Women are doing all the “man things” they can these days. Wars. Heavy lifting. Dangerous jobs. Cigars. Heart attacks. And men are doing more “lady things” than ever before, like expressing identifiable emotion and caring about children. They are really picking up the slack and the slacks. Get it? From off the floor? But don’t machete your sensible feminist heels down to flats just yet: This men-are-the-new-women thing is still overblown.
Take the whole stay-at-home dad trend. A bit overhyped, says a piece over at the Atlantic, which acknowledges that, sure, while it’s true that the number of men who are stay-at-home dads has doubled in recent years, it has doubled from such a low figure as to be almost insignificant statistically, and doesn’t merit all the trend pieces. Read it and weep directly into your yogurt/salad to burn some extra cals:
Among all married couples with children under 15, only 0.8 percent include a stay-at-home dad— up from about 0.3 percent in 1994—compared to 23 percent that include a stay-at-home mom.
But even those small percentages probably overstate the relative importance of stay-at-home fathers in the greater context of U.S. families. First, we’re living in the age of the single parent. More than half of births to women under 30 happen out of wedlock, and women disproportionately end up taking care of those children.
This is depressing, but it’s worth noting that:
- 1) It’s rare for anyone to be able to stay at home these days.
- 2) When someone does “choose” to stay home, that’s typically driven by who makes more. The person with the lesser job, pay, ambition, or no job prospects often “decides” to take one for the family.
- 3) This person is still more likely to be a woman.
- 4) Even when couples agree that splitting everything as equally as possible is ideal, they hit the hard wall of workplace, policies, and institutions, which still often grant men higher pay and less flexibility, and which still often grant women greater flexibility but in exchange for lower pay and less room for advancement.
But it’s this part that gets me upset all over again:
… even among two-parent households where women work, the percentage of men acting as the primary caregiver has actually declined slightly since the early 1990s. The fraction of these men regularly providing any care whatsoever for their children while their wives work has been static since at least the late 1990s.
Yup: In families where men and women both earn, women are rocking 12 hours of childcare while men are only mustering up 7. If anything, the author writes, men have stopped taking on more responsibility at home in recent years.
Ugh. Unfortunately, yeah, we know. We know women still do more housework than men. And handle more of the childcare. Because we are doing it, and you know we gonna talk.
And even though it’s no more shocking than the recent study that men are threatened by the success of their girlfriends/wives but that women are not bothered by the success of their men, it’s still a major bummer. Why? Because reciprocity is the ideal. It’s fucking weird to even have to bring this up again.
I’ll admit: the household chores/childcare thing is always super tough to talk about, because it triggers all kinds of irrational feelings in people. It brings up how they were raised, and how their spoken values may be contradicted by their lived experience, which no one likes to go over with a fine-toothed comb.
It also often indicts our parents, because when we look at the root of our habits when it comes to domestic labor, men realize their mothers/fathers never taught them cooking or cleaning mattered. Women realize they were routed away from outdoor work, household repairs, or car maintenance in favor of making a mean cupcake.