Fraser Sherman's Blog

My blogging about Undead Sexist Cliches focuses primarily on the myths about women: good women don’t use birth control, rape is buyer’s remorse, etc. Men, however, are also saddled with cliches about how they have to behave, many of them packaged into the soup called toxic masculinity. Currently popular how-to-fix-men pundit Scott Galloway’s recommendation — men must “protect, provide, procreate” — sounds more positive. However as Celeste Davis points out at the link, it’s not new — it’s another undead sexist cliche that goes back decades, at least. And it’s a flawed solution, partly because (as I’ll get to), it’s still suggesting there’s a precise path to manhood when as Davis says, we need a garden with dozens of paths.

I’ll pause here to say I haven’t read the book so there may be great stuff in it (you can find some analysis here and here.. Still “Protect, provide, procreate” isn’t some startling new insight, it’s going back to old-school thinking about what a man’s role should be. It would describe the male lead in lots of old 20th century family sitcoms: Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver. And protecting and providing are certainly commendable (procreating is a personal decision — I don’t think it’s automatically good or bad).

However holding this up as the solution to men’s woes reminds me of George Gilder, the anti-feminist right-winger who argued men are animals with no ability to adult unless they have a woman to take care of. Either women marry men and let them become protectors or men become gang-banging, drug-using psychopaths in the street (for the record I was unmarried until I was 50 and somehow avoided that dark path). Ergo, women have an obligation to put their plans and dreams on hold to save men. Which includes giving them kids: if a man doesn’t have the satisfaction of becoming a father, all that he is will be dust in the wind. I don’t know that Galloway would be down with all of Gilder but he does believe without a girlfriend/wife/partner men fall apart.

The idea that Men Must Protect isn’t new either. Not that protection is bad but as Susan Faludi has written, it’s part and parcel of the idea that women need and must accept protection and, conversely, don’t do any themselves. There are women cops, women firefighters, women paramedics, women on the front lines and in the National Guard — framing protection as a male thing conforms to longstanding sexist images. There’s a shit-ton of writing out there about how women must accept protection and men must provide it, even if the woman can handle the trouble better. I sincerely hope I’d take a bullet for TYG if the occasion arose; she’s damn tough though and I could see her ending up protecting me. I’d be okay with that too.

In 18 years of being with TYG, however, I have never had to protect her from anything (unless you count driving her home after surgery). We’re not on the frontier, we’re not living in a war zone; protection doesn’t come up. In evangelical circles (John Piper is one example) this gets handwaved: the man’s willing to protect his spouse, ergo she should accept his role as head of the family who’s word is law. Her submission is a daily thing, in return for an event that may never happen — and as Faludi says, many men when the crisis hit did not live up to their duty.

Which is part of the trouble with Galloway’s prescription: if men are to provide, protect and procreate to feel like a Real Man, then a woman’s role is to be protected, provided for and pop out the babies. Senator Josh Hawley similarly calls for a Christian economy where one man can support his wife and children as God intended — and he’s quite specific that he means “men” not people. They’re supposed to be in charge (more on his views in this article); the right-wing dream of reviving factory work is partly because it’s Manly Work and the dream includes women happily staying home once they have a man to support them. Never mind that lots of women who did have that arrangement walked away from it when they could.

To be sure, some women would be happy with that arrangement, given the right man … but not all. And if a woman brings in more money or the man chooses to stay home as primary caregiver for the kids (or they go without kids), that doesn’t make him less manly, nor does it mean he’s failing his duty. Nor does it make her less of a woman or mean she can’t find a man (my first ever Undead Sexist Cliche post touched on this). Women aren’t a hive mind any more than men: a given woman may need someone who’ll listen when she vents about work or cooks dinner when she’s working late or rehearses lines when she’s memorizing for her role in a play. Being a good husband is about being the man she needs, not following some generic formula.

Just as many women rebelled against the 1950s sitcom style marriage (whether by divorce, getting a job or otherwise renegotiating arrangements), plenty of men were happy to see their own sons move up to white collar work, as Natasha Zaretsky discusses in No Direction Home. Hawley, a banker’s son, former Heritage Foundation intern and lawyer, has never felt any need to prove his manliness by blue-collar work; to paraphrase George Orwell, he probably thinks talking about the alternative of manly labor is a substitute for actually doing it.

The whole point of writing about Undead Sexist Cliches is that these ideas — women shouldn’t vote, women shouldn’t have sex before marriage, women’s brains aren’t as smart as men’s — have been around decades, it’s only the details that change. Women’s brains are inferior because they’re smaller. Or because the important parts of the brain are smaller. Because the two sides of their brain are less connected than men’s. Or more connected. Because of testosterone. If one rationale goes down, switch to another. The cliche lives on (if you want details on any of these, you can find them in my book).

However there are always new cliches coming up that I haven’t encountered before (which is not to say they’re new rather than new to me). Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the big worry for conservatives was teen moms — babies having babies! Lots of young moms! Usually with a subtext that birth control wasn’t working so we’d better teach all those teenage sluts to abstain until marriage (and pay right-wing groups and churches to provide abstinence only education in schools. There’s always an angle).

Now though, as we face a dwindling birthrate, conservatives are very concerned women need to have more babies, and they need to start young. According to right-winger Dr. Marc Siegel, “the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19 the fertility rate is down 7% and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, till they’re more financially secure, maybe they haven’t found the right partner.”

Wow, how crazy. Imagine telling 15 year olds to wait to start a family until their life is more stable, they’ve found a good partner, they can afford a baby. What are we thinking? Think how many more babies she can pop out if she starts young! The problem with birth control isn’t that it lets teenage girls become sexual, it’s (according to Stephen Miller’s wife Katie) that it stops them getting pregnant! An option they hate, which is why they’ve been trying to ban contraception for years (a goal the Toddler administration is in favor of).

Let’s break this misogynistic bullshit down. First, it’s about the claim (as noted at my first link) that America needs more babies to keep our work force up, pay into Social Security, etc (I guarantee you if they axe Social Security they’ll still be demanding women become breeders). It may be the shrinking population is a problem — but simply demanding women have more babies, or taking away the option not to become pregnant, are not the answer. Women are not means to an end. They have their own ends and they’re entitled to strive for them, even if those ends do not include children.

Having a lack of young workers is a problem; fine, let’s solve it. Immigration is a simple way but that means America would no longer be a white-dominant, Christian-dominant nation and that horrifies forced-birthers. Never mind that immigrants have been coming here for more than a century, and despite being shat upon as not Protestant, not white, not Anglo-Saxon, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Polish, the Chinese, etc. have become as American as anyone (though Republicans viscerally recoil from admitting this). It will happen with future immigrants too. There may be other solutions, too; if we can spend billions on ICE and on the Toddler’s Iran stupidity, we can fund Social Security and Medicare.

For that matter we could provide serious support for women. Pay for their ob/gyn care. Police companies that don’t provide a space to bottle breast milk. Fund child care. This wouldn’t turn all women into happy homemakers but it might influence a number of them. Republicans have discussed this idea for years; nothing ever happens. One “pro-natalist” couple hand-wave giving financial support in favor of giving women medals for children and deregulating daycare.

Second, but equally important, it’s a way for men such as Siegel and his ilk to shore up patriarchy (one reason proposals that would help working mothers rarely get buy-in from the right). The right-wing shrieks about groomers a lot but they’re fine with teenage marriage and resist efforts to raise the age limit. A girl of 15 is much easier to control; pass her from her parents to a husband while she’s young and she may never learn to stand on her own. She’ll have much less opportunity to get an education or a job because becoming a mom is time consuming. As Anna Kendrick says at the link, men can enter parenthood with a good chance it won’t disrupt the rest of their life; women, not so much. A standard talking point on the right is that this is fine — have your kids, then tackle your career, you’ll have time. As plenty of women have testified, starting into the workforce when you’re late 30s or early 40s ain’t so easy.

If women can’t get an education or an independent income, they’re much more dependent on marrying a man who can support them. Which some shitbag misogynists such as Scott Yenor consider a plus (Yenor wants a world of “public men and private women”). If that also makes it harder for young girls to escape an abusive, violent husband — well, I doubt anyone on the right gives a crap.

I used to think talk about the right-wing seeing The Handmaid’s Tale as an inspiration were a little exaggerated. It’s been quite a while since I was that naive.