“The key to the recovery of masculinity does not lie in any wistful hope of humiliating the aggressive female and restoring the old masculine supremacy,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in a 1958 essay titled “The Crisis of American Masculinity.” “Masculine supremacy, like white supremacy, was the neurosis of an immature society. It is good for men as well as for women that women have been set free. In any case, the process is irreversible; that particular genie can never be put back into the bottle.”42
