Hat tip to Hadley.
The Faily Heil, a newspaper best known for its 1930s support of British fascist Oswald Mosley and its unceasing efforts to classify everything as either a cause of or cure of cancer, has offered us all an article about househusbands. Is there lulz? Of COURSE there is lulz.
First of all, the Daily Mail keeps referring to the househusband in question as being a good “mother.” Daily Mail, I hate to break it to you, but the word for a man who takes care of children? IS FATHER. You do not magically start identifying as a lady the day you change your first diaper. If so, transition for trans women would be way easier.
Also, you say the following sentence:
Like Richard and James, he feels much of his masculinity and power in the relationship was lost when he gave up his job to become a househusband.
And back it up with the following quote:
“But once I gave up my career, I lost prestige both in society and in the eyes of my wife. It was as if I had no value.”
I don’t think it’s him that thinks he’s less masculine, dude.
Hey, guess what? Large numbers of people look down upon househusbands! They think they’re less masculine for taking care of the kids instead of going out to hunt with a spear the wild, elusive paycheck! Even people who think that they’re above all that kyriarchal shit may still fall victim to the kyriarchal shit, because everyone gets bits of kyriarchal shit inside their heads. (Ask me about my internalized ableism sometime.)
I get the feeling the Daily Mail’s solution is “men shouldn’t be househusbands,” when the actual solution is to get people to start valuing househusbands more.
Part of that, of course, is valuing work that’s done inside the home equally to work that’s done outside the home. Being a stay-at-home parent is work. Taking care of children is work; cleaning is work; cooking is work. Oftentimes it is hard, thankless work. But a lot of people have a hard time conceptualizing that something is work if you don’t get a paycheck for it.
And of course this intersects with a lot of crappy gender norms. Women are expected to do this work, so even if it isn’t exactly Real Work, it’s at least the work that women are supposed to do. They get little credit for their labor (and often, although less and less so, end up working a second shift), but at least they aren’t shamed for it. Men, of course, according to the Success Myth, are supposed to be rich and powerful and generally awesome. If they choose to give it all up and take a job that quite often involves poo and small screaming snotty things, and they’re not getting paid for it… Well. They’re just failing at being men, clearly.
I slightly dislike the phrase “paragons of sensitive modern manhood.” The point is not to replace the gender system with a different gender system where men are socially pressured to stay home and women go to work. The point is to create a system in which men can stay home if they like and that makes sense for their lifestyles, or go to work if they like that that makes sense for their lifestyles, and no one gives them shit for it one way or the other. Guess what? People are DIFFERENT. Their preferred lifestyles are DIFFERENT. You cannot decide what lifestyles people like based on their gender!
I also wonder how many of the divorces are basically standard stay-at-home-parent/midlife crisis divorces, and the Daily Mail is just putting a gender lens on it because things that do not fit the norm disturb and frighten it and it wishes to make them go away.
About ozyfrantz
A) It’s true: some women feel uncomfortable when men “encroach” on their “turf.” What’s usually unsaid, of course, is that the majority of women who squirm are… not feminists. At least in my nearly 17 years as a stay-at-home dad. Most feminists, even very low-key, non-radical feminists are pretty supportive.
B) It’s true: some women feel as uncomfortable when men encroach on their turf in the “domestic” sphere as men once felt when women encroached in the “breadwinner” sphere.
C) The solution is not to preserve the two-sphere model of gender but to get the fuck over it.
D) As an (occasional) 3rd-generation writer on education and parenting, as a one-time instructional designer, and as a one-time avid consumer of parenting books, I have a surprise for a lot of people: most men lack “instinctive” parenting ability. Oh wait, that’s not the surprise. The surprise is that… most women also lack “instinctive” parenting abilities.
E) What most people don’t realize, even the ones who brass on and on about evolved behavior, is that for all their ability to howl and fuss and keep everyone awake, newborn infants are remarkably low-maintenance. What most people don’t realize, until they’ve done it and sometimes not even then, is that the first 6 months of parenthood is hurry up and wait. Where most of the time spent involves waiting. And what you’re almost always waiting for is an event or activity that’s usually only incrementally different from the previous day, and sometimes the last slow-march, one-at-a-time 30 days. In other words, no matter how hard a new skills-mastery challenge (the day they crawl is a big one BTW) is you usually get lots of practice with it before the next skills-mastery challenge arises.
F) Unless you’re a complete clot, if your newborn is sleeping up to 20 hours a day (as newborns are inclined to do) and if your 3-month-old is still sleeping 12-16 hours a day (as they’re inclined to do) then you’ve got a heck of a lot of time on your hands to read those parenting books, go to parenting circles, debrief yourself on past parenting events and map out strategies for next time, and, particularly, to practice, practice, practice.
G) A lot of the time, while you’re watching that first newborn, the “wait” section of “hurry up and wait” passes glacially enough that you can learn to appreciate the beauty of paint drying on a freshly painted wall. (It happened to me. Couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been used to rocking the first-born while he slept in my arms.)
H) Point being that as long as you don’t have mass social scripting saying what is or isn’t “natural” about the sexes, either or both sexes generally have plenty of time to become “natural” experts at parenting.
Oh yeah, and
I) As for manliness or lack thereof, while I never took advantage there are opportunities for stay-at-home fathers to have regular social contact in groups and individually with stay-at-home mothers — many of whom are respected by their husbands little more than stay-at-home dads are alleged to be respected by their wives. Just saying.
figleaf
Did someone say TV Tropes?
I think you’re looking for BumblingDad and Parenting the Husband.
Also: Men Can’t Keep House.
Thanks Doug S!
@Figleaf: Not even apes have instinctive parental skills, apparently. Orphan apes have no clue what to do with a baby if they become parents themselves. This have been a problem in zoos, where the first apes were usually babies taken to the zoo after hunters had killed all the grown-ups in their pack (do you say “pack” about apes?). When these babies grew up and had babies of their own, they’d be clueless, so eventually the zoo-keepers would end up caring for the ape babies. Once these babies grew up and became parents, it was the same problem all over again, since THEIR parents couldn’t teach them parenting.
Today, one therefore tries to teach clueless ape parents parenting rather than just taking the babies away from them.
Another problem zoos have had with apes is that apes who were cared for by humans when they were infants tend to be more sexually attracted to humans than to their own species when they grow up. That problem can also be solved by giving support to ape parents rather than taking their babies away.
I read all this in our morning paper, when there was this gorilla couple on a big Swedish zoo who had a baby. Apparently they had to be isolated with each other for months before they started to show sexual interest in each other (both had previously only been attracted to humans), and then they needed tons of support with their baby once it was born. But bottom line is; if that much is LEARNT behaviour when it comes to gorillas and other apes, there’s NO reason to suppose it’s all instinctive in humans.
In response to the separate spheres discussion: Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most people lived in family farms or home based businesses. The family was the basic unit of production and everyone in the family contributed to their income. I’m getting this from the book “Marriage, A History” in case you wondered.
http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1335107581&sr=8-2
So, the breadwinner/homemaker model is definitely not the only or the best way of arranging things. You hear conservatives going on and on about families and family values. What they mean by that is a return to the system where the man is in charge and the women and children are subordinate to him. The breadwinner/homemaker model is perfect for that (as long as the man is the breadwinner of course).
The more egalitarian alternative is for both parents to have paid employment, but that raises a bunch of other problems. There must be a better way, if only we could think of it. There must be a way to have an egalitarian family where everyone gets to spend time together and we don’t have to stress out about childcare.