Women's Lib isn't just for women.
It changed the role of men, too.
Are men even necessary anymore? Are they worth the bother? The old deal between the sexes was that men were the primary breadwinner. Increasingly women in the workforce are the primary or equal provider. Moreover, they aren't poisoned by the testosterone that makes men prone to anti-social violence, crime, and foolish risk-taking.
College classmate Jim Stodder returns to finish his reflection on fertility, this time looking at the role of men in America. He has a PhD.in Economics from Yale (1990) and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Administrative Sciences at Boston University, where he teaches financial regulation and international economics. He maintains a website at www.jimstodder.com
Guest Post by Jim Stodder
The ‘Deal’ Between the Sexes-- is Falling Apart. Part Two
Sex roles are changing, and the focus has been on women empowerment. Now female-to-male enrollments in college are a 60-40 split in the U.S and trending toward two to one. We read about the rage of "incels"--involuntarily celibate males--against feminists they consider hypocritical in preferring male partners to be successful or attractive in traditional ways. Incels aren't, and they are losing out. The media report conflicts that were unknown a short time ago, the conflict between male-to-female trans women and "cis" women, and complaints by TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) who do not want "women-only" spaces like changing rooms and women’s shelters used by those not born as biological females.Changing roles for women mean new roles for men. On one hand, in the world of #MeToo consciousness, men are instructed to be more respectful of women -- or else. But there is a growing male reaction. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in her Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, has shown how a wounded “national masculinity” and resentment at falling prospects can lead men (and women) to long for a strongman who can win it all back. Donald Trump has supporters like the Proud Boys, with their biggest guys marching in front, muscles bulging beneath tight t-shirts.
Trump revels in his reputation as a stud, bragging about his ability to "grab pussies" and get away with it. Most white American women voters in 2016 or 2020 cast their ballots for him. What most of them would probably consider disqualifying in their own workplace was apparently OK when it came to their Commander in Chief.
For most jobs, a rational sexual division of labor has vanished. Few jobs anymore require male upper body strength. But one job has always been for women alone: Childbirth. Shulamith Firestone argued over 50 years ago in her Dialectic of Sex–to the incredulity and outrage of most–that the liberation of women requires abolishing the division of reproductive labor. Firestone predicted that technology would advance to free women from childbirth itself.
This seemed quite sci-fi in 1970. But in 2017, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia maintained healthy sheep embryos in artificial wombs for up to 4 weeks and said that they can go much longer. The lead researcher says that complete extra-uterine delivery is still “a pipe dream,” but bioethicists (and techno-feminists inspired by Firestone) are already smoking that pipe. Today’s children may well live to see artificial wombs. It will be for the safety and health of mother and child, of course. But it will also destroy the last reason for a sexual division of labor.
There will still be sex roles and sexual preferences. But one can predict that both may be more broadly defined and variable. In the hands of a great sci-fi writer, Ursula LeGuin, it is a possible future: In her Left Hand of Darkness, she imagines gender as relationship-specific, depending on the dynamics between partners. Our new world of gender transition and fluidity makes this 1969 novel seem prescient. (Shockingly for a heavily male readership like sci-fi, it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for 1970.)
The old sex-role deal was essentially the man providing physical protection and support in return for the woman providing sexual access and an explicit guarantee of paternity. But many women now get that protection and support from other sources and are deciding to have few if any children.
So our old deal is dying, what is our new one? I would be crazy to say I know, but there are clearly better options possible for both sexes. The opportunities on the women’s side are more obvious. But men too are benefitting from less constricted sex roles, by being freer to explore new careers, parenting, and emotional territory.
I will end by citing the mytho-poet Robert Bly, and his book, Iron John. He shows how today’s “men’s issues” echo back from the ancient Sumerian myths of Gilgamesh. (Gilgamesh was part-god, and many scholars see the much later Greek Odysseus, 600-800 BCE, as based on this earlier work form 2,000 to 2,500 BCE.) Gilgamesh’s inseparable first antagonist is his wild-man “double,” Enkidu, sent by jealous gods to kill him. But they become more than friends, almost two halves of the same soul. The wild-man winds up being “tamed” by a female sex-priestess and only then is he reliable and disciplined enough to be of much use to Gilgamesh.
When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh breaks every rule to visit him in the Underworld. As a punishment, Gilgamesh has to stay there a long time alone, a most terrible punishment. But he comes out the other side. Bly’s interpretation is that modern man must, like Gilgamesh, descend into the underworld of his own unconscious before he can begin his hero’s quest in earnest.
Bly, I think, is not at all surprised by the tortured displays with which I began this section, modern males in search of their identities. He sees much of our quest as our search for how we can be a good father, a painful journey inasmuch as many of us had only the most limited and formal relations with our own dads. He sees our current race of males as stunted half-men who never learned or even discussed with their own fathers what it means to be a man. We have to do better for our own sons, and this requires reliving our own pain and confusion as boys.
But I am convinced that there are deeper and stronger men, braver and more beautiful men, waiting to greet us and become us. There’s really nowhere else to go, so let the journey begin.
13 comments:
Liberal men are pussies.
Ah, another well reasoned comment from our frustrated incel with water on the brain
It seems like we can see ahead to a more equitable future between the genders (all of them!) but culture moves very slowly and unevenly. No one foresaw the effects of the industrial revolution with respect to women's rights and now with things moving even faster societal change is lagging even more.
One day there will be women on the moon, just imagine...astronauts won't have to do their own laundry.
And frustrated incels, with water on the brain, like anonymous, are like the dinosaurs and dire wolves trapped in the tar pits of La Brea, doomed, and lashing out at something they are incapable of understanding.
This all brings to mind a phrase coined by Irina Dunn back in 1970: "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
The good news is that if you are with woman, it's because she wants you - which explains why Mr. Water-on-the-Brain isn't.
As a society and as a political entity, how do we provide a path forward for those seemingly unwilling or unable to make the jump to the new economic and technological realities that are coming? Hoping they die off like 🦖 is not going to work.
I remember Robert Bly's discussion of the "flying boys", ever increasing in number, who rarely or never had the benefit of a responsible, present father nor even a responsible male figure, period.
These days, however, it's rather dsisfavored as classist, sexiat and/or racist to cite the supposed superior quality of the traditional nuclear family especially in raising boys. I wonder what Bly would say today.
I think Bly looks to traditional cultural forms to learn, not just repeat slavishly. I see the breakdown in so many young male lives as the tragedy of sex role change. It is tragedy in the classic sense that the good things about the hero are inseparable from the bad things that make him destroy and be destroyed.
Our tragedy is that women's full participation in every aspect of life is rational and inevitable, but it must largely destroy traditional masculinity. This is playing out in many terrible ways.
We should have compassion for basement boys and incels. They are road-kill along the way of a change without precedent in human evolution. Men and women's sex roles and economic functions were shifted by the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions. But the Cyber Revolution is cancelling any reason for male and female labor to not be completely interchangeable.
Sex role differences are breaking down as a result. There's a promise of liberation, but a huge amount of pain along the way.
Everything changes, and we adapt or die. The key is to retain our core values, whatever happens. In the U.S., those would be the Enlightenment values that inspired our founding documents. Now, as never before, it’s important to protect them against the forces seeking to divide and conquer us – and I’m not talking about Russia or China.
Evolutionary biology is not quite so easily contravened. Human nature is not infinitely malleable.
Societies with the lowest levels of rigid sex role enforcement have the lowest percentages of female software engineers, probably because women in those societies have many occupations to choose from, and women tend to be more interested in people than in things. I have a female colleague in Computer Science who once told me that growing up in India she had the choice of either a career in computers or being a slave in her mother in law’s house. She might have picked another career if she had grown up here.
I once read an essay by a trans man who, when he started taking testosterone, noticed an immediate increase in his interest in physics and in how things worked.
You can’t always get what you want…
On changing sex roles: In 2020, women accounted for 54.09 percent of all students in ABA-approved law schools. The Governor, Speaker of the House (now running for Governor), and Attorney General of Oregon are all women. The chief justice of the Oregon the Supreme Court is a woman. In fact, five of the seven (71%) justices of the Oregon Supreme Court are women. If men are still relevant, they are certainly underrepresented in leadership positions in the state of Oregon. It remains to be seen how women will exercise the power they hold in the state.
I have also personally met four different women who had successful careers as computer programmers but who then left the field because they wanted to do something that "was more involved with people."
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