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Do Real Men Bring Home the Bacon?
That was my personal title for this essay, which The Federalist ran under a rather more measured headline:
Is it possible that Clueless Dad (that tired old television trope) is going into decline? He’s long since outworn his welcome. And General Mills seems to have gotten the message.
Further:
Their new commercial for Peanut Butter Cheerios features a no-nonsense pep talk from our hero, “Dad”, who shows us active parenthood at its best. He moves smoothly through the house, cheering his grade-school son’s scary mask and complimenting his teenaged daughter on her “great profile pic,” while regaling us with rapid-fire tips on “how to dad.” Nothing about this father says “bumbler.”
What does Hero Dad do for a living? It’s unclear. His wife makes the briefest of appearances, breezing by in her power suit as he hands her some coffee. Dad shows no signs of heading for the office, but his monologue does mention that dads, in their awesomeness, “do work work and homework,” meaning they help with schoolwork and… what? Is he, too, gainfully employed? Or could he be thinking of home repair and those defrosting chicken thighs? Anyhow, there’s room for speculation.
More and more fathers nowadays are staying at home with their kids, but Americans are still dubious about this phenomenon. Conservatives as a rule are delighted to embrace the warm, nurturing figure of the stay-at-home mom. Dads, by contrast, are expected to build careers and bring home the bacon.
Maybe it’s time for that to change. I’m going to suggest some ways we can legitimize the at-home dad, without pretending men and women are interchangeable. Do you bristle at the image of an aproned dad holding a feather duster? Then lose the apron, and give him a power drill.
I got some very nice notes from at-home dads after publishing this. The public comments, by contrast, are predictably angry and bitter. I think it’s particularly amusing that I’m accused of closet misandry for recommending to men a lifestyle that I myself live and enjoy very much.
More importantly, though, the angry responders didn’t seem to notice something significant: I wasn’t just suggesting that men should, when circumstances warrant, be open to doing more childcare and other domestic chores. I was also suggesting that women need to respect them for more than their paychecks. A father is so much more than just a source of income.
Is there any better way to pitch this message? Reading the angry, bitter responses made me feel really bad for the great at-home dads who must deal with this a lot.
Published in General
I would just mention about the cooking that it’s kind of funny to think of it as effeminate when there are so many macho chefs out there. Just a little thought…
I agree with this. I don’t actually think it’s wholly reasonable to give this line to women either. Sure, there’s more to life than work, but work can still be a good part of life, and people who want to do it shouldn’t be made to feel like they’re anti-family or anti-home or un-nurturing.
But of course, there *is* more to life, and when the work plan doesn’t pan out for whatever reason it’s good to remember that. And since this is a pitch conservatives love to give women, it seems like a good angle from which to approach the at-home dad question. Why exactly is it that something you think *so very good* for the goose must be awful for the gander?
Also, Gil, your comment #27 gets us into some pretty deep questions that are hard to sort out here, but I agree that maintaining “gender respectability” is more of an issue for men. Basically how it shakes out, I think, is that our conception of “proper traditional male roles” is quite a bit broader, but a failure to fit into one is much more socially crippling. I mean, given that men have been the highest achievers in most areas of life throughout history (best athletes, builders, writers, artists, musicians, poets, philosophers etc etc), there aren’t all that many worthwhile aspirations that *can’t be* given a masculine spin. But, if you do come across as unmanly (usually because you don’t have enough “specialized” accomplishments), that’s a source of deep shame.
For women, it’s a totally different game. Being “all girl” is much more limiting than being “all boy” because most kinds of rarified accomplishment raise certain hackles with your uber-traditional anti-feminists. In order to really embrace the traditional feminine stereotype you generally just have to give up on rarified achievement at a high level; you’re supposed to find your joy in the embrace of the ordinary and domestic life. However, especially in our day, you can depart from the stereotype without too much social opprobrium. In some circles you’ll now be applauded for doing this. (“You go girl!!!”) But even among, say, very traditional religious conservatives, the stigma associated with being a less-feminine woman is extremely mild compared to what effeminate-seeming men endure.
Hence the need to “legitimize” the at-home dad, insofar as this arrangement would (I suspect) work well for many more people than are doing it.
Thanks RachelLu
I enjoy reading your perspective. It’s interesting how gender experiences for women and men are neither the same nor mirror images. They’re just different. Other than sports, I see the areas you mentioned (high achievement in writing, music, poetry, philosohpy..) as gender neutral. I see the world primarily divided into the female and the gender neutral. You see that high achievement itself is often regarded as male, with high achieving men celebrated as men, and high achieving women getting mixed reactions. OK, I can see how that’s true (and highly unfortunate and painful).
I sometimes think of the problem of “male nurses.” Crazy that we use the word male there. I have great admiration and respect for male nurses. They have to be much stronger than I am. Good luck changing attitudes towards stay at home dads (that’s sincere, not sarcastic). IMO you’re getting nasty comments because you’re touching such a sensitive issue, not because of any problems in your approach.
I’m going to recommend a book I haven’t finished reading yet (always a risk). Do Father’s Matter? What Science is Telling Us About the Parent We’ve Overlooked by Paul Raeburn.
It starts with hunter-gathers and then dives into genetics and social sciences and the impact of fathers.
My guess is that the Rico crowd would answer the title question with a resounding “Yes!” and perhaps feel that the book would be pointless. However, I’ve found it to be really interesting and full of evidence that supports many of my values. Also, makes me think about what I think and value a bit more deeply, which is a good thing.
Given the voracious readers here, y’all will probably finish it before I do : )
In my friend’s case it’s more that she is missing out on things. She has a high stress job with long hours. Her husband will send pictures to her during the day of him doing fun things with the kids and she feels that she should be doing those things, with them. It’s tough because she’s torn between her own ambition and her motherly instinct to want to stay home with her kids. Although, I think that is the paradox for a lot of modern women.
If the kids are clean and the bills are paid, I honestly don’t care how they get things done. There was a time, not too long ago, that people sort of knew what to expect when it came to a relationship. And those expectations largely suited what the great majority wanted.
But enough people weren’t happy with that arrangement, or thought they weren’t, so it changed. So now you can’t be entirely sure what you will get in a relationship. You’ve got to work it out ahead of time. And that’s okay, but it’s more complicated.
But maybe it’s not up to us to decide from on high what is right, or what arrangements we will celebrate. Maybe we should just let people raise their kids and if they do a good job we’ll celebrate that, no matter how they go about doing it.
Perhaps you’ve gotten a negative reaction because your whole piece is premised on the idea that the traditional male role in society is all in the branding, and if there were more ads (or tweets or whatever) featuring a burly stay-at-home dad holding a drill, all the stigma associated with a man’s failure to provide would melt away. In other words, you seem to assume, and presume your readership does as well, that the traditional roles are largely a result of social construction, not biology, evolution, or the hard-fought wisdom embodied in thousands of years of trial and error (some call that “tradition”). Well, conservatives don’t believe in that dreck. Hence, the negative reaction.
One of the points I regularly make, though, is that it wasn’t just about “people being happy”. For a variety of reasons, the staple lower-middle-class steady jobs (with fixed benefits and all the rest) went away. You can’t sustain the domestic side of the model if you can’t sustain the economic side, and the economic side involves a lot of regulation and unions and protectionist policies.
I understand that the clear-cut breadwinner/homemaker split makes a nice, understandable “starter package” for people who aren’t sure how they’re supposed to do it. It would probably be easier to bolster marriage through something simple rather than through complicated meanderings about the different ways to manage things… but again, if the labor market won’t support that, we may just have to embrace the complexities.
No, that’s not it. There are natural facts in play here, but it’s overly simplistic to think they have to map onto a single model in terms of gender roles. What we think of as “the traditional model” is heavily influenced by more idiosyncratic elements of our recent history (especially mid-century America) which was itself rather odd in many ways. Anyway, odd or not, that era has passed, and the gender roles that were developed in that time aren’t always practicable now. As I make clear, I have no problem with continuing that division of labor insofar as it works well for particular families. But when it doesn’t, we need to work on coming up with something that does. There are way too many men now who see criminality as preferable to domesticity, and that’s just a problem. When you have 1) millions of kids who desperately need fathers, and 2) millions of men who just aren’t doing much worthwhile with their lives, there’s an obvious misalignment of life patterns and actual human needs.
I’m trying hard to be responsive to genuine differences in the sexes; at the same time, men and women both need to be prepared to adapt and adjust to changing economic circumstances and labor market conditions. Just like women, men sometimes need to overcome their disappointment over frustrated career plans, and step up to the plate for their kids. I don’t accept that this is somehow so contrary to the masculine mindset as to be an unreasonable expectation.
That lower middle class lifestyle is still there. What has changed is expectations. Look at the size of the houses, the food, the extracurricular activities for children. What people thinking of as a lower middle class lifestyle has gotten far grander than it used to be.
Quite frankly, if one person can stay home while the other works, you’re in the middle class. Congrats, enjoy your kids, and don’t drink in the middle of the day.
PsychLynn: #23 “When I’ve seen resentment in the working wife, it has often come down to “he’s not doing it the way I would.” While this attitude can be seen in any marriage, I think if a woman is uncomfortable with her role as breadwinner, and struggles with wanting to be at home, this type of attitude can insinuate itself into the relationship and cause problems.”
This is a bit off of what you wrote. I discovered that I wanted my wife to be a bit more attentive in house cleaning, but said nothing. She had been picked on by her mother as a girl and reacted with an aversion to having an utterly clean house. We weren’t dirty but we could get messy.
In any case, my wife was more important to me that a spotless house. My wife’s approval of her husband was more important than words or emotions coming between us. So, I had to make a choice, to love a clean house or to love my wife. My wife won that choice every time it would rear its head. She never knew. She did not need to know.