Even if we realize the ludicrous nature of these media portrayals, we are still left with a world in which women prepare for careers but find little support once they have children. Peggy Orenstein describes the modern world as “half-changed,” where “old patterns and expectations have broken down, but new ideas seem fragmentary, unrealistic, and often contradictory.” In Midlife Crisis at 30, Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin express “the echoing, pervasive anxiety” of young women living with “the persistent gap between What Has Changed in terms of women’s progress and What Has Stayed the Same in terms of old-school corporate structures and rigid social conventions.” GenMe mothers, many of whom work outside the home, can lay out every one of these contradictions. Men and women are equal; no, wait, kids are your responsibility as the woman. You need two incomes to survive; no, wait, learn to live on one income. You should retain the status and satisfaction of working; no, wait, it’s more important to stay home. There’s a reason I discussed many of these problems in the chapter on depression and anxiety. As Douglas and Michaels put it, “Both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers get to be failures.”
Even if the work-versus-stay-home decision is crystal clear to you, the realities of both situations aren’t always manageable. You might always have wanted to stay home, but then find that you can’t make ends meet if you’re not a two-income family. Even if finances aren’t an issue, you might find yourself unprepared for life cooped up with young children every day (and let’s face it—who is really prepared for that?). If you’re fine with going back to work, you might find it difficult to construct a manageable work schedule, and even harder to find good child care (and perhaps impossible to find good child care that’s affordable). As Orenstein puts it, young women have “a sneaking suspicion that the rhetoric of ‘choices’ is in part a con job, disguising impossible dilemmas as matters of personal preference.”
Almost everyone I know has a difficult time with these issues. Amy, 32, is a high-ranking corporate executive. After her son was born, she asked her boss if she could take a few more months of unpaid leave after her twelve-week maternity leave was up, and if she could work part-time after she returned to work. Her boss said no on both counts; Amy would have to come back to work, and full-time. Amy decided to resign; for one thing, the day care near her office only takes children older than a year (which is surprisingly common). Fortunately, Amy is a valued employee, so her boss called back the next day and offered her six more weeks of unpaid maternity leave and a three-day-a-week schedule, but only until the end of the summer. Also fortunately, Amy’s mother, a teacher, can watch the baby during that time. After that, Amy will have to find other child-care arrangements and go back to working the twelve-hour days that are standard in her profession. She has no idea what she will do. And this is someone with two advantages most people don’t have—a high-ranking job and child care provided by a relative. Yet it’s still a mess.
In Perfect Madness, Warner documents the new “problem that has no name”: young families struggling to pay the mortgage and take care of their kids in a country with little support for parents. Warner was living in France when her children were born, a place featuring the mandatory paid maternity leave and low-cost preschools common in Europe (yes, Virginia, there are places where these things exist). French culture also saw nothing wrong in leaving kids with babysitters every once in a while so the adults could enjoy a night out. Warner was shocked to return to the United States, where so many parents felt cast adrift and worn down by doing everything themselves. It is no coincidence that Warner subtitled her book Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. The contradictions and lack of good choices for women with children lie at the center of her attack. When you’ve always been taught that you have choices and then something goes wrong, she writes, “you tend . . . to assume you made the wrong choices—not to see that the ‘choices’ given you were wrong in the first place.”
Warner argues that many of these problems can be traced to individualism and inertia: young women’s belief that we should handle everything on our own, and our cynicism that trying to change government policies would just be “knocking their heads against the wall.” These are, of course, two central aspects of the GenMe personality. Their inherent self-focus and lack of confidence in political action lead them to assume that no alternatives exist to either (a) staying home and giving up income and a career, or (b) working and scrambling to find and pay for expensive day care. Young authors Macko and Rubin found the same thing: “Our peers were all wrestling with the same issues, yet responding to them by turning their anxiety inward and focusing on their own lives instead of seeing the bigger picture—let alone lobbying for universal changes.” Douglas and Michaels sum up the “prevailing common sense” of the last two decades as “only you, the individual mother, are responsible for your child’s welfare: The buck stops with you, period, and you’d better be a superstar.” So we’re supposed to raise our kids without help from anyone, an unrealistic expectation in the best of times. But it’s what we believe, so we soldier on. This is one of the more solvable problems faced by GenMe; more about that in the next chapter. Sometime in the next decade, the system will begin to break down: either more and more women will forgo having children, or government policies will change. Before that happens, there will be more and more tired, frustrated, and angry parents—particularly moms, but a growing number of dads too (because if mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy).
But would we go back? Hell no. “I think women having more opportunities than previous generations is a good thing—a very good thing. I cannot think of a single reason why it could be bad,” says Natalie, 21. Certainly, some GenMe women might desire to return to a simpler time when families could get by on one income and staying at home with one’s child was the only accepted course. But more would rather not. GenMe women cannot begin to imagine what it was like to be told that only some professions were open to them. They cannot imagine making an absolute choice between having children and continuing to pursue a career. And they cannot imagine being told girls can’t do something.
ATTITUDES TOWARD GAYS AND LESBIANS
On Glee, Burt Hummel is a guy’s guy. He runs a car-repair shop in Ohio, and his idea of fashion is a flannel shirt. One day, his 16-year-old son, Kurt, has some news for him. “I don’t want to lie anymore. I’m gay,” he says. “I know,” Burt says. “I’ve known since you were three. All you wanted for your birthday was a pair of sensible heels. If that’s who you are, there’s nothing I can do about it. And I love you just as much, okay?” Burt is clearly not a gay rights advocate (“I sat through that whole [movie] Brokeback Mountain. From what I gather, something went down in the tent”). But he loves his son, and if he’s gay, so be it.
Describing the revolution in equality would not be complete without mentioning the enormous change in attitudes toward gays and lesbians. American society has, without question, grown more accepting of homosexuality recently, and nowhere is that more evident than among young people. When I requested stories on my website about “being open to differences among other people,” everyone who responded wrote about tolerance for gays and lesbians. In less than two decades, those supporting gay and lesbian rights have become the majority: 50% of Americans supported same-sex marriage in 2013, up from 27% in 1996. This is clearly a generational sea change: In 2013, two-thirds (66%) of those born after 1981 supported same-sex marriage, compared to 35% of those born before 1945. As the Pew Center puts it, “Much of the shift in support of same-sex marriage is attributable to the arrival of a large cohort of young adults . . . who are far more open to gay rights than previous generations.” The law followed public opinion when same-sex marriages were recognized at the federal level in 2013. This is what I predicted in the 2006 first edition of Generation Me, though I would not have guessed gay marriage would become legal just seven years later.
It’s not just political attitudes, or attitudes about same-sex marriage, that have shifted. Americans are now much mor
e likely to say they like gay and lesbian people—only 38% of Americans in the Pew survey viewed gays and lesbians favorably in 2003, which rose to 57% in 2013. Fewer believe that homosexuality is wrong—in the Gallup poll, 55% saw gay and lesbian relations as “morally wrong” in 2002, which declined to 38% in 2013. This shift in attitudes might be due to more gays and lesbians coming out. In 1985, only 24% of Americans said that a friend, relative, or coworker had personally told them they were gay or lesbian. By 2013, that number had more than tripled, to 75%. These are enormous cultural shifts.
Abby, 18, wrote, “I remember my mom telling me and my siblings that if we were gay she would disown us. My sister and I found this extremely funny. Even though we weren’t gay we are all extremely accepting of gays. We love them.” Elizabeth, 27, went to a conservative Catholic school growing up, but often babysat a lesbian couple’s son. “I always thought this was so cool,” she says. “I thought, ‘Wow, I don’t care if they are lesbians or not.’ ” When Megan, 15, was in middle school, her gay teacher brought his partner along on a school trip to Washington, DC. Her schoolmates’ parents thought this was inappropriate and called the school. “But my friends and I never really understood what the problem was. I really don’t see how bringing his partner along was any different than if he had brought his wife—which our parents would have had no trouble with, of course,” Megan says. “People make homosexuality into such a big deal, but I just don’t understand why anyone would care if two people want to be together. It’s like race or gender—you can’t control it, so why would anyone try to force someone to change?”
Despite the parents’ protests, Megan’s story illustrates change because she can tell it. Apparently, everyone knew the teacher was gay; it was just his partner’s coming on the trip that they didn’t like. Not that long ago, a gay teacher who was out of the closet would have been fired outright—no trip to Washington, DC, and no job at all. This happened to my favorite high school English teacher in 1989 in suburban Dallas. Despite being one of the best teachers in the school, the rumors caught up with him after two years and that was it; the school used some flimsy excuse not to renew his contract. They were in sync with the times: in a 1988 Gallup poll, 57% of Americans believed that “homosexual relations between consenting adults” shouldn’t even be legal.
Don’t forget—until 1989 there had never been a major TV character who was gay. Ellen didn’t come out of the closet until 1997, and even then several major advertisers yanked their support after the episode aired and Ellen appeared on the cover of Time under the headline “Yep, I’m Gay.” (As if people hadn’t figured this out yet about a woman who regularly did her stand-up routine wearing men’s shirts, suspenders, and tennis shoes.)
It’s pretty amazing to realize that a gay television character was controversial as recently as 1997; when I went to look up this date, I was sure it was 1992 or 1993 instead. (Although the Seinfeld line “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” beat the curve, premiering in 1993.) After that, things changed remarkably quickly. Will & Grace was an instant hit after its premiere in 1998, and a year later the teen show Dawson’s Creek had a 16-year-old gay character. In 2000, All My Children introduced the first lesbian teen on daytime television, especially interesting since daytime TV skews toward an older demographic. Several young people in my online survey noted that the first time they thought about homosexuality was when they watched Glee. In 2012, the sitcom The New Normal featured a gay couple who became fathers when a surrogate carried their baby. And since 2003, Ellen DeGeneres has hosted a successful daytime talk show, where her sexual orientation is accepted but rarely acknowledged. It just is.
And we can’t ever forget the stunning though now faded glory of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which premiered in 2003. An entire generation of kids grew up seeing straight men freely hug gay men, and gay men having all of the answers while the poor, slobby straight dude shaves wrong, wears hockey jerseys on dates, and breaks things in the kitchen. And let’s not even talk about moisturizer. Main point: gay people are not only queer, and here, but they are very, very cool.
The General Social Survey, conducted since 1972, illustrates this enormous change. It asks if “a man who admits that he is homosexual” should “be allowed to teach in a college or university, or not?” In the 1970s, 64% of Americans born before 1930 said no, he should not be allowed to teach. Among those born in the 1940s—mostly Boomers—only 31% said no in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 2010s, only 13% of Americans born since 1980 said no. So over 50 birth years, firing a professor for being gay went from the opinion of a solid majority—2 out of 3—to a fringe minority of 1 out of 8. Now that is a generational difference.
Acceptance of gay and lesbian families has also risen. In just the three years between 2009 and 2012, support for gays and lesbians adopting children jumped from 54% to 61%. This may have occurred because solid social science research consistently finds that children raised by gay and lesbian parents do not differ in psychological adjustment or outcomes compared to the children of heterosexual parents.
Young people often comment to me that they have a casual attitude about homosexuality that their parents don’t understand at all. Lauren, a 21-year-old from North Carolina, was describing to her parents how a male friend of hers liked interior decorating, but, she added, “He’s not gay—he has a girlfriend.” Her father was shocked that Lauren was so nonchalant about sexual orientation. Jake, 28, has a gay uncle, but Jake’s father and his family refused to acknowledge his homosexuality. When Jake and his fiancée invited Jake’s uncle and his partner to their wedding, his parents were angry. “I quickly seized the opportunity to finally address the issue,” said Jake. “I explained to them that I have no problem with whatever sexuality a person chooses. I also told them it made me feel good that my 48-year-old uncle would take his first step toward coming out to the family at my wedding.”
Some teens find their experiences at odds with their religious upbringing. For many, this means that they see gays as sinners and/or believe that gays can change to be straight. Others are shaped by the culture’s tolerance very early on. Madison, 15, wrote, “I wasn’t taught about homosexuality when I was younger, so when I was in the sixth grade I just assumed it was okay. People are people and our differences make the world an interesting place. Then I found out my parents were totally against it, but it was too late. I already thought it was all right. I still haven’t told them what I believe, though.”
GenMe also confronts these issues at much younger ages than previous generations did. “Kids are coming out a lot earlier than they would have ten or twenty years ago,” says Virginia Merritt, a psychiatrist who works with gay teenagers. Nathan, 23, grew up in a small town in the Midwest. “Growing up, I always thought homosexuality was a bad thing. My parents would often use the phrase ‘that’s gay’ to refer to something stupid that they didn’t like.” After learning more about homosexuality in college, he finally had the courage to come out to his family and friends.
Unfortunately, hate is not long past. In 2002, my University of Michigan graduate school friend Carla Grayson and her partner, Adrianne Neff, petitioned the University of Montana, where Carla was an assistant professor, to provide health-care benefits for Adrianne, who was staying home to care for the couple’s 22-month-old son. Four days after a newspaper story reported on the lawsuit, Carla and Adrianne awoke in the early morning to the sound of the smoke detector going off. They ran to the front door to escape but were met by a wall of fire. Carla climbed out the window and Adrianne handed her the baby, finally escaping herself. The fire was ruled an arson, and police investigated it as a hate crime.
Although what happened next in no way made up for the crime, it was still notable. More than 700 townspeople turned out for a rally in support of the couple. A sign on the door of the Missoula First United Methodist Church read OPEN HEARTS. OPEN MINDS. OPEN DOORS. But not surprisingly, Carla and Adrianne soon moved back to Michigan.
This story
also illustrates how the change for gays has been slow in coming, and that although most straight people’s attitudes are now much more tolerant, it’s still difficult to be gay or lesbian in the United States. Coming out of the closet to parents is terrifying; though certainly many parents are more tolerant now, few other bits of news carry such a high risk of your parents never speaking to you again. But even in the decade since the first edition of Generation Me was published, change has come. No matter what your opinion on these issues, it’s hard to deny that the tide of history flows toward equality.
8
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Generation Me at Work
The young applicant seemed so promising on paper. When she arrived for the interview, however, she was holding a cat carrier—with the cat in it. She set the carrier on the interviewer’s desk and periodically played with it during the interview.
Generation Me--Revised and Updated Page 27