The Unmade Bed Read online

  This quiet moment, utterly personal, was the result of a grand, very public revolution. A woman with a big job delivering a baby while her husband watched would have been inconceivable fifty years ago. Of all the grand political fantasies of the twentieth century, the various ideologies that dared to reconfigure humanity, and came and went, leaving behind the fetid stench of their failed utopias, only feminism has left a tangible legacy in everyday life. Even its limited successes have had vast consequences. Only now, only a generation after the major legal and political victories of the movement, are we reckoning with how vast, and often how hidden, those consequences are. Every aspect of life—financial, sexual, cultural, domestic, political—is undergoing unprecedented adjustment. The most lowly questions—Who will do the dishes?— run together with the grandest: Who will run the state?

  The reach of lowly or grand questions seemed remote from the hospital room where Sarah and I waited for our daughter. Nothing we had read mattered much one way or the other. The crisis was cosmic. Even love, or whatever other name you might care to give it, seemed a half-dreamed precondition to this moment, the arrival of a new soul. I could not stop looking at my wife—her hair, tucked behind her ears, glistening with the sweat of effort; her eyes scouring the screen in concentration. Sarah was iconic of the rearrangement we are living through, an absolutely contemporary but also ancient human condition: She was a mammal shaping the world.

  * * *

  I live a quiet life. I have a wife and a son and a daughter and a job and a house and a mortgage, and in the middle of all this quietude I am also in the middle of a world-shattering revolution, one of the most profound reevaluations of humanity ever undertaken, the redefinition of a core human distinction that has been in place for thirty thousand years. I am living the hopeful and uncertain fate of men and women in the twenty-first century.

  Economics is the vehicle of that hope and uncertainty. The reality transforming the developed world, and to a lesser extent the developing world, is the rise of women to real economic power in the middle class. All the other changes—the changes that prepared the way for my wife on the iPad in the delivery room—follow in its wake. Companionate marriage, among other things, is an outgrowth of women earning a living.

  Female professionals were one of the great novelties of the twentieth century. They define the economic order of the twenty-first. Since 1996 American women have earned more bachelor degrees than men. In 2012 they started earning a greater number of doctoral degrees as well. Of the top fifteen growth industries in the United States, twelve are dominated by women. The most recent Pew study of the state of the American family revealed the result of all that change: in 40 percent of all households with children under the age of eighteen women are the primary source of income. That ratio has risen continuously since 1960, when it stood at a mere 10.8 percent. It will not be long before the typical American breadwinner is a woman.

  In a marketplace shifting rapidly to the manipulation of information, women have dived in headfirst, while men have watched timidly from shore. The pay gap survives, but ebbs. In 1980 women earned 64 percent of the median hourly wages of men; by 2012 the rate was 84 percent. Among those under the age of thirty, the rate is 93 percent. It’s not the scope of the improvement that’s impressive, but its continuity. The economic reality for women just gets better and better. The wage gap in the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), of which the United States is a member, has declined from 19 to 15 percent between 2000 and 2011. Women have increased their workforce participation in almost every country in the developed world since 2000. In the great middle, the twenty-first century will belong to women.

  A formidable contradiction is starting to emerge as women close the economic divide, though. Economic equality should not be confused with parity; an increase in income or workplace participation is not the same as power. Men still hold the top jobs by an overwhelming margin. Women earn, but they do not as yet own. Just 172 of the 1,645 billionaires on the Forbes list in 2014 were women, and only twelve of those were self-made. The same gender divide at the very top remains ferociously persistent. Men have more say across a range of fields; for instance, they make up 76 percent of full professors in the United States and 66 percent of doctors and lawyers. And even though women have made significant gains in those last two professions—4 and 6 percent in a decade, respectively—at the peak of their earning, female doctors make two-thirds what male doctors do, and female lawyers are only 16.8 percent of equity partners at major U.S. firms. In the top tech firms women make up 15.6 percent of the engineers and 22.5 percent of leadership. Although it ranks sixth in the world, U.S. female board membership is a measly 12 percent. In supposedly liberal Canada, where I live, it’s 6 percent, a national disgrace.

  We inhabit a hollow patriarchy: the shell is patriarchal, but the insides approach the egalitarian. The contradiction generates strange paradoxes. Even women with servants and houses and powerful jobs, who possess hundreds of millions of dollars, consider themselves victims. And they’re right. Women in the upper reaches of power are limited in ways that men simply are not.

  The hollow patriarchy is political as much as it is economic. According to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Report 2014,” female representation in the world’s democracies averages a mere 20 percent. The percentage of women in elected office in America makes for depressing reading: in 2013, 18.2 percent of seats in Congress were filled by women, and an even 20 percent of seats in the Senate. Only five governors are women; only twelve of the largest hundred cities in the United States have women mayors; only 20.8 percent of state legislators are women. The figures for women in other elected positions, attorneys general and so on, are roughly the same. And while female political participation is growing and has grown almost every year since 1979, when only 3 percent of members of the U.S. Congress were women, it is growing with painful slowness. At the current rate of expansion, women will reach political parity in Congress fifty-five years from now. And the situation is much the same in all the other Western democracies. When it comes to political power, “some countries are moving in the right direction, but very slowly,” Saadia Zahidi, head of the World Economic Forum’s Gender Parity Program, noted in an interview before their 2012 report. “We’re talking about very small and slow changes.”

  Various men’s movements, the most prominent of which is the National Center for Men, have emerged purportedly to provide a counterweight to feminism, but they are promoting an inherently absurd proposition. Power is still in the hands of a few men, even though the majority of men are being outpaced in the knowledge economy by every metric. The contradiction rolls both ways, inside and out. Masculinity grows more and more powerless while remaining iconic of power.

  * * *

  I began living the hollowness of the hollow patriarchy rather abruptly on the afternoon of April 12, 2007, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. My wife called to say that she had been offered the position of editor in chief at Toronto Life. If she accepted the offer, she would be the first female editor of that publication, and at thirty-three, by far the youngest editor in chief in Canada. Her hiring represented, in its own small way, a generational shift.

  And yet Prospect Park in the spring is not a place you want to think about leaving. The apricots were blooming. Relaxed families and groups of friends formed patchwork tribes over the rolling greenery of the East Meadow. Those urbane kids you find only in New York, the ones who know how the world works from about the age of four, chased dogs like kids from anywhere. I was thirty-one years old in 2007. Sarah and I had a beautiful son who was starting to walk; my second novel, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, was about to come out, and my day job was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, safe in the harbor of the tenure track at City College after five miserably lean years in graduate school. The call was an abrupt interruption to a carefully planned, painfully won setup. As a couple, as a man and a woman, we were faced with a star
k choice: New York or Toronto?II My career or hers?

  I knew as I looked around the park that I belonged there. I belonged with my students in Harlem. I belonged with my New York publishers. My mind raced for a way to avoid the personal and professional disaster that moving back to Canada would entail. Could I stay here and visit my wife and son on the weekends? Could I convince my wife she could find work in New York, even though she didn’t have a visa, even though she’d been offered her dream job? All my imaginary schemes collapsed as soon as they formulated because I knew they were really modes of mourning in advance for my lost futures, all the New York selves I would never become. City College paid me a little more than sixty thousand dollars a year, and my wife would make nearly double that in Toronto. Good hospitals are free in Toronto. Good schools are free in Toronto. This is what they call a no-brainer. Perhaps that was what was most upsetting about the decision to move back: that there wasn’t much deciding. It felt like something that was happening to me, to us.

  We left New York at the end of summer, and I restarted my life in the enlightened confusion of the new reality. Sarah and I took, in microcosm, the journey men and women in Western democracies have taken. She rose; she was responsible for the family’s financial well-being; and she was a boss, with all the pressures and complications that accompany that role. As for me, I went from having about as traditional a marker of authority as you can find—a tenure-track professorship—to carting my son around the play spaces of Toronto before and after day care, on weekends when Sarah was still wrestling with her new responsibilities, and in the evenings when she was expected to show up at the self-important Toronto parties where nothing ever happens. I was suddenly my wife’s husband.

  * * *

  Sarah obviously is an exception, even a pioneer, with all the usual bullshit that goes with that title. An elderly reporter, profiling her for a newspaper story, discovered she had a child and asked, panicked, “Where is he now?” As if Sarah just happened to forget his existence.III

  In part the hollowness of the hollow patriarchy derives from the strange, almost unaccountable fact that gender politics at work and at home have diverged so widely that they now appear to be from distinct cultures. In the 1950s the patriarchy at work and the patriarchy at home were of a piece. The father was head of the household because he provided for the family, and the boss was head of the company because he provided work that provided for the family. For the overwhelming majority this mode of integrated patriarchy has disappeared. The days of Dad working all week and then, having fulfilled his duties, playing a couple or three rounds of golf on the weekend are ancient history. The new model of an equal household is triumphant. A 2008 Pew Research study titled “Women Call the Shots at Home” found that 43 percent of women made more decisions at home than their male partners did, and 31 percent of male and female partners equally divided decisions. (This bit of good news contains a further conundrum: Is making decisions at home a form of power? Would women’s power in fact consist in making fewer decisions at home, in having less control?) There is no patriarchal “head of the household” in most households anymore. The family has changed and is changing further, while at work patriarchy remains intact and functional, surviving as a kind of lazy hangover, like daylight savings time or summer vacations.

  The hollow patriarchy transcends mere culture; its process is driven by underlying economic realities. The rise of women is an aspect of globalization itself, and not the smallest. The “Shanghai husband” is a recent specimen of the burgeoning Chinese cities and is, more or less, what I became seven thousand miles away in Toronto. Shanghai husbands cook. They clean. They take care of the babies. They don’t earn very much. “Many men joke fondly of their status as a Shanghai husband, oblique homage to the pleasures of domesticity,” James Farrer wrote in Opening Up, his study of sexuality and market reform in China. In a 1999 episode of the Chinese television matchmaker show Saturday Date, the father of one of the female contestants approved of such a domesticated man for his daughter: “I myself am a Shanghai-style husband. I believe he also will be a Shanghai-style husband. I believe he has real feelings for our daughter. He will take care of her.” These types emerge despite the obvious and ingrained sexism prevalent in China today, with state-run campaigns against “leftover women” (unmarried women twenty-seven and older), 117.7 boys for every 100 girls as of 2012, and no criminalization of marital rape. The Shanghai husband is a corollary of the Shanghai wife: the supertough, supersmart woman who kicks the shit out of foreign competition. I only wish I could have been as relaxed about my condition as my Chinese counterparts.

  Idiosyncrasies of culture don’t alter the basic economic trends at play. Insofar as any country participates in the globalized economy, it encounters the hollow patriarchy. The rise of the global middle class is the rise of women. Modernity is irrevocably feminist. Insofar as a country prospers, it prospers by way of women. In 2006, an OECD study demonstrated what common sense tells us: The countries where women flourish are the most stable, the most technologically advanced, the most peaceful, the richest, the most powerful. They are the countries that people in the rest of the world want to move to. Patriarchy is damn expensive. That’s why it’s doomed.

  Exactly how expensive is patriarchy? A 2013 report from the International Monetary Fund described the labor market divide as a macroeconomic burden of the first order: “Raising the female labor force participation rate . . . to country-specific male levels would, for instance, raise GDP in the United States by 5 percent, in Japan by 9 percent, in the United Arab Emirates by 12 percent, and in Egypt by 34 percent.” According to a Goldman Sachs study conducted in 2008, in the BRIC and N-11 countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and the so-called next eleven major economies), narrowing the gender gap in employment “could push income per capita as much as fourteen percent higher than our baseline projections by 2020, and as much as twenty percent higher by 2030.” These forces are slowly but determinedly under way. Investment bankers are counting on them.

  Politicians who are considering the role of women in the workplace and in society should recognize that they are asking themselves the following question: How poor do we want to be? Japan has recently announced some of the clearest and most direct attempts to smash the hollow patriarchy, both from above and from below, not because of a major ideological realignment or a widespread cultural shift but because of brute economics. Japan is patriarchal. Married Japanese women overwhelmingly stay at home. The country ranks a miserable 105 out of 136 in the 2013 Global Gender Gap Report. Roughly 1.2 percent of board members are female. In an attempt to budge these deep cultural imbalances Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called on every Japanese company to have at least one female member on its board. And he has announced the building of 250,000 new day care centers. He is not undertaking these policies because he has suddenly realized that women are people too. He has realized that, given Japan’s negative population growth rate and long recession, the country cannot afford to lose the productive efforts of its women.

  The rise of women is a byproduct of capitalism, not of an intellectual movement or political activism. Feminism as an ideology has cribbed an emerging economic reality as a triumph of professors and activists. The rise of women is not a resistance to injustice; it is an unintended consequence of the internal logic of capitalism. Countries that insist on separating women from men for cultural or religious reasons are paying an immense price for it and will continue to fall behind as long as they maintain that separation. I suppose any country, any culture can waste its money on whatever it chooses. But keeping women down is a very expensive luxury.

  Not that we should exaggerate the current state of the advancement of women. One hundred million women in West Africa have undergone genital mutilation—roughly six thousand a day. Amartya Sen’s estimate of the number of “missing women of Asia,” the girls who do not exist because of the cultural preference for sons, is a hundred million. The ratio of boys to girls at birt
h in India and China remains the same as it is in the Western world, 1.05 to 1.06, but the ratio of men to women is 0.94. The girls die off because, unlike the boys, they are denied access to food and medicine. Boys receive more education than girls in more than seventy-five countries. In global terms, we are by no means postfeminist. We are very much prefeminist.

  Just as the majority of people in the world use firewood as their primary power source, so questions of gender relations, globally, are rather more basic than the contradictions in this book. The definition of domestic abuse, the use of sexual crime as an instrument of war, whether men have the right to rape their wives—these are the gender politics of most of the planet. Not that the discrepancy between the status of women in the first and third worlds means that the rise of women in the rich democracies is irrelevant. It is a vital instruction. The patriarchs have learned its lesson better than anyone. The liberation of women is the primary marker of modernity and prosperity. Therefore those who wish to be rich and modern will actively promote women. Those who justify their poverty by calling it tradition begin their assault on the future through the bodies of women. In the United States the first sign of traditional values is the restriction of women’s control over their own bodies: the same groups that describe abortion as genocide actively discourage sex education or the promotion of contraception. Women’s flesh must first be controlled: that control is synonymous with the old ways.

  * * *

  The economic underpinnings of the new reality between men and women shouldn’t make us politically complacent, as if gender equality were going to take care of itself. The opposite: it shows how wasteful, how needlessly destructive keeping women from power is. The stakes are as high as they can be. How are we going to shatter this hollow edifice? How can we hasten its collapse?