a pilot for Fox called The New Girl, starring the terminally adorable Zooey Deschanel. Clearing the way for these young women to have their moment is a parallel phenomenon, one that TV Guide calls "the emasculation of men." It's a theme picked up by several new series. In Tim Allen's Last Man Standing, the Home Improvement star plays a Tea Party-loving dad who rages impotently against a changing country and a house full of women. In Man Up!, stunted dudes play video games and hide from their wives. And then there's Work It, a Bosom Buddies rehash in which men dress up like women in order to get jobs in the "mancession." According to the Wall Street Journal, Work It was explicitly inspired by Hanna Rosin's Atlantic magazine essay "The End of Men," and the other two seem at least implicitly influenced (here's Rosin's take on these shows at the Atlantic's website). All have the same premise: Male economic dominance is over and it's the women's turn now. To continue reading, click here. Jessica Grose is a senior editor at Slate and the managing editor of DoubleX. She is the co-author of Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages From Home. Follow her on Twitter here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Probability Neglect: How the Government Wildly Overestimates the Risks of Terrorism What Exactly Would Happen if We Did Get Rid of Social Security? Contagion: Soderbergh Elevates a Virus Horror Flick Into an Amazing Thriller	Advertisement
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