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Saturday, May 03, 2008
“Where Are The Men?” Part 2: The Differentiation Of A “Species”
As Cassy Fiano and Dr. Melissa Clouthier struggle to qualify their original arrogances, it's occurred to your Curmudgeon that there's a little-discussed phenomenon in the mix that deserves proper exploration. Indeed, it's observable every day, virtually everywhere in America, but is commented on so seldom that one might easily take it for a taboo subject. Yet it's at the core of the "problem" the cited harridans, and women who agree with them, are obsessed with.
Your Curmudgeon will call this phenomenon differentiated masculinity.
A species faced with sharply heightened survival pressures is prone to differential specialization. That is, not all the members of the species will adapt in the same way. Regional sub-populations will pursue adaptive strategies that depend critically upon local factors. In the case of subhuman creatures, the principal influences are climate and the availability of food. In the case of humans, the influences are more likely to be political, social, economic, and technological.
Of course, some adaptations will be more visibly successful than others; some sub-populations will dwindle and vanish. But remember that in this context, "vanish" is a word with two interpretations. The more easily grasped one is that the sub-population will die off, leaving no representatives in the region. The less easily grasped one is that the local survivors will "go underground;" their adaptations will be for disguise from predators they can't defeat in an overt contest.
The adaptations of the sexes to changes in the environment have been several. Not all of the consequences of those adaptations are easily understood. But that's why your Curmudgeon is on the job. First, let's review a critical fragment of American history.
It seems inarguable that American men have been put under increased survival pressures these past few decades. Most of the behaviors and predilections that characterized American men in 1950 have been sharply castigated at the very least. Many have actually become illegal; some are penalized monetarily, whether through taxation or some other avenue.
The crescendo of these pressures was sharp. From about 1960 to 1975, the milieu in which American masculinity had functioned was radically transformed. Your Curmudgeon's selection of 1960 as his base year stems from the most socially powerful technological development in human history: the debut of oral contraception.
Tom Bethell, in one of his columns on "The Hive," quotes an unnamed "veteran of the Cold War:" “We were worried about the Bomb, when we should have been worried about the Pill.” Though your Curmudgeon dissents from some of Bethell's inferences, there's no possible doubt that convenient, effective oral contraception, which made family planning infinitely less problematic, also remade the American sexual landscape from top to bottom. The discoveries we made in the years that followed stand as an object lesson to persons who believe that the sexes, apart from one's ability to conceive and bear a child, are absolutely identical. (Yes, yes, it's a lesson they've refused to absorb.)
For centuries uncounted before the Pill, one of the possible consequences of sex had been conception, with all it implies. Conception is both the grail and the Gorgon of female sexual desire. Women are biologically predisposed to want children; indeed, their bodies are prone to all sorts of maladies if they refrain from conceiving, bearing, and suckling a child. Yet childbearing causes a woman to cross a threshold that forbids retreat: the door into motherhood.
Motherhood is so different from the stage that precedes it that we might validly deem mothers to be a subspecies of female Mankind. Motherhood changes a woman's body in important ways. Her fundamental drives diverge from those of non-mothers. Her priorities are radically different. Her relations with men, including the father of her children, must change as well. All of this is objectively beyond dispute.
Women cannot help but be aware of this. Many women fear it. Pain, risk, and the renunciation of youthful pleasures and latitudes are involved. Quite a number of women are unable to imagine that the fulfillments of motherhood are worth what they cost. Time-preference and risk-aversion, two of the most important concepts in economics and game theory, are deeply involved. Women being personally (not politically) far more conservative than men, a preponderance of American women have employed the Pill to defer, bound, and limit their "motherhood exposure." Many eschew motherhood altogether.
The Pill was one of the driving factors in another, equally important development: the removal of the legal penalties and social stigma from abortion. For despite its 99%-plus effectiveness, the Pill suffers one of the classical limitations of all contraceptive methods: if you forget to take it, you'll get knocked up.
Any number of women have succumbed to this "fault" in oral contraception. But unlike its predecessor technologies, the Pill seemed to offer a guarantee of effectiveness. That the guarantee is conditional upon proper use is far too often dismissed as irrelevant.
The Pill brought America a wholesale change in sexual availability. First it was by wives to their husbands; later, as the moral and psychological transformation of Baby Boom America proceeded, by unmarried women to their male admirers. The unqualified embrace of physical pleasure as a God-given right, seemingly invulnerable to the classical consequences of sexual indulgence that had made "shotgun wedding" a part of our informal social lexicon, could only come after women had internalized the notion of guaranteed consequence-free sex, and had granted social acceptance to the irresponsible sexual aggression of men.
Careless use of the Pill gave rise to an explosion of "oops!" pregnancies. The guarantee was shown to be illusory; to defend the right to sex without costs, something had to be done. That something came in 1973, with Justice Harry Blackmun's infamous decision in Roe v. Wade.
Other factors were in operation during the fateful years. Most prominent was the sharp increase in "the cost of living well." Steady increases in Americans' tax burden and sustained post-war inflation had us pondering what we might do to keep our standards of living rising. No, most of us weren't conscious of the drivers as such; we merely knew at month's end that the bills were getting harder and harder to meet. The commonest solution, in those years, was to send the Missus to work.
American women's entry en masse into the labor force did two things: it increased the Gross National Product by about 70%, and it completed the transformation of women's attitudes toward sex and motherhood. The lady of the house was no longer "of the house" in any important sense; she had become a co-breadwinner with her husband. This new role swiftly eclipsed a wife's traditional priorities as mother and homemaker.
Young women came to think of wage labor as their proper destination. Upon leaving high school or college, they looked immediately for employment, rather than for husbands to cherish, children to nurture, and hearths to tend. True, they continued to give lip service to marriage, motherhood, and homemaking for a time. But full-time wage labor makes motherhood and homemaking rather more difficult.
His responsibilities had never before included homemaking, and of course he is incapable of motherhood. Her newly adopted responsibilities made homemaking a lesser priority, and traditional motherhood a nearly unendurable burden. She was now as tired as he at the end of the day. Suddenly sex, the consequence-free pleasure they both believed had been guaranteed them, was often unthinkable by reason of irritation or fatigue. For him to spend his free time on traditional male frivolities while she was stuck with the cooking, cleaning, and laundry became a thorn in her flesh. She began to withhold her body, and to make demands. He reacted with incredulity and resentment.
It often seems that the rapid development of improved, more affordable homemaking technology ought to have offset the resulting tensions more than it did. Greatly improved, far less expensive vacuums, washers and driers, dishwashers, self-cleaning ovens and the like did objectively and substantially reduce the burden of homemaking. But the major bone of contention wasn't the actual labor or time involved; it was women's perception of iniquity. The perception was in all major regards correct. Prior generations of women had not been expected to contribute financially to the family income, while the breadwinner role had been held to excuse their husbands from homemaking duties. The balance had been thrown off, and husbands, for the most part, declined to help correct it. The war between the sexes had begun.
Radical feminists and their fellow-travelers seized upon the new conflict with a glee properly described as obscene. The American woman, they proclaimed, was "the new nigger," ruthlessly oppressed by the patriarchal capitalist power structure. The men in her life were insincere in their professions of love and devotion; their true interest was in exploiting her body, her earning power, and her selflessness. She had every right to rise as high as she liked, but was being "held down" by a masculinist conspiracy designed to "keep her in her place." Whether the conspiracy was conscious or unconscious made no difference; the time had come for her to regard him as her enemy.
Men who dared to differ with this portrayal of gender relations were vilified as "sexists," an epithet designed to join "racist" as an equal in the hierarchy of villainy.
The picture has changed quite a bit since the heyday of Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin. The gender-war feminists are definitely on the skids, while the equity feminists, such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Tammy Bruce, are on the ascendant. But the processes of the late Twentieth Century, beginning in 1960, worked psychological and cultural changes that have resisted all attempts at amendment.
Among those changes is the regionalization of both masculine and feminine archetypes.
Populations and glaciers have this in common: they often seem to be quite still, yet are in definite motion. A glacier "moves" by growing at one end and sloughing at the other. Often, so does a population.
The phrases "red-state America" and "blue-state America" should be familiar from the political context in which they originated. Along with the political preferences of those regions go a number of other attitudes and patterns. Over the past twenty or thirty years, Americans have gravitated toward the region they find most congenial by reason of social and cultural attributes. More conservative types have moved into the "red" inland and southern regions, while the more liberal ones have inclined toward the "blue" coasts and Canadian border states. The patterns that characterize inter-gender relations in those regions are markedly different.
"Blue" America is the bastion of political correctness, where the suggestion that men and women differ in significant ways that fit them for different roles is reflexively denounced. "Blue" America produces most of our media darlings, our working women, our divorces, and our abortions. "Blue" Americans show little interest in religion. "Blue" American families tend to be small. The children thereof enjoy relatively lavish lifestyles. Nearly all aspire to college, and to places in the white collar world. There's little interest in military service among "blue" teens and young adults.
"Red" America strikes the "blue" denizen as a throwback to some pre-Enlightenment time. Though many "red" American wives work outside the home, the percentage is considerably smaller than in the "blue" zone. "Red" America produces few celebrities, but nearly all our workers-with-the-hand: farmers, construction workers, workers in "smokestack" industries, and artisans of all sorts. "Red" Americans are almost as religious as their great-grandparents were. "Red" American families are on average larger than "blue" ones; divorce is considerably less prevalent among them. "Red" children aren't as well supplied with pocket cash, designer clothes, or iPods. A greater proportion of "red" kids elect to go to work after high school, or into the armed forces.
These differences are accompanied by quite considerable differences in manifestations of masculinity and inter-gender relations.
"Red" American men haven't gone entirely unaffected by the changes of the recent past, but they've retained a greater degree of public confidence, approbation, and latitude than their "blue" compatriots. Their adaptation has been to filter the environment, dismissing and excluding persons, things, and notions that clash with their worldview and their preferences. They're largely unabashed about their delight in traditional male diversions, and insusceptible to suggestions that traditional masculinity is somehow an affront to women's dignity or well-being.
The self-protective instincts of men trapped in "blue" America have caused them to adapt by "going underground." They don't exactly hide their masculinity, but they downplay it in public, in the workplace, and in general social intercourse. They allow it to rise to the surface only when highly confident that they're surrounded entirely by friends -- male friends. They share a deep distrust of women's tendency toward "solidarity with their sisters" at their husbands' expense. Among other things, a man's carelessness about expressing himself can cost him a divorce, loss of his children, a sexual harassment lawsuit, or in extreme cases, a stretch behind bars wearing a bright orange jumpsuit.
Differentiated masculinity -- the Balkanization of American manhood and its outward expressions according to the influences that prevail in the local environment -- is one of the central sociological facts of our time.
We hear "where are the manly men?" plaints from "blue" women far more often than from "red" ones. The "red" ones have far less difficulty finding them because, in their neck of the woods, men don't feel a need to camouflage themselves. In "blue" America, failing to conceal your masculinity can cost you your family, your job, and your freedom. But concealment is not suppression, and it's certainly not abnegation. The chameleon looks like a twig, but that doesn't mean he is one.
There are other aspects of the problem to be explored, for example the explosion of single-parent families (usually mothers), which have bequeathed us hundreds of thousands of young men to whose upbringing no mature masculine influence has contributed. Your Curmudgeon would not deny that such things can give rise to undisciplined and perverse forms of masculinity: homosexuality, sexual indolence and confusion, misogyny, and thuggishness of all sorts. Our coastal cities testify to that fact far too eloquently. But his central thesis is that within the male, the masculine will forever lie. It cannot be suppressed, for it is powered by our origin in God Himself -- yet another of the foundation stones of the West the gender-war feminists and their allies have striven to shatter.
As usual, C. S. Lewis said it best:
"Yes," said the Director. "There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, He would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make yet a deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what the old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing -- the gold lion, the bearded bull -- which breaks through the hedges and scatters the little kingdoms of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it." [From That Hideous Strength]
Comments
Over our lifetime, hubby and I have fallen into several categories. He worked a blue collar job when we met, I worked clerical. After we were married he went back to college, then medical school, internship… while I was the breadwinner. When he finished his education, opened his medical office, I worked with him to help the practice grow. Now he works strictly ER, I stay at home and take care of house, family and him. Through all of that he NEVER cooked, washed clothes, cleaned house. Ever.
So, not sure where we really fit in.
Posted by Debbie on 05/03/2008 at 03:35 PMThe more I ponder on this particular topic, the more I can truly begin to see that Cassie’s post is an unfortunate sign of the way things are headed. Her words are very telling. According to her, the man should support his wife NO MATTER what her decision is, without question and without a say. If they are hurting for cash, and she decides to quit her job, why, then, according to her, the lazy bum can just get another job!
I can also see this becoming apparent in the prevailing attitudes towards gender roles in television. I’m not just talking about the feminizing of men on TV in general, but also the new stereotype of the dim, fat, bumbling doofus husband, being followed around by an infinitely patient and wise wife, who always seems to be shaking her head and “picking up” after his various foibles and follies. She is the martyr, who must put up with this pathetic loser, who is also being routinely outsmarted by his unruly and ill-mannered children.
For example, there is a television commercial for Windex, where the lazy husband wakes up from a nap he was taking while his wife labored at cleaning up the house, and finds the windows so clean that he walks into them. Meanwhile, his patient, understanding wife shakes her head with a smirk (sorry, smile) on her face in the kitchen, knowing all along that is exactly what the lazy doofus was going to do as soon as he woke up.
I could go on for a while, but I think that is unnecessary, since I think you all know several examples of this. Obviously, if this were turned around, with a doofus wife and a patient, wise, all-knowing husband, there would be hell to pay.
The point here is that this has become a part of our society’s collective conscious. Marriages are no longer partnerships, but one person laboring after another’s laziness or ineptitude, or decision to work or not work, or, or, or….
I think of the days when marriage was truly a partnership. Feminists will tell you that those were the days of male subjugation of women, but I don’t see it that way. Think of some of the stereotypes that we think of in the hated “nuclear family.” Most of them fall along gender lines that enhance, or make more evident, specific gender roles that feminists hate. However, the dark, dirty truth of the matter is that these are the roles that best fit the specific strengths of each gender. Our basic natures, from the days of stone-aged cavemen, are writ large in the roles of the nuclear family.
By way of example, think of the prairie wife, bravely standing behind her husband, reloading his rifles for him as he fights to repel marauding raiders. Feminists deplore an image like this, because they think that it is gender-based discrimination for the woman to not be standing beside her husband, fighting the Indians herself. However, common sense, and thus, true, beneficial partnership, tells a different story. If both were on the line firing, there would be no one to reload the guns, and they would both eventually run out of ammunition. As a result, there would be no guns to fire in defense, and the defense would fail. The point is, if both people in a relationship, marriage, or partnership perform the same duty, then there will be a doubling of labor on that duty, and a vacuum when it comes to completing the other duties at hand. This would not be beneficial, and it would not be optimal, and therefore, would be a situation that would not last for very long. In this particular case, both would probably have been killed and scalped shortly after running out of ammunition. MORE TO FOLLOW
Posted by on 05/05/2008 at 09:01 PMSo what does this tell us? Simply put, it states that in any relationship, marriage, or partnership, there will be a division of duties to ensure that everything gets done. In the case of a business partnership, it stands to reason that each person gets assigned the duties to which he/she is best suited. The congenial, friendly, social guy should probably be involved in customer relations and sales, while the fastidious, organized, and efficient guy should probably be involved more in production and various sundry administrative tasks that require his particular skill set.
As much as the feminists hate to admit it, there are differences between the genders. Generally speaking, each gender is better suited to a specific set of goals and tasks associated with the partnership called marriage. God, in His infinite wisdom, saw the logic in this, and saw fit to design us this way. He saw that making us the same would result in both of us either being on the firing line, or both of us reloading. It is plainly obvious that neither one of these activities make a lot of sense without the other one in support, and so He designed us with this in mind.
He designed men to be the provider, protector, and warrior. He designed women to be the caretaker, nurturer, and raiser of children. There is a reason that men have always (with few exceptions) been the warriors while the women stayed behind. Pound for pound, men are stronger, faster, more aggressive, and better suited to hunting and making war. Since the skill set gained there fits nicely into surviving in a capitalist society, men fit nicely into this role as our society evolved. Feminists, however, gasp in indignation at these truths.
They would argue that since men had the power, they created a system that fit their skill set, in order to (or, depending on who you talk to, to incidentally) exclude women from that role. I don’t see it that way.
You see, if gender roles were reversed, and WOMEN in our society were the bread winners, and MEN were the nurturers, I think we would have the SAME SITUATION. Feminists would be bitching about “lazy-assed bums mooching off of them and their hard work,” and the feminist movement would be pushing to get women BACK INTO the household, and men BACK OUT into the workforce. If there is one thing constant, it is that the mental deficiency that causes leftist (and thusly, feminist) thought is ALWAYS dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, no matter what that state may be.
When most people hear the typical complaints of a woman that works outside the household, they see a series of valid complaints, and serious issues that need to be addressed. I, on the other hand, see a reinforcement of gender roles.
For instance, the common complaint from women that not only do they have to work a full day in the office; they have to come home and do all of the housework, too. To this complaint, the typical response from “Dear Abby” and all of the other mainstream folks of the day, would be, “your lazy husband should be helping you, what a lazy husband, jerk, SOB, bastard, needs to get off his lazy butt, etc”. This is what leads to the “lazy doofus” commercial that I previously mentioned. However, what I see is a reinforcement of the female gender role; the nurturer, and the caretaker. As a result of this natural, ingrained role, she has a much lower tolerance for mess and clutter than he does. He comes home from a day’s work, sees a passably clean home, that presents no undue threats or dangers to his family, figures “eh, good enough” and goes about decompressing from his day’s efforts. On the other hand, SHE comes home, sees the same house that he does, and is horrified by the mess and clutter of it all, and instantly gets to cleaning, scrubbing, and sanitizing. MORE TO FOLLOW
Posted by on 05/05/2008 at 09:08 PMA woman who does not, or chooses to not, understand gender roles would instantly get furious at her husband for not helping her, but what she does not understand is that HE DOES NOT SEE THE PROBLEM, and thusly, DOES NOT SEE THE RETURN OR REWARD FOR DOING SOMETHING THAT DOES NOT YET NEED TO BE DONE. That said, a decent man will also understand this dichotomy in gender viewpoints, and will work with his equally tired wife to find ways to find a “middle ground” compromise, so that they may enjoy the remainder of the evening in relative peace and quiet. This is the part of the partnership that many miss out on. When the situation of the day demands that both of you are on the firing line, you each have to do your OWN reloading. However, in the case of home care and maintenance, you share the domicile, and you have to live together, so a “happy medium” must be struck, which is mutually understood and personalized FOR THE TWO OF YOU, which fits YOUR needs (not the needs of your local chapter of NOW, or whatever other feminist organization you may have nearby). If this means she must downgrade her sense of what a clean house is, and he upgrade that same sense in himself, and that is what works for you, then you’ve solved the problem. Often times, what ends up working out is that she does all of the housework, because her tolerance for mess is lower, and she refuses to compromise her sense of cleanliness. What the feminists and columnists of the day fail to realize is that THIS IS HER CHOICE, not her husband’s. This does not make him a lazy piece of worthless excrement any more than it makes her an anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive neat-freak. It makes them both exactly what God intended. What they miss in the discussion is that in seemingly all cases of gender-role friction, the man is the one expected to give in. If she wants help with something he sees as uncritical and a waste of time, then the culture of the day demands that he give in, or risk being labeled the stereotypical “lazy doofus” that we see on TV. In the Curmudgeon’s example, if she wants him to not work overtime to financially support his family, then the culture of the day demands that he is home at 5, or else he gets labeled as the distant, uncaring husband that we have all heard about. If she wants to work outside the home, he’d better support her, or be labeled a misogynistic pig. Alternatively, if she wants to stay home and raise the kids, he’d better be all for it and find a way to support this desire (but he’d better not work overtime!). Anyone else see a catch-22 here? Is this new system specifically designed to make men look bad, no matter what? When do the desires of the man fit into the equation? When does he get to say to her:
“Honey, I WANT to work overtime so that we can afford that fishing boat so I can enjoy myself”
Or:“Honey, I’m holding up MY end, so where is the return? Where the nookie at?”
Without being a total jerk by today’s standards? His desire for sex is no different than her desire for a clean house, yet the expectations of the desiree are completely different in these situations. A man not helping with the housework is seen as a “lazy doofus”, yet, a woman who chooses to not fulfill her husband’s sexual needs is deemed “empowered.” Yet, I see no difference between the two things. Each is formed by a gender-role driven need, yet our society applauds the denial of one, while condemning the denial of another, based solely on the gender of the desirer/desiree.
MORE TO FOLLOWPosted by on 05/05/2008 at 09:15 PMSorry so long, Fran, I hope you’ll indulge me one last time!To further this example, what if a man were to withhold helping with the household chores on condition that he gets what HE wants? “Honey, I am not going to help you clean the house unless I get to go fishing on Saturday.”My guess is that most folks would bristle at such a statement. However, this is a routine, expected, and APPLAUDED occurrence when it is turned around, and the woman withholds sex until the man helps with the laundry. It is shocking to me that Leftists, a group so obsessed with “diversity” in everything else, is pushing so hard for uniformity when it comes to gender. Why people cannot see that the gender roles that we’d fallen into over the course of millennia were in place, not because of a misogynistic, male-dominated society, but because that was where most people were truly happy? Fran wrote a great piece about people liking to have a “place” in society, and gender role was one of the “places” that has been removed forcibly from the way we do things. That many women hate that idea and are reacting with malcontent against it, as in the two topic pieces, is understandable. However, they are directing their ire in the wrong direction. Like I said in my previous posts, if these “Daddy’s Princesses” had matured much beyond their 16th birthday, they would realize that blaming this on the men in their life is the wrong path. If they need anyone to blame, they need to look no further than the mirror in their bathroom every morning, and at the local chapter of NOW down the street.
Posted by on 05/05/2008 at 09:20 PM
