When writer Hanna Rosin recently published an article on Slate.com stating that “the patriarchy is dead,” much of the feminist response amounted to “burn the heretic!” New Republic editor and blogger Nora Caplan-Bricker accused Rosin of “mansplaining”—the femosphere’s pejorative term for supposedly obtuse and arrogant male arguments on gender, apparently now also applied to female dissent—and being the patriarchy’s unwitting tool. San Jose State University philosophy professor Janet Stemwedel tweeted her gloating over Rosin’s Wikipedia page being vandalized to read, for a brief time, “Hanna Rosin (born 1970) is a terrible human being.”

Ironically, the feminist tendency to shoot the bringer of good news was the very topic of Rosin’s essay, adapted from the new epilogue to the paperback edition of her book, The End of Men—which, despite its title, is more about female ascendance than male decline. Rosin noted with bemusement that rebuttals to her report on women’s rising fortunes were greeted with palpable relief—not by male chauvinists but by feminists. (It isn’t just Rosin: when a recent study demonstrated that female political candidates are not judged more negatively than male ones, not even for their looks and dress, feminists reacted with either silence or sniping.)

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