Two, apparently unrelated, stories shook my complacency this morning, particularly in their juxtaposition.
First (h/t MMG), this disturbing TED talk by Hanna Rosin: New data on the rise of women.
The balance of power has shifted, Rosin reports, with women rapidly overtaking men. The “new economy” favors women, who are now the majority of the American workforce, dominate many important professions, and hold the majority of management positions. Women are getting more college degrees, and advanced degrees, than men, and boys as a group are failing in school from the elementary days, while girls thrive.
In many of the places where it counts the most, women are…taking over everything.
She does a fair amount of male-bashing that is embarrassing to hear, and not up to my expectations for a TED lecture. But her ideas are worth thinking about. I may not like her gloating about the frog cooking in the kettle, but I should be grateful for the warning about the rising temperature of the water.
How to begin with what distresses me? I’m concerned for the men, and boys; for our nephews and grandsons. It’s not a problem I’m accustomed to considering, having grown up in a patriarchal society (though my own parents were incredibly supportive) and attended for many years an über-patriarchal church, but the disrespect now accorded to men and boys is profoundly disturbing. If our “progress” has been to trade one injustice for another, we are worse off than before.
I’m concerned for the women. Women, it appears, are the new men. Did we really want to take on all the problems and stresses of manhood and leave behind many of the joys of being women? What have we lost in trading home for office?
Mostly I’m worried about the children. For all our supposedly child-centered society, their needs are being left out of this triumphant female flag-waving.
Women enter the workplace at the top, and then at the working class [level], all the new jobs that are created are the kinds of jobs that wives used to do for free at home…childcare, elder care, and food preparation.… Now one day it might be that mothers will hire a an out-of-work, middle-aged, former steel worker guy to watch their children at home, and that will be good for the men, but that hasn’t quite happened yet.
I don’t want to open the whole “working mother” can of worms here, but while acknowledging (as I did here, and here) that many of the changes of the past 60 years have been beneficial for families, we are much the poorer for the demise of the noble profession of homemaker, and the societal shift in which professionals, rather than loving parents, feed, clothe, educate, and nurture our children.
Not long after listening to Rosin’s talk, I read Eek! A Male! This Wall Street Journal article by Lenore Skenazy (of Free-Range Kids fame) points out a serious flaw in Rosin’s scenario of the former steel worker turned nanny: more and more, all men are seen as potential perverts and sexual predators. Read the whole article; it’s short.
Consider the Iowa daycare center where Nichole Adkins works. The one male aide employed there, she told me in an interview, is not allowed to change diapers. "In fact," Ms. Adkins said, "he has been asked to leave the classroom when diapering was happening."
Last February, a woman followed a man around at a store berating him for clutching a pile of girls' panties. "I can't believe this! You're disgusting. This is a public place, you pervert!" she said—until the guy, who posted about the episode on a website, fished out his ID. He was a clerk restocking the underwear department.
[T]he British Musicians' Union warned its members they are no longer to touch a child's fingers, even to position them correctly on the keys.
[A] public pool in Sydney, Australia last fall prohibited boys from changing in the same locker room as the men? (According to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the men demanded this, fearing false accusations.)
Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van's tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids' grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.
Why?
Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.
I am distressed, but not depressed. Many, I know, are taking a stand against these injustices, and when the opposition feels overwhelming, there’s always the St. Crispin’s Day speech for inspiration:
Given your warning, I expected her to be much more of a male-basher, but it seems to me she doesn't want to lock men out of success, but believes they need to learn different skills to be successful in the new economy. She wasn't as respectful of men as would be desired, but she's much more so than the exaggerated figures from pop culture she uses as examples. It's good to be reminded that little boys as well as little girls need to be taught skills and given emotional support in order to deal with the world of the future.
When Carnegie Mellon's Robotics department had more women than men enrolled a number of years ago, the joyful article (which contained primarily pictures of one female, leading one to wonder where the other women were...) proclaimed that finally they had broken the 50% barrier, and they would keep increasing the number of women higher and higher... When I quoted the story to a semi-feminist friend, she said, "good, men should be in the minority for a while and see how they like it".
I've heard a number of sermons about how men are generally happy to be lazy and let the women take over, and why that is a bad idea.
As for the Massachusetts story, we saw gobs of TV while at my parents, and so that story, among others, was played over and over again with additional bits of details each hour/day. The grandmother seemed pretty reasonable to me - she didn't see the smoke - only saw someone opening the door of her car and grabbing the kids out.
I didn't watch the video; I did read the article. What strikes me is the perspective Skenazy gives the last Rosin quote:
Now one day it might be that mothers will hire a an out-of-work, middle-aged, former steel worker guy to watch their children at home, and that will be good for the men, but that hasn’t quite happened yet.While it might be good for the men, according to Skenazy, it won't happen even if the men want to and retrain themselves, because the parents won't believe the middle-aged former steel worker isn't a pervert.
Another sneaky part of the development Rosin paints is that - because the wives and mothers that tend to the home and kids for no pay are being replaced by paid staff - we'll be doing the same amount of work but by some economic magic we'll be paid more and will be paying more income taxes.
Basically, getting both parents to work, consume, and pay taxes ends up making the economy look good. So, if you want re-election, get those mommas working for money and you'll have job creation! and economic indicators up! and who knows, maybe even a balanced budget!
Whoops. As Janet pointed out, my first comment is redundant, repeating something that already in the post. That's what I get for reading the post, waiting a while, and then commenting after reading the article.
Actually, your redundancy made me happy. It's nice to know, sometimes, that what I see is visible to others. :)
You might be interested in a slightly different take on boys in school posted at "Why Are American Men So Dumb?
Thanks, Robert, for this perspective. You make many good points.
Having lived through the time myself, I would insist that there was a great deal of injustice done to women by the men in their heyday. And there are places where it's still going on today. But I would also insist that we can't redress that injustice by turning the tables.
I certainly agree that "boys exist in school in little boxes designed to contain, bore and frustrate them." But so do girls! "No one today would hesitate to turn their daughters over to American public schools." Not so.
Have you read any John Taylor Gatto? There's another good perspective the education problem. There are many factors at work, not all of them the Boomers' fault.
Disclaimer: To see a problem is not to "bash public schools." There are many good teachers in America's public schools, and I've known several I'd call great. It IS possible to get a good education there, male or female. But I'm not sure it's possible to get a great education, and in any case the odds are stacked against even a good one without a lot of parental involvement and initiative on the part of the students. What's especially sad is that it's possible to graduate from the American school system with a bad education.
