At any rate, women are selling themselves short if they allow raunch culture to shape their identities and sexual expressions. To truly empower women, women themselves must begin identifying their new ways to assert their relevance—ones that are not contingent on uncontrollable factors nor involve contempt for men but, rather, ways that include their own creative approaches that can benefit everyone. Men and women are different, and within both sexes there are further differences. There is no need for each sex's definitions of success either to be the same or look the same. We agree with Levy when she said, “If we really believed that we were sexy and funny and competent and smart, we would not need to be like strippers or [be] like men or [be] like anyone other than our own specific, individual selves.”50
Teaching our Daughters to Succeed
The more women succeed monetarily, the more they will realize that men are not the sex with the power; rather they will understand that men are the sex most willing to accept the trade-offs. The truth is, no one can “have it all.” A mistaken belief of the feminist movement was the expectation that work would equate power and self-fulfillment.
There are not many privileges that come without responsibilities, and successful people learn to say “no thank you” if a responsibility doesn't help them secure an opportunity or offer them some advantage or valuable experience. They don't accept a situation and then complain about how oppressive it feels later. Women need to be mentored for success so they don't have to rely on the law and the government to advocate for them and in some cases supplement their incomes.
In addition to creating policies that value parenting as much as careers, the best thing society can do to allow more women to succeed in the workplace is to prepare them to overcome obstacles, such as being mentored in negotiation skills. The focus should be on creating safe and healthy work spaces for women (and men), instead of undermining women's strength by trying to ban the word “bossy,” as Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has done in her otherwise positive Lean In movement.51 We can encourage girls to lead by saying, “You know what? Bossy people get things done. Listen to others, do your homework so you know what you're talking about, and keep voicing your opinion. The climb to the top is never easy.”
We can also encourage girls to watch television shows and movies that pass the Bechdel Test and get them subscriptions to magazines that advise them on how to be leaders. In 2013, seventeen women's magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Allure, Lucky, and Teen Vogue all ranked higher than Forbes, the Economist, and Working Mother in magazine circulation. In fact, Cosmopolitan had more subscribers than Forbes, the Economist, and Working Mother combined.52 If the number of young women who read Cosmopolitan got a subscription to a magazine that covered finance and current events, we would no doubt see massive changes in young women's interests and a positive shift in their self-confidence.
If mothers and daughters read such publications together, it would open up conversations for moms to share their firsthand experience and knowledge that will help their daughters plan a future. There's no doubt a lot of future heartache could be avoided if there were more honest discussions between generations of women about how different decisions affect one's life as well as who compatible partners would be for those varying paths.
Mothers can also talk to their daughters about the different challenges and trade-offs that come with having children earlier or later (or at all) in their lives, such as education loans, fertility, and how parenthood affects opportunities. Daughters need these conversations. Can working mothers or overextended single mothers find the time for such conversations? We feel strongly that they must make the time for their offspring to benefit from their wisdom.
Although women outnumber men at colleges and are more likely to be involved in activities outside class, more than twice as many incoming freshman women (41 percent versus 18 percent of incoming freshman men) felt constantly “overwhelmed” by all they had to do. The overwhelmed students were also less likely than the not-at-all-overwhelmed students to believe in their abilities and have confidence in social situations.53
To combat this, another thing we can do is enroll more girls in team sports, which develop a unifying sense of social responsibility, and whose combination of competitiveness and teamwork creates a solid foundation for cooperating with others in business settings later on. They also help women learn that they can rely on each other when honest and open communication is lacking in other social situations. Mothers can supplement this by having the courage to show their daughters what honest communication between women can look like—by respecting others for telling the truth, by not gossiping or displaying an entirely different attitude about someone behind that person's back, and by remaining friends with someone who offered constructive criticism. They can also model being nonjudgmental of others, meaning describing others' behavior without critical evaluations added in.
Equally important is encouraging girls to ask out the boy they are attracted to, which helps them learn how to take risks and handle rejection as well as develop character, patience, and perseverance—all valuable business skills. From these experiences they also learn, indirectly, how to eventually choose a partner who appreciates a woman who takes risks. For women as well as men, we say, a life without risks is boring. A life with risks will include failures—and failures are vital learning experiences on the path to success.
FOURTEEN
Patriarchy Myths
Men must be needed because we can't be wanted. We believe we have to be the heroes only because we can't yet see other roles for ourselves.
—Noah Brand, editor for the Good Men Project1
There are numerous ways in which women experience a more acute sense of powerlessness than men. But whether you are willing to admit it or not, sexism goes both ways. Boys are conditioned differently than girls, and being a man is no casual walk in the park.
Right from the beginning, when only a few days old, many baby boys undergo circumcision. It is a process some have likened to genital mutilation, but the majority of boys in the US are still forced to endure it. As infants, baby boys take longer to be picked up after crying—giving them the implied message that complaining won't change anything. They are also sung to less, told stories less often and read to less often than girls.2 Those lesses are actually negative lessons about not being worth the time and effort from parents and guardians to provide those activities.
Later, in their preteen and teen years, boys learn to endure pain through rough team sports. Around the same time they become aware of what they are supposed to provide in a relationship, specifically financial expectations, so they begin taking on less enjoyable jobs because they pay more. Young men are still socialized to believe they must get a high-paying job to support a wife and kids, but young women do not get that same message (hence the statistics on who should pay for a date, etc). Boys also catch on to the stigma against stay-at-home fathers—a recent Pew Research survey revealed that 51 percent of people say children are better off if their mother stays at home while just 8 percent feel the same way about fathers.3 It is clear men's role as nurturers is overlooked, even by men themselves! Or at least a lot of men don't consider it an option yet.
Understanding why would take us down the “uncomfortable conversation” road of asking whether or not society would be willing to let men have more balanced lives with regard to work and family. In The Myth of Male Power Warren Farrell talks about the three options a mother considers when she has a baby:
Work full-time
Home full-time
Combination of the two: work part-time
Men, on the other hand, consider these three options:
Work full-time
Work full-time
Work full-time4
In general, he says, men learn to love their families by being away from the love of their families while women love their families by being with the love of their families. Women talk about whether or not to “lean in”
or “lean out” while men have never had the option to “lean out.” This gives men the financial advantage, but cuts them off from giving and receiving love. In Father and Child Reunion Farrell writes:
Women provided an emotional womb, akin to love; men provided a financial womb, that took them away from their purpose—loving and supporting the family, in order to achieve their purpose—loving and supporting the family. Men loved the family by being disconnected: women loved the family by being connected. Traditionally, women's role had the love advantage and the emotional advantage.5
Long-term studies reveal that women prefer more meaningful and connected jobs, which enhance their emotional advantages but “conflict[s] with making lots of money and rising through the ranks,” as psychologist Susan Pinker discusses in her book, The Sexual Paradox:
Intrinsic goals such as making a difference, or belonging to a community, are often in direct opposition to extrinsic goals like seeking financial rewards or status . . . women, on average, are motivated by intrinsic rewards at work . . . One of their [researchers of the 500 Family Study] findings was that the sway of intrinsic rewards and autonomy on the job rises with a woman's level of education . . . highly educated women were also more interested in working part-time, thus fueling the opt-out phenomenon in two ways—through their search for inherent meaning at work, and via the amount of time they were willing to commit to their jobs.6
Would more women be willing to share their love advantages or share financial pressures with their husbands? More top male executives in the US are married and have spouses who stay at home compared with top female executives—60 percent of the men's spouses don't work full-time outside the home, compared with only 10 percent of the women's spouses. The men have an average of 2.2 children; the women, 1.7.7 Some female executives have commented that “they need a wife,” yet are not keen on the possibility of their husband taking on the role of stay-at-home parent, chef, household manager, and chauffeur for the children.
In “Why Women Still Can't Have It All,” Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests men don't have to make the kind of sacrifices and compromises women make and the notion that women can have high-powered careers if men are willing to share the parenting load equally “assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children.” In her follow up book, Unfinished Business, she explains,
women also face much more cultural responsibility to be caregivers, and perfect ones at that, than men do. Even in the twenty-first century, America looks askance at any woman who doesn't appear to put her children's care above her professional life . . . the good news, however, is that the care problem is slowly but steadily becoming a men's problem too . . . Redefining the women's problem as a care problem thus broadens our lens and allows us to focus much more precisely on the real issue: the undervaluing of care, no matter who does it.8
What appears to be a man choosing work over family is more often a man sacrificing his wishes to be with his family for the benefit of his family. Where a woman may feel she is being selfish by spending time away from her children, a man may feel the opposite—since he is expected to earn more he feels it would be selfish for him to work less hours to spend more time with his kids because he would be taking away financial security from his family. And that is what allowing dads to be more integrated at home hinges on—men speaking up and women hearing the 46 percent of them that say they want to spend more time with their children9 and the 80 percent that would like to be at home full time with their newborn if they were not hurting their family economically and their wife approved.10
Many like to remark that men make more money than women, but they don't think about why—men work more hours and are willing to do so because they are rewarded with love when they pick up the tab and women are rewarded with love when they reduce their hours or drop out of the workforce after having children. Affordable childcare would allow more women to stay in the workforce if they choose to, ensuring less of a pay gap due to work experience. But there is evidence this might not even be enough, or the right solution. Even in Sweden, a country with some of the most generous parental leave benefits, women still choose to take four times as much time off from work as men, and some who initially thought they wanted the father to help raise their baby “now find themselves coveting more time at home.”11
Another concern is how the merging of more traditional feminine and masculine roles in women and men will affect gender identity and relationship success. The question remains whether or not women would still find their stay-at-home partner as attractive than if he were their stay-at-work partner. Thus far, it appears this kind of man, often referred to as a “beta male,” turns women off. For example, the risk of divorce is lowest when the husband earns 60 percent of the income and the wife does 60 percent of the housework, and women report higher levels of sexual satisfaction when there is a more traditional division of chores.12 In other words, equal opportunity does not necessarily produce equal results, and economic shifts and socially prescribed relationship changes toward “sameness” do not necessarily result in sexual attraction and relationship success, which cannot be forced.
Being a man and a stay-at-home partner is not seen as valuable and does not communicate alpha male behavior, which many women are attracted to. Indeed, even as women become more financially independent, they want an older, more attractive male partner.13 The stakes have been raised, not equalized, by the women's movement, at least for men. And men will carry whatever currency women are accepting—meaning they will adapt to whatever system rewards them.
Kids get these messages about reward and the value of a father's love in subtle ways. For example, in the Harry Potter book series, despite both James and Lily (Harry's parents) giving their life to save his, only his mother gets the credit. When Harry is an infant, the evil wizard Lord Voldemort descends on the family's hiding place because of a prophecy that Harry will grow up to destroy him. James yells at Lily to take Harry and flee, so he can hold Voldemort off. He dies protecting them, and then Lily dies protecting Harry, but because of her love, Voldemort's killing curse backfires and irreparably damages him, leaving Harry with the famous lightning-bolt-shaped scar on his forehead. The underlying message is a mother's love is more powerful than a father's, and a mother's death more profound. What is surprising is given the popularity of the series, few readers took issue with the fact that James and Lily's actions had the same consequence yet her sacrifice was worth more. It is just one of many instances of a male's purpose being seen as secondary to the mother-child connection.
The message a boy gets is that he must provide financially in order to remain relevant. At some point in middle or high school when a boy starts to think about his first date he most likely starts to curb his interests in creative pursuits because he knows art and literature majors will make less money than a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) major. He does this based on the possibility that he might have to support a family and because he most likely cannot expect a woman—especially one he were to have a family with—to support him. On some level boys know that a man with little earning potential is less likely to find a desirable wife and is more likely to get divorced;14 they know that a significant portion of their value and desirability is directly linked to their earnings potential.
Although women now comprise the majority of college graduates, men are still the majority of STEM majors. Women, on the other hand, dominate the social sciences.15 Based on the proportions and differences in earnings, at first glance it could look like discrimination, yet both sexes knew beforehand that going the STEM route would most likely lead to a higher income.
One reason why men and women differ in major choice is because they simply have different preferences. For example, men would rather work with inorganic materials while women prefer to work with living things, and mathematically gifted women are more likely than mathematically gifted men to have strong verbal abilities, giving them a wider range of c
areer choices.16 Susan Pinker determined that the gender divide is the most pronounced in nations where women have the most freedom to pursue whatever profession they want.17
Another reason men and women differ is because men more often have to pay their own way. There are plenty of scholarships offered to people of all sexes and ethnicities, but more scholarships—both academic and athletic—are offered exclusively to women than to men. On www.scholarships.com—one of the most popular sites on which to find and apply for scholarships in the US—women's scholarships outnumbered men's four to one. All of the men's scholarships were restricted to a particular geographic location or university while over half of the women's scholarships accepted applicants from around the country. There were several women's scholarships just for single mothers; zero scholarships were offered exclusively to single fathers.18 In addition, the trend of parents spending more on their sons' education in the 1970s not only equalized in the 1990s, but was reversed by the late 2000s;19 parents now spend about 25 percent more money on their daughter's education than their son's.20 Why not choose the major you like if someone else is footing the bill?
Simply put, young women do not have the same reality checks young men have that the world doesn't revolve around them. It is easier to talk about equal rights than equal responsibilities; however, if we wish to see greater compassion and cooperation between the sexes that is the logical next step.
Man, Interrupted Page 19