The End of Men and the Rise of Women (9 page)

David couldn’t care less about concepts like “head of the family” or “patriarchal authority.” He finds the word “breadwinner” funny and thinks the idea of a single “provider” is very “my baby takes the morning train.” Clare is a passionate second-wave feminist who earnestly counts the number of female executives in every office, and David is all for that. He gets that the powerful white dude in a suit, à la Jack Donaghy on
30 Rock
or the boss on
The Office,
only exists as a person behind layers of irony and self-parody. And yet he can’t seem to allow himself to cross over to the other side, where gender roles are interchangeable and it makes no difference who wears the pants. When he passes the happy dad at the playground at midday, he shudders. “Yeah, he haunts me,” David confesses. “It doesn’t matter how Brooklyn-progressive we (urban, educated men born after 1980) are, we still think he’s pitifully emasculated. I’m progressive and enlightened, and on an ideological political level I believe in that guy. I want that guy to exist. I just don’t want to
be
that guy.”

David’s unease with the changing roles of marriage leaves him
stuck in this dead space, where the only momentum comes from the aggressively malignant mutations of his own ambivalence. Some of his friends are in the process of buying their girlfriends rings, but he can’t yet bring himself to do it, although he knows that the clock is ticking and one day soon he will relent. The money, you see, has come to symbolize something, some far-off, free-fall, emasculated future he can’t bear to contemplate. When they have kids, will she suggest that he cut back his hours or work four days a week? When they need a bigger car, will she pay for it? He is reminded of these fears several nights a week in what he considers the recurring ritual of public humiliation: The waiter puts the bill on the table and slides it closer to him. His girlfriend reaches for her wallet. It makes sense that she should pay and yet she senses some horror in him, and so they just stare at each other, and it’s a “slow drip of torture every time.”

With the money David’s grandparents left him, he and Clare recently went house hunting. They found a nice little airy loft they both liked and moved pretty quickly into purchase mode. But in each conversation they got “bogged down in the specifics.” Who would get the loan? How would they split the down payment? The mortgage? How would the equity accrue? At one point David tried to maneuver so the house would be entirely under his name, even though that would mean significantly worse terms for their loan. His girlfriend began to feel that he was going to extensive lengths not to be entangled. They talked and fought for months. They lost the loft, and now they have to try again.

The men of David’s generation have been primed by TV shows and movies, or maybe their mothers, to accept that a doctor or lawyer or novelist or even the president can be male or female and it doesn’t make that much of a difference; it’s all interchangeable. If
they pay attention to such things, they would know that this era of female independence has done wonders for the men, that for the educated classes, it leads to better, more stable, wealthier, and happier marriages. Today a married man with a college degree is likely to be healthier and have a lot more money to enjoy in retirement, thanks to his wife. He is also relieved to have a wife he can talk to about work or politics or anything else that interests him.

They should be able to tune in to the fact that the clock is running out slowly, that it’s not necessarily them but more likely their sons or grandsons who will be routinely working for women. In the upper levels of society, in the creative and professional classes, women are still a few steps from being in charge. Men still hold many of the top jobs and work more hours than women. Go to a beach in the Hamptons on any summer Friday and you will still find the surf full of moms waiting for their husbands to maybe or maybe not arrive from their jobs in the city—proof that there are still pockets up in the thinner air where men rule the public domain while women rule the snacks and the sunscreen.

Anyway, these young college-educated urbanites are not like the working-class men of the South, who openly mourn the old chivalrous ways and grieve for what the new economy has robbed from them. For these guys, traditional manly ideals exist, if at all, as a fashion statement encountered in Brooklyn boutiques that stock nothing but hunting jackets and flasks and old copies of
Playboy,
kitsch recycled in an ironic-nostalgic mode the same way old Stalin-era buttons wash up in Moscow dance clubs. These men took a feminist theory class or two in college, maybe read Judith Butler and Kate Millett. They know that for a twenty-first-century man, yearning to make yourself a fixture in the ruling class is no longer all that
cool. If they are looking back at the past, it’s only between quotation marks.

Theoretically this attitude should make the transition to the new world order easier. Men with means should be slowly adjusting to a new, more androgynous world at the top, where a range of options are open to them and they can relinquish some of the burdens of being in charge. But among the rising generation of almost-marrieds or recently-marrieds, ease is not the signal one picks up. Instead what you read in the culture is a mighty struggle where the men, although they have nothing material or concrete to complain about, seem to be haunted by the specter of a coming gender apocalypse.

Finally I asked David: Why? Why does he care so much about things he theoretically doesn’t care about? Why does he care so much that he would lose a house over it?

“It’s certainly not resentment.”

“And it’s not really confusion.”

“I don’t think I could categorize my feelings about my situation as either positive or negative.”

Then an answer occurs to him: “It’s because our team is losing. All the things we need to be good at to thrive in the world we imagine existing ten or twenty or even fifty years from now are things that my female friends and competitors are better at than me. Than us. And I am loath to tell that to someone who is going to put it in print, but it’s true.”

B
ETWEEN 1935 AND 193
6 sociologist Mirra Komarovsky interviewed fifty-nine families where the man had been the sole provider for his family, but then had lost his job and had been out of work at
least a year. She published the results in her classic 1940 Depression-era study
The Unemployed Man and His Family
. The work is a window into the simple contract between married couples of that era. Different men she interviewed had fared better or worse in diminished circumstances, but what struck me most, reading the book nearly eighty years later, was the universal acceptance of the idea that “provider” was the yardstick by which all men should be measured. No ambivalence, no layers of Jack Donaghy irony; a man was as good as his paycheck and his position. The marriage equation was simple, as Komarovsky explains. The husband provides for the wife, and she honors and obeys him. “What a woman wanted in a husband was a good steady worker who would support the family,” explains one Mrs. Johnson. If A is no longer true, then neither, naturally, is B. As one wife tells the interviewer, when asked how she felt about her husband’s unemployment, “Certainly I lost my love for him.” The slightly kinder wife says, “I still love him but he doesn’t seem as ‘big’ a man.”

The men, in turn, accept this diminishment as their fate, referring to themselves as “fallen idols” and explaining dispassionately that their kids no longer say “Hi, Dad” when they come in the door. “They used to come and hug me and now I seldom hear a pleasant word from them,” one says. The particular stories are heartbreaking, but the equation is soothingly simple, with its promise of easy reversibility. Everything would be all right, the couple agreed, if her husband “could find something to do.” She could pay the grocer, give the children their allowance, and turn on the heat. Peace, along with the timeless contract between man and woman, and the blind faith in the goodness of patriarchal authority, would be restored. Was there an alternative? Could Mrs. Johnson perhaps find a job
instead? suggested the interviewer. No, they both agreed. That would be “terrible.”

Barely a decade after the publication of Komarovsky’s book, the simple contract began to break down. What had been blindly accepted as man’s singular destiny since the caveman days—to provide for his family—suddenly seemed like a choice, and a choice many men were rebelling against. In retrospect we can pin the blame not so much on the gender revolution of the 1960s but on the 1950s, where the notion of breadwinner was so brutally enforced as the only middle-class norm that it began to feel like a noose. Authorities relied on the weight of science and psychology to hammer the point home: Men who failed to accept the breadwinner role were “deviant,” “unnatural,” and “immature,” as Barbara Ehrenreich outlines in her 1987 book
The Hearts of Men
. Psychologists laid out clear developmental stages much the way Jean Piaget had done for babies: A man had to select a mate, find a vocation, establish a suitable home. Men who failed to meet these stages on time (meaning before age twenty-three) suffered from diseases such as “psychic immaturity,” or “aspiring to ‘perpetual adolescence’”—the kinds of conditions Ben Stone would recognize well. This irresponsible man, Ehrenreich writes, even “blurred into the shadowy figure of the homosexual,” so much so that psychiatrist Lionel Ovesey created a new category of “pseudohomosexual,” meaning a man who was not gay but nevertheless failed to conform to the standards of masculinity.

Peter Tarnopol, Philip Roth’s alter ego in
My Life as a Man,
summarizes the prevailing ethos of the fifties perfectly:

As you can surmise from the bitterness in Tarnopol’s voice, the establishment had turned the screws too tightly. Almost simultaneously the first rumblings of the male revolt began. The best sellers of the mid-1950s—William Whyte’s
The Organization Man
and David Riesman’s
The Lonely Crowd
—warned men that they had become puppets of large corporations, mechanized versions of real men. Riesman especially lamented the creation of the emasculated, other-directed new man of the American workplace, who was forced to suppress concrete skills in favor of qualities such as perpetual alertness to signals from others and sensitivity to his colleagues. (And how prescient he was! These are now known as “people skills,” and they are highly valued in the twenty-first-century workplace.)

How precisely to escape this trap was not at all clear. Midway through Richard Yates’s 1961 novel
Revolutionary Road,
April Wheeler comes up with the perfect way to get out of the desperate suburban prison. Her husband will quit his post at Knox Business Machines, “the dullest job you can imagine.” They will move to Paris, and she will work as a government secretary while he roams the city and reignites his old creative bohemian self.

But the world was not yet ready for this new definition of man, set free from his family duties. April finds herself pregnant, and the plan is drowned by the chorus of men alarmed by such a gender upheaval. His neighbor: “What kind of half-assed idea is this about her supporting him? I mean what kind of man is going to be able to take a thing like that?” His colleague (to Frank): “I don’t see you languishing indefinitely at sidewalk cafés while your good frau commutes to the embassy or whatever.” His neighbor again, imagining the lovely April Wheeler “grown thick and stumpy from her decade of breadwinning.”

The peaceful solution to upper-class breadwinner angst did not present itself in the sixties and seventies, either. Instead marriage became the casualty of the all-out, sexually charged gender wars of the era. The new magazine
Playboy
urged men to reclaim the domestic space for themselves—put on some mood music, mix up a highball, and invite a woman over as a one-night guest, not a permanent resident. For women, meanwhile, marriage and all its accoutrements became the enemy, the barrier to fulfillment and progress. The worst thing one could be was a housewife, enslaved to a master husband. “Prostitutes don’t sell their bodies, they rent their bodies,” feminist activist Flo Kennedy wrote in
Color Me Flo,
a quote that got reprinted in
Ms.
magazine. “Housewives sell their bodies when they get married.” In a 1971 forum captured in the documentary
Town
Bloody Hall,
Germaine Greer and her feminist acolytes mocked a culture that believed a woman should “get an orgasm from a shiny floor.” The forum ended with three women falling all over one another and making out onstage. This might have been an act designed to annoy and titillate Norman Mailer, who was also onstage, or it might have been a genuine gay rights moment. Either way, the message was that conventional bourgeois marriage was for the dogs.