Life

'Having Kids Is So Gay'

Or are childless men caught in a homosocial comfort zone?

By Vanessa Richmond, 23 Apr 2009, TheTyee.ca

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"Having a kid is so gay," a man told me recently. How’s that for irony? Especially given that the guy is pushing 40.

It’s the kind of juvenile language that only makes sense when you understand the near-hysteria about family life that exists in a new tribe of middle aged, North American males: the Baby Bailers.

Clearly, there are rational reasons to have kids and rational reasons not to, whether you're a man or a woman. And from the amount of column inches devoted to the topic lately, you might even get the idea that people like arguing about the question of to breed or not to breed more than doing it.

What we’re discussing here, however, is a lot of men on cusp of middle age who, at some sub-rational and visceral level, see their masculine identity threatened by the act of fathering a child. They understand babies to be enemies of what makes it great to be a straight man. Thus, having one is "gay."

The joke may be on them. Research shows married, child-rearing fathers, relatively speaking, tend to be pretty darn happy (more on that later). And of the dozens of Baby Bailers I’ve heard about from friends who do "cave" (to use the word of a male friend), most tend to be glad. (I’ve also heard of many who didn’t have kids for rational reasons and are glad they didn’t). The problem is that because gender identity is involved, the struggle over "giving in" (another male friend’s term) can be excruciating for both the man and the woman, and based on anything but reason.

'Bros before hos'

Who are the Baby Bailers? They are well into their 30s, even 40s. They tend to have careers, apartments (often mortgages), and even wives or long-term girlfriends. They also tend to have hobbies, which often include being in a band, playing video games, watching online porn and partying. Hobbies are great. But in this case, those hobbies, and the male friends they share them with, become the most important part of their lives because they symbolize freedom and fun. Many see having kids as a symbolic defeat: when the wife or girlfriend wins, their masculinity loses.

"Masculinity, is a homosocial experience, performed for, and judged by, other men," writes Michael Kimmel in Guyland. A professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, credited with founding (fathering?) man's studies, Kimmel sums up the "guy" phenomenon with the phrase "bros before hos." His recent book looks at men aged 16 to 26, but says, with a few differences, the analysis also applies to men in their late 30s and 40s who are resisting the symbolic end fatherhood would bring to their "guy" status.

According to Nicholas Townsend, who conducted an extensive ethnography on middle class masculinity, four things make someone a grown up man: being employed and a good worker, owning a home, being a spouse and, finally, being a father.

Most embrace the first two easily, then start to resist. "Growing up is the negation of fun, pleasure, happiness and sexiness, which is all based on the fantasy idea that adulthood is a loss for men," says Kimmel. "Boyhood is fun, but adulthood is sober and responsible."

He says these guys are able to juggle serious careers, mortgages and even relationships with the pursuit of "boyishness" because to them, it's like balancing work and family. The idea is, "If I'm going to capitulate and have a real job and a real apartment, I still want to feel like a guy. So I'm going put my feet up on the table, fart in public, do raunchy things, and say sexist things with my friends, because [in] the workplace... I have to watch what I say all the time and what I do. I can't make fag jokes or girl jokes there."

So guys try to prolong their post-adolescent male bonding pleasures and their kind of fantasy locker room world though activities like video games and online porn. "The thing that's interesting is that they are pretty unapologetic about it. Ten to 15 years ago, guys who watched porn and played video games, they were a bit sheepish and guilty about it. Now, they're saying -- so what?"

Just let me sleep a few more years

Bailers I’ve interviewed often say they're "not ready" to have a baby, that they just need a few more years. This can seem humourous coming from a man in his 40s. The listener begins to calculate that micro-sliver of time between fatherhood’s "ready" and "expiry" dates. As one 51-year-old dad told me, "I have to take a few ibuprofen just to be able to make coffee in the morning. I'm not exactly looking to do a 3 a.m. poo call." He has two kids, the eldest of which is 14, and feels like he "just got it done in time." He explained, "You know like in the movie, where the character races ahead of the fireball, with the huge iron door closing, and at the last second, he dives under the door and it closes on his shoe? Like that." I guess that's what the ibuprofen's for.

But, according to Kimmel, the Baby Bailers "believe that a grown-up relationship, with a grown-up woman, is a loss... And what is lost is fun," whatever the age.

When they flick on the TV, they see their fears reinforced. Shows like Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother and Rules of Engagement "basically portray singleness as fun and married life as a kind of compromise at best, and drudgery at worse," says Kimmel. Consider, as well, pre-wedding rituals. "When a woman is getting married, her friends take her out to celebrate. When a man is getting married, his guy friends take him out for an elegiac last night of freedom, to get him drunk and laid, because he'll never get to do that again: she's trapped you, she's caught you."

More sex if you're married

But that myth contradicts the data, according to Kimmel: married men are much happier than unmarried men. In many cases, they gain a chef, a laundress and a sex partner. Married men have much more sex than unmarried men and are less likely to see therapists than unmarried ones. (Married women, on the other hand, tend to have lower happiness levels and are more likely to see therapists than unmarried ones).

"The more men are sort of grown up -- the more they do housework and child rearing -- the happier they are, the happier the kids are, and the happier the woman is," says Kimmel.

Don’t tell that the Baby Bailer, and don’t expect the expanding brood of macho Brad Pitt to hold sway. As one Baby Bailer told me, the rich dad is different. "They don't have to give anything up. They can just hire people to do everything, and still have fun and have a life."

"Giving things up," is a dreaded concept I’ve hear a lot in my conversations with Baby Bailers.

But Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad, a book about his quest to retain his identity after becoming a father, says "My wife and I played more video games than ever the first six months after our kid was born. I mean, all the kid is doing is eating and crapping. Any dad who is a gamer before is still a gamer."

And though it's harder to go out with friends as much, "if they're real buddies they'll still be there."

"Men are afraid that fatherhood is going to take over their identity. And it does for a little while, but if they want to, they can integrate fatherhood into their previous identity." Pollack found the first couple of years to be "an emotional maelstrom," but now finds his old self is still there.

It doesn’t help that men get a lot of messages that their old self must transform into some kind of uber-father they never knew. UBC sociologist Nathanael Lauster says expectations are increasing. While people used to put their baby in a drawer in a bedroom of a rental apartment a few decades ago with full social sanction, now elaborate staging is often considered necessary: a house with yard (what he calls "the moral home"), a car, expensive strollers, baby clothes, nannies and so on. That's why he says affluent men might be more willing to become fathers -- since they know they can afford those "requirements." Plus, Lauster says affluent men they have less fear of being labeled a "deadbeat dad," a term men can acquire for contributing insufficient money or even time.

What about work?

For every Baby Bailer who worries he'll need to work harder, there’s one so immersed in his career that he’s terrified of sacrificing it to the new definition of family life. "At one point," Lauster says, "there wouldn't be this idea that men would have to give up work to become a father. Men would actually intensify their work commitments than they would prior to have children and that's how they would demonstrate their commitment." Exhibit A: the 1960 version of father portrayed as Don Draper on Mad Men.

But a note to Baby Bailers: Evidence suggests that men's work performance can actually increase after becoming a father. "There's the myth of the unencumbered worker," says Kimmel. "That worker is gendered and it's male. We think those are the best employees -- they have no trouble making it to a 7 a.m. meeting, or staying late. But when you're a parent, you're far more reliable and far more likely to remain loyal to the company, especially if the company is flexible."

But hey, there I go again, engaging in rational talk about something as fundamentally emotion driven as gender identity. There's a commercial for the Hummer SUV, in which a bunch of guys is working out at the gym, and an announcer asks the man with the white mini van, the symbolic family vehicle, to come forward as he's left his lights on. No one does. Kimmel says the message is, "You henpecked, feminized pussy."

So it’s social forces, I get it. But I’m thinking if "gay" means a grown up man, well, heterosexual breeding culture could really use some.

Related Tyee stories:

[Tyee]

Tyee contributing editor Vanessa Richmond writes the Schlock and Awe column about popular culture and the media.

38 Comments:

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  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    Quite the disparaging piece.

    Quite the disparaging piece. And quite cruel to set up a class of people as ridiculous, whose concerns are so obviously born of irrationality, emotion--sillyness and sheer bigotedness, that the research of one noted baby-boomer sociologist, Kimmel (whose research has always betrayed his pleasure in setting men up as ridiculous, thereby showing himself to be one of the few good men who really respects women, thereby helping enshrine himself as a noted sociologist at a time when criticizing men, patriarchy, western norms, was largely what sociological research aimed to accomplish), would really have been enough to show them up as self-centered slackers who need to shut up, step up, and grow up.

    Quick reminder that women's concerns were often muted by identifying them as irrational. Reasoned researchers stepped in and showed women to be hysteric(al), completely unaware of what really ailed them, invalidated their concerns, complaints, made them (women) worthy of treatment, and to the public at large, appropriate subjects for "drawing room" derision and laughter. To use your words, the joke was on them, sadly enough.

    You do describe becoming a parent as becoming part of the Borg: "Don't worry, you'll come to like it. Come join us," is what I hear from the men whose stories of becoming a parent you relate. This should scare more men off, but strangely, my own sense is that a lot of men will be drawn to this, like soldiers are to their demise on the battlefield--just get it over and done with.

    I would like to see most people (or at least warm, empathic people) marry and have kids. For sure. I think, potentially, being a parent can offer rewards I would never want to deny myself. This said, there actually may be a best time for this, there may be something about the time we're living in which should lend respect for those concerned about leaving familiar comfort zones, for waiting just a few more years. People had a lot of babies AFTER the war, after-all. This wasn't just about money--it had something to do, MORE to do, I think, with society finally relaxing--with a large scale expansion of collective comfort zones, of societal permissiveness, which made a family just naturally seem to mostly be about enrichment, life enhancement rather than restriction--regardless of bachelor party pretense at the time.

    Times have changed, evidently, and I look forward to more insightful explorations of why men are freezing in place than ones done by researchers who to me are not so much moved by reason, but by an unconscious desire to show men up as sexist assholes at every bleeping turn (oh, and bleep you, Kimmel, for your smug hate propagation, your misandry), and who seem lacking in the sort of attuned sensitivity and self-awareness to be trusted to offer a spot-on sense of "what's up," in an individual's, or a culture's, psychic core.

  • notamused

    3 years ago

    Peter Pans, not Tinkerbells

    While I feel a tiny bit sorry for the individuals who won't have kids to change their poopy diapers when they're 90, I think society will probably be better off if these Peter Pans remain childless.

  • VivianLea Doubt

    3 years ago

    chef and laundress

    Guess you don't agree with:

    "Masculinity, is a homosocial experience, performed for, and judged by, other men, writes Michael Kimmel in Guyland" eh, Patrick?

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    VivianLea: What

    VivianLea: What sociologists get right is that there is something really off about certrain men's need to feel like real men. This phenomena shouldn't be naturalized, or just readily accepted--ideally, and very possibly, no human being will feel the need to buttress their self-assessment in this fashion, or at all, period. What they get wrong, is their unwilliingness to credit that men's fears of women, of being entraped and rendered pussies, are born out of actual experiences of feeling dehumanized in their interactions with women. More pointedly, they would never credit what I believe to be the case: namely, that men who were used as boy-toys for the entertainment of their lonely mothers, who were traumatized/abused by their mothers, will always by hyper-ready to expect entrapment and shameful surrender of self, in their relations with women. They can't go there, because this would involve exploring their own past with an intimacy, with a degree of self-introspection, their very training has worked to establish as wholy suspect, as in the path of scientific neutrality--objective truth. Plus, it would mean inviting abuse from the parental alters (super-ego) they've established in their heads, to stop them from asking, "why did you do that to me, mommy?" Some poets go there--there's that famous line from Philip Larkin ("they fuck you up, mom and dad"), for instance, but about zero, give or take zero, sociologists. Kimmel would blame culture, but never seriously consider deMause's contention that: "culture is explanandum, not explanans," that is, that saying that "'culture determines social behavior' is simply a tautology."

    http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln05_psychogenic.html

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    In my first post, by "after

    In my first post, by "after the war," I meant after WW2, btw.

  • VivianLea Doubt

    3 years ago

    reading and writing

    I read a fair bit of deMause the other day; in fact included some ideas in a paper. This is the bit that I was struck by:

    "Most historians, too, have assiduously avoided psychology, going along with Paul Veyne in believing that history "consists in saying what happened," little more than or trying to explain history by "impersonal structural forces," as though such a passionate human enterprise as history could be "impersonal." The result is that I have at least a hundred books on war on my shelf, and I don't recall seeing the word "anger" in any of them. Nor does the word "love" appear very often in any of the hundreds of books of history, sociology or political science on my shelves, though most of history has origins in problems of insufficient human love and all of its derivatives."

    I don't think that copied quite right, hmm...but anyway, you know what I am referring to.

    The degree of intimacy for that kind of self-introspection, as you call it, is profound.Women, of course, also experience that surrender of self; but it appears our culture believes that is okay for women; i.e. it does not denigrate them. Then there are those of us who do see it as shameful...But in any case I get a sense here of men as providers, which would surely f*** with anyone's identity.

    I remember my dad telling me that when I was born I changed his life, and he talked of how exciting and rich things became for him...perhaps my experience is coloured rose.

    I am thinking very deeply about this, but in the end, as you say, it does no good to say that culture determines behaviour.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    Very nice to hear what your

    Very nice to hear what your dad said to you, VivianLea. You deserved no less, but it's still so very wonderful you had someone to tell you that.

  • Fii

    3 years ago

    Ah, but if only...

    Notamused- if we could only hope to have our diapers changed by a loved one rather than a stranger in a nursing home when we are 90- or even better, be always able to do it ourselves... what fantasy land are you living in??

  • nightbloom

    3 years ago

    Excellent article. The

    Excellent article.

    The missing component here is the social valuation of fatherhood (or lack thereof).

    Sexual access used to be something that young men *earned* - ditto with licit fatherhood. It was all mediated by the timocratic norms of the community as a whole, and therefore intimately connected to a man's self-worth, sense of achievement, and to his initiation into the full responsibilities (and privileges) of manhood. Not so anymore. (Kimmel doesn't get male initiation).

    A couple other things to consider:

    Men have been bombarded with horrendous stories emerging from family law courts, in which men are routinely treated as the expendable parent, valued only for their bank accounts, and possessing little leverage when seeking access to their children. They also know that they'll always be painted as the bad guy. We've all known men who have been thru that nightmare - either friends or family members. And many men already lived through it as children, and may be reluctant to venture into that territory again.

    Which bring me to my second point: men today are the product of the over-involved hothouse nuclear family, charged with undiffused psycho-sexual drama, and therefore to a great extent are *refugees* from the nuclear family. The nuclear often becomes taken over by the suppurating power-struggle that emerges within the daughter-father-mother triangle as girls approach adolescence. That's usually when men's "family refugee status" begins, and it can be a life-long exodus.

    There really is so much more happening with men than meets the eye. Articles like this are great catalysts to get that long-overdue conversation going.

  • Jeffrey J.

    3 years ago

    Great Stuff

    This is really interesting material. Most people are fascinated by what is academically referred to as sociology. Go to any workplace or social occasion and people are discussing why various age, gender or other demographic groups do what they do. Whether it be young mums, aging white men, dino dads or yuppie couples: we all want to know what makes them tick.

    Listening to Michael Kimmel on CBC was riveting and I recommend his book to anyone curious about the changing face of male conduct in the early 21st century. Changes are indeed afoot, yet without the wisdom of sociology, we'd remain ignorant of its occurrence.

    One can see a number of confluences impacting male behavior (just as there are for females), most of it IMHO determined by a society top heavy with elites and corporate propaganda. As wealth and opportunity are ever more diminished in the majority of citizens, men are embracing a certain form of return to the 50's masculinity, while women are pushed into a certain parallel return to the 50's.

    Great to read Ms. Redmond's work; looking forward to more.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    Nightbloom: I think your

    Nightbloom: I think your suggestion that young men are sort of forced into become family refugees is interesting, and has me perhaps reconsidering my decision not to allow my sisters as facebook friends.

    But I believe it starts way earlier than in adolescence. Again from deMause, who offers the empathy and respect, missing from Vanessa's provocative article:

    "It is not just genetics but more importantly maternal environment that Tronick and Weinberg blame when they see from their studies that “Infant boys are more emotionally reactive than girls. They display more positive as well as negative affect, focus more on the mother, and display more signals expressing escape and distress and demands for contact than do girls.”23 This is because from infancy boys are expected to “just grow up” and not need as much emotional care as girls—indeed, boys are regularly encouraged not to express any of their feelings, since this is seen as “weak” or “babyish” in boys.24 While mothers may sometimes dominate their little girls and expect them to share their emotional problems, they distance their boys by not making contact with them and expect them to “be a man.” This begins from birth: “Over the first three months of life, a baby girl’s skills in eye contact and mutual facial gazing will increase by over 400 percent, whereas facial gazing skills in a boy during this time will not increase at all.”25 Boys grow up with less attachment strengths because careful studies show that mothers look at their boys less, because both parents hit their boys two or three times as much as they do their girls, because boys are at much higher risk than girls for serious violence against them, and because boys are continuously told to be “tough,” not to be a “wimp” or a “weakling,” not to be “soft” or a “sissy.”26"

    http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/02_whymalesaremoreviolent.html

  • VivianLea Doubt

    3 years ago

    enjoying the conversation

    If the social valuation of fatherhood is missing, Nightbloom - and I think it is not as much celebrated as previously - so too, is the social valuation of motherhood.At its heart, perhaps the need to have the house, the yard, the $2000 baby stroller are about trying to regain the status of parenthood. Betty Friedan wrote admirably about the plight of middle class housewives in the decades after the war; maybe what was missed what that she was, too, talking about the plight of men and the family...I don't think they can be separated. I can only tell you I have been completely humbled by my brother as a single parent: he is the most amazing parent I have ever encountered.I guess I would say that moving towards parenthood as opposed to motherhood or fatherhood would marvellous - without denigrating what each might bring to the joy of children.

    My brothers even today are astounded and sometimes uncomfortable at the depth of intimacy my mother and I have: we have always talked, argued, cried, and laughed about everything; there is nothing significant about me that my mother does not know.I suspect that my conversations with her rely on this in a way that excludes my brothers somehow...but I do not understand this.

    But I would say that if family, community, and culture became truly ingrained values of our society - in whatever fashion or configuration that might play out for diverse people - the way forward would not seem so difficult.

  • morechatter

    3 years ago

    Who Am I?

    Children don't take from your identity they add to it as dad or mom or aunt or sister or uncle are all names on the lips of babes...as we are that and so much more.
    And so are our children as not only do they have all of us to bank on as part of their identity but then they are their own unique individuals onto themselves also.
    As often when talking about my kids and growing up together that is exactly how it was, we grew up together and learned from each other and still do as we all have are own uniqueness that we share with one another.

  • Dan the socialist

    3 years ago

    I know many straight men my

    I know many straight men my age that do not have nor want kids.

    The world has to many people anyway, so I do not see what the big deal is.

  • morechatter

    3 years ago

    No One Said You Had to Have Kids

    Its not how its works as certainly not recommended for the faint of heart or the heartless for that matter. I thought what was being said was children take from an individuial's idenity for those who have one I guess? What I was saying they don't need to take from a person's idenity as most likely they will enhance it if you so desire.

  • morechatter

    3 years ago

    And No One Said Not to Have Kids Either

    And how Gay is that???

  • colinarahj

    3 years ago

    one less dad

    I always get the line that I'm a "selfish person" by not wanting to have kids.

    I believe that phasing out a large percentile of the human race (by voluntarily ceasing to breed) to allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Am I purely Maslowian to think that less people is better for the world?

    Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as human population becomes less dense.

    To recap :

    Less people =

    1) Better quality earth
    2) Longer sustainment of the human race

    - who's selfish now ?

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    Colinarahj: If you're a

    Colinarahj: If you're a warm person, I hope you do have kids: we need less of certain kinds of people, but much more of the nicer kind.

  • nightbloom

    3 years ago

    No offense to anyone in

    No offense to anyone in particular, but hetero men who proclaim their environmental sainthood by claiming that they gave up having children out of selfless concern for planet Earth, Panda bears, and the Lemurs of Madagascar make me LAUGH. You guys are hilarious.

    It's quack science anyway. Up until very recently, the most polluted countries were the least populated. Environmental devastation is really about human *systems* not numbers - i.e. economics, technology, institutions and their accountability mechanisms (or lack thereof).

    There's an insipid and perverse similarity between between the self-congratulation of the barren enviro-fornicators and the insipid superiority of the Christian neo-Cath "missionary-position-only-all-sex-must-be-open-to-conception" crowd. Both groups can't stop patting themselves on the back for having the most moral sex on the block. And in both cases it's always (always!) the MEN making the public proclamations asserting the "licitness" of THEIR particular brand of sex. It's funny!

  • VivianLea Doubt

    3 years ago

    enviro-fornicators?

    I must say thank you for making me laugh, nightbloom, in the midst of a hard working day...

    So, as a woman who has distinctly chosen not to have children (although I raised a partner's children) does that make me, too an enviro-fornicator? (I can't be in the other camp because I am not a...missionary)

    I don't take any offense, but still, I would put forward the argument I made previously in another fashion: it may be that some of our problems with "the family" could be solved by allowing for a broader definition of family. Is that not what you were also arguing for when you remarked that fathers were becoming the expendable parent? I realize you did say men, by the way, I just don't know how you separate parenting by gender.

    Patrick: I think your remark about my father was nice. My dad was a marvellous blend of humour, and patience, and love, and deep-seated kindness, that I forget sometimes that not everyone is/was so fortunate. But the act of having children does have to chosen/not chosen, in order for "the family" to be healed.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    Thanks for the feedback,

    Thanks for the feedback, VivianLea. Also, the bit from deMause you found compelling, is one of my favourites too.

  • The Blackbird

    3 years ago

    "Some people shouldn't have children."

    I'm male, 45 years of age and a confirmed Bailer.

    We've all heard or even spoken this phrase before, usually after we witness some stressed out parent abuse his or her child emotionally and/or physically.

    I'm one of those people and it serves as my reason not to raise kids. For myself, it's the responsible thing to do. My upbringing was rough: poverty, parental alcoholism, neglect. I lost a sibling to homelessness and eventually to addiction and death by overdose. I struggled with addiction and depression as a young adult. But with luck, determination, hard work and support from friends, I've managed to carve out a livable existence. I earned an undergrad degree, work full-time at a job I enjoy, find fulfillment in photography work and poetry (neither of which I consider "hobbies") and have a beautiful girlfriend with whom I don't live. My life is good and I do what I can, where I can, to find ways to improve the quality of life of those in my community who are less fortunate.

    In my mid-thirties, I made a conscious decision not to become a parent, ever. I made this choice after a lover I had lived with for several years raised the idea of having a child. Starting a family was important to her, something she definitely wanted for herself. I lost her because, after examining my own capacities and considering whether they would impact on my ability to be a healthy parent, realized I didn't have it in me.

    My upbringing has left me prone to intermittent but extended bouts of depression which I refuse to treat with pharmaceutics. My tolerance for stress is low; high levels of it have brought me near relapse into substance abuse. I choose not to have children because I do not wish to risk the possibility that I might harm them in some way.

    So call me a bailer, insinuate that I'm selfish and just want to have a good time, don't invite me over at Christmas. I could care less. I'm doing what I think is best for everyone, including myself. I have friends in my life who appreciate my reasons for remaining childless. They're all I need.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    Pleasure to hear your story,

    Pleasure to hear your story, The Blackbird. Glad you've got good friends who well appreciate/respect your life decisions.

  • nightbloom

    3 years ago

    Yes - what Patrick said.

    Yes - what Patrick said. Thank you for sharing that, Blackbird.

  • Fii

    3 years ago

    Wait a minute.....!

    Thank you Colin, as much as Blackbird.

    I am a little taken aback at Nightbloom's very different reactions to the reasons the two men above chose not to be fathers. What is up with that?? You insult Colin (ok ok, you didn't 'name' him, I got it)... and then agree with Patrick's "Pleasure to hear your story, glad you've got friends who well appreciate/respect your decision" for BBird.

    Well Colin, I appreciate and respect your decision for the reasons you posted as well- just as much as I appreciate and respect Blackbird's.

    And I'm not even a friend- though let's say, a like-minded stranger :)

  • Blackbird

    3 years ago

    I don't know ...

    What I shared probably plays right into the agenda of the elite, though. There are some out there who would read my post and be filled with glee knowing the gene pool will be healthier.

    But thanks for your kind words, just the same.

  • Blackbird

    3 years ago

    Poetry/Photography

    In case you're interested:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbird_hollow/522683880/in/set-72157600269552032/

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbird_hollow/sets/

  • lancestone

    3 years ago

    so wrong on this one

    this article "having kids is so gay" is insulting to those of us who have, for whatever reason (and there are many) chosen to remain childless.
    To base your article on some idiot who would make such an asinine comment such as "having kids is gay" is insulting to other and all middle aged males without children, just because I don't have children you assert that it is because I want to tell misogynist and homophobic jokes and sit around in the stench of my own farts. pretty harsh generalizations here and unfortunate that I have to tell you that you are wrong.

    The barometer for "manliness" that you mention, being mature and therefore having a home, being a good worker, having a long-term relationship and ultimately being a father-- these, you suggest are the real measures of manliness and maturity which for those of us in our middle-age with none of the above (although I do work 60 hours a week but it sure isn't a career and I am not remotely interested in being "a good worker" as you require) having you define what it means to be a mature man is belittle-ling and generalizing.

    You're measure of success goes back to the times when men hunted, built shelter, fought and killed for women's honor etc... I thought we were passed that in 2009 but I guess not.

    The pressure on a man to conform and fit in and obey societies norms of marrying and reproducing and consuming are enormous-- it is unfortunate to see you champion them as well.

    Of course Hollywood is a major contributor to maintaining pressure on men to become cogs in the societal machine. I find it intesting that new shows such as "Lie to Me" "Castle" and "Shark" all have leading macho men charactors who are also single fathers.

    You also embrace the tired argument that if you do an activity but it has no economic value it is not "art" or even worthwhile it is merely a wasteful hobby.

    Not being much into video games or porn I do however play music. I have for all my adult life but I don't make money at it so in your view it is a childish "hobby" diverting me from my real manly calling of fathering more children on our already over populated planet. (you should met my parents, they've been telling me to hang up my instrument for years, you would get along well with them)

    so yes I take issue with your calling me misogynist and homophobic because I have no children. While not perfect I am involved in activist groups and non-profits that both work against domestic violence and prop 8 in California, I could do more, of course, but if I had children I couldn't even be involved as much as I am now.

  • nightbloom

    3 years ago

    Lancestone, I thought the

    Lancestone, I thought the author of the article made it fairly clear in her opening line that the gay reference was second-hand and originated from a male friend whom (we can assume) was using it tongue-in-cheek.

    She describes how the intentionally juvenile language seeks to make light of something that is the object of intense debate (“you might even get the idea that people like arguing about the question of to breed or not to breed more than doing it”), and she also covers herself with a fairly encompassing disclaimer: “Clearly, there are rational reasons to have kids and rational reasons not to, whether you're a man or a woman.”

    The false dichotomy between “real” man and ersatz-man (gay man) is a meme that has always been leveraged by heterosexuals (both men and women) to shame and ridicule homosexual men to render them marginal, powerless, and pathologized. There’s some irony in the fact that what was once a “real” man’s definitive act – fatherhood – is now being embraced and celebrated by gay men while *some* straight men fear the loss of their boyhood and adolescent freedoms.

    Fii – my difficulty is not with Colin’s first assertion (about simply not wanting to have kids, which his his choice) - it’s with the rationale presented in his second paragraph onward, which is based on some sort of misanthropic neo-Malthusian environmentalist canard. If people want to have sex without kids nor consequences, that’s their call. But if you’re going to claim to be doing your bit to save the planet while your female partner flushes a lifetime of synthetic hormones into the ecosystem, you might want to rethink your enviro-ethics.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    You can sense a bit of

    You can sense a bit of masochism--if I suffer or sacrifice, I'll be worthy of appreciation--in some responses here, that probably ought to be pointed out, but it's really awful to see someone once again go after men, and I'm glad to see people defending themselves from Vanessa's mean-spirited, gutless attack. She sets people (single men--the easiest of targets to ensure hate-speech is lauded rather than blasted) up so that they seem worthy of derision. It's crappy when this happens to anyone in the gay and lesbian community, and it's crappy here.

    I don't want to see people projecting forward and imagining no dramatic change in who they are. I hear a lot of people doing that in my own social circle (I'll never get married; I'll never have children), and it frightens and saddens me. You do hear people saying they are proud of what they've accomplished, and no doubt they have managed to effect a life well worthy of their and our respectful consideration/appreciation. But if we're going to probe at some aspects which could well reflect an unhealthy rigidity, which prevents them from FURTHER elaborating, nurturing, their sense of themselves and what they might offer to the community at large, we need to begin by respecting the pleasure they take in their lives and the legitimacy of their fears in broaching anything substantially new.

    Vanessa goes after the easiest of targets with real meaness and lack of respect. At some level she must know that what and how she writes ensures she does not get criticized by those she can't easily blow off and handle, that she gets (or that she can imagine herself getting) praise from the empowered, who help legitimize their enfranchisement by thinking correct thought, by hating incorrect people. This is not life, forward progress--it's appeasement, that itself speaks of a termination in self-growth, that may never be coaxed into evolving into something more beautiful.

  • nightbloom

    3 years ago

    Patrick, I’m really not

    Patrick, I’m really not getting that from what the author wrote here...and even I can certainly identify with several aspects of the “Baby Bailer” phenomenon she’s describing. As a gay man navigating the long-term effects of a delayed career-track, I’ll be lucky if I ever clear my student loans, let alone own property or afford the phenomenal costs of IVF and surrogate motherhood (i.e. for gay men biological fatherhood is decided by one very crucial common denominator, all other things being equal: MONEY. Lots of it.). Yes, I know there’s always adoption, but that’s a whole other ball game, and a whole other article.

    While there are certainly additional angles to explore on this topic (which some are doing in this comments thread), I think the author has written a light and engaging riff on a potentially heavy and off-putting topic. What more can you expect from 700 words of prose?

    The author’s enjoyable writing aside, I’ve been noting for years that The Tyee’s articles on topics related to gender, sex, and reproduction would benefit by including a men’s perspective from time to time. But you may have noticed that the author of this article made the effort to quote male sources throughout this article. She did her job as a writer and journalism, in my opinion.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    3 years ago

    Nightbloom

    Yeah, I read it as a really disrespectful piece, primarily moved to show these man-boys up. I know she's effecting to summarize Kimmel's take here, but when she says that bailers are "guys try[ing] to prolong their post-adolescent male bonding pleasures and their kind of fantasy locker room world though activities like video games and online porn," this to me reads as HER identifying them as, in essence, irresponsible social parasites who far about with their time and take pleasure in other people's victimization: that is, as, at best, disposable people. (I wonder how aesthetic gay men used to be characterized by respectable society? Like that, probably.) A suspicion that cannot but be confirmed by how she ends her piece, where she shows men's fears as baseless (jokes on you guys!), and laughs off emotion driven gender concerns with the HUMMER/pussy reference.

    One of the guys quoted mentioned that his lifestyle wasn't so much a hanging on to something that ought to pass, but an accomplishment--a carving out of play and self-expression, curtailed everywhere elsewhere in life. If she had taken that point on with some more respect, that would have been something. And we hear here too of men becoming less ashamed of life preferences than they used to be: What is it Vanessa's article that made this feel something different than an admirable coming out?

    Btw: Perhaps more important than having a male "lifestyle" reporter, would be to have journalists who do not at some level loathe themselves, and hate men. Nothing worse than a "good boy" male reporters, after-all, for they denouce other men more loudly than anyone else is wont to. Still, I'm pleased to hear you've been encouraging The Tyee to broaden it's point-of-view, its perspective, through the hire of a male voice. Why don't you take it on?

  • dave49

    3 years ago

    Immaturity?

    About a year ago, in the main Vancouver liquor store, I ran into a fellow my wife knew from her undergrad days at UBC. He had his children younger and had some interesting comments on raising a boy through the late teens. He said he’d rather have one who’s ‘normal’ and chases girls. Otherwise, they hang around with a few male friends and get wrecked.

    It sounds like these baby bailers are the latter category, who are more content to hang out and girlwatch with other guys while getting wrecked. The real issue is that they never grew out of this phase.

  • Fii

    3 years ago

    well good comeback, haha

    "But if you’re going to claim to be doing your bit to save the planet while your female partner flushes a lifetime of synthetic hormones into the ecosystem, you might want to rethink your enviro-ethics."

    A lifetime of synthetic hormones?? Ok, whatever... even still, that would be a heck of a lot less of a footprint than all those dirty diapers.

  • Fii

    3 years ago

    well good comeback, haha

    "But if you’re going to claim to be doing your bit to save the planet while your female partner flushes a lifetime of synthetic hormones into the ecosystem, you might want to rethink your enviro-ethics."

    A lifetime of synthetic hormones?? Ok, whatever... even still, that would be a heck of a lot less of a footprint than all those dirty diapers.

  • nightbloom

    3 years ago

    Fii said: "Ok,

    Fii said: "Ok, whatever..."

    Whatever, Fii? How flip. Read the science. This particular technology (the birth control pill) is causing immense damage to the environment, the water supply and the ecosystem. Where have you been? Actually, most forms of *artificial* contraception cause some sort of environmental destruction.

    As for this: "even still, that would be a heck of a lot less of a footprint than all those dirty diapers" - what you're saying here is the problem is disposable diapers. This particular 'technoloy' (and perhaps the waste management *system*, the culture of consumer convenience, and the addiction to disposable goods) are not doing a good job. The real problem in this instance is not what the diapers are meant to contain, which is actually a wonderful thing for the environment and a potential asset.

    As I said, the real problem here are the systems and technologies we create. Your argument is, fundamentally, an excuse not to change.

  • nightbloom

    3 years ago

    That should read

    That should read "technology" not "technoloy" of course...

    Fii, I just re-read your post, and didn't hear your tone correctly the first time around, so now my reply strikes me as too combative. Apologies - and yeah I'm glad I don't have to deal with dirty diapers!

  • nightbloom

    3 years ago

    Patrick - I totally agree on

    Patrick - I totally agree on the "good boy" male lifestyle reporter/writer being a bad thing. There's a second kind of male chauvinist - the kind that takes covert pleasure in shooting down other men, and who compulsively seeks female approval – especially if it comes at the expense of other men in some visible way. His masculinity and sense of place is validated by it. He's a bad apple.

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