Hand in Hand

I was listening to Russ Roberts interview Richard Reeves on "the problems of boys and men in today's America" on EconTalk today. To be honest about it, a lot of it seemed like a fine whine, with Professor Roberts and Mr. Reeves united in the opinion that men were suffering from a crisis of meaning/significance due to a sense that they weren't needed. This was, of course, mostly discussed as an "everybody" problem, rather than something that men need to sort out for themselves. Or, considering the emphasis on families, something that fathers needed to teach their sons to deal with.

Things picked up towards the end of the discussion, when a particular variation on the "marriage contract" was discussed. Put simply, the deal was this, women enter into marriage to gain financial security, and men enter into marriage to learn to be mature and "civilized." When feminism removed the need for many women to be dependent on men for their livelihoods and material well-being, men lost access to the emotion work that women performed on their behalf. (Note that colloquially, this is often called "Emotional Labor," but sociology Professor Arlie Hochschild, who coined both terms, used "Emotional Labor" to refer to paid work, where managing one's own or others emotions was considered part of the job.) And this makes sense; after all, if women were bringing financial and material resources to the partnership, the expectation that men would come prepared to share in the emotion work (not to mention the housework) of the home seemed reasonable. But, of course, men were slow to adapt to the new reality, and so are seen as less and less useful as partners. As Mr. Reeves puts it:

The problem is, we're in a situation now where women aren't willing to marry "idiots" [meaning being immature, referring to a quote from an acquaintance of Professor Roberts], and then help them become non-idiots. The used to be. [...] But women now are looking to marry men who've already ceased to be idiots, rather than marrying them to help them to cease to be idiots.

This lack of preparation is unfortunate, because it's not like no-one was able to see this coming. Forty years ago, when I was in high school, the Black community in the United States was already starting to deal with a lot of the concerns, like educational attainment, that Mr. Reeves mentioned to Professor Roberts. And by the time I made it into college, it was in full swing. I went to a Historically Black College/University for my Freshman year, and it seemed to me that the student body was some 80% female. I may be overstating that somewhat, but women outnumbered men by no less than two-to-one. And with Black women then being no more willing to shoulder the emotion work of maturing their partners (or marrying risky ones) than White women are now, many Black men found themselves locked out of the marriage market, and the only thing that a number of them could think of to do was advocate that women be returned to positions of dependency.

But, as was noted in the podcast, that djinni is out of the bottle, and good luck getting her back in. Because one of the things that women have purchased with their ability to pay their own bills is freedom from being in the position where an abusive or otherwise poor partner is better than not having a partner. I can't think of any rational reason why women would want to go back to a situation where their needs were so easily, and brutally, used against them.

It's interesting. I know a guy, and I've known him since we were children, and he and I had a version of this very same discussion. He was angry over not having found the partner he wanted, and I pointed out that he wasn't a person that his desired partner (or anyone reasonable) wanted, and he said that he would be, because being with her was the catalyst he needed to change. The tide on this doesn't flow in his favor.

But he'd also set himself against the solution that Mr. Reeves proposed; that other men take over the process of making immature men into worthwhile partners for women, because he had so internalized this idea that such was women's work.

Society will shift, and the era of extended adolescence will end. It doesn't have any real choice. Clocks don't run backwards, unless they're very, very broken. Most women have internalized the difficulties, and sometimes the impossibility, of changing men, even if men haven't all internalized the fact that the responsibility is now theirs.