by Hanna Rosin
But there are more hopeful signs as well, even in Korean media. A recent popular drama, My Name Is Kim Sam-soon, starred a charming, pudgy pastry chef who always speaks her mind. She falls for a younger man who, after much drama, chooses her over his younger and more classically feminine ex-girlfriend—a vindication for the King Kong girls. Kirsten Lee recently worked on a soap opera, which features a working woman who insists that her husband, who can’t find a job, take care of the children and cook. The woman had gotten the idea from her sister-in-law, who was a typical Gold Miss and intended to be the villain of the show; in one scene, the man’s mother bursts into tears when she discovers her Cinderalla son wearing an apron. But Kirsten’s viewers ended up being much more sympathetic to the Gold Miss, Kirsten told me, because at least “she was working hard, and she symbolized a good work ethic.”
I HEARD HOPEFUL STORIES of the intimate kind, too, although they tended to involve the persistence and patience of a Confucian parable, like that of an ant pushing a boulder up a hill. Generally, they featured a woman slowly and slyly teaching her husband to notice when she needed help, and a husband pliant and loving enough to start noticing. One of the women I most enjoyed meeting in Korea was a senior official at one of the government ministries. If she’d been a decade younger, she could have been a Gold Miss; she wore a fur vest and chose as our meeting place a French café on the top floor of a posh department store. Over the twenty years of her marriage, her husband had changed, she swore, but at a “glacial pace.” In the early years, family rituals would proceed in the usual Korean fashion. They would visit his family for the holidays and she would spend all day preparing food for neighbors she’d never met while the men watched football. “It really got under my skin,” she told me. “After every holiday I came back in a nasty temper.”
Then slowly she started making small requests, adding a new one each year. “Oh, honey, can you hand me that bucket?” “Oh, honey, I need more flour.” “Guys, could you crack the walnuts?” “Pass the coffee?” Rice-flour dumplings are the staple of Korean holiday meals, and generally making them is solely a woman’s job. Eventually she recruited her husband to help with even that detailed and tedious work, instead of just shooting him “bullets with my eyes.” Just before the holidays, she will remind him that a “happy wife means a happy husband,” and after two decades he has learned to take the hint. “Now, as soon as we step through the door at my mother-in-law’s house he starts rolling up his sleeves.” She has also taken steps to ensure that her son’s wife won’t have to go through that twenty-year reeducation process. She makes him clean up his breakfast dishes and do his own laundry.
Yeeun Kim, the young debater, may not have had any dating luck yet but she did have a breakthrough with her debate partner. For a year she debated with two men and one in particular always left her out of the strategic planning. “He was a very traditional Korean guy and whenever we would prep together he would try to dictate what we would do.” He would say she was “too strong” and compare her to other girls he knew. Yeeun got fed up and at one tournament, burst out crying from fury, and said she would no longer debate with him.
But then she set her mind to reforming him. She tried to strike just the right note between deferential and confrontational. She argued with him but without being too aggressive. Eventually she won him over, and they began to operate like true partners. Now she says that’s the closest model she has to a good relationship, and the reason she still has hope she might find someone she can marry.
You can understand why Korean men are in a state of shock. Korean women have gone from housewives to manic superwomen in just one generation. But the shock needs an equally strong countershock. A recent best seller loosely translated as Things of a Man by a local academic advises Korean men to change their habits because their form of patriarchy belongs to a dying era. In what might count as the most monumental change, Korea’s leading presidential candidate at the time I visited was a woman: Park Geun-hye is the daughter of a political dynasty, but her candidacy is still an amazing development in a country that effectively does not believe in female leadership. With any luck, Korea might go the way of some other formerly patriarchal, even militaristic cultures, and recognize the value of women leaders as a sort of maternal rescue team—Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, for example, who portrayed her country as a sick child in need of her care during her 2005 campaign. Or post-genocide Rwanda, which elected to heal itself by becoming the first country with a majority of women in parliament.
Despite her bad experience or maybe because of it, Stephanie Lee is doing her part to make sure the next generation of men will make a clean break. She has taught her son to speak softly, and she buys him pink stuffed animals and enrolls him in cooking and ballet instead of tae kwan do, even if he’s the only boy in the class, even if the teachers object. “I think machos really can’t survive in this new era,” she says, “and if I want him to thrive he needs a more feminine side.”
CONCLUSION
By the end of my research for this book I had gone a few months without talking to Calvin, the man I mentioned in the introduction—the boyfriend of Bethenny, the man who’d set off my curiosity about the fate of men. I gave him a call to catch up. I was happy to hear his deep, slow voice again, and as always he had plenty of time to talk, although not as much time as he’d had when we first met. Calvin was seeing his daughter much more regularly these days; he had just dropped her off at a friend’s house when I called. She was a preteen now, which he acknowledged is not the easiest time for a father to reconnect. (He and I have daughters about the same age, so we relate on that front.) But better late than never, right?
Calvin told me his next stop was the unemployment office, but not just to inquire about his check this time. He was looking into applying for a tuition subsidy. A few weeks earlier, he had wandered over to the local community college. It offered classes in engineering and various mechanical skills that might have seemed like a natural fit for Calvin, especially now that manufacturing jobs were trickling back into the region, as everywhere else in the United States.
But Calvin had decided to check out the nursing program—the same program Bethenny had just completed. His own mother had been a nurse, and he’d seen Bethenny “grow up about twenty years” while completing the program, he told me. Even though the classes looked like “all skirts” to him, he’d decided to give it a try. I could almost see it. Calvin was big but pretty gentle and not all that intrusive, qualities that might be soothing in a nurse. I could imagine patients feeling safe in his presence, particularly since “safe” in a hospital context does not entail long-term commitment. I told him I could not be more delighted, which is the truth. If he had started out as my muse for the “end of men,” Calvin was now showing that “end” might not be a permanent state of existence.
AS PART OF MY RESEARCH, I have read and reread the prophets of brain difference, particularly the popularizers such as Simon Baron-Cohen and Louann Brizendine, who argue that the male brain works this way and the female brain works that way and that those distinctions ordain the sexes to permanently work and love and live in diametrically opposite ways. But at this point at least, I just don’t find that line of research all that convincing. I’m sure that in the future neuroscientists will discover important differences between the male and female brains, but I suspect it’s less likely that those differences will decide matters so complicated as whether we choose to better ourselves by studying, to work in fulfilling jobs, or to be dedicated parents.
At this moment in history, Plastic Woman and Cardboard Man are at their most divergent. Over this century, women have proven themselves adept at shifting and remaking and sometimes contorting themselves to fit the times, and that very flexibility and responsiveness has come to define success in our era. Men, by contrast, seem much more resistant and rigid. But that might just be the case at this particular moment. In my heart of hearts I believe that men, even some of the most
discouraged men I’ve written about in this book, will eventually learn to decode the new flexibility, and will begin to adopt it for themselves. This doesn’t mean they will all go to nursing school or become teachers or get straight As in AP English, but it does mean that they will learn to expand the range of options for what it means to be a man. There’s nothing like being trounced year after year to make you reconsider your options. Bethenny had laughed when Calvin told her he was considering following in her footsteps. But when he asked, “You got any other ideas?” she admitted that she didn’t.
There are not only Calvins out there, but also plenty of men considerably further along in helping with Project Plastic Man. I chose not to focus on them in this book because there didn’t yet seem to be enough of them to constitute a definite trend. But some men I came across make it obvious that plasticity is not necessarily limited by gender. A few men I interviewed for my Slate survey on breadwinner wives, in particular, sounded like voices from the future. Here, for example, is Robert from Portland:
The fact that my wife makes more money than I do is never a topic of conversation in our house and is in no way an issue in our relationship. I’m proud of her accomplishments, and since everything we earn and spend is “ours,” I never feel like I’m not pulling my weight. I’ve read a few articles about this topic and find the idea of jealousy or emasculation completely foreign.
Robert lives in a city so progressive that it’s the subject of an extended TV comedy sketch on organic food–loving, DIY-ing, bike-lane-nazi progressives (Portlandia), and I suspect that his neighbors admire his open-mindedness. But my hope is that men in Calvin’s slice of America will also adjust their attitudes.
A subtle shift in their behavior is already underway. In 2009, sociologists Carla Shows and Naomi Gerstel published a study comparing child-care habits of men who were high-earning, highly educated physicians and men who were low-income, less-educated emergency medical technicians. Because the hours of the EMTs were generally more flexible than their wives’, the EMTs ended up being fairly active participants in their children’s daily routines, the researchers found. They picked up the kids from day care, fed them dinner, and traded shifts with other EMTs to stay home when a child was ill. Their self-image might not have included “active dad” but that is exactly what they were. The physicians, by contrast, had very little to do with the routines of family life. Instead, they saw themselves as “good fathers” because they attended their children’s special events, such as soccer games or performances that took place on weekends. Living closer to the bone, it turns out, provides a certain impetus to inhabit new kinds of masculine roles. The EMTs did not have the luxury to consider what someone might think of them staying home with a sick baby or making dinner. In a world where their wives were working hard and earning as much or more, they had to step into new roles to keep their families afloat.
But it’s not just the men who have to adjust. In “The Seesaw Marriage,” I mentioned that I was “startled” at the sight of a stay-at-home dad at my youngest child’s preschool making hand-printed T-shirts for the teachers. When I confessed to that reaction in introducing my female-breadwinner-couple survey in Slate, a stay-at-home dad who guessed I was talking about him approached me to ask what exactly was so “startling.” I had to think about that one for a while. In fact, he was one of the saner parents I knew. He brought in instruments to play for the kids, concocted cool art projects, biked his toddler daughter to school in all weather, and generally seemed to radiate the energy of someone who considered himself lucky. Obviously it was not just men restricting themselves to a narrow set of acceptable roles, but the rest of us colluding to keep them imprisoned. He was right. Why should I, after all my research, be “startled”? Why should I be anything but delighted?
Slowly, our attitudes seem to be shifting, the surest sign being that pop culture is starting to pick up the signal. In the TV sitcom Up All Night, the character played by Will Arnett starts out as a doltish stay-at-home dad, playing video games and ignoring the baby. But over the course of the series he evolves into the competent sensible parent reining in his wife’s crazy competitive instincts. The series’ main accomplishment is creating a stay-at-home dad whose wife wants to sleep with him. The movie What to Expect When You’re Expecting focuses on a “dude’s group,” where the dudes confess that their kids eat cigarettes or play in the toilet, but still there they are, a crew of dads and babies at the park. One of them confesses to a reluctant would-be father: “We love being dads. When I was young I used to think I was happy but now I know I’m happy.” This seems to be about as far as the culture can go right now, although a few trailblazers are helping to move things along. A recent Huggies campaign showed a group of guys too transfixed by a football game to change a baby’s diaper. (“Hand him some diapers and wipes and watch the fun,” one promotional ad condescended.) Chris Routly, a stay-at-home father of two boys, started an online campaign complaining that the ad was “encouraging mockery of dads” and got Huggies to take the ad off the air.
The changes are starting to show up in younger men even before they have children. Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies what she calls the science of love—how people meet, the laws of attraction, what they long for when they date. Lately, she has started to notice something curious in the online dating population. The men want children more than the women do. In her recent study of over 5,000 singles, 51 percent of unattached men aged twenty-one to thirty-four wanted children, compared to just 46 percent of single women that age. In older age groups (ages thirty-five to forty-four), 27 percent of single guys wanted to have children, and only 16 percent of women. Fisher theorized that maybe as women “gain self-confidence, self-worth, money, and experience through work,” men are becoming more needy and “broody,” much like the old female stereotype. But why is that “broody”? Maybe the men are just making a sane and healthy adjustment to a new economic reality. Maybe they are even copping to longings they have always felt but were not expected or permitted to express.
There have long been theorists who claim that masculinity is entirely a social construct, a kind of warrior mask or armor men have insisted on wearing, down through the generations, partly because they fear that if it slips away their softness will be revealed. And although “masculinity” has taken many forms over the centuries and in different cultures, one of its constants—dating even to the epic of Gilgamesh—is being “steeped in nostalgia for lost masculinity,” writes Leo Braudy in his book From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. Maybe we are approaching the moment when men stop looking back, fretting that all the “real men” are dead, and allow themselves to go soft, a little.
In 2010 I edited a story for Slate by an American father who was living in Sweden and just ending his extended paternity leave. Over the last decade, the Swedish government had piled on incentives designed to force fathers to actually take the allotted leave, and now 80 percent of them do. The writer, Nathan Hegedus, described indoor play centers full of dads acting just as moms would, talking about “poop, whether their babies sleep, how tired they are, when their kid started crawling or walking or throwing a ball or whatever.” By filling the sidewalks with men pushing strollers, the country had achieved what Hegedus called a subtle redefinition of masculinity, where the notion that nurturing and caregiving is unmanly was “melting away.” Now if a man refuses to take the time off, he is judged negatively by his family and even his guy friends. Sweden has gone the furthest to orchestrate such a shift, but other countries are trying. The Japanese government has recently started to offer paid paternity leave, and newspapers have tried to make celebrities of the new Iku-men, or men who stay home with their kids.
Sociologist Amy Schalet, who studies the culture of young boys and romance around the world, reports that Dutch teenage boys are extremely comfortable saying they’ve been in love, because the culture in the Netherlands encourages them to do that. But she also finds that American teena
ge boys are moving more in that direction. The American teenage boys she interviews have started to use “strong, almost hyper-romantic language to talk about love,” she reports. Chalk it up to Twilight, maybe, or the influence of teenage crooner Justin Bieber. One boy she interviewed whose condom broke during sex was not callous or dismissive but distraught, she writes. The most important thing to him was being in love with his girlfriend, he told Schalet, and “‘giving her everything I can.’” Maybe the Dutch will lead the way and transport us all into a new era of sweeter teenage romance.
Homogenous, social welfare–minded Nordic countries may be the global equivalents of Portland, but the effort to reengineer masculinity is cropping up in some surprising places—even more surprising than the average American high school. Over the last few decades, the company that controls a couple of offshore oil platforms nicknamed “Rex” and “Comus” in the Gulf of Mexico has made a systematic effort to transform their work culture. The goal was to reduce the unusually high number of workplace accidents, but the method they chose involved basically leaching the macho out of the workplace culture. In the old system, “the field foremen were kind of like a pack of lions. The guy that was in charge was the one who could basically out-perform and out-shout and out-intimidate all the others,” one of the workers explained to two researchers from Stanford and Harvard who did an anthropological study of the worksites. The old macho culture encouraged the workers to be man enough never to wear a hard hat, for example, or ask for help, or otherwise show a shred of vulnerability. The aim was to be the “biggest, baddest roughnecks” around, one worker explained.
The new initiative, called Safety 2000, identified this macho behavior as the root source of the accident rate and tried to discourage it in every way possible. Management put up signs everywhere with reminders like NO ONE GETS HURT, PEOPLE SUPPORTING PEOPLE, and RESPECT AND PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT. They held regular meetings where they encouraged workers to share their mistakes so others could learn from them. If a man needed extra help carrying a heavy load, say, or navigating a dangerous situation, he was encouraged to ask for it. If a man was having a hard time at home—if he was facing a divorce or had a sick child, for instance—he was encouraged to ask his coworkers to take it easy on him and to give him emotional support. At one point, the researchers overheard two of the crew talking about how much a worker named Joe missed his baby. One of them confessed that he had “sent home a tape of that Mozart and Chopin for Joe’s baby, because it’s real important for them babies to listen to music like that. Real soothing.”
