*Note – This article deals with a very limited set of people. I am not discussing those below the poverty line, or even really outside of Western Europe and North America. I am not interested in convincing anyone’s Limbaugh/O’Reilly-obsessed dad that women have it rough, and I regard the workplace as an unpleasant place, by design, for all humans. *
I have started reading contemporary articles on romance, dating, sexuality, and so on, and it’s humbling how average I appear to be. Salon.com is an entertaining read. It is the antithesis to my preferred news sources – The Christian Science Monitor, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and (just because they are representative of the shit Americans get fed as news) CNN. The timeliness of some salon.com’s editorial writing leads me to frightening realizations about where I fit in the population of North Americans. I’m young, bright, gainfully employed, well-educated, and so on. There’s money to be had writing news to people like me, but I’m too young and not quite wealthy enough to feel like the New York Times is written to me. So, I have Salon instead. Worst of all, the money to be made writing news to people like me, or people like the New York Times’ readership is what keeps everybody else from getting the kind of news they should be getting.
I have relatively recently stumbled over two articles that address ideas that I’m being forced to think about, given my current relationship with a 3rd wave feminist and my lingering classical notions of “purpose.” These ideas and the articles overlap in their treatment of these topics.
These articles discuss (sometimes indirectly) increasing female empowerment (especially in dating and sexual contexts), its role in male identity, and the increasingly common view of men as exceptionally flawed by contrast with our female counterparts. For me, the latter is the major issue here. As a male, I’m noticing that my quirks seem less-permissible than presumably similar flaws were for my father, uncles, (figurative) older brothers, and so on. The former article declares this a controversial opinion, apparently by the traditional view of the man as the breadwinner, decision-maker – the images you get in black and white short-form videos produced in the fifties. (“Hi, honey. Here’s your pipe and a whiskey with two ice cubes just like you like. Dinner will be ready in 30 minutes, and the kids are upstairs studying. Can I make you a little more comfortable?”) That’s been dead since at least the late seventies, and probably was always a myth. This is not where I want to spend most of my time. This ideal was bound to get destroyed by capitalism. I mean, seriously, someone sitting around the house all day serving another person with no money involved directly? Feminism cannot take credit for the widespread acceptance of women outside of the home, if it even wants it. The empowerment that women are now seeing is largely the result of it being profitable to make women “empowered.”
I don’t find this particularly interesting. It’s socialism, and relatively mainstream socialist thought, as I understand it. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
But the above writers (one a woman, one an older man interviewed by a woman) view contemporary young men as “unworthy” of their female counterparts in the first case, and “scared shitless” of commitment in the second.
This interests me, because I can imagine someone perceiving my behavior as me experiencing the feelings ascribed to men in these articles.
(According to this mindset) Women are overqualified for men in general and awestruck, in the good way, by the wealth of opportunity they now enjoy. Men, by contrast, are now assigned an incapacity to make decisions in general, from what to have for dinner, to what sort of jobs to apply for, to which girls we date are worth taking past those first couple nights out.
I can’t say a lot about female empowerment. I’m a man, I’ve dated women (almost exclusively) from the generation currently under the microscope, and I only have indirect experience of the inner workings of American men who I believe were transitional from “the old way” to the current batch of twentysomethings – the baby boomers – for a comparison. In my world, Baby boomer women were essentially sexless housewives or bed-tanned second wives with expensive tastes. Neither talked a whole lot about sex. Catholic education also provided a lot of adults who didn’t talk about sex outside of abstinence.
The baby boomer men I know don’t sound like they had much more of a clue, really. I’m more emotionally healthy and have a better job at twenty-six than any of them I know well enough to talk about had at 30. I think most of them were married (or close to it) by my age. They aspired to financial security and pursued it in pretty conventional ways. My dad was my age in 1975. I think he was on his first marriage by then. I was six years away from being born. There was apparently an expectation to get married that I don’t feel.
The expectation of marriage by your mid-to-late thirties might be the difference, and might be what’s making men like me all fucked up. Let me explain.
Women get told to have all these experiences now that they are (theoretically) liberated. Go out and have fun before you settle down and start making babies, or (gasp!) don’t make babies at all. That’s great. I’m seriously happy that this is happening. Women at 35 are still enjoying dating. Great.
But what about the guys? What are we supposed to do while women are having all that fun? We have that fun, but it isn’t endorsed by the public the way it is being endorsed for women. There’s something attractive and positive about a 35 year old woman seeing a few guys at the same time that I don’t immediately feel about a man the same age. He’s past his prime and ought to be settling down a bit, right?
At least in mixed company, women get winks and giggles for being size queens with sugar daddies, but guys who openly attest to preferring girls dramatically younger than them with disproportionate breasts aren’t even worth commenting on.
I do it, too. I am not blaming anyone.
I am still formulating this. Either men are continuing to act the way they were in the past, or are having even more fun in general before getting married, while women are increasing their premarital jollies. At any rate, there is still a sense that what men in general are doing is not permissible while what women in general are doing is either commendable or out of their hands. There’s a lot to be had here, and I’ve been writing this off and on all day. I give up.
