Fertility, Part Two: What about men?
“Women's Lib” isn't just for women.
It changed the role of men, too.
Are men even necessary anymore? Are they worth the bother? The old deal between the sexes was that men were the primary breadwinner. Increasingly women in the workforce are the primary or equal provider. Moreover, they aren't poisoned by the testosterone that makes men prone to anti-social violence, crime, and foolish risk-taking.
College classmate Jim Stodder returns to finish his reflection on fertility, this time looking at the role of men in America. He has a PhD.in Economics from Yale (1990) and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Administrative Sciences at Boston University, where he teaches financial regulation and international economics. He maintains a website at www.jimstodder.com
Guest Post by Jim Stodder
The ‘Deal’ Between the Sexes-- is Falling Apart. Part Two
Sex roles are changing, and the focus has been on women empowerment. Now female-to-male enrollments in college are a 60-40 split in the U.S and trending toward two to one. We read about the rage of "incels"--involuntarily celibate males--against feminists they consider hypocritical in preferring male partners to be successful or attractive in traditional ways. Incels aren't, and they are losing out. The media report conflicts that were unknown a short time ago, the conflict between male-to-female trans women and "cis" women, and complaints by TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) who do not want "women-only" spaces like changing rooms and women’s shelters used by those not born as biological females.Changing roles for women mean new roles for men. On one hand, in the world of #MeToo consciousness, men are instructed to be more respectful of women -- or else. But there is a growing male reaction. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in her Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, has shown how a wounded “national masculinity” and resentment at falling prospects can lead men (and women) to long for a strongman who can win it all back. Donald Trump has supporters like the Proud Boys, with their biggest guys marching in front, muscles bulging beneath tight t-shirts.
Trump revels in his reputation as a stud, bragging about his ability to "grab pussies" and get away with it. Most white American women voters in 2016 or 2020 cast their ballots for him. What most of them would probably consider disqualifying in their own workplace was apparently OK when it came to their Commander in Chief.
For most jobs, a rational sexual division of labor has vanished. Few jobs anymore require male upper body strength. But one job has always been for women alone: Childbirth. Shulamith Firestone argued over 50 years ago in her Dialectic of Sex–to the incredulity and outrage of most–that the liberation of women requires abolishing the division of reproductive labor. Firestone predicted that technology would advance to free women from childbirth itself.
This seemed quite sci-fi in 1970. But in 2017, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia maintained healthy sheep embryos in artificial wombs for up to 4 weeks and said that they can go much longer. The lead researcher says that complete extra-uterine delivery is still “a pipe dream,” but bioethicists (and techno-feminists inspired by Firestone) are already smoking that pipe. Today’s children may well live to see artificial wombs. It will be for the safety and health of mother and child, of course. But it will also destroy the last reason for a sexual division of labor.
There will still be sex roles and sexual preferences. But one can predict that both may be more broadly defined and variable. In the hands of a great sci-fi writer, Ursula LeGuin, it is a possible future: In her Left Hand of Darkness, she imagines gender as relationship-specific, depending on the dynamics between partners. Our new world of gender transition and fluidity makes this 1969 novel seem prescient. (Shockingly for a heavily male readership like sci-fi, it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for 1970.)The old sex-role deal was essentially the man providing physical protection and support in return for the woman providing sexual access and an explicit guarantee of paternity. But many women now get that protection and support from other sources and are deciding to have few if any children.
So our old deal is dying, what is our new one? I would be crazy to say I know, but there are clearly better options possible for both sexes. The opportunities on the women’s side are more obvious. But men too are benefitting from less constricted sex roles, by being freer to explore new careers, parenting, and emotional territory.
I will end by citing the mytho-poet Robert Bly, and his book, Iron John. He shows how today’s “men’s issues” echo back from the ancient Sumerian myths of Gilgamesh. (Gilgamesh was part-god, and many scholars see the much later Greek Odysseus, 600-800 BCE, as based on this earlier work form 2,000 to 2,500 BCE.) Gilgamesh’s inseparable first antagonist is his wild-man “double,” Enkidu, sent by jealous gods to kill him. But they become more than friends, almost two halves of the same soul. The wild-man winds up being “tamed” by a female sex-priestess and only then is he reliable and disciplined enough to be of much use to Gilgamesh.
When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh breaks every rule to visit him in the Underworld. As a punishment, Gilgamesh has to stay there a long time alone, a most terrible punishment. But he comes out the other side. Bly’s interpretation is that modern man must, like Gilgamesh, descend into the underworld of his own unconscious before he can begin his hero’s quest in earnest.
Bly, I think, is not at all surprised by the tortured displays with which I began this section, modern males in search of their identities. He sees much of our quest as our search for how we can be a good father, a painful journey inasmuch as many of us had only the most limited and formal relations with our own dads. He sees our current race of males as stunted half-men who never learned or even discussed with their own fathers what it means to be a man. We have to do better for our own sons, and this requires reliving our own pain and confusion as boys.
But I am convinced that there are deeper and stronger men, braver and more beautiful men, waiting to greet us and become us. There’s really nowhere else to go, so let the journey begin.