The Unmade Bed Read online

  The equality of women is spiritually and practically a flourishing of human potential. The hollow patriarchy keeps women from power and confounds male identity. It serves nobody’s interests. And yet it may be harder to unravel than older modes of sexism. The struggles articulated by The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch were broadly oppositional: women against men, young against old, feminists against the existing power structures. The hollow patriarchy demands the negotiation of complex contradictions by men and women together, an infinitely thornier, more difficult process requiring compassion rather than force, empathy rather than outrage. Life between men and women is becoming less a battleground and more a labyrinth from which we need to thread a way out. The assumptions girding our lives are giving way. We need rearrangement rather than revolution. Rearrangements are quieter but they can be more profound. For one thing, the rearrangement of our moment is not just a woman’s movement; it involves changing men and women together. For another, the rearrangement requires a more difficult and more nuanced politics than the gender wars of a previous era.

  Revolutions require loud voices and slogans. Rearrangements require considered decisions, taste even. That’s the bad news. The good news is that revolutions mostly fail and sometimes rearrangements work out.

  * * *

  The hollow patriarchy changes the nature of sex and domestic life and the raising of children. It infiltrates our dreams and our clothes and our music and our food. And, in the distance, though not the near distance, a reevaluation of the nature of power itself is coming. But before all those grand gestures, all those important overturnings of the nature of society and the gender roles it nurtures, there’s the day to get through.

  I enjoyed my time with my son when my wife couldn’t be home. Long walks in the park (nodding to other dads), naptime (wasted online), a spot of lunch (grilled cheese and chicken noodle soup, or macaroni and cheese), cuddles (the best), snacks in the park (absolutely no nuts), nap (again wasted online), more walks (smiling less this time), more snacks (raisins and crackers), whiskey and water (for me), Dora the Explorer (for him), dinner, a hasty phone conversation with my wife about what was going on in the world of real people (not that I cared anymore), then bed (alone or together).

  To hold a baby is to hold what matters: the point, the hope. Child care is restless labor; the total intimacy shared with another lump of flesh is no compensation for the utter loneliness of spirit that accompanies it. Driven from task to task, from moment to moment, everything in life seems adrift but also pressingly urgent. Leave your kid eating cereal while you run upstairs for a book, and he’s shoved three Cheerios up his nostril and you have to suck them out, spitting the soggy snottiness into an unwelcoming palm. Check your email at the playground, and your son has run to squat in the road over an unfortunate worm that has modernistically dried in the middle of traffic. Pick a quarter off the street, and the kid is suddenly standing on the roof of a car. Ask yourself at the end of the day what you have accomplished and the best answer you can come up with is that not everything has completely fallen apart.

  There remain the pressures of vanity and status. In downtown Toronto the school system is run by Vietnam-era draft dodgers and people who openly call themselves socialists—the progressiveness tends to expand into an unbearable holier-than-thou-off in Toronto—so I expected open-mindedness. But while Sarah and I were living out the new codes, the old codes remained very much in effect. The reaction to my unemployment and fatherhood-centricity was sharply divided along generational lines. Among Boomers classic gender stereotypes prevailed. I had become “the woman” and my wife had become “the man.” Mine was a case of straight emasculation. Boomer men—and these were good guys, guys who considered themselves forward-looking, guys who had lived through real progress, who had seen the whole reality of men and women overturned in their lifetime, who had helped bring about the overturning—would vibrate with suppressed head shakes of disbelief. And the women, kind women, women who were not hateful, women who had steeped their radicalism in the tempering waters of real life, would smile with amazement, eyes glinting with the cruel pleasure that takes its fullest flavor from righteousness. I was a living embodiment of patriarchy overcome, and they had contributed somewhat to my secondary status.

  Among people my own age the reaction was subtler. By no means is my own story extraordinary. Well over half my male friends have wives who make more money than they. Our family story nonetheless possessed a species of limited glamour. To academic competitors and colleagues the fact that I had given up a tenure-track appointment was like the charge of the Light Brigade: glorious economic suicide. To others, giving up New York for anything, even wife and child, verged on the inconceivable. Most friends and acquaintances roughly in my age group at least understood the nature of the decision. They knew it had nothing to do with politics or virtue or even my relationship with Sarah. Hopping from city to city is part of twenty-first-century life, and sometimes one person in a marriage has to make sacrifices. Nonetheless I had become an addendum. One of the lessons the contemporary marriage is teaching a lot of men—women have always known it—is that sacrifice is real. At first I thought through leaving New York that way, that I was doing what women had always done, sacrificing their career for their family and their partner’s success. Another tormented thought pursued me: Would I have destroyed my careerIV for my husband if I had been a woman? If Sarah had had a tenure-track job in New York, would she have given it up?

  The low point for me was a family dinner with my parents. They had their own new order to face up to, one in which their beloved son, whose expensive and seemingly ludicrously decadent education in various abstruse literary questions, they had supported and nurtured until it had miraculously ended in a real-life job. Which he had promptly abandoned. My father, who no doubt meant well, compared our situation to those of other academic couples he had known. “Every big career needs a wife,” he said. So I was not just my wife’s husband; I was my wife’s wife. And to my father.

  I was also broke, one of the more precise terms in the English language. In giving up my middle-class income I found out how vulnerable you really are when you rely on somebody else financially. Let all men and all women heed the obvious lesson: Financial independence is all of independence. These were the dark days. Every marriage has them. “We’ve been married for twenty-five years,” I remember my dad saying at my parents’ anniversary. “Happily for twenty-two.” I cannot recall exactly what Sarah and I screamed at each other, but it was about money. She had made promises about money she could not keep.V And I felt my powerlessness about money. We screamed at each other because screaming would change nothing. We were angry because we loved each other, and love and money had placed us in circumstances outside our control. Anger is its own form of intimacy. It kind of made it worse that I couldn’t imagine divorcing her. Love was another way I was trapped.

  As was sleeplessness. This story, and all of the psychic turbulence I am describing, should be understood to occur inside the condition of never sleeping more than a few hours at a time because the boy never slept more than a few hours at a time. The mood of desperate exhaustion permeated our lives like a chemical foulness. The most ferocious effect of sleeplessness is also one of the most difficult to see: insomnia sucks all the hope out of life. Insomnia makes it impossible to imagine that life will improve.

  * * *

  I remember, as a boy, waking up on a mattress in the back of a station wagon in a hospital parking lot in Edmonton, Alberta. My mother is a physician, who at that time delivered babies, and my father commuted to another city by plane every day. So, when she had to deliver a baby, a few times my mom had to put my brother and me in the back of the station wagon in the middle of the night and leave us in the hospital parking lot. Edmonton, Alberta in the winter is as dark and as cold as cities are allowed to be. Outside the station wagon, it could easily have been minus thirty or forty. But inside it was cozy. I loved the
adventure. I didn’t know that it was unusual for children to wake up in parking lots in the middle of the night. Later, I came to realize how my parents had clawed themselves, with single-minded ferocity, into the middle class through many such superhuman acts. Nor was their story atypical. My mother-in-law used to return home from her job as a radio broadcaster, feed two children, put them to bed, and then return to the office for a couple more hours of work. If it was like this for doctors and broadcasters, what must it have been like for factory workers? Challenges was the word my upwardly mobile parents used, I think. Domestic challenges. From my vantage point they seem like domestic impossibilities.

  The rise of women has always been about assuaging competing demands of the domestic and professional spheres. The feminist movement, along with the rest of society, has assumed that taking care of children is women’s work and a woman’s political issue. The exclusion of men from the discussion of work and life is strange, because in heterosexual relationships the decisions about who works and who takes care of the children and who makes the money and how the money is spent are not made by women alone nor by some vague and impersonal force called society. They are decided by that blackest of black boxes, that repository of social mystery: the marriage.

  The Pew Research study “Modern Parenthood,” which came out in March 2013, found “no significant gap in attitudes between mothers and fathers.” Working fathers are more conflicted than working mothers about work-family balance: 46 percent of working fathers worry about not spending time with their kids, compared to 23 percent of working mothers. The same report revealed the sharpness of changing attitudes toward the family. In the past decade the number of dads in America who stay home with their kids has doubled, up to 176,000. According to census data prepared for the New York Times, that number rises to 626,000 if you include part-time workers and freelancers who are primary caregivers, guys like me. In 2009, 54 percent of fathers with kids under seventeen believed that children should have a mother who didn’t work. In a mere two years that number dropped to 37 percent.

  For the Boomers and people older, the relationship between husband and wife, and the decisions about work made by husband and wife, are questions of power, and therefore political, ideological. Nobody asked me why we returned to Canada when we did. They knew it was money. In my experience, the modern marriage, and all of its decisions, and all the consequences those decisions have on the role of gender, boil down almost entirely to money. The conflict is no longer about the appropriate roles of men and women but the more general problem of the insane productivity demands of the contemporary workplace coming up against hunger for home life. The work-life problem belongs to both genders now. It belongs to everybody who needs money and has children and is subject to time.

  The fact is, men can’t have it all, for the same reason women can’t: whether or not the load is being shared fifty-fifty doesn’t matter if the load is unbearable. It will not become bearable once women lean in, or once the consciousness is raised, or once men are full partners, always, in domestic life. It will become bearable when decidedly more quotidian things become commonplace, like paid parental leave and affordable, quality day care.

  If men’s voices are absent from the conversation about family, we have, I’m afraid, only ourselves to blame. Those who speak loudest tend to be either members of the aforementioned men’s rights groups or explicit antifeminists who long for a traditional family that bears little resemblance to the current reality. Men are not victims in this story, not helpless witnesses to their wives’ struggles. And yet, while a chorus of women demands maternity leave, only recently, and only in the most progressive companies of Silicon Valley, have men started demanding paternity leave, and even then only for a few weeks.

  A conversation about work-life balance conducted by and for a small sliver of the female population only perpetuates the perception that these are women’s problems, not family ones. If you doubt that such thinking is still pervasive, see the recent op-ed in the New York Times about the effect of tax policy on working families, which contained this sentence: “Most working mothers who pay for child care do so out of their after-tax income.” That’s right: child care is a not a father’s expense, or a family’s expense, but a mother’s. There are a hundred linguistic gaps between mothers and fathers in the tax code and in everyday life: stay-at-home mothers are parents; stay-at-home fathers are child care arrangements. Mothers are carers. Fathers provide care.

  The residual prejudice explains why, despite the narrowing gender gap among millennials, both men and women feel that the narrowing is temporary. The gender gap for those under thirty is small, but it feels huge. The reason is the undeniable math of procreation: among millennials 59 percent of women but only 19 percent of men think “being a working parent makes it harder to advance in a job or career.” Plus, 75 percent of millennial women and 57 percent of millennial men think that “more changes are needed to give men and women equality in the workplace.” They are obviously correct. Twenty-three percent of American women return to work within two weeks of giving birth. In the United States the National Institutes of Health have rated only 10 percent of child care facilities nationwide as providing “high-quality care”; most are rated “fair” or “poor.” And in every state the average annual cost of day care for two children exceeds the average annual rent. Not surprisingly, low-income mothers are far more likely to stay at home than are upper-income mothers. Such women are forgoing paid work because they can’t earn enough money to cover child care. Although the situation is much better in Europe, across the twenty-seven countries in the EU, 26 percent of women with a child under the age of three who are working full- or part-time “report that suitable care services for children are not available or affordable.”

  Here is where, as we approach the end of the gender wars, we approach the limits of feminism as an ideology, because to concentrate on the needs of women is counterproductive. As early as 2008 Great Britain was already seeing the unintended consequences of maternity leave without paternity leave. “There has been a sea change on maternity leave and flexible work and we welcome that,” said Nicola Brewer, chief executive officer of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. “But the effect has been to reinforce some traditional patterns. The Work and Families Act has not freed parents and given them real choice. It is based on assumptions, and some of them reinforce the traditional pattern of women as carers of children.” The struggle for maternity leave—the struggle for women—only creates another gender division, one that employers cannot help but recognize: young women have an inherent disadvantage due to their biology.

  Only family leave solves the problem. Only by considering the question from the perspective of the family as a unit can patriarchy be smashed. As long as family issues are miscast as women’s issues they will be dismissed as the pleadings of one interest group among many. Fighting for the family is another matter. When gay rights activists shifted their focus from the struggle for their rights as an oppressed minority to the struggle to support their families, their movement achieved unprecedented political triumph. It is easy to have a career as an antifeminist. Force the opponents of day care support and family leave to come out instead against working families. Let them try to sell that.

  The central conflict of domestic life right now is not mothers against fathers, or even conflicting ideas of motherhood or gender. It is the family against money. How do you hold the family together? Domestic life today is like one of those TV shows that reveal what goes on behind the scenes in show business. The main narrative question is “How the hell are we going to make this happen?” There are tears and laughter and little intrigues, but in the end the show goes on, everyone is fed and clothed and out the door.

  * * *

  I’m saying this as a man: day care saved my life. When my son was at day care, I could once again lift my head out from the miasma of domesticity. I could once again breathe and look around. I could once again write, and therefo
re earn. Eventually, David Granger, the editor-in-chief of Esquire, read something I’d written for the Toronto Star and called to ask me if I wanted a column in his magazine. I could take him up because of day care. Of all the privileges my wife and I possessed, the boy being in a safe place we could afford between nine and five was by far the greatest. Day care is not theoretical liberation; it is the real deal, for men and women.

  The most progressive government policy in the past thirty years has been put forward by a male cabinet member of a conservative government. In February 2000 Norway’s secretary of state for trade and industry, Ansgar Gabrielsen, set female board membership rates for companies on the Norwegian Stock Exchange at 40 percent. He explained:

  The law was not about getting equality between the sexes; it was about the fact that diversity is a value in itself, that it creates wealth. I could not see why, after 25–30 years of having an equal ratio of women and men in universities and with having so many educated women with experience, there were so few of them on boards. From my time in the business world, I saw how board members were picked: they come from the same small circle of people. They go hunting and fishing together, they are buddies.

  When voluntary measures didn’t work, Gabrielsen imposed quotas. The penalties included fines, deregistration from the stock exchange, and dissolution.

  The rise of the “golden skirts,” the Norwegian phrase for the new breed of female board members, has had no conclusive economic results so far, one way or another. A 2007 McKinsey report noted that having three women on an executive committee meant that a company outperformed its sector for return on equity by roughly ten percent. But a larger and later metastudy found “the relationship between female board representation and market performance is near-zero.” Norway has not seen that kind of improvement, though there hasn’t been a massive Norwegian financial collapse from the sudden arrival of inexperienced female board members either. Other countries are imitating Norway’s success. France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands are instituting their own board membership quotas.