'Having Kids Is So Gay'
Or are childless men caught in a homosocial comfort zone?
Gay or grown up?
"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:
- Is Breeding a Sin?
Only if you have a litter, and happen to be poor. - So You Want Me to Breed?
Fertility crisis fretting misses how lots of women really think. - Bitches Are Back
But is cruelty mandatory for feminism to prevail?
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
notamused
23-04-2009
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
23-04-2009
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
23-04-2009
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
VivianLea Doubt
23-04-2009
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
23-04-2009
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
23-04-2009
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
24-04-2009
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.
24-04-2009
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
24-04-2009
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