House of Eratosthenes

The line in Dr. Helen’s column from last week, like all truly effective, deceptive things, is technically true. But one is tempted to glean something from it that is unsupported and misleading, and the observant reader must cast a jaundiced eye toward Dr. Helen, because it seems this might have been deliberate.

This letter could have been written by many women around the United States.

What I think is common about the letter, is that it concerns a bride who is now earning more money than her groom. What is open to question in my mind, is the much-prophesied blistering angst from the hubby…

Dr. Helen, I’ve recently found myself bringing in more money than my husband, and it’s causing problems. It’s not because he doesn’t work hard — he works more than me (which probably just adds insult to injury). I’ve been looking up this topic online. Everywhere I look it is just women commenting on how to make the man feel better, but I’d like to hear from men on what works for them. Thanks — Please don’t use my name! For my husbands sake!

From where I sit, this letter could not have been written by many women around the country. This letter stands alone. Or it would…if the author came out and said her husband is suffering from a bruised ego. Go back and read it a second time, very carefully. Really, really read it, every sentence, every syllable. She doesn’t come out and say this. It’s causing problems. Don’t include my name for my husband’s sake.

This is a fatal flaw, at least toward the purpose I have in mind for this letter. It stands as a solitary piece of evidence, thus far, available to pose a challenge to Thing I Doubt #1 which is:

1. Men who have problems with their wives making more money
I’m continually told this is a major cause of trouble in paradise, but I notice the people who tell me this are very seldom personally involved. In fact the only exception to that, is when it’s the wife who earned more…and in those situations it would be more accurate to say she had fantasies about earning more. Now, I’m a man. Having a wife or live-in who earned more than me, would be a real first-time experience. It strikes me, at first blush, as a rather pleasant change of pace. I know other men. None of them, not a single one, has demonstrated any attitude about this remarkably different from my own.

Working Woman Eight months after I jotted down that gem, the New York Times trumpeted yet another pocket-protector lab-coat clipboard propeller-beanie egghead study, seemingly unrelated at first glance, but tightly interwoven with Thing I Doubt #1 once you take the time to inspect — which says…

Last year, a team of researchers added a novel twist to something known as a time-use survey. Instead of simply asking people what they had done over the course of their day, as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s, the researchers also asked how people felt during each activity. Were they happy? Interested? Tired? Stressed?

Not surprisingly, men and women often gave similar answers about what they liked to do (hanging out with friends) and didn’t like (paying bills). But there were also a number of activities that produced very different reactions from the two sexes — and one of them really stands out: Men apparently enjoy being with their parents, while women find time with their mom and dad to be slightly less pleasant than doing laundry.

Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist working with four psychologists on the time-use research team, figures that there is a simple explanation for the difference. For a woman, time with her parents often resembles work, whether it’s helping them pay bills or plan a family gathering. “For men, it tends to be sitting on the sofa and watching football with their dad,” said Mr. Krueger, who, when not crunching data, enjoys watching the New York Giants with his father.

This intriguing — if unsettling — finding is part of a larger story: there appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.

Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.

Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.

Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

As is the case with all other male-female issues, once you’re untethered from concerns about political correctness this is all easy to predict. More women are working now, for money, than in times past — that much is beyond question by anybody. And since we’re being politically incorrect, let’s be honest. Women started working more because a bunch of women got together and whined. Sorry, it’s true. We can debate whether this is a good thing, how good the women are at their jobs, if they can do those jobs as well as men can. But they didn’t get these jobs because a hundred million men woke up one morning and decided to be a bunch of Steve Trevors ready to appreciate the positive attributes of their Wonder Women with squeaky-clean, sincere and asexual adoration. Nope. The women complained. They demonstrated, they screeched, they intimidated, they bullied, the beat on brows. For years. The activists among them did everything they could to force society to function the way they thought it should.

So let’s be honest — women started working because they…or at least, the activists amongst them….did a lot of whining. They whined, and as a result of the whining got more work to do. Whining people got more work…what happens next, class?

How in the world could we avoid lots of whining about the work? In what universe? How would that be logically possible?

When has a whiner ever gotten something the whiner was whining about wanting, and stopped whining?

Now do spare me your peevish comments and e-mails. Nowhere in the above did I say all women with jobs, got those jobs because they whined. Comments about individuals, comments about groups — learn the difference. Also, nowhere in the above did I say women enjoyed a monopoly of whining. I wish like hell that they did. I could listen to a whining woman all day long, but a whining man has a nauseating effect and lately it seems we’re buried in ’em. So no. I’m not even going to say there’s a correlative relationship between the act of whining and our fairer sex. But more women are working now than in times past, and it wasn’t because someone said “the gentlemen in this job just aren’t getting me the results I want, I’m going to put a woman in there.” No, we created a post-feminist modern society in which executives felt their careers were in jeopardy if they didn’t do something to prove they weren’t sexist. Traditionally-male roles were filled with females, not because people were hopeful about the results once this took place, but because they were fearful of the consequences if it did not. That, and…I’d like to think…much of the time the hiring manager was familiar with the skills of the individual and didn’t care if she was female. I’m sure that’s happened. A few times. I’d like to think that happened most of the time. But I dunno. The coercion-based cause-and-effect, the culturally-based language of horse-heads-in-beds, to anyone who was alive and aware in the middle of it, is undeniable. You do this the way we want. Or else.

Gawd I hate disclaimers. I hate that they’re necessary.

Anyway, now women have lots of jobs, and they’re beginning to dominate the higher-paying jobs. A job is something you do for money. Which — statistically, this is the tendency — is something you probably wouldn’t do were it not for the money. If there’s more money involved, it will be connected to something you’d be even more reluctant to do if it weren’t for the money. Yes, I’ve heard the adage — do what you love. There is truth in this, but it doesn’t work beyond a certain point. I know. I’ve done things I love for money, and sooner or later the money rests on you doing what you love in a way you’d much rather not. You’d rather do it some other way. But if you do it that other way the money won’t be forthcoming. And so, next year if not this one, all jobs become…a job. Something you’d rather not be doing, to get the money that you won’t get if you do something you’d much rather be doing.

Hate to shock the establishment once again, but there isn’t that much of a male-female split here. In marriage, or not, I’ve shared households with more than my share of woman. I’ve always generated the higher income. You don’t spring out of bed everyday and say to yourself “Oh boy! I’m the primary breadwinner! Life is good!” Life doesn’t work that way.

Let’s be blunt: I have a lot more sympathy for the ladies now that they’re whining about being the primary breadwinners, than I did back when they were whining about jobs being held by mostly-men. Once the household as it exists in this minute rests, sixty or seventy percent, on you, the sad truth of it is that everyone else can goof off to their heart’s content should they so choose. And you can’t.

But are the gentlemen complaining? Dr. Helen’s letter-writer doesn’t come out and explicitly say so. I damn well wouldn’t. And one day, I actually posed the question to a group of us while we were waiting for a table in a Sushi restaurant during a weekday lunch — said party being, at the time, all-guy. Would any of you be among the angst-ridden patriarchs who’d have a problem with it if your ladies out-earned you? Would any of you know any other gentlemen who might react that way? And the answers came back. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope, and nope.

So relatively early on, this became Thing I Doubt #1. I doubted it, because I had not seen it. And I still haven’t. I don’t believe in it. I think the fella whose forehead is pulsating and throbbing with jealous rage that his bride brings home a bigger paycheck, is a work of fiction. I think it’s an act of projection. I think what we’ve done, is raise our daughters to adulthood constantly beating them up over how other people feel…at all times. To the point where our women imagine problems of resentment to exist where, in fact, they do not. And in so doing we’ve made it needlessly difficult for our women to be happy. We’ve told them when they earn less than men, they should feel slighted, and when they earn more they should feel guilty.

Now I see (via Boortz) the rest of the world is coming around to view things my way.

It seems we’ve officially left “Leave It to Beaver” behind.

In the new dynamics of home economics, it’s not just that men want women to contribute financially to a marriage: The vast majority of men say they wouldn’t even mind if their wives brought home the bigger paycheck.
:
After years of being conditioned to believe that men relish the role of primary provider, researchers were surprised to discover that just 12 percent of men surveyed said they’d mind if their wife earned more than they do, and in general men seemed happy to share the breadwinner role. [emphasis mine]

Years of being conditioned to believe…rather shocking, I think, that the article comes right out and admits this. But in my world, it’s like a big fat duh.

It’s all a big crock. A crock designed to make women feel guilty. Somewhere, I’m firmly convinced, there is a real study kept under lock and key, a study that says women pay more money for newspapers and glossy magazines when they’re feeling guilty than when they don’t. Well, if women want to feel guilty, I can tell them when to feel guilty: If they share a house with me, don’t work, and let me come home to a kitchen garbage can that is full. In my real life we have that working the other way…my sweetie works later than I do sometimes, and I told her on the days she does, she won’t come home to a full garbage can. I was doing pretty good at holding up that bargain, and lately I’ve slipped a couple times.

But let’s be clear on this. If she got a massive raise and started making more than me, I’d think that was freakin’ awesome. I also think it would be fair. And I don’t know of a single stud anywhere on the entire civilized part of the globe, who’d say anything different. The disgruntled, second-fiddle breadwinner hubby, squirming away, working himself into a lather and an early grave in his stew of spite and bile, popular a legend as he may be, is just that and nothing more. And not a very good one. It’s like a husband wishing his wife would win more arguments by crying, have sex with more of his friends, or run up the credit cards to a higher balance. I’ve been doubting him for a very long time. I believe in the Loch Ness Monster before I believe in him. Welcome to the club, all you late-comer doubters.

I have always wondered how this actually got started. My wife usually made more than I did. My brother’s wife makes more than he. I don’t know about my other brother. I mean it has just never come up, it’s just not something you would think about.

This one has always kind of mystified me.
- Allen L | 03/13/2008 @ 19:10

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On Thing I Doubt #1Thursday, March 13th, 2008

On Thing I Doubt #1
Thursday, March 13th, 2008