RebelDad

Newsweek Messes Up Masculinity

Posted on 27. Sep, 2010 by Brian Reid in Uncategorized

Newsweek is aware that *something* is going on with guys. I mean, the evidence is everywhere: the recession hit guys a lot harder than women, social roles are clearly being redefined, women are outearning men, Sweden is doing something right, dogs are sleeping with cats, etc. And they turned that mishmash of fact and anecdote into … a mishmash of an article last week that, ultimately, says nothing.

I have a number of ways I can go with this post. I could encourage everyone to read the only the last paragraph, sigh at the simplistic and silly idea that dads should continue to draw their worth from their jobs (or at least half of their worth), and then take advantage of the 30 minutes that they would have otherwise spent reading the article.

I could do a paragraph-by-paragraph explanation of the errors made (the number of at-home dads has not “stalled at 3 percent”) and the silly implications left unchallenged (that huge majorities of both political parties are committed to paid leave), but then parcel out praise for picking up insight from Joan Williams, Jeremy Adam Smith and Michael Chabon.

Or I could try to put the article in historical context. It seems like the “new macho” that the piece describes isn’t so new at all. I’ll buy a beer at the convention to any guy who can find a Newsweek piece on Robert Bly from 20 years ago talking about the “new macho.” I could drop even older history, noting that the whole man-is-defined-by-his-paid-work meme isn’t some sort of inescapable fact of society; before the industrial revolution, families looked a lot more like the involved-father, post-modern makeup than most people realize.

It seems like everyone does best when there aren’t any expectations at all, and fathers can do what’s best for them or the family without feeling locked into any stereotype. Because there wasn’t always a “right” way to be a man. One of my favorite books on fatherhood is an old, old work by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the guy who wrote “The Scarlet Letter.” He was once left as the primary caretaker of his little boy for 3 weeks, and 20 Days With Julian and Little Bunny by Papa is a charming set of stories about watching his kid grow and explore.

But that book is missing one element that has become standard in almost all first-person accounts of fatherhood (see Michael Lewis or Austin Murphy for a contrast): Hawthorne spends zero time ruminating on whether or not he is swimming against some current of manhood or fatherhood. He’s just a dad, hanging out with his kid.

That’s what we need: less navel-gazing about “why we need to reimagine masculinity” and more being just a dad, hanging out with the kids.