I don’t think I emotionally have it in me to write another post like 42 out of 100 as there is little more to say beyond questioning Netanyahu’s statement about Europe trying to pressure the State of Israel into expediting aid to starving children and the elderly that “When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.” I mean, I think the statement is true, but 29 children and elderly people have died from starvation-related causes in the last couple of days, and they are not Israelis. It is the Israeli’s that are insisting that the UN move the trucks full of aid along dangerous routes that will be the most likely to inspire looting and attacks, according to the UN. I will probably have to keep coming back to this topic. In updates as it really sits heavily on me, as a human being and father to a child who would be starving in Palestine, but today I don’t have it in me to solely focus on this and go to bed so completely devastated and hopeless.
So instead, I want to talk about a different BBC article, and why it is impossible to really confront Patriarchal Misogyny without talking about capitalism. It is a little weird to me how much the topic of stay at home fathers and emasculation have ben coming up in mainstream news lately, but I am guessing that a lot of mainstream media folks are all encountering the same Journal of Family Issues research article, “What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Breadwinner’ Mother?” And it feels like novel enough information to combine with the latent interest that has been generated by the show Adolescence, for the purposes of in-depth exposés. The reason it feels weird to me, of course, is because I have been doing the stay-at-home parent thing for about a year now, and so it is a particularly relevant topic to me, even if a lot of what is being said about it hasn’t really been my experience. The BBC article, “Why money and power affects male self-esteem” is pretty tame in its political conclusions, but I expect I will soon be reading Manosphere responses to the research the article is based upon soon enough, especially as the people who are most likely to judge stay-at-home fathers are the younger Gen Z adult males. I explored the youth and media angle of this topic in post 28, so I will wait to come back to it until I find some Manosphere “hot take” about the imagined harms to the male psyche of losing economic control over the family, and instead focus on how this BBC article that is probably read as “pro women’s liberation” is just kind of conceding self-worth and one’s importance to the family to capitalism.
The main (pretty obvious) argument of the article is gender pay parity is likely to result in healthier power dynamics in relationships, and that if men learn to be more comfortable deprioritizing their own incomes, and focus on the relationship-building opportunities provided by being a stay-at-home parent, that we, men, might eventually change the overall social expectations that make some men insecure in the homemaker role. It acknowledges that one of the difficulties of this is that women generally get paid less than men for doing the same job, and thus families with a woman “breadwinner” are often making less money than the same family would if the male was working, although, this is not true for the younger adult generation, as women in their early twenties are earning slightly more than men of the same age, largely because men are falling behind in educational achievement than women. All of this seems pretty true to me, so what exactly am I trying to say?
Towards the end of the article, the author starts talking about how men are changing their understanding of masculinity to one of a “caring masculinity” that places caring, empathy and other “feminine” softer skills above economic skills. In many ways, I think this entire blog project could be considered an attempt to foster an ethic of caring within masculinity, and I I have no objections or disagreements with encouraging men to take on more domestic responsibilities and less economic responsibilities, especially if we can acknowledge that men will need to find other means of taking care of themselves emotionally than can be accomplished by spending money. But the obvious issue to me is that most families cannot afford to have anyone stay home for very long.
Now, to be fair to the article, the author does address this issue in part, by suggesting that nations provide more paternity leave, the shining examples provide a couple months of leave at most, while the other suggestions for achieving gender parity in child care responsibilities focus on men pursuing more flexible working situation that provide them more caregiving opportunities, and all of that is screaming class-based privilege to me. The author’s only real address of this is to suggest that “welfare systems should be doing more to help.” Again, I agree that a lot of gender-based power disparity is rooted in economic systems that demand most people surrender their entire selves over to the pursuit of making money, and that robust social services are pretty much the only way that many working-class families are ever going to be able to meet a minimum level of survival, but that is because, as I have argued before (in post 37 of 100), the kind of capitalism that has come to dominate Neo-liberal world econmics inherently breeds a need for as much individualism as possible.
This article might appear to be countering that by suggesting more equitable sharing of economic responsibilities and caregiving responsibilities within a family, but that definition of family is so nuclear, that it gives itself away as being incredibly class-privileged, white idealism that imagines caregiving only as a role that needs to be provided to children and must be provided by each family unit individually. Maybe it is a my failing, as a citizen in a country that miserably fails to provide for the healthcare and welfare of any of its people who cannot afford to buy those things on their own, but it is nearly impossible for me to imagine state run welfare institutions that provide adequate and respectful care for the all people experiencing the socio-economic disability of “not currently functioning as a laborer producing an income in excess of their personal needs” (so including children; the elderly; many people with long term, chronic or genetic disabilities; but also, it turns out, more than 60% of the people living in the US), that burdens of developing a welfare system that can meet these needs…and not so dependent upon racist, sexist, ableist, heteronormative, transphobic philosophies of what kind of care that welfare system is responsible for providing is going to result in the kinds of horrific, historic decision-making that resulted in residential schools, insane asylums that locked women up for hysteria, educational institutions that get labeled “pipelines to prison,” and assisted-living centers where people past the point in their lives of viable economic contribution disappear from society except occasionally at family holidays and celebrations. Not for everyone of course. The richest people will grow old and become politicians, members of various governing boards, or social organizations. Their family wealth will be protected by the state while paying the lowest tax rates possible, while everyone else over pays for the most basic services, get taxed at rates they can’t afford, and pretty much lives on borrowed time before they slip into a welfare system designed around preserving the economic and social order for as little money as possible.
This might seem like a critique of socialism instead of critique of capitalism, but it is really a critique of the authoritarian control over people’s construction of family and community units capable of meeting the needs for care of people on a personal level. When something like “caring masculinity” is only theoretically feasible in a social welfare state that will need to provide humane standards of living for 60 percent of the people, I see the ideological breeding ground for a genocidal techno-fascism that believes itself having advanced past the need for the vast majority of human labor, and thus the need for the vast majority of human beings. Thus while I do value the idea of disrupting ideas of masculinity that require men to be breadwinners and to base their sense of self-worth on what they can own, and I actually like the appeal of how the article tries to encourage men to see the value that can come from socially productive labor instead of economically productive labor…I guess I sort of worry that an attempt to counter Patriarchal Misogyny exclusively by presenting what something like “caring masculinity” can look like without more directly addressing the personal and social harms of what uncaring (read: patriarchal misogynistic) looks like, articles like this (maybe even like the blog posts I keep writing), are basically just providing fodder for the manosphere and the system of patriarchal misogyny currently in power to use to call proponents of something like “caring masculinity” and out of touch delusion that is only possible in a woke/elitist bubble.
Should more men be involved in providing the social and domestic labor of caring for family and community? Absolutely. 100%. But structuring that as something targeted solely at the fathers of nuclear families, and in particular the ones who just can’t make enough money to be the family’s real breadwinner, or the men who have so much inherent class privilege that they can take a few months off of work to be with their children before turning that domestic and social care work back over to servants (possibly including family members and spouses) is a mistake. Every man should be more involved in the domestic and social care work of their families/communities, focusing that gendered labor expectation change exclusively on men who have had children is way too late, and while children do need to see their father figures more involved in care work, they need to see their grandparents, uncles, family friends, siblings and men involved in their community support networks doing that work too. Expecting Patriarchal Misogyny to surrender the nuclear family over as a tool that was used for enforcing gender inequity over into a tool for accomplishing gender parity feels like it will be about as successful as creating lasting change as expecting the same from having more women CEOs, or how having a black president solved racism in the US. Having a bunch of rich guys talk about how caring their masculinity is while poor guys who have to stay at home because their female partners can make more money than them get ridiculed by gen Z kids online for being failures feels very much like the kind of rhetorical move that gave Donald Trump the presidency.