The End of Men and the Rise of Women (8 page)

In the fifteen years I’ve been married, I’ve started to encounter more families where the wife is at least for some period the main breadwinner. Some couples seem to ease into it naturally—the wife is a born workaholic and the husband delights in, say, coaching the sports teams or picking the kids up after school. One woman at our preschool can’t stop bragging about her stay-at-home husband—although, I can’t help it, I am still startled by the sight of him hanging around the school making handprint T-shirts for the teachers. Some dynamics are not so pleasant—one woman I know, whose husband works part-time as an airline mechanic, never seems to run out of ways to call him a loser. Another, with an out-of-work lawyer husband, complains about petty things—why does he spend all her money on dress socks if he hasn’t had a job interview in over a year, and why does he have to subscribe to every damned sports channel? In a couple of cases I know, the disparity never felt natural, and the couple got divorced.

The emotional landscapes of such families were a mystery to me, which is why last year I conducted an extensive survey of seventy-five hundred people in female-breadwinner couples in the online magazine
Slate,
and followed up with interviews.
Slate
readers are much more educated than the general population, and the majority of people who answered the survey were women. Still, the responses start to get to the bottom of some of the more sensitive questions: Does more money mean more power in the relationship? Do more hours worked mean fewer hours taking care of the children? Do the
men feel liberated? Humiliated? Do the women feel proud? Taken advantage of? Does a husband ever separate darks from whites?

In fact, nearly 80 percent of people in my
Slate
survey on breadwinner wives described themselves as happy in their marriages, and rated themselves as having a fairly low chance of divorcing. About a third said the men were self-conscious about making less money, and slightly fewer felt judged by the community. Nearly 90 percent said in the future, it will be more acceptable for women to be the main providers. This may be because as financial providers go, women are relatively benign. A surprisingly small number of respondents said the woman has more power because she makes more money; about two-thirds reported that they share power equally.

One recurring storyline I uncovered in my follow-up interviews was
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, only with a Hollywood ending. Lori, an attorney who makes half a million dollars a year, was tired of dating men who considered her professional competition, and whose “entire mood depended on whether they’d inched one step closer that day to being CEO.” So she married a train conductor she met on the dating site Match.com. “I wanted a man who didn’t talk about his work all day, who would rather go for a bike ride on the beach,” she told me. “My husband knows who he is. He’s just comfortable in his own skin.”

Still, it was clear from my dozens of interviews that there are tensions under the surface. A power arrangement that’s prevailed for most of history does not fade without a ripple. In many cases I heard the same old marriage anxieties, only they showed up in the reverse gender. Andy, a stay-at-home dad in San Jose, had had to cancel several appointments with me because he couldn’t get his twins to sleep. Before he stayed home with his kids, he was a carpenter. His wife is a physician, and because she makes so much more money it made
more sense for him to stay home. Andy likes watching the toddlers, but he is wistful about his old life, and somewhat defensive about his new one. The feelings flood over him when he passes construction crews while taking the twins on a walk: What would it be like to work with a group of guys up on a roof again? What adventures is his wife having while he’s wiping off bibs? When his wife and her doctor friends rib him about staying home, he over-aggressively pulls the manual labor card: “How about I come over and help you put that Ikea furniture together, Mr. Doctor?” It’s the old Betty Friedan identity crisis, only in masculine form. These days when his wife suggests that he should go back to work, he feels “terrified.” It’s been a long time, and he’s lost the stomach for the outside world.

On the other side of that equation are women who are resentful about carrying the whole economic load, much the way husbands once were. They exhibit the same range of provider symptoms: pressure, fear of the gold digger, frustration at being trapped in the day-to-day with no outlet for creativity. Michelle, an attorney in Los Alamos, complained to me about being “hunted like a deer by men as a desirable wife because of my wage-earning capability and good job.” Beverly, an African-American executive in Washington, DC, fed up with her couch-potato husband, warned that “women should be very careful about marrying freeloading, bloodsucking parasites.” Julie, an attorney and reluctant family breadwinner, said, “I’m a little envious of the old days, where women weren’t expected to go out and make a living on par with men. I just feel it’s unfair that women are in a position where there is a ton of pressure to do both things.”

Mostly, though, I discovered that the roles do not just reverse. I did not talk to a single breadwinner wife who has entirely ceded the domestic space. This is true even if the woman is working two jobs.
It’s true even if the woman makes considerably more money than the man, and it’s true even if she has a stay-at-home husband. In over three-quarters of the couples in my survey, either the woman did more child care and housework, or they shared equally. This is modern Plastic Woman at her most voracious, taking up ever more space until she explodes: “I HATE HATE HATE the annual ‘what should a stay-at-home mom make??’ tripe that comes out around Mother’s Day,” said Dawn, a software engineer and mother of three who has been the primary breadwinner “forever.” “I have to do the same house/child-care work, AND if I lose my job, my whole family is fucked.”

Over the last thirty years, women have started to work considerably more hours than they once did, without easing off on child care. In fact, the opposite has happened. In 1965 women reported doing an average of 9.3 hours of paid work a week and 10.2 hours of child care. Now women not only do an average of 23.2 hours of paid work a week, but they do
more
child care—13.9 hours. The hours in a woman’s week have not expanded, and mostly women have made up for it by shaving off time in other areas—housework, personal grooming and, tragically, free time, which women claim less of now than they ever did. But mostly what the time-use surveys confirm—for the United States and many other Western countries—is a vision of every woman as a slowly expanding and jealous colonial empire, refusing to cede old territories as she conquers new ones.

Men, meanwhile, are moving into new areas much more slowly than women. Over the same period of time, men have decreased their average work hours per week from 46.4 to 42.6. And their child care hours have upped from 2.5 to only a modest 7. Despite decades of self-help literature imploring men to explore their nurturing sides, the stay-at-home dad remains a rare phenomenon. Only 2.7
percent of Americans in the latest census count themselves as full-time stay-at-home dads, although that does not count single fathers or part-time dads. In fact, one picks up an overwhelming note of reluctance, resistance, and in some cases revolt against the new regime. One man I spoke to aggressively belittled his wife, forged her name on checks, and wasted her fortune, all over jealousy about her professional success. Another got his revenge in the bedroom. After he lost his job, he confessed to forcing his wife to have more violent sex than she was comfortable with, to make up for his feeling of impotence elsewhere.

In more traditional or more macho cultures, the concept of the alpha wife goes down even harder. In Spain, marriages with foreigners have gone up to about 20 percent of all marriages. High-achieving women in Spain marry progressive men from Belgium or Switzerland, while Spanish men seek out wives from Ecuador or Colombia. In South Korea and Japan, men from rural towns, and more recently even cities, are importing brides from poorer Asian countries with more traditional notions of marriage.

But even in the West it’s hard to avoid the latest crisis of macho. The 2010 sitcom season was populated by out-of-work husbands, meek boyfriends, stay-at-home dads, killer career wives, and a couple of men who have to dress up like women in order to get a job. For the first time, a slew of new sitcoms were shot with the premise that women go out to work while men stay home to take care of the house, stock the refrigerator with low-fat yogurt, or pretend to be taking care of the baby while watching a hockey game. “Women are taking over the workforce. Soon they’ll have all the money, and the power, and they’ll start getting rid of men,” laments one character in a new show called
Work It
. “They’ll just keep a few of us around as sex slaves.”

For the last few years, romantic comedies, sitcoms, and advertising have been producing endless variations on what Jessica Grose at
Slate
dubbed the “omega male,” who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (like Ben Stone in
Knocked Up
and many of director Judd Apatow’s other antiheroes), a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s
Greenberg
), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he is haunted by the idea that he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s perpetually bitter character in
Greenberg
, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”

In decades past, the cinematic loser had a certain broken nobility (Norm on
Cheers
); he may have been out of a job and disappointing his wife, but ultimately his man cave, with its dim lights and its endless procession of amber mugs, contained as much warmth and heart as the most lovingly dysfunctional family. The women on
Cheers
with any ambitions were presented as denatured and destined for failure, and wound up folded back into the bosom of the bar. But in the new era the rules are reversed: The man cave is what has to get sacrificed. Ben Stone lives with his three yo-yo friends running a porn site while collecting some sort of disability payment. He is a lovable degenerate, and his girlfriend is shrill and obsessed with success. Still, Ben loses in the end, and in the final montage we have shots of him as a modern, happy playground dad. So it goes in the new era of on-screen marriage. The men are almost always more endearing than their significant others, but that does not get them very far anymore. In the epic battle of the sexes, they now have to wave the white flag and cross over to the woman’s world if they want any hope of a good life. To win, they have to submit.

Of all the days in the year, one might think, Super Bowl Sunday should be the one most dedicated to the cinematic celebration of macho. The men in Super Bowl ads should be throwing balls and racing motorcycles and doing whatever it is men imagine they could do all day if only women were not around to restrain them. Instead, in a 2010 ad that has come to best represent the modern state of gender relations for me, four men stare into the camera, unsmiling, not moving except for tiny blinks and sways. They look like they’ve been tranquilized, like they can barely hold themselves up against the breeze. Their lips do not move, but a voice-over explains their predicament—how they’ve been beaten silent by the demands of tedious employers and enviro-fascists and their women. Especially the women. “I will put the seat down, I will separate the recycling, I will carry your lip balm.” This last one—lip balm—is expressed with the mildest spit of emotion, the only hint of the suppressed rage against the dominatrix. Then the commercial abruptly cuts to the fantasy, a Dodge Charger vrooming toward the camera, punctuated by bold all caps: MAN’S LAST STAND. But the motto is unconvincing. After that display of muteness and passivity, you can only imagine a woman—one with shiny lips—steering the beast.

D
AVID
G
ODSALL
describes himself as “adapting pretty well to the new world order.” The twenty-nine-year-old Vancouverite is not like one of those blue-collar guys who are just “humiliated and fucked in this new economy” because they can’t retool and go to college and find a new profession. He has a master’s degree and a job, as an editor at a Vancouver city magazine. He has an apartment he shares with his steady girlfriend, a kitchen full of nice appliances, a car in the garage, a bullmastiff. But this steady accumulation of
life’s comforts has only uncovered for him how uncomfortable he actually feels.

At the moment, his girlfriend, Clare, makes more money than he does. Not very much more—something on the order of $15,000—plus she has significant student loans to pay off, and he has a modest family inheritance. And he’s well aware that in the future, when they have children, the seesaw may very well tip in the other direction. But the difference is enough to unsettle him. “As a generation of educated urban men who never knew a world where our female peers didn’t outperform us in almost every meaningful category, we’re in the middle of a long, uncertain process of negotiating a new male-ness,” he wrote me. “Money is inextricably part of that process, even for those of us who really like that our partners are successful.”