RebelDad

Posted on 23. Feb, 2004 by Brian Reid in General

Last Flanagan-based post (for now. Caitlin Flanagan will apparently be joining the New Yorker as a staff writer, so I’m sure she’ll be back). In short, the anti-Flanagan analysis has ended up looking strikingly similar to the Rebel Dad critique (My point, in brief: why bash working moms and ignore dads?)

Here’s Daddy Zine:

Look, I have a front-row seat to an educated professional woman who is making choices about family and work. I can even wrap my brain around the idea of gender inequities when I have the enough mental energy left over after a day of fillips and niceties around our house. But to insist that gender gives my wife the Masonic handshake necessary to partake of ambivalence over (and debates on) the relative values of home life and work life seems silly. These debates are welcome and in some cases productive but for the love of Pete can’t we at least lose the tired rhetorical flourishes on the gendered nature of toilet-paper replacement?

Here’s a Baltimore Sun column:

Her entire argument about the exploitation of poor women is made with the working mother alone in her cross-hairs. But aside from taking note of Shulman’s failed effort to divide chores down the middle, the working father never seems to enter the room.

Even if it is true that women are primarily responsible for finding a suitable substitute for themselves if they decide to work, in what universe do women alone bear the moral fault for what happens next?

He may never ask about it, but that doesn’t mean the working father is off the hook when it comes to the decent treatment of the hired help.

This is a different version of an old - but still kicking - argument about whether mom should go back to work at all. Only if she makes enough to cover the cost of getting her out the door, it seems. Unlike dad, she has to justify the expense of her job. Flanagan seems to argue the exploitation of the underclasses is on her tab as well.

I don’t buy that. Like Alix Kates Shulman, I am looking for an honest division of the blame.

And here’s Moorish Girl:

Where are the men in all of this? In our enlightened times, shouldn’t men share in the responsibility of raising the children and therefore face up to what their nanny choices entail? Why not throw a little responsibilty and guilt their way? But, no. Piling on women is so much better.

Clearly, men are doing more and more around the house. But as Flanagan makes clear, a man’s house may be his castle, but it sure ain’t his responsibility, no matter how much work he may (or may not) be doing.