Men are enforced into a kind of silence about their gender; they're supposed to not think of it as a performance. That's the definition of manliness - that it's not a performance; it's being yourself, authentic. Whereas women have understood gender as performance. Men have not yet made that quantum leap, or rather they're making it in many ways, they're not thinking about it.
The problem with the way we discuss gender is that it tends to be "Let's sympathize with women" or "Let's sympathize with men."
When you look at how men and women are living together, there are two processes at work. One, women are rising in the middle class; their earning potential is rising compared to men. It has been underway for 100 years, and nothing is going to stop it. On the other hand, women are denied iconic positions of power - equity partnerships law firms, Hollywood salaries.
Men are losing power in their daily lives, but manliness is still iconic of power. This creates incredible turbulence around masculinity and incredible confusion around gender norms that's only going to accelerate.
When you ask single men in their 20s, "Do you want children?" they want children more than women do. Again, economics drive this. If you're a 29-year-old woman, having a baby is going to seriously blow up your career. If you're a 29-year-old man, it isn't.
When you look at the biggest study of the American dream, the number-one correlate for upward mobility is having two parents in a home. It doesn't matter if they're male or female.
Marriage is this black box which is the key to all social and political problems; the family is the unit.
Women become breadwinners, men become caregivers. That's the birth of intimate marriage.
Culture is always the echo of economic realities; that's what Marx teaches. Feminism is a clear example of that.
Actually the family is still the core social unit. Culturally, traditional masculinity was a removed father. That was a false conception of masculinity and the proper relationship between a man and his children.
Look at The Iliad, there's all this stuff about men loving children. The King of Sparta was the most brutal warrior of ancient Greece, and the only thing he liked to do was horse around with kids when he was back from slaughtering. One thing that feminism revealed is that being a distant patriarchal figure was not something men wanted to be. They want to be more involved in the lives of their children, and you can see that once they're allowed to have that connection, they crave it.
You cannot have an advanced economy while holding women back from the workplace.
Marriage is an an inherently contradictory state. It involves the fusion of two people into one thing. And it's also love, and it's a lot of work, and it's got glory in its drudgery.
Men are not taking women's job, which are good jobs. Being a nurse is an excellent job.
I cannot imagine why a woman would ever call herself anything but a feminist. But a man calling himself a feminist, what does that mean? The answer is he wants to be taken as a good guy. Your choice is between saying you're a feminist and raising a flag at a "Take Back the Night" rally and being a men's rights activist, which is basically the only two ways men have of talking about gender right now, I mean that's just ridiculous. That's just two extremes that are totally useless.
The economy is changing everything. And men need to deal with that. Our response to it has been rage, stupidity and conscious avoidance of dealing with what the reality of being a man might be outside of empty concepts from ancient history.
Men who define themselves as breadwinners are going to have to leave the traditional iconography of masculinity behind if they want to be breadwinners.
