by Hanna Rosin
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 failu
re, 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.
DAVID GODSALL 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.”
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 th
ey 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.”
BETWEEN 1935 AND 1936 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.”
