Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  The stereotype that men are deficient in nurturing and empathising skills has been reinforced by some of those writers who rely on biological explanations for sex differences. In the view of some writers, the autistic man – a man who has a brain development disorder which impairs social interaction and communication – is only an exaggerated example of a pattern characteristic of many men. ‘Extreme men, to be sure,’ says Susan Pinker, commenting on men with autism, ‘their profiles still illustrate a pattern that has been documented in average males.’41 This view of masculinity encourages us to forgive men their poor showing in family life and domestic work; it’s not just that they prefer the rewards of paid work, but that they are handicapped in the everyday skills required to create a satisfactory domestic environment.

  We see examples of this stereotypical man, whose bumbling lack of social skills is in extreme contrast to the poise and capability of his girlfriend, everywhere in our culture, from the grunting men seen as typical of their sex in self-help books, to the perpetual adolescents we meet in popular films from Knocked Up to The Break Up. And the rise of this stereotype encourages a fatalistic attitude towards men’s underachievement at home. For instance, as one writer in the Daily Mail put it, while reviewing Louann Brizendine’s book on the female brain: ‘We blokes, struggling to live up to the template of “new men” who can be caring and empathetic, are apparently being forced to behave in a way for which we are simply not designed.’42 Such commentary may not always be entirely serious, but even so it often encourages a lazy acquiescence in the status quo. It is reinforced by the use of bad science by the media, as we saw in the last chapter. For instance, the BBC series Secrets of the Sexes highlighted an ‘experiment’ that showed that men responded less well to babies’ needs. They sent five women into a room with five babies, and asked them to change the babies’ nappies, and then five men to do the same task. The voiceover concluded that because the women were more likely to pick the baby up: ‘Men find emotional connection difficult.’ When one man did pick up the baby, we were told that this was not a natural response: ‘Lloyd is aware that he is not naturally empathic, so he has made more of an effort.’43 There was no exploration of, for instance, what kind of experience any of the men and women had had with babies or whether they behaved the same way if they believed they were not being watched.

  But other research has suggested that men can respond very much as women do to babies, especially if they are given the chance to spend time with children. As Adrienne Burgess has recorded in her study of men as parents, Fatherhood Reclaimed, when tapes of babies crying were played to boys and girls and their reactions were recorded, ‘Their social responses – whether they smiled or frowned – were different, with the girls on the whole showing greater concern. But when their concealed responses – their heart-rates, blood pressure and so on – were measured, there were no differences. Both sexes were reacting with the same degree of disquiet.’ Similarly, if new fathers are left alone with their babies, they are just as deft, just as responsive, and just as able, if blindfolded, to recognise their babies by the shape of their hands.44

  The fact that the biological ability to bear children has been given only to one sex does not necessarily mean a biological gift for caring has been similarly unequally distributed. The narrative of biological determinism is often intensely idealistic about women’s natural bond with their children. But let’s be honest: although they are biologically fit for bearing children, not all women slip entirely easily into caring for them. Women learn to care, and for some of them that entails a real struggle. Although women often keep this struggle to themselves, sometimes their frustrations, and their desire to have their male partner alongside them in the struggle rather than pushed out to work, can be clearly heard. On one thread in 2008 on the parenting website Mumsnet, women remembered their feelings when their partners went back to work. ‘I very clearly remember that in the early days, when he left the house I had an incredible urge to open the door and run up the street screaming “PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME WITH THE BABY!”’; ‘I also had that horrible dread when he was leaving for work that “I just can’t do it, don’t go”’; ‘I used to be so jealous of my husband swanning off to work with not a care in the world whilst I was stuck at home with a colicky, refluxy baby who wouldn’t stop screaming’; ‘I even used to watch neighbours pootling off in their cars and feel envious of them going about their day to day business’; ‘I used to find that by 5pm I was at breaking point. I remember one night calling him on his bus journey home (15 min journey) several times, demanding “where is the bus now”. And even meeting the bus so that I could hand my daughter over!’45

  In the past feminists have often explored these struggles and frustrations – not in order to downgrade the work of caring, but in order to show that what looks natural may in fact be the product of a great effort. For instance, Naomi Wolf in Misconceptions laid bare the ways in which women may feel often unsuited to mothering, even when they are determined to be good mothers. There is a telling scene in this book, where a friend of hers remembers how she was playing with her baby son, sorting cubes, for ‘what seemed to me to be a really long period of time. Ed came in, saw this scene and said, “Oh, you’re just entranced.” And I said, “Are you out of your mind? I’m bored silly.” And he was stunned – he had no idea.’46

  I see this ‘Ed’ over and over again in men who look at women behaving in a certain way and assume that the behaviour is utterly natural, without bothering to imagine the other desires or frustrations that may lie beneath that behaviour. Once I talked to a senior editor at a national newspaper about why there are so few women in senior editorial roles, and so many very young women in junior roles at newspapers. This successful, hugely confident, well-paid man, who also happened to be a divorced father who rarely saw his children, told me that most women simply didn’t want to continue their careers in their thirties because what they really wanted was to stay home with their children. ‘That’s what they want!’ he laughed. ‘You see them come in, all fresh and keen, and then ten years later they are telling you they’re off to look after their kids. But that’s what they want – you can’t stop it. It’s nature.’ I have talked to dozens of women over the years who have done exactly that – started a career with great verve and commitment, and then moved away from it once they have started a family – and what I have heard, alongside the pleasures of their changing lives, is also a great deal of frustration and anger, about the impossibility of setting up part-time work in the field they loved or the difficulties they had in getting their husbands to take on a fair share of the childcare. The new fashion for biological determinism encourages us to see as natural a division of labour between men and women that could otherwise be challenged.

  To be honest about how mothering does not necessarily come naturally to all women is not to downgrade the bonds of family life and the happiness they bring. Home is the centre of a life well lived. Yet the insistence that this haven must be created and protected by women because of our unique aptitudes rests on a shaky assumption. A mother does have a special physical relationship to a baby during pregnancy and birth, but it’s fatally easy to overstate the ongoing difference this will necessarily make to her parenting. For some women, the very exhaustion of pregnancy and childbirth makes the early days of parenting harder for them than for their partners. For some women, hormonal imbalances or the pressures of childcare cause depressions that take months to lift. For many men, the entry of children into family life is just as real a joy as it is for many women.

  The fact that women are still, by and large, the keepers of the hearth, is not just about nature, but also about nurture. Girls are still training themselves in the work done at home from an early age, with their dolls and dolls’ houses, their little pushchairs and their toy cookers. Women still find that they will be judged harshly if they do not create a good home for their families. Despite the movement of many men into the home, there has recently arisen a ten
dency to emphasise the femininity of domestic work. I wouldn’t judge any woman for wanting to spend time at home, cooking or doing housework or looking after her children. I know myself that the times I have spent purely in family life have been among the happiest hours of my life. But I have always assumed this would be true of my partner, too, and I have been surprised by the way that we have recently seen a resurgence in much of the media and in certain social circles of an almost 1950s image of a perfect stay-at-home mother who wants to create her domestic haven single-handedly. With her Cath Kidston aprons and home-made Christmas decorations, her cupcakes and her languorous Sunday lunches, this idealised mother is recreating the look of a world in which women had no choice but to embrace domesticity. Some young women who have fallen for this image wholeheartedly say that they feel this old-fashioned domestic ideal amounts to a new movement among younger women. Jazz D Holly, a woman in her twenties who has joined the Women’s Institute and spends time baking cupcakes, told the Guardian, ‘For my generation, girls in their 20s, all my friends, it’s a cultural shift, almost a movement: many people are fascinated by retro ideas.’47

  This investment in an almost kitsch domesticity runs alongside a new glorification of the image of the perfect wife, who enables the powerful man next to her to consolidate his status through her physical beauty or her domestic perfection, or, ideally, both. This glorified wife crosses all social groups, from the WAG whose glossy sexiness is as necessary for a successful sportsman as the latest model of a fast car, to the charming, smiling politician’s wife who enhances her husband’s power without trespassing in his realm. While the 1990s saw ‘first wives’ such as Hillary Clinton and Cherie Booth, who never made any secret of their desires to carry on their high-powered careers next to their husbands, the twenty-first century swoons over the reassuring first wives Sarah Brown and Michelle Obama, who have decided to give up paid work. They call themselves ‘mom-in-chief’ and receive admiration not for their incisive intelligence and active careers, but for their toned arms and great clothes. They have learned to smile sweetly when their husbands call them ‘good-looking’ or ‘spectacular’. Perhaps they once felt anger at having to fill the role of the angel in the house. Indeed, we know from Barack Obama’s memoirs that Michelle Obama was, at one point, furious. By the time their second child was born, he wrote, ‘my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. “You only think about yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.”’48 But her anger disappeared, her career was put on hold, and the powerful man was enabled to carry on in his pursuit of power by the shining presence of his acquiescent wife.

  I wouldn’t judge any woman for deciding to spend time with her family. But the reception given to those wives in the media is highly revealing of our current expectations of women. The culture of domestic goddesses and yummy mummies is often presented as ironic and playful, not least by its leaders – the cooking guru Nigella Lawson often refers to her sense of irony. But, nevertheless, the recreation of this ideal of a devoted woman who, in Nigella’s own words, doesn’t ‘want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake,’49 has created an image that can put greater stress on those women who try to live up to it. ‘I never thought,’ one mother said wryly to me at our regular school bake sale, ‘that I’d see so many professional women competing over baking fairy cakes. Is this the new feminism?’ I looked down at my own handiwork, the cupcakes decorated with icing hearts, and saw what she meant. It is as though we are fetishising the accessories of old-fashioned motherhood to prove that at heart we are all still perfect mothers, whatever we get up to in the world beyond the home.

  The narrative of biological determinism fits this new wife culture very well, and by suggesting to us that nurturing and domestic work comes more naturally to women than to men, it obscures the fact that nurturing behaviour is learned and reinforced for women in our culture, and that in fact men can and do learn this too when the situation is right. When men do take on the care of their children, they often find, just as women do, that their priorities and their abilities are changed. As one journalist, Rafael Behr, put it on returning from paternity leave: ‘When I first went back to work I felt agoraphobia for the first time. My reassuringly narrowed horizons were forced back open. The idea that you are expected, after a few hearty pats on the back, to get on with business as usual struck me as grotesque. I sat in meetings struggling to care. I now live in fear of missing some minuscule step my daughter might have taken down the road of infant development, a newly articulate gurgle or a very prolific poo. Fathering is addictive like that.’50 Fathering is addictive, just like mothering; people learn to care by caring.

  Far from feeling that they have done something unnatural, men tend to find increased happiness when they step up their contribution to domestic work. In Australia, two social policy researchers at the University of New South Wales found that fathers were more satisfied when they spent more time at home. ‘The more fathers reported that they do more than their fair share of looking after the children, the more satisfaction they reported with their work–family balance. There was no variation by age of the child. … This suggests that allowing men opportunity to spend more time with children, through easier access to (for example) part time work, could be a welcome policy change.’51 Another study found that men’s involvement in infant care positively correlated with their satisfaction with family life and adjustment to fatherhood; and that ‘when men do almost as much child care as their wives their psychological well-being soars’.52

  The genuine, positive happiness men can find in family work does mean that despite the backlash visible in some areas of our culture, men are taking steps into doing more domestic work. The amount of time spent by men with young children on childcare activities has increased eight-fold since the 1970s, and in one recent survey seven out of ten fathers said they would like to spend more time with their children.53 We can all see that change around us, from increasing numbers of men at the school gates to increasing numbers of men asking for flexible working patterns. Men often make these changes in the teeth of cultural and workplace opposition and a loss of status and pay; for instance, employers are more likely to turn down requests for flexible working from men than from women.54 One analysis by the Equal Opportunities Commission found that one in five working men wanted to change their working patterns in order to spend more time with their children, but felt prevented from doing so due to workplace obstacles.55

  Whatever changes have been made in men’s lives, this is still far from the revolution; men still do by far the majority of paid work and women by far the majority of unpaid work. A necessary first step for challenging this unequal situation would be to equalise rights to spend time with one’s children. At the moment, government policy locks fathers out of childcare by giving them the most unequal parental leave rights in Europe, with just two weeks’ paternity leave compared to a potential fifty-two weeks for women. So even if a mother and father go into parenthood with the same ideas about childcare and the same aptitudes for it, once the mother has spent months at home with her child, while the father has to work his usual long hours outside the home, it is almost inevitable that she will feel she is more keyed into her child’s needs, and is far more likely than the father to have discovered an identity beyond her working self. We need not mystify this shift in priorities by putting it down to the oxytocin surge or the way a woman’s brain is wired. The difference in the time a mother currently spends with her child and the expectations laid upon her by everyone around her are bound to reinforce and exaggerate the difference between her behaviour and her partner’s. The fact that parental leave rights in the UK have been made so unequal has disadvantaged women in the workplace as well as disadvantaging men in the home. This imbalance means that employers still assume that women will be less committed to work than men – and in our curre
nt situation they are often right to make this assumption. That creates a circle in which expectations of women’s lesser attachment to paid work is perpetuated. It means that employers can continue to rely on many male workers who can shuffle off their responsibilities at home and force themselves into the all-hours commitment upon which so many workplaces rely.

  Until we give men the same rights to care for their children that women have, we will never reach equality both at work and at home. Yet when such a reform is suggested in the UK, the language of biological determinism is immediately marshalled against it. ‘They are up against the realities of human nature,’ is how one typical commentator in the Daily Mail put it.56 Or, as another writer put it in the Sunday Times: ‘It flies in the face of human nature and it’s deeply unfair on men. What if men don’t want to spend their time changing nappies and nurturing their feminine side? Actually, there’s no “if” about it: they don’t … modern men just aren’t interested in the paternity leave which the government is preparing statutorily to impose on business. They are much happier working long hours, avoiding childcare as much as possible and generally being men.’57 It is tragic that a narrative about men’s biological inability to care has infected this debate, so that instead of looking clearly at the inequality of their situations once they become parents, we talk about men’s natural lack of empathy. This means that the urgency regarding the need for changes in government policy and employment practice has lessened. The new fashion for biological determinism does not encourage us to look at the current situation clearly and seek to change it. On the contrary, it wraps an aura of inevitability around current inequality, giving it the status of enduring archetype rather than a social situation that could be changed.