Cathy
Reisenwitz is a D.C.-based writer. She is Editor-in-Chief
of Sex and
the State and her writing has appeared in The
Week, Forbes, the Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast,
VICE Motherboard and Reason magazine,
I
sit down to write this essay having just finished washing
the dishes from the breakfast I made for my boyfriend. The
neighbourhood we live in, with an olive oil shop next door,
a sushi bar across the street, and an artisanal cheese shop
around the corner, I could not afford without his generous
assistance. In return I happily take the clothes to the wash
and fold, and walk to the Whole Foods. The app that sends
us housekeeping help is on my phone, not his.
There’s
a trope that feminism stands in opposition to masculinity,
typified by the man-hating feminist. I don’t speak for
all feminists, of course, but I love men. I love masculinity.
I’m writing this not because I delight in seeing masculinity
in decline. It makes me sad to know that fewer and fewer people
get to experience what my partner and I do. I would feel incredibly
grateful for my charmed life regardless. But knowing what
I know about macroeconomic trends, I feel even more so.
In
2013 I sat on a Heritage Foundation panel about single motherhood.
Of the four women participating, I was the only product of
one. I hadn’t expected to get angry, because I was young
and naïve. The idea from some of the other panelists
was that by normalizing single motherhood, the media was encouraging
women to become single mothers, thereby exacerbating poverty.
As
Ryan Cooper wrote for the Week in March 2017, many D.C. conservatives
and libertarians “are obsessed with poor people’s
relative lack of marriage. They look at social dysfunction
among the lower classes, conclude that it happens because
they don’t conform to bourgeois social norms, and then
rig up some policy to bludgeon the poor into getting married
(and staying in school, getting a job, and so on).”
I
love my antiquated gendered norms. Just like some people love
the soft, flickering glow of candlelight. Or a hipster loves
to jar his own preserves. But as great as they are, candles,
preserves, and marriage are all utterly incapable of saving
anyone from poverty. More than that, the traditional conception
of marriage, with a male breadwinner and a wife who works
less or not at all, is quickly becoming as workable as candlelight
and canning for lower income Americans.
So
what then? How do we save marriage? Is it worth saving at
all? I think the answer is yes. But to do so, we need a new
masculinity, built upon a more solid and lasting foundation
of liberal gender norms.
WHY
MARRIAGE ISN’T A SOLUTION TO POVERTY
You
don’t need the elaborate fantasies conservatives have
concocted to explain the trend away from marriage. Murphy
Brown and Gloria Steinem didn’t convince women that
they “don’t need no man.” Most people still
want to get married. According to Pew research only 13% of
never-married adults say they do not want to marry.
Marriage
rates are only declining among the poor. Among the upper and
middle classes marriage is just getting delayed.
The
idea that single motherhood is a personal choice motivated
by television and movies is belied by the fact that the vast
majority of single mothers are poor. In developed nations,
33% of births are out-of-wedlock on average. But when you
look at areas where demand for manufacturing labour has collapsed,
70% or more of births are outside of marriage.
The
problem? Women, at least 78% of them, highly value a steady
job in a spouse or partner. They’re not wrong to. Marriage
is only helpful if it comes with resources. And that, for
poor women, is getting harder and harder to find.
Men
at the middle and top marry women at the middle and top. This
phenomenon, known as assortative mating, is a fairly recent
phenomenon in the US, and is a driver of inequality. Because
assortative mating leaves only men at the bottom for women
at the bottom.
Men
at the bottom are not doing well. And for that reason they
don’t make very attractive husbands. Men are far more
likely than women to spend time in prison. There are 20 million
men with felony records who are not in jail. And men are less
likely than women to earn a college degree. According to the
Economist, boys in the developed world are 50% more
likely to fail their basic math, reading and science classes
than girls.
The
New York Times reports that more than one fifth of
prime working age American men (between the ages of 20 and
65) had no paid work last year. Seven million men between
25 and 55 aren’t even looking for work right now. From
Men Without Work, America’s Invisible Crisis: “In
1948, men made up a little more than a tenth of working age
(20-64) Americans without jobs. By 2015, however, they made
up nearly two-fifths of this population.”
Between
1979 and 2013 median wages for high-school educated men fell
21% in real terms. During that same period it rose 3% for
similarly qualified women.
It’s
not that people are choosing to stay unmarried, and are therefore
poor as a result.
Instead,
a study by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson shores
up what other studies have shown. Which is that there simply
aren’t enough single, high-earning men at the bottom
of the economic totem pole to lift anyone out of poverty.
Women at the bottom, unable to find men who can provide materially,
have three choices. They can marry a man who is a net economic
cost and does not pull his weight in the realm of housework
and childcare. That seems like a bad idea. They can choose
not to have children at all. Or they can choose to have kids
out of wedlock.
As
the Economist summarizes:
The
vast majority of women would prefer to have a partner who
does his bit both financially and domestically.
But
they would rather do without one than team up with a layabout,
which may be all that is on offer: American men without jobs
spend only half as much time on housework and caring for others
as do women in the same situation, and much more time watching
television.
Hence
the unraveling of working-class families. The two-parent family,
still the norm among the elite, is vanishing among the poor.
HOW
GENDER NORMS HANDICAPT THE POOR
A
January 2017 New York Times article points out that
the large cohort of non-working American men are turning down
new service-sector jobs. Why? Because they pay less than manufacturing
jobs and have less prestige. But also because they’re
“women’s work.”
“I
ain’t gonna be a nurse; I don’t have the tolerance
for people,” 53-year-old unemployed welder Tracy Dawson
told the Times. “I don’t want it to sound
bad, but I’ve always seen a woman in the position of
a nurse or some kind of health care worker. I see it as more
of a woman’s touch.”
“Traditional
masculinity is standing in the way of working-class men’s
employment,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist and
public policy professor at Johns Hopkins. “We have a
cultural lag where our views of masculinity have not caught
up to the change in the job market.”
This
same attitude keeps men from contributing around the house.
We stigmatize men who take care of their children full-time
and engage in other ‘feminine’ activities. Which
puts low-education men in a bind. They aren’t qualified
for high-earning jobs. But if they do the labor available
to them, they’re emasculated.
The
Economist again:
Over the past generation, middle-class men have learned
that they need to help with child care, and have changed
their behaviour. Working-class men need to catch up. Women
have learned that they can be surgeons and physicists without
losing their femininity. Men need to understand that traditional
manual jobs are not coming back, and that they can be nurses
or hairdressers without losing their masculinity.
Norms
are useful, but when they are rigid and butt up against economic
realities people on the fringes find themselves caught in
the middle, squeezed from both sides. Unable to hew to norms,
the marginalized find themselves having to choose between
staying poor and being mocked or ostracized.
There
is so much more to masculinity than the ability to bring home
more money than your female partner. We do men and women such
a disservice by reducing men to what -- and how -- they earn.
Tolerance
and specialization are prized features of the liberal order.
Poor men need our tolerance for a wider variety of ways to
perform masculinity so they can specialize according to their
individual strengths.
LARGER
ECONOMIC TRENDS
At
2017’s World Economic Forum executives at companies
working in artificial intelligence (AI) , including IBM Corp.,
Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and Google parent Alphabet
Inc., debated the likely impact on employment.
Many
business leaders and economists are optimistic about the impact
of machine learning on employment, predicting AI will create
more new jobs than it displaces, on net. They see automation
raising prosperity across the board, just as past waves of
innovation have.
Others
see a less rosy future. A recently released World Economic
Forum study shows that over the past five years annual median
incomes in all advanced economies fell 2.4%. Many economists
blame automation (plus global trade) for slow job growth and
stagnant wages across the developed world.
“I
don’t think you’ve even really seen the beginning
of the disruption,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said.
“The wave of technology will create a big increase in
productivity. But we also risk getting a lot more inequality.”
The
problem of inequality has been talked to death. And we’re
beginning to grapple with the impact of automation and outsourcing
on low-education men’s employment and wages. But how
these factors are impacting marriage has not been discussed
nearly as much.
The
trend of low-education men dropping out of, or never entering,
the job market is a massive problem, and it’s only growing.
On the EconTalk Podcast, host Russ Roberts spoke with economist
Erik Hurst who told him that if you asked a 21-30 year old
man with less than a BA whether he’d worked in the past
year in 2000, 8% would say they hadn’t worked at all
in the prior year. Today, that number is 18% for same cohort.
This trend started prior to the recession and hit 18% in 2010
and has stayed there. And these men aren’t in school
either. For women, there has been no similar drop off in labour
force participation.
It’s
a problem not just because men aren’t working outside
the home, but because they’re not working inside of
it either. America still needs men. Marriage can be a way
to utilize male talent and energy once again. But men need
to become worth marrying once again. Some of them can do so
by learning how to earn money in a shifting economy. Others
will need to take greater responsibility for helping out around
the house. Most will need to do a little of both.
A
WAY FORWARD
There
is no silver bullet solution. When it comes to earning potential,
some, like technology thinker and entrepreneur Anil Dash,
see coding as a viable replacement for the manufacturing work
we’ve lost to outsourcing and automation. He recommends
that high schools offer coding classes, perhaps through vocational
programs. It would also help if we as a culture could stop
telling our children that racking up debt for a four-year
degree is the only path to success, when there are skills
they can learn just as effectively at a community college.
For those already in the job force, programs like Dev Bootcamp
offer a way to pick up coding skills.
Of
course, not every man is going to be a coder. Other, more
traditional vocational paths, such as becoming an electrician
or plumber, are far too undervalued. Ultimately, however,
more men will have to embrace a broadened vision of manhood.
I
think marriage is worth saving. And I think it can be saved
by embracing the liberal principles that helped bring much
of the world out of grinding poverty. Deirdre McCloskey, emerita
professor of economics, history, English and communication
at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently wrote for
Reason, “Adam Smith defined liberalism in 1776 as the
shocking idea of ‘allowing every man [or woman, dear]
to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal
plan of equality, liberty, and justice.’”
Instead
of prescribing a narrow, stifling, and ultimately unworkable
path for men, why not broaden masculinity to encompass more
general principles? The Art of Manliness posits 3 P’s
of Manhood: protect, procreate, and provide. There are myriad
ways to protect, procreate and provide that have nothing to
do with breadwinning. To protect the home and family from
those who would do them harm does not require a high income.
Nor does procreation. There are many things a husband can
provide that have higher value than a paycheck. A husband
can provide a safe, clean home. He can provide training and
education to his children. He can provide transportation and
planning and all the things it takes to run a modern family.
There is nothing to keep modern men -- even ones who are not
incredibly competitive in the job market -- from being fabulous
husbands and fathers but our own narrow ideas of what is valuable
about men.
American
marriage among the poor is kneecapped by the idea that work
traditionally done by women is less important, valuable and
respectable than work generally associated with men.
People
like me, with college degrees and middle-class incomes, can
afford to be antiquated in a way that people without those
privileges cannot. I recognize that it’s rich for me
to prescribe a vision of masculinity for others that I’m
not willing to adopt for myself. But it’s my love of
men and everything they offer that makes me want to find ways
to make marriage work for everyone again, and not just the
privileged few.
