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.
