FOR MEN – RISKY EXPLORATIONS OFF THE MAP
As we all know, men are largely mute brutes – the stuff of unresolved feelings, edgy longings and unsatisfactory declarations of commitment. While we have much to say about the exterior world and exalt in action, our inner lives are a mess that is embellished by beer, sport and half-suppressed desires for the last girl who got on the bus.
And that is only the part we can begin to talk about.
Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails after sugar and spice and all things nice.
Well, that’s pretty much what I was brought up to believe during my childhood in the 1950s – by my mother.
She was also fond of quoting the Fifth Commandment: ‘Honour thy father and mother that thy days shall be long in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee’.
But as she viewed herself effectively as a solo parent, the saying provided her with an unchallengeable mandate.
And if that wasn’t enough, she was capable of imposing considerable psychological duress. Let me quote a relatively uncomplicated example – involving her claim to be able to foretell and even influence the future.
Irked by one of my misdemeanors, she once prophesied my demise in my early 50s. Fortunately, I have survived 15 years beyond this send back date. However, I do not recommend modern parents to predict the deaths of their children – it can cause resentment.
At least some men are prepared to embark on voyages around their fathers but I wouldn’t know where to source sufficient emotional victuals to up anchor and successfully circumnavigate my mum.
But some of the terra incognita that nurtured her can be sketched in using maps drawn by the descendants of the original feminist conquisatadoras.
So I was fascinated to read Stephanie Coontz’s article in the New York Times ‘When we hated Mom’. While Stephanie sees things from a feminist viewpoint, men can re-orientate the chart to get some readings.
Stephanie argues that mothers were held in great esteem 150 years ago, with society putting them on a pedestal and popular culture being filled with paeans to their self-sacrifice and virtue.
She quotes Sophia the wife of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who told her mother that she did not share her concerns about improving the rights of women, because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.”
That sounds like a good place to start.
FREUDIAN SLIPS
But, says Coontz:
‘In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of “Mother Love” as unmanly and redefine what used to be called “uplifting encouragement” as nagging.
'By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality and content themselves with being, in the self-deprecating words of so many 1960s homemakers, “just a housewife.”
‘Stay-at-home mothers were often portrayed as an even bigger menace to society than career women. In 1942, in his best-selling “Generation of Vipers,” Philip Wylie coined the term “momism” to describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and demanded that politicians heed their moralizing.
‘Momism became seen as a threat to the moral fibre of America on a par with communism. In 1945, the psychiatrist Edward Strecher argued that the 2.5 million men rejected or discharged from the Army as unfit during World War II were the product of overly protective mothers.
‘According to the 1947 best seller “Modern Woman: The Lost Sex,” two-thirds of Americans were neurotic, most of them made so by their mothers.
‘Typical of the invective against homemakers in the 1950s and 1960s was a 1957 best seller, “The Crack in the Picture Window,” which described suburban America as a “matriarchal society,” with the average husband “a woman-bossed, inadequate, money-terrified neuter” and the average wife a “nagging slob.”
‘Anti-mom rhetoric was so pervasive that even Friedan recycled some of this ideology in “The Feminine Mystique” — including the repellent and now-discredited notion that overly devoted mothers turned their sons into homosexuals’.
Coontz then goes on to argue that Post-War men retaliated by walling off their wives in suburban Stepfords - bereft of company, help and opportunity.
To deepen the treachery, the boys who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s lost respect for their mothers because the stay-at-home mums of the day were in a state of constant exhaustion, as a result of fathers doing little to help.
Consequently, the Post-War mums were as cranky as rattlesnakes on a barbecue or maritime explorers spiked on a sandbank.
A MAN WHO SLAP-DASHES KIDS AND DISHES CAN’T BE ALL BAD
One problem for women with all this is that men are now sailing some of these seas, having rounded Cape Horn - like it or not.
Some of us men are now honorary mums – also prone to late dressing, rapid tidying before the spouse comes home, and not immune from crankiness about mud on the carpet - we are the stay-at-home dads.
My brother-in-law Dene Allen who looks after 4 kids (with another on the way) is a second case in point.
This year Dene was a finalist in the NZ ‘Freshly Squeezed Talent’ competition screened on New Year’s Eve TV. He‘s a great singer and was one of four Southlanders who made the finals. But he blotted his copy book a bit with his mother-in-law by blurting out on camera that it ‘only took him an hour or so in the morning to tidy up and do the housework after the kids had gone to school’.
I think that a lot of the criticism that he faced from the females in the family came less from horror at his slap-dashery and more from his lack of solidarity in giving the game away.
So, in the light of contemporary male exposure to the dishes, did the Post-War mums really have it so bad at the hands of their husbands and sons?
I suspect not. After all, there were relatively few kids to look after anyway and labour saving devices were rapidly proliferating.
Unless you aspire to be a domestic goddess or godlet, and as long as you are prepared to put in the time training the kids (and sometimes the spouse), a man can knock off a lot of the basics pretty quickly – though I would be the first to admit that Nigella Lawson or Martha Stewart would make a better job of it, with better grace (at least in front of the TV cameras).
So could there be an alternative explanation for the preponderance of ‘nagging slobs’ and ‘overly protective mothers’ in the period 1910 to 1980, before women rose from their beauty sleep?
Perhaps they were bored but only partly stirred – as simple as that. And their unwillingness to cough out the apple bite and lift the thin glass ceiling of their protective mausoleum awaited the kiss of commerce.
That’s part of it at least. By the 1980s the economies of Western Countries had become much more feminine-friendly – and with many more jobs available in the service sectors in warm, well-lit offices a middle class girl could feel at home as well as pull in a sizeable pay packet.
THE FEMINIST NARRATIVE UPDATED
I realize that I have probably raised the ire of my mother’s spectre at this point – along with that of some contemporary harpies, so I’ll let Stephanie Coontz back into the argument:
‘Contrary to myth, “The Feminine Mystique” and feminism did not represent the beginning of the decline of the stay-at-home mother, but a turning point that led to much stronger legal rights and “working conditions” for her.
‘Domestic violence rates have fallen sharply for all wives, employed or not. As late as 1980, approximately 30 percent of wives said their husbands did no housework at all. By 2000, only 16 percent of wives made that statement and almost one-third said their husbands did half of all housework, child care or both.
‘Most researchers agree that these changes were spurred by the entry of wives and mothers into the work force. But full-time homemakers have especially benefited from them.
‘From 1975 to 1998 men married to full-time homemakers increased their contributions to housework as much, proportionally, as men whose wives were employed. And from 1965 to 1995, homemakers decreased their own housework hours more than did wives in dual-earner families. As a result, most stay-at-home mothers now have shorter total workweeks than their husbands.
‘There also seems to have been a significant shift in the relationship between depression and homemaking. Stay-at-home mothers still recount more feelings of loneliness than working mothers.
'But in a new Council on Contemporary Families briefing paper, the sociologists Margaret Usdansky and Rachel A. Gordon report that among mothers of young children, those who were not working and preferred not to have a job had a relatively low risk of depression — about as low as mothers who chose to work and were able to attain high-quality jobs.
‘These findings suggest that it is time to stop arguing over who has things worse or who does things better, stay-at-home mothers or employed mothers. Instead, we should pay attention to women’s preferences and options.
‘Feminism has also fostered increased respect for men’s ability and desire to be involved parents. So we should also pay attention to expanding men’s ability to choose greater involvement in family life, just as we have expanded women’s ability to choose greater involvement in meaningful work.
‘While stay-at-home mothers may not have the aura of saintliness with which they were endowed in the 19th century, it’s indisputable that their status and lives have improved since their supposed heyday in the 1950s’.
IT IS A TRUTH THAT SEEKS UNIVERSAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT THAT A HOUSE-HUSBAND MAY EXPECT NO COMPLIMENTS FROM HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW ON HIS COOKING
Just a few comments here from me to round things off.
First, as the UK Open University explains, with respect to England, in the period 1775 to 1850, this was an era of hazardous family building during which there was only a slight improvement in child survival. Throughout this period, families averaged at least five live births – but only half of these children survived to the age of 25. And women were dreadfully at risk from childbirth.
It is hardly surprising then that ‘society put them on a pedestal and that popular culture was filled with paeans to their self-sacrifice and virtue’.
Secondly, I somewhat resent the comment that ‘feminism has fostered increased respect for men’s ability and desire to choose greater involvement in family life’. An alternative view is that the rabbits have become bolder now that the foxes have left for work.
Third, I have to wonder briefly how far stay-at-home blokes, like Dene and I, are now eligible to earn potential sainthood serving wafers in the Convent of the Mum?
I don’t think that we should hold our breath for canonization by the feminists.
There is no doubt in my mind that males are the dumber of the two genders but having said that we also try our best to shore up our inadequacies with straightforward inanity and a devil-may-care attitude.
Better that we just take any opportunity that offers to slope off for a pint, chat about the Rugby and ogle the barmaid – halo be damned.
As for my own mother perhaps she was a throw-back to an earlier era – though I find it more likely that she was just a twentieth century manifestation of the more “general power which no king or conqueror can cope with.”
Let’s face it, things haven’t changed that much. It’s about the survival of the fittest – and if a man says a woman looks fit, it just shows that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.
No comments:
Post a Comment