The Unmade Bed The Messy Truth about Men and Women in the Twenty-first Century

In response to books such as Unfinished Business, provocative cultural commentator Stephen Marche examines the state of male-female relations in the 21st century, with the help of his wife, Toronto Life editor in chief Sarah Fulford. One warm spring morning in Brooklyn, Stephen Marche, then new father and tenured track professor, got the call: his wife had been offered her dream job … in Toronto. Their mutual decision to abandon his career for hers and return home to Canada threw new light on the gender roles in their marriage and in the world they saw around them. As Marche provocatively argues, in the West we are no longer engaged in a war of the sexes, but rather stuck together in a labyrinth of contradictions. And these contradictions are keeping women from power and confounding male identity. The Unmade Bed is a deeply researched, personal essay on the aspects of everyday life where men and women meet. It’s Marche’s claim that the way we talk about men and women today is antiquated and that the failure to catch up to the new reality means we are not actually facing the real issues – that true power remains shockingly elusive for women while the idea of masculinity, trapped between iconographies of power and powerlessness, struggles in a state of uncertainty, to the point where manliness and crudity are almost synonymous. The only way out of these mutual struggles is together. With footnote commentary from Sarah Fulford, Marche’s wife and Toronto Life editor in chief, Marche’s message is thought-provoking and ultimately hopeful.