A book I found enlightening: The Hearts of Men

(My working title was Undead Sexist Cliches: Marriage is how parasitic women trap men but as my focus is the book below, I changed it).

Marriage for most of the last century had lots of drawbacks for women. If she didn’t work she was financially dependent on the husband (something James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal wishes were still true), marital rape was legal and his control of the purse strings meant he had way more authority over her than vice versa. THE HEARTS OF MEN: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment by Barbara Ehrenreich argues that marriage also sucked for a lot of men.

In the 1940s and 1950s, it bedame excepted that getting married and having kids was a bar you had to clear to be an adult (something The Fifties and Homeward Bound both point out). If a man stayed single that didn’t necessarily read gay but he was definitely immature, a Peter Pan unwilling to grow up. Being able to support your wife and kids on your salary was a mark of manhood. Beyond that, a real man was ambitious to get ahead in the rat race, climb the corporate ladder and get a better salary to spend on them. You had a nice apartment? Well, you should be working to afford a small house in the suburbs. Got a house in the suburbs? Time to move to a bigger house in a more upscale suburb.

That left some men seeing marriage as a trap forced on them by society, and by women. Wives were parasites, constantly demanding better clothes, homes and cars but (in the men’s view) giving little value back. Men could buy sex, pay for housekeepers or get along with their own crappy housekeeping and sandwiches if they had to; they didn’t need women the way women needed male support. In return for a wife, all men really got was a loss of freedom. Perhaps that’s the source of the women are buzzkills sexist cliche; it certainly explains a lot of male jokes, snark and distaste for marriage I’ve seen or heard in various movies, TV shows and occasionally from real people over the years.

Ehrenreich traces the various forms of male pushback from the 1940s through 1983, when the book came out. The Beats rejected the rat race, as did the hippies later. The “Playboy philosophy” rejected marriage in favor of casual sex and self-indulgence, with women reduced to one more consumer good (Ehrenreich covers some of the same territory as JFK And the Masculine Mystique but she does it better). The men’s liberation movement pushed to bust free of the roles men were supposed to play. As the book License to Thrill observes, the Angry Young Man films and James Bond are flip sides of the same coin, both rebelling against the conventional male breadwinner role.Ehrenreich concludes none of this worked out well for women: rather than taking on the system together, male rebels were more likely to leave women in the lurch. Women still suffered from a sexist system paying them less but they were losing out on male support — and by 1983, the “breadwinner wage” that let one person support a family was fading away. Her glum conclusion was that it would take massive reforms and government support to give women a fair shake, which she could see was unlikely.

Then there’s the antifeminist movement which began in the 1970s to fight the Equal Rights Amendment and flourished more aggressively in the 1980s. The movement used men’s rebellion to position themselves as the champions of women: they wanted to keep traditional standards and laws that ensured men had to support their wives (which was a lie — nothing required a husband to buy his wife nice clothes, new appliances, a decent house, etc.). Feminists in the workplace would compete with men, making it harder for husbands to bring home a breadwinner wage (they did not, of course, object when businesses started killing the breadwinner wage).  And if women didn’t marry men and civilize them, men would remain immature party animals at best, rapists and drunkards at worst (the subject of my first Undead Sexist Cliches post). What do you want women — the brute or the breadwinner? It’s all on you!

Ehrenreich makes the same point I do in Undead Sexist Cliches, that while antifeminists complain about feminist man-haters, their contempt for men is far greater. As misogynist George Gilder explained it, men are incapable of achieving manhood unless a woman civilizes them and bears them children (refusing to have a man’s kids is virtually castrating him!). Men have no control, so only women have agency. If they don’t control their men, nobody can.

I was going to blog about more recent forms of this cliche but I’ll save that for a subsequent post. I will say that while a lot of the push for women to get married is about putting them under a man’s thumb, it also reflects that conservatives prefer blaming women to blaming corporate America. Women staying home won’t bring back the breadwinner wage but demanding people get married to fight poverty easier than suggesting they need a stronger social safety net or a higher minimum wage.

As someone with the username Michael Cleaves put it in a comment on Lawyers, Guns and Money recently, “it is demanded of us in the USA that we always face collective action problems as individuals and are asked to feel guilt about them, whether or not we make the supposed choice that’s going to solve the problem.

“Obviously other countries have collective action problems, too, but they do not have ideologies that assume no possible solution to anything can be done collectively, and that individuals are always responsible, even when their actions (e.g. refusing to fly, going vegan, no longer keeping the lights on in your home) could not possibly change a damn thing without collective action.”

Hence the right-wing emphasis that a strong country depends on strong families. Therefore, to fix America, all we need is for more people to marry!

More next week. There’s also more about marriage and relationships in Undead Sexist Cliches (cover by Kemp Ward).

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