Are We Men Yet?

Women Get To Have Sex Like Men, Work Like Men, And Parent Like Men

I don’t call myself a feminist any more. People have wildly different ideas about what feminism is and means, and without defining terms in a rigorous and pretty granular way, I often find little common ground for discussion. Christie Hefner—who, for decades, headed the Playboy Empire started by her daddy, Hugh Hefner—identifies as a feminist because girl boss, big bucks, making it in a man’s world. Anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin also identified as a feminist, arguing in her writings that porn encouraged violence against women and emboldened men to eroticize the humiliation and harm of women. So we have to be clear, I think, when we’re talking about feminism to understand whether we’re on the same page.

As a young woman, I identified with ecofeminists like Susan Griffin. They tended to view the world as a web of relationships, and to acknowledge that health or unwellness in any part of the web affected the web as a whole. Ecofeminism proffered a basic, underlying critique of the life that most of us consensually participate in: We live in and under a rotten-ass system that’s not particularly good for women or children or men or the natural world. It also suggested a way out: By discerning how we really want to live, how we want to structure work and community and family and economics for optimal human flourishing, and by moving in that direction, we can buoy all boats. I still feel pretty at home with those ideas.

I’m old enough to remember when feminism bifurcated. Although “bifurcated” might not be the best word here; “splintered” might be more accurate. There were so many different feminisms and so many different feminists! There were Christian feminists; lesbian feminists; 59-cents-is-not-enough feminists; consciousness-raising feminists; black feminists; we-must-pass-the-ERA (Equal Rights Amendment)-feminists; anti-porn feminists; Marxist feminists; radical feminists; liberal/mainstream feminists; separatist feminists; pagan wicca feminists; ecofeminists; and I have barely scratched the surface here. People talk chronologically about first wave feminism, second wave, third wave. But that second wave was definitely not a homogeneous monolith.

For purposes of this discussion, I’d like to focus on two branches of feminism that did bifurcate, with one branch prevailing, and the other branch largely fading into obscurity. Broadly speaking, these were the Gloria Steinem-Helen Gurley Brown-Sex And The Single Girl-women-can-do-anything-men-can-do branch, and the less public-facing branch that celebrated women’s history and accomplishments and their unique contributions to life, including acknowledging, valuing, and honoring caregiving, because for God’s sake, where would any of us be without caregiving? One goal of this latter branch of feminism was to demonstrate how caregiving, compassion, kindness, and gentleness—traditionally understood as the purview of women, but obviously practiced by some men as well--contributed to a good life, and how important it was to acknowledge, value, and celebrate these contributions.

As that first branch of feminism became more muscular and more prominent, there were many ways that that second branch of feminism atrophied. I unearthed an example of this atrophy when I was researching my undergraduate thesis, a biography of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which housed the homeless and fed the hungry in a literal interpretation of the corporal works of mercy that offer a pretty complete template for caregiving.

During my research, I had learned that Dorothy Day had been invited to speak at a feminist conference in New York in the 1970s. It was a big deal, Angela Davis was also one of the speakers, and I wanted to find the transcript of the event. When I finally tracked down that transcript, every speech from every speaker on the roster had been included, except Dorothy Day’s. I learned from people who had been at the event that Day had discussed what she always discussed—the importance of remembering the poor and caring for them, the practical work that she and her colleagues did to realize that caring. All the other speakers talked more abstractly about how women’s time had come, women were now going to get what they were due, women were going to take their place at the table.

Now, the exclusion of Day’s speech could have been a simple error. I have to allow for that. But it also could have been intentional. Those doing the transcribing could have determined that Day’s life’s work—caring for others and discussing and writing about the importance of that—was transgressive, not attuned to the direction in which the movement was, as many believed, inevitably headed. At any rate, the one talk that provided some diversity of opinion and commentary was not part of the transcribed document that survived the event.

And, if you allow for the possibility that that exclusion might have been purposeful, that may be illustrative of what happened to feminism. The feminists who celebrated women and everything that makes them unique—and that includes caring for the poor (men were also doing this, of course), but also pregnancy and childbirth and nursing and childtending, although it is certainly not limited to those things—those feminists were busy (with caregiving! among other things); they didn’t have the same public platform that the girl boss feminists had; what they were offering seemed less cool than what the Sex And The Single Girl feminists had on tap; and what they were promoting was more potentially disruptive and revolutionary than simply plugging women into CEO slots, thus making it less agreeable to The Man and The Powers That Be. A world that really, truly values caregiving will value people, communities, life, the natural world, and the well-being and thoughtful nurturance of children in ways that will require a reordering of all we tolerate now.

Instead, the medical technology of the Pill aligned very agreeably with the Girl Boss Feminist Program. Now women could get it on like men!! Without the risk of pregnancy, the societal guardrails that had circumscribed male and female sexual behavior for centuries seemed obsolete, quaint. Why would you wait for marriage to have sex, why would you limit yourself to one or a couple of sexual partners, why would you have children at all when you could just have fun having sex with lots of different people? (Louise Perry has written thoughtfully and well about this.) 

As with anything, there’s a cost. Freedom never comes without a price tag. In this case, one tariff was that sex was stripped of its spiritual nature. I had a history professor in college who shared, in a senior seminar, that during his youth, he received invitations to have sex as he would an invitation to eat lunch. You wouldn’t turn down an invitation to lunch, would you? I remember him saying. He was gay, but that ethic of yes-to-everything-all-the-time was pretty pervasive. Not participating situated you outside something that felt very important and of-the-moment; why would you be outside all of this lush fun unless you were a prude or a loser? But the preciousness of sex, the profundity of that kind of connection and intimacy, and the cosmic possibility of procreation inherent in heterosexual intercourse was not part of the conversation. Nor does it much seem to be now.

I’m suggesting that the sacred quality of sex and its ability to foster an absolutely singular, deep connection are both hindered by an ethos that seeks to shift sexuality into the realm of commodification. Not in the sense of money being exchanged, although we could talk about that too, but in the sense of something utterly special and unique becoming cheapened by the casualness with which my history professor and many others chose to give it away.

I don’t favor a full-bore return to the sexual mores or gendered assumptions of the pre-Pill era. I do favor assessing how all this freedom has worked for men, women, and children (and children and their best interests are rarely part of these assessments), and for the health and vitality of our society at large. I also favor moving forward, eyes wide open, having made those necessary assessments, into a way of being and doing that reveres and respects sexuality, its power, and its implications rather than acting like it’s simply another recreational activity that you do whenever, wherever, with whomever. How has that worked for us as individuals, as a society? Sex is not pickleball.

Women entering the workforce in urban jobs was part of the Cosmopolitan/Ms. template. This meant working full-time outside of the home (which I imagine was heady and exciting until it wasn’t), like men, and earning, maybe not as much as men in an equivalent position, but a lot more than they had been. Earning money, having that independence—those are strengths that absolutely need to be acknowledged. But it’s only a societal good if you consider the model itself good. I.e., was it good for anybody—man or woman—to work 40+ hours a week in a single place, on a single task? To commute back and forth like bizarre lemmings, to arrive home spent, with little oomph left for family, friends, community? Honestly, probably for a few people at the tippy-top of that heap, the financial and prestige rewards may make it all worth it. It’s the other 98% of humanity I’m concerned about.

When I worked full-time before I had children, I remember coming home and feeling like, I need a wife! I needed somebody to help with all of the tasks of daily living that make it possible to carry on—shopping, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry. I found myself dropping off and picking up dry cleaning on the weekends, which was also when I did the week’s grocery shopping. It seemed my whole life was spent getting to and from the job; being at the job; and engaging in support tasks during my “off time” that sustained me minimally so I could keep doing the job. Blech.

Don’t get me wrong! I love the idea of expanded opportunities for women. (I still remember the What Shall I Be? Girls Version board game from the 1960s. The career choices were stewardess, nurse, teacher, actress, model, ballerina!) But I’d like “expanded opportunities” to mean more than: Now you get to work like Walter Mitty or Bartleby The Scrivener.

I’d like it to mean the availability of more, varied, well-compensated part-time jobs—for women and men. I’d like it to mean more support for small, local businesses that really serve the community to thrive. I’d like it to mean more opportunities to do the work that needs to be done as quickly as it can be done well and still get compensated for it as if you were putting in your 40+ hours under surveillance in the workplace. I’d like it to mean more creative possibilities like job sharing. I read a lot of articles about job sharing in the 1990s, but I never met a single person who was involved in a job sharing arrangement. Basically, it means that two or three people do a single full-time job, dividing the hours, pay, and benefits. This doesn’t work for all jobs, of course, but for certain positions, such as copy editor or proofreader, it’s easy to imagine that it could work very well. I’d like it to mean that we begin to organize work as a regenerative, sustainable component of a life that also includes opportunities for investment in community, in artistic pursuits, and in relationships. I’d also like it to mean that, if you decide that you want to stay home and raise and educate your precious children, that’s understood to be a valuable and valued option. I acknowledge that there are less desirable jobs that need to get done in every society, like maybe garbage pickup; so how do we square that with more people doing meaningful, nourishing work? I remember reading some utopian novels in the 1970s, some of which had responsibility for those kinds of jobs rotate among citizens so nobody was doing it all the time; everyone did it a little bit of the time. Folks, I’m trying to think big here! Of course, everything is connected. You tug on the “work” string and you find it connected to the “education,” “family,” “community,” and “how much everything costs” strings. Today, we’re trying to, modestly, just start somewhere.

And yes, women who work full-time also typically do more of the household and domestic work that needs doing than their male counterparts. But what I see in my world is a lot of overworked people—men and women both. The way we’ve organized what we call work does not allow for human flourishing.

I know people who have had flexible arrangements, working in jobs that they loved. It’s unusual. More of that, please!

And as always, cui bono? Who benefits? Expanding the workforce, getting more women working meant more people were paying taxes—good for the government. It also meant that people’s role as consumers expanded. If there’s not someone shopping and cooking for the household in a dedicated way, then those tasks often need to be outsourced. You can pay for grocery delivery services—something that I don’t think existed when I was a girl, at least not where I lived; alternatively, you can pay for frozen meals, takeout food, and restaurant dinners. Everywhere I go now, I’m struck by what seems to me to be an insane number of restaurants. It seems that eating out has really grown into a big budget line item for a lot of households. At any rate, many industries now exist to provide new and varied ways to spend money, to consume for people who are time-poor because of the demands of their full-time jobs.

In the consumer vein, there’s also the phenomenon of treating yourself. You work hard, maybe your boss is unreasonable or inept, you don’t have the luxury of time, you deserve a little something something. Why not treat yourself to a manicure, a couple of drinks, a gym membership, high-quality chocolate, an extravagant restaurant meal, a luxury body butter, a massage, a weekend away? More ways to consume. This is a cross-gender phenomenon. I think it becomes more likely when people feel tired, underappreciated, and uncared for.

Because of the demands on the time, attention, and energy of a full-time employee, women and men in that position are going to parent in roughly the same way too, which is as an absentee landlord “tends” to her rental property. Minimally.

It’s an acknowledgement of the finiteness of energy, and especially of your best energy. If your best attention and juju is going to the job five (and more) days a week, the children aren’t getting it. What you have instead are one or two parents who come home at the end of a long workday, with little juice left. Where have they or she/he been all day? What have they been doing? Children and their parents become mysterious and unknown to one another as their lives unfold in discrete realms. The Venn diagram of this kind of family life has very little overlap between parents and their precious children.

The trifecta! Women get to have sex like men; women get to work like men; women get to parent like men. Is this a triumph? If yes, why do so many metrics point to women being unhappy today? According to the research you consult, anywhere from 23% to nearly 25% of adult women are taking antidepressants. More importantly: Do you see a lot of contented, joyous women in your life?

I include this because it’s a fun trip down memory lane, AND because of the chorus, relevant, I think, to today’s post:

Are We Not Men? We are DEVO!