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Return of the Guy: Men were pronounced economically and evolutionarily finished in the late 1990s. but Charlotte Allen says that manhood is back in fashion.

Article Excerpt
REMEMBER BRENDA BERKMAN? You probably don't, unless you're a hard-line feminist or you live in New York City. In 1978 or thereabouts, Berkman filed a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit against the New York Fire Department, complaining that she and several other women couldn't pass the physical fitness section of the city's employment examination for aspiring firefighters. In 1982, in response to Berkman's suit, a federal judge ordered the city to lower the physical standards, and Berkman and about forty other women who were now able to pass the new and easier rest went ahead with their firefighting training. The overwhelming majority of them dropped out, deciding that they didn't really want to be New York City firefighters after all. Since 1982, the city's graduating classes for firefighters have contained only one or two women each and, out of a force of about eleven thousand, there are currently fewer than thirty women.

After her hire, Berkman and some of her cohorts engaged in nearly two decades of guerrilla warfare against their male coworkers. The women charged that the men were committing a catalogue of horrors and hate crimes against them, including rape, tire-slashing, death threats, tear-gas assaults, urinating into women's boots, and leaving a female firefighter alone in a burning house. None of these charges quite made it to the courts, or even to the serious union administrative stage. But they were reported in rich and credulous detail by feminist journalists and historians (one of them called physical fitness a "social construct"), and Berkman became...

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