Letters to the Editor
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StubbornInSF
Those shows that you mention are just as misogynist as they are misandrist. What better way to preserve the status quo than to make women think that their husbands are incapable of housework and childcare?
Laundry is easy, but my dad needs written instructions from my mom if she needs him to do the wash (once in a blue moon). In the end it's just easier for her to do it herself than to go through the hassle of getting him to do it. That's the kind of dynamic these shows promote-- and it's not healthy for either partner.
These shows that portray all-knowing together wives with oafish husbands are insulting to both genders. It's almost like subtle brainwashing-- make the women feel like they're the only ones capable of housekeeping or childcare and they'll do all the work!
I for one do not buy into that, and I hope most men are not buying it either (to your credit, it looks lke you don't).
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Nora Vincent (The Self-Made Man) on Men and Women:
On Men:
Everything was out and above board with these guys. If they were pissed at you, you'd know it. They were glad enough to see me, but not glad enough to miss me if I didn't show. They were coming from long, wearying workdays and they didn't have the energy for pretence,...
None of them got much satisfaction from their jobs, nor did they expect any. There were the occasional gay or sexist jokes, but they were never mean-spirited,...
Despite all the dirty talk and hiding strip club visits from their wives, they would speak about their wives and their marriages with absolute reverence. It was an odd contradiction, but one that I came across fairly often among married men who talked to Ned about their sexuality.
I could never have predicted it, but part of me came really to enjoy those nights with the guys. Their company was like an anchor at the beginning of the week, something I could look forward to, an oasis where nothing would really be expected of me.
On Women:
Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist,...I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating,...
The women I met wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space, and at times it made me feel quite small in my costume, like a young man must feel when he's just coming of age and he's suddenly expected to carry the world under his arm like a football,...
They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, "someone who can drive the bus",...
Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colours and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it. But I began to feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men - the pressure to be a world-bestriding colossus is an immensely heavy burden to bear, and trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible.
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KStone: a Clarification
When we married in August of 1970, I was making $180 a month, my bride was out of a job at the time, and we lived in Hawaii, where the cheapest place we could find was $200 a month. You do the math. My wife was re-employed a few months later, after us eating a diet of rice and, occasionally, pancake mix with nothing but water (we had no milk or eggs). And my mathematics were off on her income, which did not commence until January. It was 6K per year, which is about 500 a month. It wasn't until 1975 that I was making 1500 as the sole wage earner (note I did not say worker; her labors, literal and figurative, in bearing and raising four children are beyond price). You beg the central question: is either career, the man's or the woman's, worth subjugating the spouse, or (let me reiterate) subcontrating your parental responsibilities? I know full well that, thanks for fascist economics in vogue since ray-gun, that two incomes are often almost a necessity (depending on local issues like property values, housing costs, etc.). The issue is choice: marriage is a choice. Mean it, or don't do it. Child bearing is a choice (barely, any more: see above fascist reference). And, the extent to which you elect to choose more work and more career over time with your own offspring is, if you're a Salon reader, a choice you make, and the consequences are those you reap as a result. I do not deny that we have been providentially fortunate, and have an extremely close family. Our younger daughter, now 30, is my wife's partner in real estate. We do the child care for the grandchild, and arrange schedules so that there is no lengthy, daily separatioon between mother (especially), father, and child. The poor, the divorced, those mired in loveless marriages, are worthy of our sympathy, and social programs to help them out, not our contempt. My attitude is not one of superiority, but of gratitude. I am cognizant that what our lives have been is not entirely a matter of our own valor or innate worth (at least not mine; my wife is another, more angelic matter). We were born white Americans, and became college educated. Those elements alone place us in privileged strata unavailable to most of the planet. But this is Salon, ladies and gentlemen, and most here are not of the class that drowns in New Orleans or starves in Somalia. It makes it all the more galling when we take that exalted start in life, relatively speaking, and sell it out. Money may not be the root of all evil, but it's sure as hell pretty low on the tree.