The essence of how culture uses men depends on a basic social insecurity. This insecurity is in fact social, existential, and biological. Built into the male role is the danger of not being good enough to be accepted and respected and even the danger of not being able to do well enough to create offspring.
The basic social insecurity of manhood is stressful for the men, and it is hardly surprising that so many men crack up or do evil or heroic things or die younger than women. But that insecurity is useful and productive for the culture, the system.12
Baumeister highlights research from biologist Jason Wilder, who, through sampling the genetics of various populations alive today, found that humanity's ancestors are roughly 67 percent women and 33 percent men, indicating some men were able to have children with multiple women, but most men didn't have any children at all.13 An example of this unequal distribution is recent genetic evidence that the descendants of the thirteenth-century Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan, whose sons had large harems, may account for 8 percent of the men living in the former Mongol empire today.14
Historically, perpetuating a man's genetic line motivated much of his risk taking. On the flip side of that motivation is male laziness that occurs when an abundance of sexual opportunities present themselves. In general, as long as males have easy sexual access to attractive women, they feel no need to exert more energy, time, or money to get female attention. This is particularly evident on college campuses where there are 1.33 females for every male. The imbalance also exists later in life in nursing homes where women vastly outnumber men, often more than two to one.15 With fewer men presenting themselves as viable partners, the sense that there is a “man shortage” further perpetuates itself.
The Guttentag-Secord theory was first presented by Marcia Gut-tentag and Paul F. Secord in their 1983 book, Too Many Women?: The Sex Ratio Question. They suggested that members of the sex in smaller supply are less reliant on their partners because many potential relationships are available to them, thus they have more “dyadic power”—the upper hand—over members of the surplus sex. When confronted with an abundance of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship. In societies with too many women, or too few “marriageable” men, fewer people marry, and the ones who do will do so later in life. Since men take advantage of a variety of available partners, women's work and traditional roles are devalued, and because these women can't rely on their partners to stick around, more of them turn to furthering their education or career to support themselves.16
On college campuses, the number of romantic relationships has decreased and casual sex has increased. A couple of female college students we spoke with shared their concerns:
Both men and women are extremely busy these days and technology has made it easy to access a large pool of people to find an arrangement that works for them. For example, a friend of mine in [New York] works for a top tier investment bank and is extremely successful. She wants company at times but is also extremely busy. So she “hangs out” with a guy she likes on three days a week. This phenomenon is vastly prevalent amongst men and women in their 20s and 30s. Personally I think a lot of women grow out of this (probably a lot to do with eventually wanting to start a family) but a lot of men have realized it is easy to have non-committal relationships without having to explain yourself too much. We live in a world where we exchange bodily fluids before last names. You can be sleeping with someone but be seen as coming on too strong if you ask them if they are sleeping with other people. Modern cities like London, New York, San Francisco, etc. all offer men and women the option of having Peter Pan lifestyles—heterosexual men, especially, have one advantage—they can always go younger. None of this is meant to be a rant, it really is just the way it is.
I think one of the biggest challenges will be the effect this will have on family dynamics. Today's well-educated, empowered, successful women don't want lame, slacker husbands, and most men don't want to feel inferior to their wives. Will this push us into becoming more of an individual, rather than a family-based, society?
“Men are as good as their women require them to be,” said one twenty-seven-year-old man we interviewed. This statement made us wonder about how easy access to sex affects men's motivation to achieve other life goals. Could there be a spillover from easy sexual access to assuming other goals can also be achieved with only minimal effort and planning? It could be argued that our goals are fuelled by evolution and that the majority of our efforts are just part of one big elaborate mating ritual. But in the past, the prize—a sexual partner (and propagating one's genetics)—would have been the reward for hard work, or at least some wise planning. Today the reward is essentially free and available before any hard work has been done, so what's left? It's like downing dessert before dinner.
A young woman who Leonard Sax interviewed for his book, Girls on the Edge, said that these days all young men want is “wham, bam, thank-you ma'am,” that they don't have a clue as to how to satisfy a woman or care about establishing an emotional connection to build a relationship. Sax pointed out that because boys and girls are becoming sexually active at an earlier age than in their parents' generation, males are more egocentric and less mature, and that there's been a cultural shift from dating toward “hooking up,” with young men feeling less of an obligation to care about the young women. The growing influence of porn was evident in the young men's comments. Many eagerly described the sites they visited, and told Sax that if they were given the choice between masturbating to online porn or going on a date with a real girl, they would choose the porn.17 One young man from our own student survey said that many of his male friends were disappointed when they had sexual encounters with real girls because they were not as good looking as the porn stars.
Interestingly, a recent study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy suggested that both men and women who had watched porn scored higher on three commonly used narcissism inventories, and that even greater levels of narcissism were correlated with more hours spent watching porn.18 Narcissism is the enemy of compassion, by not wanting to be a part of the social community around you, and by feeling no obligation to make life better for anyone other than Me.
THIRTEEN
The Rise of Women?
Since the 1960s women's earnings have grown by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. A 2010 study of single, childless, urban workers between the ages of twenty-two and thirty found that women actually earned 8 percent more than men. The proportion of married women with children and with an income that is higher than their husband's has increased from 4 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2011. Childless women who have never been married make 117 percent what their childless male peers do. Women are also getting more higher education than their male counterparts, and this upward trend will continue.1
American women benefited considerably from democratic laws that expanded their rights—such as Federal Drug Administration legislation approving the use and distribution of birth control pills in the early 1960s. They also were beneficiaries of Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments to the Civil Rights Act sanctioning equality for the sexes in education, causing educational institutions to support women in sports; the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling allowing women the right to a safe and legal abortion; and the 1993 Family Medical Leave Act allowing women to take employment leave after giving birth or for other family emergencies.2
In addition, NASA began accepting aspiring female astronauts in 1976 with Sally Ride becoming the first American woman in space in 1983;3 the United Nations (UN) launched the End Violence Against Women campaign in 2008;4 raising worldwide public and political awareness of violence prevention and policy; the 2012 Games in London were the first Olympics where women competed in every sport;5 and consciousness-raising of women's issues has been on the rise all around the globe.
Your authors celebrate the rise in status, power and wide-ranging abilities of girls and women. Slowly but surely the glass ceil
ing is disappearing, enabling talented women to move up to top leadership positions in industry. There are virtually no professions today that are off-limits to women who are willing to work to make it in them. We also believe that the guardians of that corporate glass ceiling are older men from earlier generations who are still living in the old boys' club” system. When they retire, we believe more capable women will rise up to the tops of their industries.
Still, the “leadership gap” persists. As of 2014, women held only 18 to 20 percent of seats in the US Congress, the Senate and the House.6 That puts the US 90th out of 197 nations ranked in terms of female representatives in Parliament,7 behind Sudan, where sharia law is in effect, and China, where the term sheng nu—“leftover women”—is used to urge professional women to get married. Women also make up just one out of five directors of companies in the S&P 500.8
Despite earning more than men in their twenties, women still lag in perpetual earnings. There has been a lingering statistic that claims women earn 77 cents per dollar that a man earns. This statistic—circulated as recently as 2014 by the White House9—is deceptive because it is not talking about a man and a woman doing the same work. The 77 cents statistic doesn't account for actual number of hours worked, years of job experience, or type of career; it just takes the median salaries made by full-time female and full-time male workers. In reality, twice as many men than women work very long hours.10 Men also don't take off as much time after the birth of a child, and there is a greater concentration of men in higher paying careers, such as engineering. Essentially, if employers could really get away with having women do the same work for 77 percent of what they would pay a man, they would do so.11 We must look at the other variables at play.
Do We Need a Democracy of Gender?
As mentioned earlier, childless women make more than their childless male counterparts. What would help enable more women to remain in the workforce and earn as much if not more than men? Paid maternity and paternity leave, affordable childcare, allowing the flexibility of some work to be done from home, and compatible children's school schedules.12
In her book The World Split Open, University of California professor emerita Ruth Rosen wrote that women are “both like and unlike men,” and a society that doesn't honor women's ability to bear and raise children is “clearly violating their rights to fully participate in society.” Rosen argued that a society that compels women to live as men do is not a true democracy. A true “gender democracy,” she said, must honor the life of the family as much as it honors the life of work.13
Honoring the commitment to family makes sense, but the philosophy should be applicable to both mothers and fathers. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, more men said working full-time was the ideal situation for them, but about the same number of men and women said they would prefer to be at home raising their children rather than working. Fifty-six percent of mothers and 50 percent of fathers surveyed found it difficult to balance the responsibilities of their job and their family, and while 23 percent of mothers said they spent “too little” time with their children, 46 percent—or double that amount—of fathers wished they could spend more time with their children. This disparity helps explain why, overall, more women than men believe they are doing an excellent or very good job as a parent.14
Despite having higher confidence in their parenting abilities, women still experience internal tension with how they prioritize their career and family. In the Atlantic's most-read article of all time,15 “Why Women Still Can't Have It All,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, an academic who was a former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, agreed that the notion of work-life balance needed to change. She wrote about how she found it very difficult to perform at the level she wanted as a high government official and be the kind of parent she wanted to be, even though her husband was willing to take on the bulk of parenting responsibilities for the time she was in Washington. She said that she believed women (and men) could have it all, and have it all at the same time, but not with the way that Western society and economy are presently structured. She said it was time for women in high-powered and leadership positions to recognize that “having it all” is hardly a function of personal ambition and discipline, and that many working women are just struggling to make ends meet or support partners who are unable to find work. Additionally, the cost of good day care can break the bank and children's school schedules and activities often conflict with work demands. To create a society that actually works for women, Slaughter suggests closing the “leadership gap” by electing a female president and fifty female senators, so that women may exert power evenly and be equally represented in judicial and executive positions.16
We agree that it would be a very good thing to have a greater number of women in political and leadership positions, and companies would attain and retain more talented female employees if they adopted “family-friendly” policies. But again, we believe the work-life balance will improve for everyone only when both mothers' and fathers' rights are supported. The US is the only OECD country that lacks a national paid parental leave policy.17 To create genuine fairness and partnership between the sexes we must move beyond the current female-centric conversations that so often alienate men toward more human-centric conversations that strive to include everyone. The things that women are really looking to have happen are more likely to happen if men's roles in the family are supported, as doing so will alleviate some of the work-life crunch many women feel while allowing men to be more involved in their families and communities.
In addition, more and more women are finding that, although it may not necessarily be what they want, they don't have to have a man in their life to achieve many of their personal, social, and romantic goals. This is a liberating feeling for many women, as it should be. Something to be mindful of, however, is that as feminine confidence grows, it could proportionally and inversely affect the harmony between men and women; the more women separate their long-term goals from men the more the social chasm could widen between the sexes. In order to minimize that chasm it is crucial to allow men and men's issues to be welcomed and addressed in discussions on equality.
Overlapping Challenges
The negative trends in male behavior that we noted in Part I are hardly one-sided. The number of women who are overweight is also quite high—obesity rates are about the same as men's in many developed countries, and often higher in less developed nations.18 Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell noted in The Narcissism Epidemic that narcissistic personality traits rose rapidly among college students from the 1980s to today, “with the shift especially pronounced for women.” While young men still score higher on narcissism, young women are quickly catching up.19 Just think about all the “princess” propaganda pushed on girls—and strangely, embraced by parents who think it's “cute.” They are not thinking about how movies like Frozen or Cinderella condition their daughters to feel entitled romantically and financially later in life.
When it comes to media, although young men spend more time on the Internet and playing video games than young women, young and middle-age women watch roughly eleven hours more television per month than men.20 This aligns with the research on women's overall unhappiness levels and the data that unhappy people watch more TV.
Just as the media show few alternatives to the slovenly male, it also presents few alternatives to the boy-crazy female with nothing better to do than seduce the male protagonist. The Bechdel Test is an informal rating system that classifies films with three simple criteria: to pass the test a movie must “have at least two [named] women in it, who talk to each other, about something besides a man.”21 Very few video games pass all the criteria of the Bechdel Test,22 and just over half of movies do.23 The test is imperfect, as a film could pass the test but still include sexist content; nevertheless some cinemas and organizations—such as the Swedish Film Institute—are taking the rating seriously, and using it to highlight gender bias against women.24
Gi
rls are more obsessed with social networks and their mobile phones than boys are. For example, one woman in her early twenties told us how her younger sister in high school spends hours doing her hair and makeup just to post a “selfie” on her Facebook page so her friends would think she was going somewhere. In reality, right after taking the photo she would remove the makeup and go to sleep. The average fourteen- to seventeen-year-old girl sends 100 or more text messages a day—more than twice the amount that boys send and receive.25
Despite all this “socializing,” women often have difficulty expressing their true feelings about each other and situations to one another. Whereas some men prefer socially intense situations, women prefer social pleasantries, avoiding any and all confrontation. Older generations of women, unfortunately, have passed down the habit of not saying anything—directly—when they don't have anything “nice” to say.
Recently, I (Nikita) listened to an all-too-common scene from one of my friends, who was trying to navigate a tricky text conversation with her “bestie.” There was clearly something off between them because her friend had planned a baby shower without her and hadn't been returning all her texts. She asked her friend if she was mad at her. The friend denied it, saying “let's get coffee later.” My friend turned to her husband, who was sitting right next to her, and asked him how he would respond. “I'd tell him to quit being an asshole, then we'd have a drink and move on.” Where men will tell each other exactly what's on their minds even if it's an insult, women so often say nothing and distance themselves from the other person in the hopes that the issue will resolve itself or fade to the point where it's no longer a problem. The result, in general, is that women have difficulty negotiating solutions together for personal matters.
Man, Interrupted Page 17