There are many implicit daily tests for this proposition. Whose responsibility is it to organise babysitting, if you’re going out? If a child gets sick at school, who goes to the rescue? Who is responsible for organising holiday activities? If both parents have a work commitment that clashes with a dentist visit or sports day, who is ultimately the person who will reschedule? And, most significantly, who pays for child care?
When mothers are making the decision about when or whether to go back to work, you will often hear something along the lines of: ‘Well, I would like to go back to work, but my salary would barely cover the childcare fees, so we decided against it.’ A tiny little part of me goes a tiny little bit crazy when I hear this. Not because I am enraged by the prospect of women staying out of the workforce in order to look after their kids; far from it. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because of all the non-economic advantages such an arrangement entails. I also think it’s entirely reasonable for men to do it. It just fascinates me that childcare expenses are automatically hypothecated against a mother’s income. What other household expense is tied directly to one household member’s earning capacity in this way? I can’t think of another example. You don’t hear women saying: ‘Yeah, well, we’d love to live in a house, but my salary doesn’t cover the mortgage, so we’ve decided to live in a tent in Centennial Park instead, just till things pick up a bit.’
I know, I know; it’s a cost-benefit analysis, and an immediate one. When the decision is about whether a woman will go back to paid work, it’s her job that hangs in the balance, and her salary that is stacked up against the child-care fees that will be incurred, should she choose to earn that salary. They are hinged together by the economic decision facing the household. I get that.
But cost-benefit analyses are regularly a close-run thing in matters of household strategy. People continue to buy houses even in ruinously overheated markets. Or spend vast amounts of money on private school educations, sometimes going in to debt or substantial short-term adversity to do so. They buy cars they can’t afford. They put themselves in hock up to the eyeballs to establish a small business they believe in. Why? Because they have faith that the benefits, in the long term, will outweigh the up-front costs. But the calculations about women’s salaries often exist in a different strategic space. A woman who takes leave from work to have a baby and then elects not to go back to work at all gives up more than the ticket value of the immediate salary she would have recovered on her return. She gives up her capacity to win further advancement. She gives up the personal professional relationships and networks that might otherwise have yielded opportunities for promotion. The salary foregone is far, far greater than the figure punched in to the household calculator at the point when the decision is made. Such is the cost of human assumptions.
Like I said at the beginning of this chapter, averages have their limitations. Every household is different in its own way, whether it’s a bloke who actually likes ironing, or a woman who has an inexplicable fear of removing cutlery from the dishwasher. But the broader patterns of the Australian home are so distinct as to be undeniable; women, and especially mothers, do more housework than men. They do more housework than men even when they also have full-time paid jobs. And men do less housework than women, even if they’re not working at all.
This is the wife drought’s strange and seemingly unshakeable grip on us all. In an average Australian family, a woman will commonly behave like a housewife even if she isn’t one. And a man will behave as though he’s married to a housewife, even when he isn’t.
5
A QUESTION OF COMPETENCE
I am standing in the kitchen of the man who is about to become Australia’s twenty-eighth prime minister. He is throwing together a casual barbecue dinner; salmon for me, steak for him. He is lovingly, if inexpertly, encasing my salmon in foil. He gets some butter on a knife and butters the fish. After the fish has received its unguent coating, there is some fishy butter left over. He reaches to scrape it back into the butter dish. The salad-preparing Abbott girls – as tensed for paternal clangers as the Rudd progeny are for the electronic clack of an iPhone selfie – stare at what he’s doing, eyes widened in discreet horror. ‘Dad!’
This is a campaign of dad moments. Kevin Rudd’s targeted use of the Aussie vernacular implies a rigorous, retrospective immersion course of Kingswood Country back episodes. His latter-day attachment to the building blocks of social media – the selfie, the Tweet – evoke the same feelings of complex affection and horror as are experienced by adults whose parents sign up for Facebook for the first time. Anyone who has been ‘poked’ on Facebook by their mother-in-law will immediately know what I mean.
And every day there’s a new dad moment from the Abbott camp: Tony at a press conference heartily congratulating his candidate for Lindsay on her sex appeal, Tony hollering his encouragement to his daughter ‘Go Bridgey babe!’ during a staged netball game, Tony winking as a pensioner tells him she is working on an adult sex line to make ends meet. This is mild to borderline stuff; conduct that might win you a chilly audience before some kind of formal mediator if attempted in the workplace, and a spell on the back verandah if ventured at a family barbie. But they don’t do him too much harm.
It’s funny what people notice out of a show like Kitchen Cabinet. Sometimes I’ll get a torrent of outraged correspondence about something I genuinely haven’t noticed at the time. When the Abbott episode goes to air, for instance, the hottest topics turn out to be the fact that his kitchen fridge only has a two-star energy rating (this had escaped me entirely) and the fact that he prepared fish for me, and steak for himself. ‘Fish for the lady, and steak for the man! What is this, 1956?’ tweeted one horrified viewer. I did point out, several times, that he cooked fish for me as a courtesy, because I don’t eat things with legs.
But the fact that the prime-minister-to-be was not, shall we say, at his competent best in the kitchen was not particularly widely remarked upon. The fish-buttering, which to me was extremely memorable, did not provoke significant comment.
Modern political image control is ceaselessly, twitchily alive to the risk of appearing incompetent in public. Media advisers take a hyper-conservative approach with their candidates: don’t use chopsticks before the cameras, in case it turns out you’re not as good with them as you thought. For God’s sake, don’t dance. Don’t try a sport you’re not familiar with. Don’t arm-wrestle anyone. Don’t chop wood.
But for men, there is a definite exemption for incompetence in the kitchen. The prime minister’s fish-buttering – like Joe Hockey’s appearance on our programme, in which the now-treasurer served an entrée of Dippity-Bix, could not find the drawer with the knives, and visibly blanched in fear when handed an iceberg lettuce – did him no harm at all.
These instances are clearly distinguishable from the national round of horror and garment-rending that ensued when Julia Gillard was, in 2005, photographed in her kitchen next to an empty fruit-bowl.
Gillard’s empty fruit-bowl was not a sign of hypocrisy, nor had she been caught out. She has spent years in politics cheerfully acknowledging her complete uselessness in the face of anything culinarily north of a buttered Salada. I remember her telling me – in her customary self-deprecating drawl – about an incident in 2002 in which her electorate staff, rather evilly, had auctioned off a ‘Dinner for Six at Julia Gillard’s House’ for a fundraiser. Gillard wheedled a friend into coming round to cook for the event, and had just cleared a large volume of papers from her dining table in advance of the guests’ arrival when Labor leader Simon Crean – then her close ally – rang for a chat. Cradling the phone twixt ear and shoulder, she groped around under the sink for something to clean the table with, and had squirted a generous amount of what she thought was furniture polish all over the wooden table before – in full declamatory flight on some question of political strategy or other – she looked down and realised she’d just coated the table with oven cleaner.
Male incompetence in the kitchen is almost a recommendation, from which it can be calmly inferred that the chap in question has better things to do: run the country, understand what the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment is, and so forth.
Female incompetence in the kitchen, however, carries with it a certain implicit suggestion of aridity, of a humanity strangled in some way that is not right, as Julia Gillard discovered. She is the only politician we’ve asked to appear on Kitchen Cabinet who consistently refused. She can’t cook, and was not keen to pretend she could, or be filmed being rubbish at it. She realised, I imagine, that she would not be extended the indulgence of a dad moment.
Dad moments are rather a fascinating phenomenon. They celebrate instances of lovable male incompetence. Being unable to boil an egg, or get through a standard press conference without mildly sexually harassing a colleague, becomes a forehead-slapping occasion for a certain brand of fond ruefulness: oh, you devil, you. Dad moments are moments in which it’s okay to be howlingly bad at something – in fact, it’s more than okay. It’s a good thing.
Dad moments are a powerful national force. Channel Seven’s breakfast host David Koch, whose smart-but-daggy presentation style is supplemented by a constant Twitter-stream of dad jokes, is one of the nation’s favourite broadcasters.
The ‘Mere Male’ column in New Idea has been published every week since its debut on 15 March 1950. It serves as a sort of national Dad Moment Hansard, and the tone and content – I gauge from the weirdly addictive compendium of Mere Male’s first thirty years that I acquired from eBay at an extremely competitive price recently – have changed very little over the decades.
‘I was sick in bed but feeling rather hungry,’ reports Ginny, from Auckland. ‘MM was rattling round in the kitchen and told me there was no need to get up and get the tea. He did – his own!’1
A correspondent from Shepparton offers this: ‘As I ate lunch at my boyfriend’s house, his mother remarked that he had made the salad. As soon as she began to eat it, she shrieked, “Are you sure you washed the lettuce properly?” “Yes!” MM replied. “I even used soap!”’
Ay-Mee, of Glen Waverley, chimes in: ‘A very excited MM greeted me on my return from shopping. “They delivered your new automatic washer and I have done the washing for you, love,” he told me. “The cycle is finishing now.” So it was. There was just one snag – the dear man had forgotten to put the clothes in!’
Dad moments tend to involve near-criminal degrees of incompetence in an area largely independent from his professional life: household matters or, at a pinch, inter-personal relations. ‘Dad! You forgot to fix the brake pads on the bus and now all those school children are horribly maimed! You crazy knucklehead!’ is not a dad moment. But ‘Dad! You can’t iron a shirt while it’s ON YOU!’ most certainly is.
I’ve always been fascinated by women’s eagerness to write in to New Idea with these stories. How is having a husband who is thoughtless, or a domestic dunderplunken, anything to write home about? Mere Male is – as the publishers note in the foreword to my 1981 compendium addition – ‘almost an institution within the structure of our society. While he has been around since the colonials decided to call themselves Aussies, his exploits have been reported faithfully by wives, mothers, friends and lovers every week for thirty-one years in New Idea. And despite this, he endures still.’
Mere Male has pottered along happily for more than sixty years now, soaping up lettuce leaves and popping electric kettles on hotplates, largely unmolested by the vast social changes that have occurred around him in that time. Feminism has not starved him of habitat, nor has political correctness done much to reconstruct him. His quaint antiquity itself is compelling.
In fact, the continuing existence of Mere Male is a valuable piece of anthropological evidence. The fact that a man trying and failing to do housework is still funny demonstrates how deeply we still believe that domestic work is a female sphere of competence. And there is nothing funnier, in the annals of comedic formula, as the ‘Fish out of water’ story.
Just ask Hollywood. It’s funny when a kid inhabits an adult’s body (Big, Freaky Friday, etc.). It’s funny when a tough Aussie jackaroo ends up in slick New York (Crocodile Dundee). It’s funny when an African chieftain is obliged to adapt to American life (Coming to America).
And above all, it’s funny when a man is left to look after children. It’s funny, because it’s still kind of unusual.
There are two distinct types of full-time screen dads: Widower Dad, and The Bumbler. Hollywood is historically cautious when it depicts a man looking after his own children. Usually, there has to be a good reason for the mom not being around, and often the writers just take the cleanest route – killing her before the movie even starts. This approach has several advantages. Obviously, it saves on actors’ wages. And it means viewers don’t feel awkward the way they might if the mom was just at work or something. Plus, it leaves the dad uncomplicatedly free to date Cameron Diaz.
Dads whose wives have been killed are definitely the pick of the Hollywood fathers. They are wise (Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird), sensitive (Liam Neeson in Love Actually) and usually handsome (both of the above, plus Jude Law in The Holiday). This Widower Super-Dad meme also extends to animals, including fish: Nemo’s dad, for instance, who trails his son all over the ocean, was widowed in dramatic circumstances when his wife was attacked fatally by a barracuda.
The death-rate among screen mothers who get hitched to warm, sensitive, handsome fathers and then conveniently expire is actually getting to a point where screen-marrying Jude Law should carry some sort of government health warning.
But Hollywood offers another, much dicier variety of Hands-On Dad. He’s the Bumbler. The Bumbler’s primary carer status is much less likely to come about due to spousal death; usually, it’s conferred by some kind of Act-of-Godstyle external event.
Redundancy or recession is a popular one (Mr. Mom, Daddy Day Care), but occasionally it gets more exotic, like in Three Men and a Baby, where the chaps just find an infant on the doorstep (a development which seems to arouse negligible interest among responsible authorities). Or Gru, the unlikely dad in the animated hit Despicable Me, who borrows three girls from an orphanage (another maternal mortality event, alas) in order to exploit them for his nefarious schemes, but ends up bungling his way into adoring them. These dads are seriously clueless, and their ineptitude is the central source of laughs. The children may as well be puppets in these films.
Humour really is an incredibly useful diagnostic social tool. It’s okay to laugh at a man being bad at bringing up kids or cooking, because it’s not really an insult; we don’t expect him to be good at either of those things.
All this explains why Mere Male is funny. But how does it explain why women are so prepared to expose the incompetence of their partners or sons, when in so doing they identify themselves firmly as the type of boob who would rather pick up after her husband all her life than teach him how to use a washing machine?
Perhaps it’s because the existence of a spouse who is helpless in a particular field serves gently to enhance the status of the more expert spouse. Thus, a woman whose husband cannot boil an egg is – one subtly intuits – a woman who runs such a tight ship that boiled eggs are available to that husband around the clock, within minutes, without him needing to lift a finger. Just as it once was a male status symbol to have a wife who ‘didn’t need to work’, it remains to some degree a female status symbol to have a husband who is charmingly unable to shop, or cook, or iron. The incompetence of her husband is actually a demonstration of her own super-competence.
Rebecca Meisenbach, in her 2009 paper ‘The Female Breadwinner’, ventured the theory that women who earn more than their husbands may exaggerate their husbands’ incompetence in the home in order to retain a strong feminine identity despite their ‘unorthodox’ domestic arrangements.2 A majority of the female breadwinners Meisenbach interviewed reported that they retained con
trol over the housework. They either did it themselves or they directed their husbands to do the jobs that needed to be done. But even when they got the husbands to do the chores, they reserved the right to complain that he wasn’t very good at it. Or to make generalised comments about how men just aren’t as tidy, or don’t notice when things need doing. ‘By highlighting stories of how the men have to be told or asked to do specific chores in the home, these female breadwinners still fit gender boundaries of a wife as someone who manages the home and children,’ Meisenbach wrote.
This certainly gels with the phenomenon from the last chapter, in which women pick up more housework again as they earn a greater proportion of the household’s income. It seems crazy. Why would you deliberately hold on to chores?
And then I realised that I do exactly the same thing. As I’m writing this, I’m also using another part of my brain to plan the next forty-eight hours, during which period I will be interstate at a conference. I will be away for two nights. I’ve planned what will be for dinner for those nights. I’ve cooked enough fried rice for everyone, and left the makings of another meal ready in the fridge. I have also procured some easy lunchbox items so school lunch will be easier for Jeremy to put together.
This is not because Jeremy cannot cook. He is a good cook. Nor does he, as far as I am aware, have any special impairment in the ‘lunch box assembly’ part of the brain. So why do I think it’s necessary to carry on like he needs special help with these basic tasks? If someone trailed around me at work, pre-writing articles for me, I’d probably feel like punching them within about twenty minutes. Certainly, I’d find it patronising.
But that’s how this works: it’s okay to assume men are incompetent at domestic tasks, even if it would be quite offensive for the diametrically opposite assumption – that women are incompetent at work – to be vocalised in public.
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