House of Eratosthenes

This morning’s Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL), the sixty-first one, goes to Michael Lewis, author of Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. We learn of this through the delightfully titled Wall Street Journal article From Patriarch to Patsy (hat tip: Dr. Helen). I’m not so sure I’m that big of a fan of the overall message. Mr. Lewis zeros in on the issue of men losing their voice in society and in the family, and thereby losing their wives’ and childrens’ respect. On that whole thing, I’m on board. It is the plague of our times. Men being harnessed as beasts of burden, valued only grudgingly and only for their muscle. Household decisions made dictatorially by the matriarch while the man does what is “expected” of him. Everyday married life looking, just a little bit too much, like the planning of the wedding that started it — women somehow knowing exactly what needs to be done, the only indecision involved being the egotistical competitions with other women, while the men stand around with hands in their pockets trying to stay out of the way, until they’re told what needs to be moved where. Man-haters being given exactly what they wanted, and ending up angrier.

From Patriarch to Patsy I just have some reservations about the tone; it seems to me to be whiny, and unlikely to accomplish much of anything in terms of getting a message out. My beef is — you’re not going to get too far arguing for “the rights of men.” It’s kinda like highlighting the plight of an endangered species of beetle or spider. The cute furry things with the great big eyes will win out every time.

No, the central issue, to me, doesn’t have to do with what men need, but with what others need. Not only what they need, but what they want. Here is the ugly truth nobody wants to admit anywhere: We want the patriarch. We need the patriarch. Kids are programmed to respond to his benevolent guidance, and women are programmed to co-exist with him, and to the extent it is required for shared responsibility in the household, I’ll go ahead and say it — even obey him. Women who rankle at that, whether they know it or not, by rankling at it are demanding all of the responsibility for making decisions in the household. And by demanding that, they demand something that will thoroughly exhaust them — it’s not an “if” but a “when.” I’ve not yet seen it fail.

So there is no need to crusade for “equal rights” for men. There is no need to crusade for “fairness.” This is all unnecessary and a losing argument.

But this may very well be unfair criticism. Home Game itself, going by the product description, does not appear to be provided to us as an instrument of advocacy for social change; it appears, more, like something tossed out there for laughs. With perhaps just a dollop in the stew of something more serious —

When he became a father, Michael Lewis found himself expected to feel things that he didn’t feel, and to do things that he couldn’t see the point of doing. At first this made him feel guilty, until he realized that all around him fathers were pretending to do one thing, to feel one way, when in fact they felt and did all sorts of things, then engaged in what amounted to an extended cover-up.

Lewis decided to keep a written record of what actually happened immediately after the birth of each of his three children. This book is that record. But it is also something else: maybe the funniest, most unsparing account of ordinary daily household life ever recorded from the point of view of the man inside. The remarkable thing about this story isn’t that Lewis is so unusual. It’s that he is so typical. The only wonder is that his wife has allowed him to publish it.

This has societal implications. The consequences of this man-as-beast-of-burden family configuration, are not limited to under the roof of the household. It has a bearing on how all of society functions. And that is the point. It shapes and molds how future generations develop — and not in a good way. What child, boy or girl, can possibly come to maturity in a healthy way, after spending a childhood perceiving the cleansing, creative power of raw masculinity only as a toxic agent, as a contaminant, something to be abhorred and avoided? It just isn’t possible. Masculinity is important. It is essential to life. It’s gotta come from somewhere — even if it comes from the ladies.

Which it certainly can if that’s what is necessary. But the girls aren’t built to provide this. The beverage being served is a poor fit to the vessel, and the vessel doesn’t come out of the experience whole. Ever quaff down some hot coffee out of a cold-soda cup? It’s a painful mess, isn’t it? That’s why they’re so stressed out over the last generation or two. The feminists pitched something overboard, and after they got it pitched overboard we figured out it wasn’t the dead weight we were told it was. It seemed like it at the time…because what we were pitching overboard, didn’t bother to fight back. That would have been unmanly.

And that brings me to the sentence that is pure gold. This sums up, nicely — as in, Bingo! — exactly what the state of male-female relations is, in 2009:

Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight.

Thing I Know #157. If a man and woman are really “together,” the woman can’t be unhappy when the man is happy. The man can’t be happy, if the woman is unhappy. But for the man to be unhappy while the woman is happy, is very possible. There are people who have understood this difference between men and women, and gambled on it, and won, for generations. They’re called “salesmen.”

Dr. Freeberg’s prescription for this household disease is to make the man happy, so that the happiness of the other inhabitants naturally follows. Not send him off on an “all guy camping” weekend. That doesn’t work, because that’s exactly what you do with a horse, a mule, a yak, or any other beast of burden — board him up in a stable to sleep, feast on oats and recharge. No paradigm-shift there. Nope, the man has to plan things. Be treated in some way other than how a barnyard animal is treated.

I’m convinced, from what I know about how people function in their households now, that a lot of families live day-to-day and year-to-year in crisis mode. And a lot of angst would be cured and done-away-with if only a weekend was circled on the calendar, and the man was given free reign to plan it, right down to the mile and the minute. I would estimate easily half the households where I live, in Soccer-Mom-Central Folsom, would draw an enormous psychological benefit if this proceeded like General Grant planning the next day’s battle: In solitude. He disappears into his tent at midnight with a bagful of cigars, some grease pencils and a hunk of parchment, and even his most trusted aids are not allowed inside.

Do it before the kids become teenagers. That’s too late.

The wife is not allowed to say “Honey, when we drive through X, can we hit Y?” Absolutely not. General Grant in his tent. Too many women seem to have walked down the aisle without learning to trust their men.

Everyone’s allowed to comment on how it could’ve been better — a big part of our problem is that soft, squishy men are avoiding criticism by avoiding any opinions — but no sloppy, generalized, vague criticism is allowed. “Next time, let’s check the weather” — good. “That trip sucked” — out-of-bounds.

In 2009, my plan would be unworkable for a lot of families. And this is a sad thing. Because these are families that never should have become families. Also, they’ll only remain families so long as the man remains docile. As soon as he expresses an opinion, never mind whether it has any tangible effect on anyone, it’s all over. See ya in court pal. He’s the villager who didn’t put up a fight.

Agreed. But the real problem is that men aren’t standing up for themselves.

We’re now at least a generation deep into the “de-masculinization” of men. The previous generation, out of some misplaced sense of chivalry, allowed women to take social ground, far exceeding equity, at the expense of mankind.

Those men and women had offspring, the women divorced the men (75% of all divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women,) and then got sole custody of the children (90% of custody cases are decided in favor of women.)

Assuming that 49% of their offspring are male, these men, who have now grown into adulthood, had no substantial Father figure in their life. And if they did, he would have still been a first-generation emasculated male, incapable of teaching them to be real men.

Fast-forward to today, and you now have a bunch of confused estro-males, who have been imbued with feminine characteristics from one-sided, ideological (as opposed to practical) parental influence.

But somewhere in the male DNA is the understanding that it doesn’t feel right, that the (mis)arrangement is somehow unfair, and at the very least, unsettling. What do these “men” do about it? Nothing. Well, some write whiney books that deliberately skate around the larger sociological ramifications of their otherwise astute observations.

Guys, quit being pussies, and you won’t have to worry about what women do. Be a real man, and women will either follow or leave. Either way, you’ll be better off than being somebody’s footstool.
- sanskara | 05/19/2009 @ 14:05
I think where we really fell off the boat was the expansion of the word “abuse.” For a decade or longer, enormous pressure was applied for married people, and the behavioral/therapy professionals who treated them, to regard “mental abuse” as on par with, or worse, than the physical kind.

Without anyone ever lending their good reputation to that statement, word-for-word! And so our society came to believe in something so absurd that nobody had the balls to say it out loud: Demanding an explanation out of your wife for a fifty-dollar parking ticket is just as awful as giving her a fat lip.

The double-standards are just natural consequences of this. Man plans things without a woman’s participation: Abuse. Woman plans things without a man’s participation: Natural order of things. Man demands to be included in the planning of something: Abuse. Woman demands to be included in the planning of something: Very accommodating of her to offer an alternative before heading to divorce court.

See, we all say we want men and women to get along. But there are quite a few people out there who say it and don’t mean it.
- mkfreeberg | 05/19/2009 @ 14:15
Yep. All true. But I wonder if the “enlightened” among us aren’t overly concerned with how it happened, when they should be concentrating on how to fix it–history vs. present. I keep coming back to this refrain: men need to stand up for themselves and quit being such babies.

Being a wussy weenie is bad for the guy, but it also lessens the woman’s attraction for him, which makes her very unhappy to be romantically involved with him. Simply put: everybody loses.

My experience: when a woman is attracted to you, she bends over backwards to accommodate you, and she finds reasons to justify her behavior. If you’re one of the “good guys” this phenomenon functions as a means of stabilizing relationship reciprocity.

The more experience I have with women, the more I find myself not caring what they want or think. If that sounds misogynist to the overly sensitive, it’s not. By not caring, I’m also not invested in manipulating or using women, something born out of misplaced reliance. The guys who seem to “care” the most, are usually the most needy, and end up “caring” for purely selfish reasons, which never works in the female’s favor.

What I care about, though, is doing what’s good, healthy, and right for me. In other words, I take care of my needs, and let the chips fall where they may. At which point, I don’t have to worry about the sort of women who gravitate towards me. The ones who are right for me, show up, and we have a good interaction; the ones who are not (misandric users, for example,) I never notice them in the first place, as I’m busy doing my own thing.

And let’s face it, when you’re doing your own thing, you tend not to put up with crap from other people. They just don’t matter enough for you to accommodate them.
- sanskara | 05/19/2009 @ 15:53
Realistically, what is one to do? If one is not valued as a man, and that is how one finds value in oneself, one has two options: first, to alter oneself into that which is pleasing to the one(s) you love, or find some-one else to love. In general, men will make the sacrifice of altering themselves for those they love. What is happening increasingly is that men are either dropping out of the marriage pool, or altering themselves into a beast of burden with little besides their family to live for, which tends to value them for their paycheck, and little more.

For a man, marriage is a bad bet. Indeed, when your partner seems to view marriage as a fluid arrangement that depends on her feelings, one would be wise to not enter into the marriage. Will women be happy with the biddable metrosexuals they seem to marry instead of, well, men? Probably not, but that doesn’t help us. What it comes down to for us is to find the outliers in the population who do value us, which is statistically improbable. So society will change: what it changes into has yet to be determined, but the signs don’t look good.

It comes down to the old question of, “How does one change another’s opinion?” Ultimately, you can’t. They have to see another, more valid option, and choose it themselves. So what can men do? Nothing, beyond demonstrating what they are, and hope that someday, who they are will be valued again.
- Tom | 05/19/2009 @ 21:56
>What it comes down to for us is to find the outliers in the population who do value >us, which is statistically improbable.

So live for the exceptions. There are over 300 million people in the U.S., over half of them are women. Don’t suffer from what psychologists call an “impoverished model.” There’s a lot of different kinds of women out there; it’s a numbers game. Most men just don’t have the balls to weather the “search cost” of a new female, so they settle in to a bad situation.

That doesn’t, however, make the search for human value a statistical improbability. Anything (or anyone) of quality is rare. If you’re not willing to search out the rarity, you pretty much can’t complain about what you end up with. I agree with your other observations, though, for what it’s worth.
- sanskara | 05/20/2009 @ 00:14
Regarding outliers in the population, the point was that demand far exceeds supply, at least in the US. While true that anything of quality is rare, it is also true that there is never enough of a rarity to go around.
- Tom | 05/20/2009 @ 01:02
Yeah, but most guys don’t have the drive to go out and get it, so the competition isn’t that fierce.
- sanskara | 05/20/2009 @ 01:05

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Best Sentence LXITuesday, May 19th, 2009

Best Sentence LXI
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009