At this moment, I'm in an expensive hotel in Miami Beach. I'm here because I'm attending DevCon, which is perhaps not as silly but perhaps just as nerdy as Comic-Con. I don't have much to tell you about this conference, except that I'm almost giddy with the opportunity. I never thought, when I asked, that my employer would actually pay for me to attend. I'm apparently consuming almost the entirety of my department's training budget to be here. The pressure is keeping me in attendance at all of the sessions and off the beach, which rumor has it is easily accessible out the back door of this hotel.
Because I must seek reimbursement for my travel expenses, and because I am less than 100% clear on the rules, limitations, and requirements for travel reimbursement, I am hesitant to spend any actual money here. This is a resort hotel, which translates in my mind to "expensive as hell," and I do not think "expensive as hell" translates well to expense reports when seeking reimbursement. So I'm trying my best to live on the cheap here. I took the "shared ride" option from the airport rather than the "private car" or "taxi" option.
And aside from the expense, which I suspect would not be fully reimbursed, on the few occasions that I get to travel outside of my own little white bread suburban world, why would I want to keep myself sequestered in the resort world, where a dinner not only costs me $40 or $50 but also keeps me well removed from the world I came here to visit?
So I considered, and I concluded that asking the working folk where they eat might be a good strategy. I asked the parking valets last night where I could find a cheap dive with good food. They hemmed and hawed, put their foreheads together, and suggested I walk down the road, across the bridge, and that way a few blocks. I took their advice and wandered off the resort hotel strip a ways. I've wandered that direction both days so far.
Last night, I was the only man at Asi's Grill and Sushi Bar that wasn't wearing a yarmulke. The shawarma laffa was delicious, and stunningly huge. I ate the other half for breakfast this morning. Tonight, I was the only non-Spanish-speaking person at Latin Cafe. I love these moments when I suddenly become acutely aware that I am the minority. As a white man in the South, they don't happen often, but that awkward, frightening, exquisite realization is delicious. Remind me to tell you about walking to Roxbury from my Emerson College dorm in 1991 to buy an audio cassette of a Malcolm X speech. With my freshly shaved head. Ah, brings a smile to my face just thinking of it.
Anyway: traveling. Childless. Good chance of getting fully reimbursed. I'm delirious with the thrill of where I am, what I'm doing, what I'm learning, and having the opportunity to miss my family. I can't wait to see Thumper and his Mama again when I get home, but I am relishing this chance to be me, by myself, for just a little while.
Oh, and I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm also naked. I'm spending almost all of my time in the hotel room naked. Apparently I like to shed my clothes when I'm completely alone. This goes back at least to (again) 1991, when I stayed in my ex-girlfriend's dorm room at Brandeis while she went home for the extended Thanksgiving weekend, when my Emerson College dorm closed and I couldn't afford to fly home. Why she let her ex stay in her room, I couldn't tell you. I suppose she was a kind and generous person, despite the fact that she dumped me. Yes, I spent most of that time in her room naked. She, being my ex-girlfriend, probably wouldn't appreciate knowing that, any more than you do now. You're welcome.
Showing posts with label College Days. Show all posts
Showing posts with label College Days. Show all posts
Monday, July 16, 2012
Friday, October 7, 2011
Being a Boy and Being a Man
I grabbed a book to read while Thumper bounced his ass off at Extreme Fun this morning, and because it's been on my shelf for 10 or more years, and I've never read it, I picked Christina Hoff Sommers' The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.
Now, before you get worked up over the term "Misguided Feminism," I think the essence of the book, that perhaps the author didn't choose to represent in the title because provocative turns of phrase are just plain good marketing, is that improving the academic standing of girls does not necessarily have to come at the expense of boys, and vice versa.
I bought this book years ago, when I was still thinking about the novel that I started to write but never finished as part of my Honors Program Creative Writing directed study in 1996 or thereabouts, a project I was still thinking about finishing in 2000 or so when I bought the book. The idea occurred to me, through the fervor of political correctness that permeated the University atmosphere throughout the '90's, that men in general, and white men in particular, were the villains of the historic and cultural tale that we were told, and how that indoctrination into our own villainy would affect us in the long term. It was supposed to be a novel about the marginalization of men, the irrelevance of men in family and cultural life.
So, anyway, here I am, 11 or 12 years later, a man in a non-traditional gender role, happily married to a woman who is happy with the value of the contributions that I make to our family, trying to teach my son how to be a good man, (despite the accusations of chauvinism that may now and again be raised against me), and I picked up this book. Having finished only 50 or 60 pages, I'm not in a position to say anything meaningful about the book itself, but it's certainly timely as I try to navigate the rough waters of playground etiquette and aggression.
A couple of weeks ago, Thumper ended a thoroughly pleasant play date by punching his best friend in the face. Most play dates or other excursions to playgrounds, bounce houses, and other places where children gather, involve some discussion, sooner or later, about not hitting, about being nice, about not taking toys from other kids. This, according to the book, is exactly the kind of aggressive behavior inherent in boys that the "shortchanged girls in public school" movement believes must be actively "re-socialized" if women are to make significant progress in this society. Sommers seems to assert that that progress has already been made, and then some, but that's not really the point.
Ultimately, though, I don't think raising a boy is so different from raising a girl, as far as trying to teach them to fit into the social order. Do we not all try to teach our kids to be nice to each other? Maybe for boys it's teaching your son not to punch his friend in the face while for girls it's teaching your daughter not to ostracize, or ridicule, or manipulate, or I don't know, whatever the little girl version of not being nice is. I don't believe in the pathology of masculinity, the idea that without intervention, the average man will likely become a predator of women. I believe in the value of teaching my son to be proud of strength and speed and skill, to work to improve these things in himself, to want to play games where scores are kept and winners declared. And I believe that these things can be taught while also teaching him not to punch his best friend in the face, to remind him that he does not want to be hit, or have toys taken away from him, and so he should not hit, or take toys away from, others.
I do not accept that masculinity is defined as a thirst for power and dominion, and that if it is not quelled early, it will develop into a destructive force.
I also hope that he can get through school without feeling marginalized, undervalued, despised, feared, or ignored.
Now, before you get worked up over the term "Misguided Feminism," I think the essence of the book, that perhaps the author didn't choose to represent in the title because provocative turns of phrase are just plain good marketing, is that improving the academic standing of girls does not necessarily have to come at the expense of boys, and vice versa.
I bought this book years ago, when I was still thinking about the novel that I started to write but never finished as part of my Honors Program Creative Writing directed study in 1996 or thereabouts, a project I was still thinking about finishing in 2000 or so when I bought the book. The idea occurred to me, through the fervor of political correctness that permeated the University atmosphere throughout the '90's, that men in general, and white men in particular, were the villains of the historic and cultural tale that we were told, and how that indoctrination into our own villainy would affect us in the long term. It was supposed to be a novel about the marginalization of men, the irrelevance of men in family and cultural life.
So, anyway, here I am, 11 or 12 years later, a man in a non-traditional gender role, happily married to a woman who is happy with the value of the contributions that I make to our family, trying to teach my son how to be a good man, (despite the accusations of chauvinism that may now and again be raised against me), and I picked up this book. Having finished only 50 or 60 pages, I'm not in a position to say anything meaningful about the book itself, but it's certainly timely as I try to navigate the rough waters of playground etiquette and aggression.
A couple of weeks ago, Thumper ended a thoroughly pleasant play date by punching his best friend in the face. Most play dates or other excursions to playgrounds, bounce houses, and other places where children gather, involve some discussion, sooner or later, about not hitting, about being nice, about not taking toys from other kids. This, according to the book, is exactly the kind of aggressive behavior inherent in boys that the "shortchanged girls in public school" movement believes must be actively "re-socialized" if women are to make significant progress in this society. Sommers seems to assert that that progress has already been made, and then some, but that's not really the point.
Ultimately, though, I don't think raising a boy is so different from raising a girl, as far as trying to teach them to fit into the social order. Do we not all try to teach our kids to be nice to each other? Maybe for boys it's teaching your son not to punch his friend in the face while for girls it's teaching your daughter not to ostracize, or ridicule, or manipulate, or I don't know, whatever the little girl version of not being nice is. I don't believe in the pathology of masculinity, the idea that without intervention, the average man will likely become a predator of women. I believe in the value of teaching my son to be proud of strength and speed and skill, to work to improve these things in himself, to want to play games where scores are kept and winners declared. And I believe that these things can be taught while also teaching him not to punch his best friend in the face, to remind him that he does not want to be hit, or have toys taken away from him, and so he should not hit, or take toys away from, others.
I do not accept that masculinity is defined as a thirst for power and dominion, and that if it is not quelled early, it will develop into a destructive force.
I also hope that he can get through school without feeling marginalized, undervalued, despised, feared, or ignored.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
What Did I Expect? That IS What It's For...
Some time ago, I thought, "Facebook? Why the hell not?"
In 1991, I moved from suburban Dallas to Back Bay Boston to attend Emerson College. I lived in the Fensgate dorm. The cool kids got to live in the bizarre and apparently haunted Charlesgate dorm, but alas, I wasn't that cool. Emerson sold both dorms as they dumped their Back Bay properties and centralized their campus downtown. Now Fensgate is the Charlesview, a luxury condo development. Rumor at the time had it that it had been a mental hospital long ago, because there were strange panels in the door that looked like they had at one time been cutouts, supposedly for passing through food to the patients locked inside. Not true. It was a hotel. Maybe that was the Fensgate uncool kids attempt at one-upping the Charlesgate cool kids.
Anyway, what was I talking about again?
Oh, yeah. I had three roommates. The first, a sophomore, moved in a week earlier than the rest of us because he had volunteered for Orientation Week, showing the new students and their parents around. Consequently, he claimed the dorm room's one bedroom for himself, leaving the rest of us to share the common room. He was also extremely active in his fraternity, which was actually a Boston University chapter, so we didn't see that much of him in the room. Within a few weeks of the start of school, the second roommate was asked to take a leave of absence to seek treatment for alcoholism. So, for the most part, the room was shared by the third roommate and me.
We weren't the best of friends, but we got along fairly well. He was a charmer and a ladies man. I latched onto him because I didn't have a lot of friends. He invited me to Seder at Passover, and his parents welcomed me warmly. We lived one floor above Aerie, and once she and I got over hating each other, she, the roommate and I would spend a lot of time hanging out in our room together. He was a relentless flirt, and she enjoyed messing with him, and I liked playing along. Except when he tried to tell her that he could drive her crazy by kissing her neck, and she said something to the effect of "good luck with that," and I had to leave the room when he began to try while she stared off into space looking bored. Weird moment. Didn't realize at the time that it bothered me because I was jealous. We were still months away from being a couple.
So summer approached, and I decided to stay in Boston, though I couldn't afford to continue going to Emerson. The roommate wanted to move out of the dorm and into an apartment, so we agreed to be roommates. We searched for an apartment, but I couldn't afford rents in the Back Bay area, and he refused to compromise and live a little further out, even though we were talking about places right on the T line, only a few minutes ride away. He was spending his parents' money and had no financial motivation to live further out, so he flatly refused to do it. That should've been my first clue that this wasn't going to be a good arrangement. In fact, it should have been the latest in a string of clues, but I wanted to stay and didn't have many other prospects, so I went ahead.
We rented an expensive condo right at Mass. Ave. and Commonwealth Ave. Not a cheap neighborhood. Nope. But so that I could afford it, we got a one-bedroom, and he paid (slightly) more per month and got the bedroom. I lived on a pullout couch in the living room. I had been essentially doing the same in the dorm, so I thought it wasn't that bad of a compromise.
But it became quickly apparent that he didn't really respect it as my "bedroom." I worked overnights, and came home to find his party guests of the night before sleeping everywhere, including my couch.
When Aerie and I had our first kiss, and I told him about it, he told me to be leery of her because she'd wanted to do the same thing with him not long before, but he'd refused. Was it true? No, it was not. Yeah, he was that kind of friend.
As my relationship with Aerie blossomed, we once did a little fooling around while the roommate was out. In the middle of it, we heard his key in the lock. I jumped up and ran toward the door yelling for him to give us just a minute, but of course he wouldn't. He came right in, doing his best to get a look at her in flagrante delicto. He found it hilarious, and he teased me for weeks about coming through the door and seeing me running right at him, naked. Hilarious.
Then, with 4 months left in the lease, he stopped coming home. One of his grandparents had died, and he was spending more time at home, or something like that. I don't remember exactly. He just left. We talked to our landlord about letting Aerie take over the roommate's part of the lease, or to sublet it from the roommate, or something. But the landlord had a perfectly good lease and didn't care to make a change. So the roommate's mother continued to pay his portion of the rent, and I told the roommate we'd pay him back monthly. He told me to just hold on to the money and pay him the total at the end of the lease.
Then after Aerie moved in, the roommate decided he wanted to come back. We were almost through with the lease anyway. He never really moved back, but he did come and go whenever he pleased, and I didn't put it past him to do something to mess with us, so I put my own lock on the bedroom door, and we rode out the awkwardness. And when the time came to pay him, well... I didn't. I kept the money. I still feel guilty about it, a little. Mostly I regret, though, that it was his mother's money I stole and not his.
We ran into him a few years later, walking on the street on New Year's Eve. He wished us the most sarcastic Happy New Year ever, and kept walking, and we never saw him again.
But yesterday I got a Facebook message from him: "Well, well, well. If it isn't Rodius. What's it's been, 15 years? You still with Aerie? How the hell are you? What have you been up to?"
And that's when it hit me: Oh. Facebook. That's why the hell not.
In 1991, I moved from suburban Dallas to Back Bay Boston to attend Emerson College. I lived in the Fensgate dorm. The cool kids got to live in the bizarre and apparently haunted Charlesgate dorm, but alas, I wasn't that cool. Emerson sold both dorms as they dumped their Back Bay properties and centralized their campus downtown. Now Fensgate is the Charlesview, a luxury condo development. Rumor at the time had it that it had been a mental hospital long ago, because there were strange panels in the door that looked like they had at one time been cutouts, supposedly for passing through food to the patients locked inside. Not true. It was a hotel. Maybe that was the Fensgate uncool kids attempt at one-upping the Charlesgate cool kids.
Anyway, what was I talking about again?
Oh, yeah. I had three roommates. The first, a sophomore, moved in a week earlier than the rest of us because he had volunteered for Orientation Week, showing the new students and their parents around. Consequently, he claimed the dorm room's one bedroom for himself, leaving the rest of us to share the common room. He was also extremely active in his fraternity, which was actually a Boston University chapter, so we didn't see that much of him in the room. Within a few weeks of the start of school, the second roommate was asked to take a leave of absence to seek treatment for alcoholism. So, for the most part, the room was shared by the third roommate and me.
We weren't the best of friends, but we got along fairly well. He was a charmer and a ladies man. I latched onto him because I didn't have a lot of friends. He invited me to Seder at Passover, and his parents welcomed me warmly. We lived one floor above Aerie, and once she and I got over hating each other, she, the roommate and I would spend a lot of time hanging out in our room together. He was a relentless flirt, and she enjoyed messing with him, and I liked playing along. Except when he tried to tell her that he could drive her crazy by kissing her neck, and she said something to the effect of "good luck with that," and I had to leave the room when he began to try while she stared off into space looking bored. Weird moment. Didn't realize at the time that it bothered me because I was jealous. We were still months away from being a couple.
So summer approached, and I decided to stay in Boston, though I couldn't afford to continue going to Emerson. The roommate wanted to move out of the dorm and into an apartment, so we agreed to be roommates. We searched for an apartment, but I couldn't afford rents in the Back Bay area, and he refused to compromise and live a little further out, even though we were talking about places right on the T line, only a few minutes ride away. He was spending his parents' money and had no financial motivation to live further out, so he flatly refused to do it. That should've been my first clue that this wasn't going to be a good arrangement. In fact, it should have been the latest in a string of clues, but I wanted to stay and didn't have many other prospects, so I went ahead.
We rented an expensive condo right at Mass. Ave. and Commonwealth Ave. Not a cheap neighborhood. Nope. But so that I could afford it, we got a one-bedroom, and he paid (slightly) more per month and got the bedroom. I lived on a pullout couch in the living room. I had been essentially doing the same in the dorm, so I thought it wasn't that bad of a compromise.
But it became quickly apparent that he didn't really respect it as my "bedroom." I worked overnights, and came home to find his party guests of the night before sleeping everywhere, including my couch.
When Aerie and I had our first kiss, and I told him about it, he told me to be leery of her because she'd wanted to do the same thing with him not long before, but he'd refused. Was it true? No, it was not. Yeah, he was that kind of friend.
As my relationship with Aerie blossomed, we once did a little fooling around while the roommate was out. In the middle of it, we heard his key in the lock. I jumped up and ran toward the door yelling for him to give us just a minute, but of course he wouldn't. He came right in, doing his best to get a look at her in flagrante delicto. He found it hilarious, and he teased me for weeks about coming through the door and seeing me running right at him, naked. Hilarious.
Then, with 4 months left in the lease, he stopped coming home. One of his grandparents had died, and he was spending more time at home, or something like that. I don't remember exactly. He just left. We talked to our landlord about letting Aerie take over the roommate's part of the lease, or to sublet it from the roommate, or something. But the landlord had a perfectly good lease and didn't care to make a change. So the roommate's mother continued to pay his portion of the rent, and I told the roommate we'd pay him back monthly. He told me to just hold on to the money and pay him the total at the end of the lease.
Then after Aerie moved in, the roommate decided he wanted to come back. We were almost through with the lease anyway. He never really moved back, but he did come and go whenever he pleased, and I didn't put it past him to do something to mess with us, so I put my own lock on the bedroom door, and we rode out the awkwardness. And when the time came to pay him, well... I didn't. I kept the money. I still feel guilty about it, a little. Mostly I regret, though, that it was his mother's money I stole and not his.
We ran into him a few years later, walking on the street on New Year's Eve. He wished us the most sarcastic Happy New Year ever, and kept walking, and we never saw him again.
But yesterday I got a Facebook message from him: "Well, well, well. If it isn't Rodius. What's it's been, 15 years? You still with Aerie? How the hell are you? What have you been up to?"
And that's when it hit me: Oh. Facebook. That's why the hell not.
Monday, June 16, 2008
How To Watch Your Father Sleep
Guest blog entry from Mrs. Rodius...
You really don't want to read this. I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. Fitting, since it was recently Father's Day. But, this started several weeks ago.
As I mentioned in my last guest blog, Thumper's been vocalizing more these days and he often talks about "Bob." He bob, bob, bob, bob, bobs so often that The Man and I have decided Bob must be Thumper's imaginary friend, and he often blames Bob for the things that crash! And, Bob is the reason why Thumper does some of the things that he should not...Bob told him to. My dad was Bob, and I lost him a long time ago now. Some say that imaginary friends aren't imaginary at all...that they are some other force or form or spirit. I don't know...the thought has struck me, though.
It makes me sad that Thumper will never know him and that my father will never have the chance to meet the little guy I'm so proud of. He was far from perfect, but he was that dad running like mad away from the sewer he'd just dropped an M-80 down (on the 4th of July) as all of us neighborhood kids cheered on. Boom! Ha ha ha ha ha!
The Man recently resurrected some old writing we'd stored on floppy disk. Floppy disks...yep! I came across this. One of my writing professors used to have us do free writing exercises to start class. She'd give us a topic and we'd just start writing. It was an exercise in free-flow writing. I believe this day must have been "What if..." Excuse how rough it is. I never went back to flesh it out, though that was the idea behind the free-flow writing.
How To Watch Your Father Sleep
What if when you were nine years old your dog died? She'd have been german shepherd and husky and her name would have been Kelly, and she'd have been the first thing in your life to go and die on you. What would you do? You might cry a bit and think about the time when you were out riding your bicycle (and Kelly was outside too because there wasn't a leash law then) and Mikey Powell came up and stood in front of you and wouldn't let you by. You would remember that you had been too scared to do anything when he pushed you off your bike, but Kelly had rescued you. She'd charged at him barking and barking, and you knew she didn't bite, but Mikey had run away, the piss scared out of him.
And what would you do if you found out years later that all day long your mother thought she heard the dog whining on the back porch where your parents had hidden her the morning they found her cold as stone on the kitchen floor? They would have done this so you wouldn't know until after you had come home from school that day. Parents do that kind of thing. If Kelly had been your goldfish, they would have bought you another and secretly switched it with Kelly thinking you wouldn't know the difference, trying to spare you this pain. But a dog would have been much more difficult to switch, so it was the back porch until they could get rid of her.
"I kept thinking I heard her crying on the porch," your mother will tell you one day when you are older as you sit in the kitchen drinking coffee with her and some of her friends. "I kept going out there to check and I'd say 'Kelly?', but it was just my imagination."
You won't be mad or sad when she says this, having long since gotten over it. You will think it's eerie and let the words pass away with the rest of the small talk. It will come back to you though, this thought.
Because when you were twelve, just a few years after Kelly, you would stumble groggily into the kitchen to find your father as gray as modeling clay sitting at the breakfast table. He'd be sweaty and cold and you'd watch, unable to move, as he turned to your mother and said "I think I better go to the hospital."
What would you do if you heard this from a man who refused to take so much as an aspirin when he had a headache? You won't be able to remember a single day when you shivered more, even though it was June. Your mother would come home from the hospital, alone and crying. She would continue to cry as she called all of your relatives to say that Bob had had a heart attack and they don't know if it means surgery or not but that she needed everyone's support and couldn't some of them take one or two of the kids for a while if she needed them to?
You wouldn't know what to do that night or when two months, one more heart attack and by-pass surgery later, he finally came home from the hospital. Your mother might tell you what you have to do. You musn't upset him and you kids musn't fight in front of him and your father won't be allowed to do heavy lifting anymore, so if you're a boy, you must do it for him. You might do it for him anyway, even if you are a girl.
You would have only gone to visit your father once while he was in the hospital because you had gotten so upset that one time that your mother didn't think it was a good idea for you to go again. You wouldn't have been able to say much or even look at your father with all those wires and tubes attached to him and that machine that beeped in time with his heart. Your father would have noticed you staring out the window and would have called you over to him to explain to you what each tube and wire was for and to tell you that he was going to be okay. And you'd have choked trying not to cry because you were ashamed. Ashamed because you're not supposed to upset someone in I.C.U. and because he was the one in need, not you.
Once your father was home from the hospital, you'd begin to notice that you watched him a lot more than you ever used to. He'd be lying on the couch taking a nap after work and you'd stop suddenly, your face tingling and fear cementing all of your joints and you'd stare. You'd stare, but then you would relax and tell yourself yes, he was breathing. You'd get really good at scaring yourself this way. You'd practice different methods of ignoring other sounds, the television, a car passing on the street. It would be a game almost, a kind of art, shutting out all other noises just to hear his breathing. This is how you watch your father sleep.
And years would pass and your father's health would continue to deteriorate and all new complications would develop, too many sicknesses for one man. You would wonder why he refused to quit smoking and why he couldn't seem to stick to the doctor's diet. You wonder how long a death can be carried out. You would think it's strange as you stood outside his bedroom door listening, that he goes to bed earlier than you now. Yes, he was breathing and it was just your imagination. But no matter how many times you tell yourself this, you can never make it stop. You always find yourself straining, holding your own breath to listen for his.
You really don't want to read this. I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. Fitting, since it was recently Father's Day. But, this started several weeks ago.
As I mentioned in my last guest blog, Thumper's been vocalizing more these days and he often talks about "Bob." He bob, bob, bob, bob, bobs so often that The Man and I have decided Bob must be Thumper's imaginary friend, and he often blames Bob for the things that crash! And, Bob is the reason why Thumper does some of the things that he should not...Bob told him to. My dad was Bob, and I lost him a long time ago now. Some say that imaginary friends aren't imaginary at all...that they are some other force or form or spirit. I don't know...the thought has struck me, though.
It makes me sad that Thumper will never know him and that my father will never have the chance to meet the little guy I'm so proud of. He was far from perfect, but he was that dad running like mad away from the sewer he'd just dropped an M-80 down (on the 4th of July) as all of us neighborhood kids cheered on. Boom! Ha ha ha ha ha!
The Man recently resurrected some old writing we'd stored on floppy disk. Floppy disks...yep! I came across this. One of my writing professors used to have us do free writing exercises to start class. She'd give us a topic and we'd just start writing. It was an exercise in free-flow writing. I believe this day must have been "What if..." Excuse how rough it is. I never went back to flesh it out, though that was the idea behind the free-flow writing.
How To Watch Your Father Sleep
What if when you were nine years old your dog died? She'd have been german shepherd and husky and her name would have been Kelly, and she'd have been the first thing in your life to go and die on you. What would you do? You might cry a bit and think about the time when you were out riding your bicycle (and Kelly was outside too because there wasn't a leash law then) and Mikey Powell came up and stood in front of you and wouldn't let you by. You would remember that you had been too scared to do anything when he pushed you off your bike, but Kelly had rescued you. She'd charged at him barking and barking, and you knew she didn't bite, but Mikey had run away, the piss scared out of him.
And what would you do if you found out years later that all day long your mother thought she heard the dog whining on the back porch where your parents had hidden her the morning they found her cold as stone on the kitchen floor? They would have done this so you wouldn't know until after you had come home from school that day. Parents do that kind of thing. If Kelly had been your goldfish, they would have bought you another and secretly switched it with Kelly thinking you wouldn't know the difference, trying to spare you this pain. But a dog would have been much more difficult to switch, so it was the back porch until they could get rid of her.
"I kept thinking I heard her crying on the porch," your mother will tell you one day when you are older as you sit in the kitchen drinking coffee with her and some of her friends. "I kept going out there to check and I'd say 'Kelly?', but it was just my imagination."
You won't be mad or sad when she says this, having long since gotten over it. You will think it's eerie and let the words pass away with the rest of the small talk. It will come back to you though, this thought.
Because when you were twelve, just a few years after Kelly, you would stumble groggily into the kitchen to find your father as gray as modeling clay sitting at the breakfast table. He'd be sweaty and cold and you'd watch, unable to move, as he turned to your mother and said "I think I better go to the hospital."
What would you do if you heard this from a man who refused to take so much as an aspirin when he had a headache? You won't be able to remember a single day when you shivered more, even though it was June. Your mother would come home from the hospital, alone and crying. She would continue to cry as she called all of your relatives to say that Bob had had a heart attack and they don't know if it means surgery or not but that she needed everyone's support and couldn't some of them take one or two of the kids for a while if she needed them to?
You wouldn't know what to do that night or when two months, one more heart attack and by-pass surgery later, he finally came home from the hospital. Your mother might tell you what you have to do. You musn't upset him and you kids musn't fight in front of him and your father won't be allowed to do heavy lifting anymore, so if you're a boy, you must do it for him. You might do it for him anyway, even if you are a girl.
You would have only gone to visit your father once while he was in the hospital because you had gotten so upset that one time that your mother didn't think it was a good idea for you to go again. You wouldn't have been able to say much or even look at your father with all those wires and tubes attached to him and that machine that beeped in time with his heart. Your father would have noticed you staring out the window and would have called you over to him to explain to you what each tube and wire was for and to tell you that he was going to be okay. And you'd have choked trying not to cry because you were ashamed. Ashamed because you're not supposed to upset someone in I.C.U. and because he was the one in need, not you.
Once your father was home from the hospital, you'd begin to notice that you watched him a lot more than you ever used to. He'd be lying on the couch taking a nap after work and you'd stop suddenly, your face tingling and fear cementing all of your joints and you'd stare. You'd stare, but then you would relax and tell yourself yes, he was breathing. You'd get really good at scaring yourself this way. You'd practice different methods of ignoring other sounds, the television, a car passing on the street. It would be a game almost, a kind of art, shutting out all other noises just to hear his breathing. This is how you watch your father sleep.
And years would pass and your father's health would continue to deteriorate and all new complications would develop, too many sicknesses for one man. You would wonder why he refused to quit smoking and why he couldn't seem to stick to the doctor's diet. You wonder how long a death can be carried out. You would think it's strange as you stood outside his bedroom door listening, that he goes to bed earlier than you now. Yes, he was breathing and it was just your imagination. But no matter how many times you tell yourself this, you can never make it stop. You always find yourself straining, holding your own breath to listen for his.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Oh, You Know, This and That
This morning I finally hit ten pounds lost since the boy was born. A pound a month isn't a great rate, but it's better than nothing. And better than gaining. I didn't, as I hoped, get to the point before summer arrived where I'm not self-conscious about taking off my shirt at the pool. Thumper loves the pools, as do Freckles and Robert McGee, so we'll be spending a lot of time at them this summer. I guess I have to keep trying, and also try to get to the point where I don't worry about what other people think. It's not like everybody else out there is a swimsuit model.
I gave Thumper his first haircut last night. It was hanging over his ears. The Mrs. and I periodically mentioned that we should do something about it, but it seemed like it would be hard to accomplish on a squirming infant, so we never followed through. I told her I could just buzz it all off like I do with my own, but she wasn't keen on that idea. So last night, I had a few drinks, took the sharp, steely, slicing implement in shaking fingers, and let fly. Just kidding; I only had one drink. I trimmed over his ears and straightened out his bangs where his widow's peak made them uneven. Actually, they're still uneven. It's hard to cut a squirming infant's hair. I kind of regret doing it now; I think I Delilahed his Samsony cuteness. He looks like he's moved a bit down the scale from babyish to boyish.
I haven't been blogging or twittering much. I've just kinda been laying low. I've been thinking a lot about the portions of What the Fuck Do We Know? that deal with shaping one's own reality and about how people repeat the same behaviors because they've established neural net patterns and they're addicted to the brain chemicals that result from those behaviors. I've also been playing a lot of Scarface. These two things don't exactly go together very well, but when I found out that the latest in my beloved Grand Theft Auto series, GTA IV will not be available on Playstation 2, and simultaneously realized that I have no interest in purchasing a PS3 or XBox, or Wii, or whatever else, I used the last trade-in credits that I was saving for GTA IV on the closest thing I could find: Scarface. Last night I folded some diapers, then killed the Diaz brothers with a chainsaw. After that, I folded some more diapers, then took over the coke warehouse. It's cathartic, but not very New Agey.
I thought I was going to blog about What the Fuck Do We Know?, but by now I think it's gone the way of the review I was going to write for The Time Traveler's Wife: by the time I got around to it, the moment had passed.
I also thought I was going to blog about what Now Me thinks of 1995 Me and the paper he wrote, but it turns out I don't have that much to say. It was a paper written five months before I was married and twelve years before I actually became a househusband. The part about the fear of being perceived as gay is a little stupid, but I guess the movement from "househusband" = "less manly," to "less manly" = "gay" makes sense in a way. I do feel awkward being the only dad sometimes, but I don't feel a loss of respect, but it is twelve years later, and I doubt that it could still be said that "[s]tatistically, few men enter into the role of househusband completely voluntarily." I get Tracey's thoughts on gender socialization and how I omitted any consideration of same-sex couples, but I think it was outside the scope of the paper since it focused on reversing gender roles in heterosexual couples that had previously embraced more traditional gender roles. I also think it's part of her template to be ever-vigilant for racism/sexism/homophobism. And in my opinion, her illustrative boy being raised by lesbians mothers is still likely be socialized toward traditional male gender roles by one or the other of those mothers anyway. At least, that's what my experience with lesbian couples leads me to believe. But perhaps that's homophobic to say. Still, I'm glad she read it and had something to say about it. Thanks, Tracey!
We'll be at the Brushy Creek Lake Park water playscape around 12:30 today. Stop by and say hello. It's a good time.
I gave Thumper his first haircut last night. It was hanging over his ears. The Mrs. and I periodically mentioned that we should do something about it, but it seemed like it would be hard to accomplish on a squirming infant, so we never followed through. I told her I could just buzz it all off like I do with my own, but she wasn't keen on that idea. So last night, I had a few drinks, took the sharp, steely, slicing implement in shaking fingers, and let fly. Just kidding; I only had one drink. I trimmed over his ears and straightened out his bangs where his widow's peak made them uneven. Actually, they're still uneven. It's hard to cut a squirming infant's hair. I kind of regret doing it now; I think I Delilahed his Samsony cuteness. He looks like he's moved a bit down the scale from babyish to boyish.
I haven't been blogging or twittering much. I've just kinda been laying low. I've been thinking a lot about the portions of What the Fuck Do We Know? that deal with shaping one's own reality and about how people repeat the same behaviors because they've established neural net patterns and they're addicted to the brain chemicals that result from those behaviors. I've also been playing a lot of Scarface. These two things don't exactly go together very well, but when I found out that the latest in my beloved Grand Theft Auto series, GTA IV will not be available on Playstation 2, and simultaneously realized that I have no interest in purchasing a PS3 or XBox, or Wii, or whatever else, I used the last trade-in credits that I was saving for GTA IV on the closest thing I could find: Scarface. Last night I folded some diapers, then killed the Diaz brothers with a chainsaw. After that, I folded some more diapers, then took over the coke warehouse. It's cathartic, but not very New Agey.
I thought I was going to blog about What the Fuck Do We Know?, but by now I think it's gone the way of the review I was going to write for The Time Traveler's Wife: by the time I got around to it, the moment had passed.
I also thought I was going to blog about what Now Me thinks of 1995 Me and the paper he wrote, but it turns out I don't have that much to say. It was a paper written five months before I was married and twelve years before I actually became a househusband. The part about the fear of being perceived as gay is a little stupid, but I guess the movement from "househusband" = "less manly," to "less manly" = "gay" makes sense in a way. I do feel awkward being the only dad sometimes, but I don't feel a loss of respect, but it is twelve years later, and I doubt that it could still be said that "[s]tatistically, few men enter into the role of househusband completely voluntarily." I get Tracey's thoughts on gender socialization and how I omitted any consideration of same-sex couples, but I think it was outside the scope of the paper since it focused on reversing gender roles in heterosexual couples that had previously embraced more traditional gender roles. I also think it's part of her template to be ever-vigilant for racism/sexism/homophobism. And in my opinion, her illustrative boy being raised by lesbians mothers is still likely be socialized toward traditional male gender roles by one or the other of those mothers anyway. At least, that's what my experience with lesbian couples leads me to believe. But perhaps that's homophobic to say. Still, I'm glad she read it and had something to say about it. Thanks, Tracey!
We'll be at the Brushy Creek Lake Park water playscape around 12:30 today. Stop by and say hello. It's a good time.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Househusbands, Part 2
My paper from May 1995, continued...
Changes in the Men
A househusband is defined as a married man who does the bulk of the domestic chores and is in the case of families with children, the primary caregiver of the children. He does the cooking and the cleaning, as well as the feeding, playing, and disciplining of the kids. This does not preclude him from working, either inside or outside the home, but in most cases he has left a career, temporarily or not, and fulfills the domestic chores while his wife provides the resources.
The husband changes as a result. The socialization of gender roles is so strong, that “there is a contradiction between the status of being male and the status of someone performing child-care tasks.”6 The change of roles can create changes in personality, restructuring of priorities, and redevelopment of ideals. The men can find new insights into their relationships with their wives, creating a more egalitarian bond. Men’s attitudes about work outside of the home change, too.
In Beer’s study of fifty-five househusbands in New York, men reported both positive and negative affects to the change of gender roles. Many reported a loss of status, or even a loss of respect from their children, from leaving a good-paying job to taking care of the household. Some expressed a feeling of awkwardness as the only father publicly displaying traditionally motherly roles; as one father says, “I felt strange taking her [his daughter] to the park or the Botanical Gardens and being the only father there.”7 Because of their recollections of certain tasks as always done by women, some men report feeling “twinges of , ‘this is not my place.’”8
More telling, however, are the positive responses men gave to the question, “In what ways do you feel different about yourself since you started doing housework?” Many men reported new feelings of competence, self-sufficiency, responsibility, and closer relationships with the members of their families. As one respondent put it, he felt “more complete, more self-sufficient. I find that sometimes it helps my thinking, by doing something like washing dishes; you have some time and space.”9 Their new sense of independence affects their relationships with their wives: “I just feel that I’m sharing, that’s all. The family is a matter of taking part, of participating together. It’s alleviating some of the burden from the wife.”10 They also feel closer to the family, more intimately involved with it: “I feel that I am now a bigger part of my home,”...”I am in much more intimate and daily contact with the kids. I understand them better, I understand women better.”11 Approaching their families with new attitudes about what the appropriate roles for men and women, househusbands inevitably change their relationships with their wives and children. They have a new appreciation for what the traditional female role involves, though it is an unpaid position. They learn firsthand what wives and mothers must do, and what they must sacrifice, in order to fulfill their roles. More egalitarian relationships, though perhaps complicated in many cases by tensions over how tasks should be divided, are the result. A rise in the acceptance of equality by men and women begins with a rise in egalitarian marriages.
Changes in the Marital Relationship
In households where the gender roles had been traditional, with the husband working outside the home and the wife doing the domestic labor, and later were reversed with the husband at home, men face changes in the relationships with their wives. Men may be balancing a new sense of respect for their wives accomplishments with a feeling of ambivalence to the housework itself. Some couples may experience difficulties in dividing labor equally, in finding a balance between different standards for housework.
Although there may be tensions, househusbands are able to see their marriage as a partnership in all respects; the lines between exclusively male and exclusively female roles are blurred. As a result, when the gender roles, which may carry inherent value judgments for many men regarding the inequality of the worth of the work assigned to those roles, become interchangeable, the sense of inequality for the person performing the domestic tasks is diminished, and the marriage operates in a more egalitarian manner.
Traditionally, marriage has followed three patterns: the owner-property pattern, the head-complement pattern, and the senior partner-junior partner pattern.12 The liberation of women through the nineteenth century was essentially to move the relationship closer to equality by stressing the importance of the female sphere; with men cooperating in fulfilling the obligations of the domestic sphere and women cooperating in fulfilling the role of the breadwinner, a new equality in the decision-making power is achievable, even inevitable. A more open and sharing marriage can become a marriage of greater intimacy.
Changes in the Children
As the primary agents of socialization in a young child’s life, the parents and their attitudes about gender roles affects how that child will perceive his or her own obligations as a man or a woman. If a female child grows up with parents who share domestic tasks or with a father who is the primary caretaker of the children, she is less likely to grow up believing that she is limited to a domestic life, or that men are excluded from domesticity. Similarly, a young boy living with a househusband father may grow up accepting that the domestic realm is the responsibility not of the woman, but of the man as well. With the increase in the number of working women, the opportunity for men to take on a domestic role grows, and the culture itself and its socialized norms begin to change.
There is some evidence that children with fathers involved in their lives to the degree that a househusband must be have advantages to children who spend less time with their fathers. For boys, the process of socialization to male roles is heavily dependent on the behavior of all the males that a child perceives. With a father present, a child is less dependent on outside sources, such as television, movies, and peers, for learning the social norms for male behavior. Such a father’s opportunity for influencing his child is enormous, far greater than the father who is most often at work.
Girls, too, depend on role models for socialization when they begin to learn how to form relationships with men. A father in an egalitarian relationship with his wife provides a model for how relationships should be constructed, and the child of such a relationship may be more likely to seek such an equal pairing for herself, as well. Girls can be socialized to believe that wife-battering is acceptable, that the domestic sphere is the woman’s sphere, and that men are the accepted wielders of power in relationships. If the models of relationships in her life are contrary to that kind of imbalance, then she is more likely to assert her own equality in relationships.
Conclusion
The househusband role, though accounting for only a small portion of husbands and fathers, is a role that has tremendous potential for altering the structure of the family, the relationships of the members of the family, and the ways in which both men and women are socialized into an understanding of proper gender roles. A househusband is a father who is deeply involved in the lives of his children and husband who is understanding of the tensions of the female role and able to accept his wife on a more egalitarian level. In both of these roles, husband and father, a househusband has tremendous potential for deepening the intimacy of his familial relationships and opening up new opportunities and perspectives for his wife and his children.
Bibliography:
Beer, William R., Househusbands: Men and Housework in American Families.
South Hadley, Massachusetts, Bergin & Carvey Publishers, Inc. 1983.
Lindsey, Linda L., Gender Roles: A Sociological Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, Inc. 1994.
Rotundo, Anthony E., American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.
Scanzoni, John and Letha D., Men, Women, and Change: A Sociology of Marriage and Family. New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1988.
Footnotes:
6Beer, Househusbands, p.73.
7Ibid. p. 77.
8Ibid.
9Ibid. p. 78.
10Ibid. p. 79.
11Ibid.
12Scanzoni, p. 263.
Changes in the Men
A househusband is defined as a married man who does the bulk of the domestic chores and is in the case of families with children, the primary caregiver of the children. He does the cooking and the cleaning, as well as the feeding, playing, and disciplining of the kids. This does not preclude him from working, either inside or outside the home, but in most cases he has left a career, temporarily or not, and fulfills the domestic chores while his wife provides the resources.
The husband changes as a result. The socialization of gender roles is so strong, that “there is a contradiction between the status of being male and the status of someone performing child-care tasks.”6 The change of roles can create changes in personality, restructuring of priorities, and redevelopment of ideals. The men can find new insights into their relationships with their wives, creating a more egalitarian bond. Men’s attitudes about work outside of the home change, too.
In Beer’s study of fifty-five househusbands in New York, men reported both positive and negative affects to the change of gender roles. Many reported a loss of status, or even a loss of respect from their children, from leaving a good-paying job to taking care of the household. Some expressed a feeling of awkwardness as the only father publicly displaying traditionally motherly roles; as one father says, “I felt strange taking her [his daughter] to the park or the Botanical Gardens and being the only father there.”7 Because of their recollections of certain tasks as always done by women, some men report feeling “twinges of , ‘this is not my place.’”8
More telling, however, are the positive responses men gave to the question, “In what ways do you feel different about yourself since you started doing housework?” Many men reported new feelings of competence, self-sufficiency, responsibility, and closer relationships with the members of their families. As one respondent put it, he felt “more complete, more self-sufficient. I find that sometimes it helps my thinking, by doing something like washing dishes; you have some time and space.”9 Their new sense of independence affects their relationships with their wives: “I just feel that I’m sharing, that’s all. The family is a matter of taking part, of participating together. It’s alleviating some of the burden from the wife.”10 They also feel closer to the family, more intimately involved with it: “I feel that I am now a bigger part of my home,”...”I am in much more intimate and daily contact with the kids. I understand them better, I understand women better.”11 Approaching their families with new attitudes about what the appropriate roles for men and women, househusbands inevitably change their relationships with their wives and children. They have a new appreciation for what the traditional female role involves, though it is an unpaid position. They learn firsthand what wives and mothers must do, and what they must sacrifice, in order to fulfill their roles. More egalitarian relationships, though perhaps complicated in many cases by tensions over how tasks should be divided, are the result. A rise in the acceptance of equality by men and women begins with a rise in egalitarian marriages.
Changes in the Marital Relationship
In households where the gender roles had been traditional, with the husband working outside the home and the wife doing the domestic labor, and later were reversed with the husband at home, men face changes in the relationships with their wives. Men may be balancing a new sense of respect for their wives accomplishments with a feeling of ambivalence to the housework itself. Some couples may experience difficulties in dividing labor equally, in finding a balance between different standards for housework.
Although there may be tensions, househusbands are able to see their marriage as a partnership in all respects; the lines between exclusively male and exclusively female roles are blurred. As a result, when the gender roles, which may carry inherent value judgments for many men regarding the inequality of the worth of the work assigned to those roles, become interchangeable, the sense of inequality for the person performing the domestic tasks is diminished, and the marriage operates in a more egalitarian manner.
Traditionally, marriage has followed three patterns: the owner-property pattern, the head-complement pattern, and the senior partner-junior partner pattern.12 The liberation of women through the nineteenth century was essentially to move the relationship closer to equality by stressing the importance of the female sphere; with men cooperating in fulfilling the obligations of the domestic sphere and women cooperating in fulfilling the role of the breadwinner, a new equality in the decision-making power is achievable, even inevitable. A more open and sharing marriage can become a marriage of greater intimacy.
Changes in the Children
As the primary agents of socialization in a young child’s life, the parents and their attitudes about gender roles affects how that child will perceive his or her own obligations as a man or a woman. If a female child grows up with parents who share domestic tasks or with a father who is the primary caretaker of the children, she is less likely to grow up believing that she is limited to a domestic life, or that men are excluded from domesticity. Similarly, a young boy living with a househusband father may grow up accepting that the domestic realm is the responsibility not of the woman, but of the man as well. With the increase in the number of working women, the opportunity for men to take on a domestic role grows, and the culture itself and its socialized norms begin to change.
There is some evidence that children with fathers involved in their lives to the degree that a househusband must be have advantages to children who spend less time with their fathers. For boys, the process of socialization to male roles is heavily dependent on the behavior of all the males that a child perceives. With a father present, a child is less dependent on outside sources, such as television, movies, and peers, for learning the social norms for male behavior. Such a father’s opportunity for influencing his child is enormous, far greater than the father who is most often at work.
Girls, too, depend on role models for socialization when they begin to learn how to form relationships with men. A father in an egalitarian relationship with his wife provides a model for how relationships should be constructed, and the child of such a relationship may be more likely to seek such an equal pairing for herself, as well. Girls can be socialized to believe that wife-battering is acceptable, that the domestic sphere is the woman’s sphere, and that men are the accepted wielders of power in relationships. If the models of relationships in her life are contrary to that kind of imbalance, then she is more likely to assert her own equality in relationships.
Conclusion
The househusband role, though accounting for only a small portion of husbands and fathers, is a role that has tremendous potential for altering the structure of the family, the relationships of the members of the family, and the ways in which both men and women are socialized into an understanding of proper gender roles. A househusband is a father who is deeply involved in the lives of his children and husband who is understanding of the tensions of the female role and able to accept his wife on a more egalitarian level. In both of these roles, husband and father, a househusband has tremendous potential for deepening the intimacy of his familial relationships and opening up new opportunities and perspectives for his wife and his children.
Bibliography:
Beer, William R., Househusbands: Men and Housework in American Families.
South Hadley, Massachusetts, Bergin & Carvey Publishers, Inc. 1983.
Lindsey, Linda L., Gender Roles: A Sociological Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, Inc. 1994.
Rotundo, Anthony E., American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.
Scanzoni, John and Letha D., Men, Women, and Change: A Sociology of Marriage and Family. New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1988.
Footnotes:
6Beer, Househusbands, p.73.
7Ibid. p. 77.
8Ibid.
9Ibid. p. 78.
10Ibid. p. 79.
11Ibid.
12Scanzoni, p. 263.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Househusbands, Part 1
We have a stack of 3.5" floppies, but no longer had a floppy drive. So today, I bought a USB floppy drive. Going through the old school papers that make up a good portion of those disks, I found the following. I wrote it in May of 1995, for a class called HON290B. I don't recall what this class was, and I don't recall writing it. Interesting. Here's the first half:
The growth of the domestic roles of the husband in middle class American nuclear families is a trend that can have profound effects on all family members. Statistically, few men enter into the role of househusband completely voluntarily1; however, the role can be liberating for the man, and deeply emotionally satisfying. He begins to discover a new appreciation for his wife, and a more egalitarian relationship may develop between them. For the wife of a househusband, the restructuring of the family can give her the sense of freedom to find fulfillment in a career. For the children, the redefinition of gender roles within their own families can lead to a revolution in the way they are socialized into gender roles themselves.
Taking on gender roles opposite to those he was socialized to accept can lead to difficulties for the man, especially in his relations with other men. He may begin to feel that his manliness, or even his heterosexuality, is doubtful. He may also feel that he is avoiding his real responsibilities to his family because he is not providing for them in the manner he should.
To examine the change of gender roles and implications for the future of the American family, the effects on the individual members of the family must be understood. The most profound effects of househusbandry are most likely on the man himself.
The Socialization of Gender Roles for Men
The greatest hindrance to the growth of the phenomenon of househusbandry is the traditional socialization of American men. A man who takes on the tasks and roles customarily allocated to the feminine sphere risks feeling that he has abandoned the male sphere, and hence has given up his own manhood. It is important, then, to explore what male gender roles are in American society, and what they mean to the men who are socialized to accept them.
The development of gender roles in children has been well-documented as depending more on a child’s upbringing than his or her genetically-determined gender. These roles can be passed on to children according to several theories of gender-role socialization: through imitation, when a child associates with a same-sex parent and imitates the behaviors of that parent; through self-socialization, when a child associates with the concept of “boy” or “girl” and pursues the behaviors associated with that concept; or through reinforcement, when other members of society offer a child positive and negative sanctions for appropriate or inappropriate gender-related behaviors2.
These gender roles are the blueprints for a child’s emotional development and his or her understanding of task allocation, that is, what sort of work is appropriate to his or her gender. Though the messages Americans give their children about what gender roles are normal or appropriate may be beginning to change, traditionally, the sexes are separated into different emotional and role-playing spheres. Women and men, or the female gender role and the male one, play complementary roles in society:
These are the roles that parents, teachers, friends, television, music, and all forms of human communication pass on to children every day, in thousands of ways, from dolls and toy cars, to gender-specific language, and differences in the way that love is shown to children of different sexes. From the time children are born, they begin to learn, simply by watching the images of gender roles that they see around them. In most cases, the children take on the roles they learn are most appropriate for them. Thus, a boy child learns what it means to be a man, and a girl child learns what it means to be a woman. These ideas of manhood and womanhood become part of the personality of each individual person, and it affects their behaviors and emotions on every level.
Manhood, in the American culture, has grown through two centuries of American individualism to embody strength, both physical and emotional; self-reliance; and responsibility for the physical needs of the family. The man is the provider, the solver-of-problems, and the public face of the family. Boys are considered wilder and more aggressive than girls4, less intuitive and emotionally sensitive, more physically strong and athletic. It is the man’s role to go out into the world and bring back to his family the resources it needs to survive; in contrast, it is the woman’s role to organize and dispense those resources for the stability of the family. She also provides the emotional support for the other members of the family, supporting the children in their academic or athletic pursuits and providing a sort of haven from the public, business world for the man.
In practical terms for a marriage, then, it is the husband’s role to work for the support of the wife and children, and it is the wife’s role to rear the children and operate the household and complete the domestic chores. In many cases, the roles are not so clearly defined, especially when both parents work; the roles as cultural norms, however, still affect the allocation of domestic tasks in two-income families: the wife still is more likely to be the primary caregiver of children and do more household tasks.
In cases where the traditional gender roles are reversed and the man takes on the domestic role and the woman provides the bulk of the financial support, all members of the family will be affected, especially the man. His abandonment of the traditionally male role to take on the traditionally female role can make him feel that he is abandoning his sense of masculinity. This may mean anxiety over how he is perceived by his peers, especially whether his heterosexuality is questioned. A man may fear he is perceived as homosexual because of his move away from the traditional roles of his gender. Such homophobia is perhaps overreaction, but homosexuality as a cultural taboo is certainly an ignominious reputation to gain:
Of course, the female who takes on the tasks associated with the male role in society faces stigmatization as well. She is sometimes thought of as manly, as too aggressive, perhaps a butch lesbian. For both sexes, going against the gender roles defined through American socialization can be a difficult and stigmatizing process. It unmistakably provides some emotional and relational hurdles, but in many ways, it can help to improve marital relations, change the socialization process of the children, and affect a positive move toward sexual egalitarianism in American culture.
(To be continued...)
Bibliography:
Beer, William R., Househusbands: Men and Housework in American Families. South Hadley, Massachusetts, Bergin & Carvey Publishers, Inc. 1983.
Lindsey, Linda L., Gender Roles: A Sociological Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, Inc. 1994.
Rotundo, Anthony E., American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York, HarperCollins Publishers,
Inc. 1993.
Scanzoni, John and Letha D., Men, Women, and Change: A Sociology of
Marriage and Family. New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1988.
Footnotes:
1"The majority of these men... left their jobs because of disability or being fired." Lindsey, Gender Roles, p.201
2Scanzoni. Men, Women, and Change, pp. 20-21.
3Lindsey, p.6.
4For a description of the “boy culture” as a “‘free nation’ of boys [as] a distinct cultural world” see Rotundo, American Manhood, pp. 31-55.
5Rotundo, p. 278.
Househusbands: Repercussions for the American Family
The growth of the domestic roles of the husband in middle class American nuclear families is a trend that can have profound effects on all family members. Statistically, few men enter into the role of househusband completely voluntarily1; however, the role can be liberating for the man, and deeply emotionally satisfying. He begins to discover a new appreciation for his wife, and a more egalitarian relationship may develop between them. For the wife of a househusband, the restructuring of the family can give her the sense of freedom to find fulfillment in a career. For the children, the redefinition of gender roles within their own families can lead to a revolution in the way they are socialized into gender roles themselves.
Taking on gender roles opposite to those he was socialized to accept can lead to difficulties for the man, especially in his relations with other men. He may begin to feel that his manliness, or even his heterosexuality, is doubtful. He may also feel that he is avoiding his real responsibilities to his family because he is not providing for them in the manner he should.
To examine the change of gender roles and implications for the future of the American family, the effects on the individual members of the family must be understood. The most profound effects of househusbandry are most likely on the man himself.
The Socialization of Gender Roles for Men
The greatest hindrance to the growth of the phenomenon of househusbandry is the traditional socialization of American men. A man who takes on the tasks and roles customarily allocated to the feminine sphere risks feeling that he has abandoned the male sphere, and hence has given up his own manhood. It is important, then, to explore what male gender roles are in American society, and what they mean to the men who are socialized to accept them.
The development of gender roles in children has been well-documented as depending more on a child’s upbringing than his or her genetically-determined gender. These roles can be passed on to children according to several theories of gender-role socialization: through imitation, when a child associates with a same-sex parent and imitates the behaviors of that parent; through self-socialization, when a child associates with the concept of “boy” or “girl” and pursues the behaviors associated with that concept; or through reinforcement, when other members of society offer a child positive and negative sanctions for appropriate or inappropriate gender-related behaviors2.
These gender roles are the blueprints for a child’s emotional development and his or her understanding of task allocation, that is, what sort of work is appropriate to his or her gender. Though the messages Americans give their children about what gender roles are normal or appropriate may be beginning to change, traditionally, the sexes are separated into different emotional and role-playing spheres. Women and men, or the female gender role and the male one, play complementary roles in society:
When the husband-father takes on the instrumental role, he helps to maintain the basic social and physical integrity of the family, by providing food and shelter and linking the family to the world outside the home. When the wife-mother takes on the expressive role, she helps cement relationships, provides the emotional support and nurturing qualities which sustain the family unit, and ensure that the household runs smoothly.3
These are the roles that parents, teachers, friends, television, music, and all forms of human communication pass on to children every day, in thousands of ways, from dolls and toy cars, to gender-specific language, and differences in the way that love is shown to children of different sexes. From the time children are born, they begin to learn, simply by watching the images of gender roles that they see around them. In most cases, the children take on the roles they learn are most appropriate for them. Thus, a boy child learns what it means to be a man, and a girl child learns what it means to be a woman. These ideas of manhood and womanhood become part of the personality of each individual person, and it affects their behaviors and emotions on every level.
Manhood, in the American culture, has grown through two centuries of American individualism to embody strength, both physical and emotional; self-reliance; and responsibility for the physical needs of the family. The man is the provider, the solver-of-problems, and the public face of the family. Boys are considered wilder and more aggressive than girls4, less intuitive and emotionally sensitive, more physically strong and athletic. It is the man’s role to go out into the world and bring back to his family the resources it needs to survive; in contrast, it is the woman’s role to organize and dispense those resources for the stability of the family. She also provides the emotional support for the other members of the family, supporting the children in their academic or athletic pursuits and providing a sort of haven from the public, business world for the man.
In practical terms for a marriage, then, it is the husband’s role to work for the support of the wife and children, and it is the wife’s role to rear the children and operate the household and complete the domestic chores. In many cases, the roles are not so clearly defined, especially when both parents work; the roles as cultural norms, however, still affect the allocation of domestic tasks in two-income families: the wife still is more likely to be the primary caregiver of children and do more household tasks.
In cases where the traditional gender roles are reversed and the man takes on the domestic role and the woman provides the bulk of the financial support, all members of the family will be affected, especially the man. His abandonment of the traditionally male role to take on the traditionally female role can make him feel that he is abandoning his sense of masculinity. This may mean anxiety over how he is perceived by his peers, especially whether his heterosexuality is questioned. A man may fear he is perceived as homosexual because of his move away from the traditional roles of his gender. Such homophobia is perhaps overreaction, but homosexuality as a cultural taboo is certainly an ignominious reputation to gain:
The effeminate homosexual provided a negative referent for ... masculinity.... The homosexual male and the man who was insufficiently manly were understood in the same figures of speech... The longer the association lasted between the homosexual and the unmanly man, the greater the power of the homosexual label to stigmatize any man.5
Of course, the female who takes on the tasks associated with the male role in society faces stigmatization as well. She is sometimes thought of as manly, as too aggressive, perhaps a butch lesbian. For both sexes, going against the gender roles defined through American socialization can be a difficult and stigmatizing process. It unmistakably provides some emotional and relational hurdles, but in many ways, it can help to improve marital relations, change the socialization process of the children, and affect a positive move toward sexual egalitarianism in American culture.
(To be continued...)
Bibliography:
Beer, William R., Househusbands: Men and Housework in American Families. South Hadley, Massachusetts, Bergin & Carvey Publishers, Inc. 1983.
Lindsey, Linda L., Gender Roles: A Sociological Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, Inc. 1994.
Rotundo, Anthony E., American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York, HarperCollins Publishers,
Inc. 1993.
Scanzoni, John and Letha D., Men, Women, and Change: A Sociology of
Marriage and Family. New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1988.
Footnotes:
1"The majority of these men... left their jobs because of disability or being fired." Lindsey, Gender Roles, p.201
2Scanzoni. Men, Women, and Change, pp. 20-21.
3Lindsey, p.6.
4For a description of the “boy culture” as a “‘free nation’ of boys [as] a distinct cultural world” see Rotundo, American Manhood, pp. 31-55.
5Rotundo, p. 278.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
In the Beginning
anniemcq emailed me this morning to make sure I understood that she was not offended that I used her sweet, innocent child as the starting point to a story about anonymous sex in public spaces. She also expressed the desire to give my pea-coated, pipe-smoking, bearded nineteen-year-old self a hug. It occurred to me that my nineteen-year-old self could've used a hug, and it was a good thing he connected soon thereafter, despite himself, with the future Mrs. Rodius.
So, even though I should probably be saving up this kind of thing for NaBloPoMo, I thought it was the perfect time to tell the story of "How Mrs. Rodius and I Met and Didn't Murder Each Other."
She lived on the floor below mine in the dorm, which, rumor had it, had once been a mental hospital. There were strange inserts in the doors that I heard used to be removable for shoving trays of food through to the nutjobs. I wished I'd lived in the dorm across the street, which was dark, musty, and mazelike, with low ceilings and uneven floors. It was rumored to be haunted.
My first impression of Mrs. Rodius was that she was definitely out of my league. She was a sophomore, and I was a freshman. She's four months younger than I, but I had spent my first year out of high school taking only a couple of classes at the local community college before following my Brandeis-attending girlfriend to Boston. We maintained a long-distance relationship for a year after high school, but within a month of me moving to Boston, that girlfriend had dumped me. She liked me more when she saw me less.
Mrs. Rodius was confident. She had friends. She walked with authority, thumping her heels through the hallway like she had places to go and people to see. She had a boyfriend who wore a fireman's coat. It was the coolest coat I'd ever seen, much better than my pea coat and felt cap. I was jealous of him in his coat. He also had a job at the college radio station, and you can't get much cooler than that. I later found out, though, that the coat really was his best feature.
I was also in the same French class as Mrs. Rodius. I had two years of French in high school, but Mrs. Rodius had no previous French experience. She had taken Russian instead, a fact that made her even more intimidating. But she was defensive about the fact that she was behind the rest of the class due to her lack of previous experience in French. I was a little cocky because I felt sure my pronunciation was lightyears ahead of the rest of the class, what with my familiarity with Inspector Clouseau and all. Consequently, I thought she was a bitch, and she thought I was an ass.
Our professor was much amused by our interactions in class and decided always to pair us together in classroom exercises. He even took me aside after class one day and asked me to take her under my wing, as it were, and correct her pronunciation at every opportunity, thereby jacking up my ass factor considerably. Our annoyance for each other began to really blossom over the first few months of the semester into a deep and abiding dislike.
Over time, though, our dormroom proximity and my tendency to skip class for no good reason began to bring us together. We came to each other to find out what homework assignments we may have missed. She began to spend more and more time in my room, finding great pleasure in toying with one of my roommates who was, incredibly, an even greater ass than I. We discovered a shared appreciation for Captain Morgan and Diet Coke. She started treating my roommate and I very well at the sandwich shop at which she worked, one of a couple of jobs she held while paying her own way through school. I was impressed by that, because I was attending entirely on my parents' dime, as were most of the student body there. And for the most part, those who had it the easiest were achieving the least.
By the time the school year ended, we'd become good friends. She dumped the boyfriend with the cool coat, whose ass factor was also greater than mine, though perhaps not greater than my roommate's. With the free ride from my parents ending, I couldn't afford to come back to school after the summer, but I moved into an apartment with my roommate, who wanted to stay close since he would be returning. So by the next fall semester, I was working full-time and no longer a part of the college community, though I stayed close to it.
Mrs. Rodius went back to her parents' home for the summer and returned in the fall looking absolutely smoking. She'd worked out all summer, partly out of revenge against the ex-boyfriend, and she looked amazing. I honestly didn't realize that I was attracted to her, though. I wrote SWSIL (Social Worker Sister-in-Law) a letter telling her about my good female friend, and how nothing would ever happen between us because our friendship was too strong.
Five days after I sent that letter, the roommate and I were throwing a party; Mrs. Rodius was working late that night and would miss most of the party, but I invited her to come over after work for a margarita and a massage. I think she believes that this was me being smooth, but honestly, smooth was not in my repetoire. She came over long after the party had petered out. We sat on the couch and talked. Eventually, she asked me, "What would you do if I kissed you?" I think I said something like, "I'd probably kiss you back." And so we did. Now, fifteen years later, there's finally a third attendee at the party. I'm glad he's here, but it's strange no longer being alone on the couch together, after all this time.
So, even though I should probably be saving up this kind of thing for NaBloPoMo, I thought it was the perfect time to tell the story of "How Mrs. Rodius and I Met and Didn't Murder Each Other."
She lived on the floor below mine in the dorm, which, rumor had it, had once been a mental hospital. There were strange inserts in the doors that I heard used to be removable for shoving trays of food through to the nutjobs. I wished I'd lived in the dorm across the street, which was dark, musty, and mazelike, with low ceilings and uneven floors. It was rumored to be haunted.
My first impression of Mrs. Rodius was that she was definitely out of my league. She was a sophomore, and I was a freshman. She's four months younger than I, but I had spent my first year out of high school taking only a couple of classes at the local community college before following my Brandeis-attending girlfriend to Boston. We maintained a long-distance relationship for a year after high school, but within a month of me moving to Boston, that girlfriend had dumped me. She liked me more when she saw me less.
Mrs. Rodius was confident. She had friends. She walked with authority, thumping her heels through the hallway like she had places to go and people to see. She had a boyfriend who wore a fireman's coat. It was the coolest coat I'd ever seen, much better than my pea coat and felt cap. I was jealous of him in his coat. He also had a job at the college radio station, and you can't get much cooler than that. I later found out, though, that the coat really was his best feature.
I was also in the same French class as Mrs. Rodius. I had two years of French in high school, but Mrs. Rodius had no previous French experience. She had taken Russian instead, a fact that made her even more intimidating. But she was defensive about the fact that she was behind the rest of the class due to her lack of previous experience in French. I was a little cocky because I felt sure my pronunciation was lightyears ahead of the rest of the class, what with my familiarity with Inspector Clouseau and all. Consequently, I thought she was a bitch, and she thought I was an ass.
Our professor was much amused by our interactions in class and decided always to pair us together in classroom exercises. He even took me aside after class one day and asked me to take her under my wing, as it were, and correct her pronunciation at every opportunity, thereby jacking up my ass factor considerably. Our annoyance for each other began to really blossom over the first few months of the semester into a deep and abiding dislike.
Over time, though, our dormroom proximity and my tendency to skip class for no good reason began to bring us together. We came to each other to find out what homework assignments we may have missed. She began to spend more and more time in my room, finding great pleasure in toying with one of my roommates who was, incredibly, an even greater ass than I. We discovered a shared appreciation for Captain Morgan and Diet Coke. She started treating my roommate and I very well at the sandwich shop at which she worked, one of a couple of jobs she held while paying her own way through school. I was impressed by that, because I was attending entirely on my parents' dime, as were most of the student body there. And for the most part, those who had it the easiest were achieving the least.
By the time the school year ended, we'd become good friends. She dumped the boyfriend with the cool coat, whose ass factor was also greater than mine, though perhaps not greater than my roommate's. With the free ride from my parents ending, I couldn't afford to come back to school after the summer, but I moved into an apartment with my roommate, who wanted to stay close since he would be returning. So by the next fall semester, I was working full-time and no longer a part of the college community, though I stayed close to it.
Mrs. Rodius went back to her parents' home for the summer and returned in the fall looking absolutely smoking. She'd worked out all summer, partly out of revenge against the ex-boyfriend, and she looked amazing. I honestly didn't realize that I was attracted to her, though. I wrote SWSIL (Social Worker Sister-in-Law) a letter telling her about my good female friend, and how nothing would ever happen between us because our friendship was too strong.
Five days after I sent that letter, the roommate and I were throwing a party; Mrs. Rodius was working late that night and would miss most of the party, but I invited her to come over after work for a margarita and a massage. I think she believes that this was me being smooth, but honestly, smooth was not in my repetoire. She came over long after the party had petered out. We sat on the couch and talked. Eventually, she asked me, "What would you do if I kissed you?" I think I said something like, "I'd probably kiss you back." And so we did. Now, fifteen years later, there's finally a third attendee at the party. I'm glad he's here, but it's strange no longer being alone on the couch together, after all this time.
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