The Myth of Male Power

The second in a two-part series

Sexism, we have been told, made men powerful and women powerless. The reality is somewhat different. For centuries, neither sex had power. Both sexes had roles: She raised the children, he raised the money. Neither sex had options, both sexes had obligations. If both sexes had traditional obligations, it is more accurate to call it sex roles than sexism.

Men's roles didn't serve their interests any more than women's roles served women's interests. Instead, both sex roles served the interests of survival. Her role was to create a family. His role was to protect a family. Her role was to gather the food. His role was to hunt the food. For thousands of years most marriages remained focused on survival in just that way. But after World War Two, marriages began to focus on self-fulfillment.

The transition between survival and self-fulfillment created a change in the psychology of how couples relate. In the survival phase, most couples were role mates. In the self-fulfillment phase, couples increasingly desired to be soul mates. This led to a redefinition of love.

When survival was the focus, a woman called it love if she found a man who was a good provider and protector. He called it love if she was beautiful and could take care of a home and children. Love meant a division of labor, which led to a division of female and male interests. Now that self-fulfillment is preeminent, love means common interests and common values. This is a new definition of love. (continued on page 108) Myth of Male Power (continued from page 105)

In the past two decades, the people with the most freedom to redefine love have been women, not men. Not all women, but those married to successful men. These women had the financial safety net to go to therapists, watch Oprah, read Women Who Love and the Men Who Hate Them books--in brief, to up the ante on what they wanted in a relationship.

The problem? The men who provided the money that freed women were so caught up in providing an income for themselves, their wives and their families, they didn't have a chance to free themselves. They didn't ask questions such as "If I could do anything with my life, what would it be?" Or "Is earning money that someone else spends really power?"

In essence, the transition between the two phases of love has so far been the story of how successful men freed women but failed to free themselves. The resultant neglect of men helps explain the fact that men's life expectancy went from one year less than women's in 1920 to seven years less than women's today. Why? Let's look at the lives of Abigail and Cindy.

Abigail, a typical 1890s woman, had eight children. Twice, she nearly died in childbirth. She sewed for her whole family, shopped by horse and buggy, pulled meals out of her garden, cooked everything from scratch and washed clothes and dishes by hand. By the time her last child left the house, she was near death.

Cindy, a typical 1990s woman, was single until she was 25. After she married, she bore two children in a modern hospital. With her husband's help, she buys discount clothing at Wal-Mart, pulls precooked meals out of the microwave and leaves cleanup to her dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, clothes washer and drier. When her last child leaves the house, Cindy will have a quarter of a century to live.

Does Cindy face pressures that Abigail never had? Absolutely. To play chauffeur and to help pay for a college education, for instance. But those new pressures are not additions, they are substitutes for old burdens. Had they been additions, a woman's life span would not have increased by almost 50 percent since 1920.

Why, then, did men's life expectancy go from one year less than women's in 1920 to seven years less today? Because men's work--inventing, manufacturing, selling and distributing--saved women, but no one saved men from the pressure to perform. A woman went from being a baby machine, cooking machine and cleaning machine to having time for love. A man went from being a performing machine near the home to being a performing machine away from the home. And having less time for love.

The location of a man's work disconnected him from the people he loved. And if he succeeded at work, he became a male machine. If he failed, he suffered humiliation. Either way, the more he saved his wife, the sooner he died compared with her. The money he made for her and his children was left for them to spend.

The men who created the industrial revolution did a better job of creating better homes and gardens for their wives than they did of creating safer coal mines and construction sites for themselves. We live in better houses because men are injured in three dangerous professions required to build them: construction, logging and trucking. Few people cared that thousands of men died to lay tracks for trains that allowed the rest of civilization to be served in a dining car.

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Today, when the successful single woman meets the successful single man, they appear to be equals. But should they marry and contemplate having children, she almost invariably considers three career options:

Option 1: Work full time

Option 2: Mother full time

Option 3: Some combination of working and mothering

He considers three options as well:

Option 1: Work full time

Option 2: Work full time

Option 3: Work full time

In fact, his option to work full time is really an obligation, and usually is an obligation to work overtime or work two jobs. (Enter the era of the multi-option woman and the no-option man.) The money he earns will, in effect, pay for her time to be with their children. Mothers are still 43 times more likely than fathers to leave the workplace for six months or longer for family reasons. But the more time he spends making the money so she can love, the less time he has for his family. In effect, he pays for her time to love, and for the children to be loved. No one pays men to love.

Ironically, it is the husband's success as a provider that makes his wife more than equal to him, that gives her three options while he has none. Of course, a woman's choice to mother may hurt her career, but she can choose maternal opportunity or career continuity. Men who chose to be pioneer house-husbands soon learned that many reporters wanted them for interviews but few women wanted them for marriage.

Women did more than speak up for new options. They articulated the problems the new options created. So we heard about their juggling acts. Men did not articulate the pressure to intensify their commitment to the workplace, so we never heard about their intensifying acts. Nor did men discuss how hurt they felt about being left out of their families.

Clearly, those with the most freedom to recast their lives were women who married the most successful men. These were the have-it-all women who had a financial safety net and, thus, equal access to all three female options as defined above. Virtually no men were in the same position.

These women began asking questions such as "Why should I be married to a man who can show me his wallet but not his love?" "Why am I called Mrs. John Doe--who am I?" "Why am I always serving him, deferring to his opinions?" "When the children are grown, will my life have meaning?" The woman feared that her husband didn't really respect her, then she chastised herself for being so preoccupied with what he thought, anyway. She expressed her concerns aloud, and they were institutionalized in the women's liberation movement.

The political genius of the feminist movement was its sense that it could appeal to all women only by emphasizing expansion of rights and avoiding expansion of responsibilities. Had the National Organization for Women fought to register 18-year-old girls for the draft, it might have lost members. Had feminism emphasized women's responsibilities for taking sexual initiatives, or paying for men's dinners, or choosing careers they like less to support adult men more, its impact would have been more egalitarian but less politically successful.

Meanwhile, the man who was paying for this bout of introspection and political development kept his thoughts to himself. He repressed his hurt that his (continued on page 151) Proposal (continued from page 69) Myth of Male Power (continued from page 108) wife seemed more interested in the children, in shopping and in herself than in him. He felt criticized--instead of appreciated--for working late. His wife seemed to define communication as her expressing her negative feelings, but not him expressing his.

Turned off and unappreciated, he wondered, What am I getting from this marriage? Restaurants offer better food and give me a menu to choose from. Housekeepers don't ask for half my income. My secretary is more attractive, has more respect for me and is more in tune with my work. And besides, selling product X is hardly what I call an identity. Unlike her, though, he failed to express his concerns. His concerns became ulcers, heart attacks, cancer and alcohol abuse.

When men did express their concerns, these were dismissed as their midlife crises. Essentially, though, women's liberation and men's mid-life crises were the same search--for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, men's mid-life crises were thought of as identity crises.

Similarly, women's liberation was called insight, self-discovery and self-improvement--akin to maturity. Men's mid-life crises were called irresponsibility, self-gratification and selfishness--akin to immaturity. Women's crises got sympathy, men's crises got a bad rap.

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It is tempting to think of modern love--that is, love based on the search for self-fulfillment--as unconditional love. In practice, it is more conditional. Couples now expect communication skills, joint parenting, shared housework, sexual fulfillment, joint decisionmaking, a spiritual connection, mutual attraction and mutual respect. They want both stability and change, both interdependence and a partner who is independent. They want time to grow and time to discover each other's growth.

In a survival-oriented relationship, these pursuits would have taken time away from raising the children, raising the crops and raising the money. Discovering each other was the traditional relationship's trivial pursuit. It threatened survival.

Couples who pursued self-fulfillment created a new set of problems: They were increasing expectations faster than they were able to fulfill them. They were discovering that the qualities that made perfect couples in survival-based marriages made them perfect for divorce in self-fulfillment-based marriages. The traditional wife was seen as preoccupied with the home and boring, while the traditional husband was seen as preoccupied with work and afraid of intimacy. When survival roles clash with self-fulfillment goals, the resultant setup for divorce becomes apparent.

Many marriages established in the traditional world were suddenly found wanting by modern standards. That was not only because the standards were higher but also because the standards were contradictory. This may account for the divorce epidemic of the past 30 years.

Divorces planted the seeds from which female anger grew. They threw millions of women out of the have-it-all class. But the women who got divorced--who were probably closer to 40 years old than 20 years old--were tossed into the marketplace of men more addicted to two 20s than one 40. Understandably, they became angry.

In the traditional society, reinforcing men's addiction to the 20-year-old woman worked for many women. The addiction made men agree to support their wives for a lifetime. The taboo on divorce made them stick to their agreements. When the taboo on divorce weakened and the woman was 40, the man's addiction to two 20s worked against her. She felt disposable.

Divorce altered the psychological relationship between men and women. For one thing, it damaged the ability of a woman to have her sexuality, youth and beauty combine to create a guarantee of a lifetime of economic support. The more beautiful the woman was when she was younger, the more she had been treated like a celebrity--what I call a genetic celebrity--and therefore the more she now felt like a has-been. As she became increasingly invisible, she felt increasingly disposable and increasingly angry.

Simultaneously, women who never made it into the have-it-all class also felt like failures. In different ways, both groups of women felt rejected by men and therefore became angry at men.

Divorce forced the middle-class woman to sacrifice her satisfying but low-paying job for a higher-paying job she liked less. When feminism explained that women were segregated into the lowerpaying and meaningless jobs, women felt devalued. Feminism was so powerful that it blinded women to the men around them who were also segregated into lower-paying, meaningless jobs: the short-order cook and dishwasher in the local coffee shop, the migrant workers who picked the fruit for their tables, the custodians and car washers, the busboys and gas-station attendants.

Women's anger increased because they were hearing only one side of the story. A professional woman is more likely to know her secretary's name than her garbageman's name. She's therefore more likely to know how her secretary experiences men than how her garbageman experiences women. Because less powerful women tend to work in the office and less powerful men tend to work outside the office (e.g., in more hazardous jobs), professional women are more conscious of the problems of the less powerful women who work around them. The powerful woman doesn't feel the effect of the secretary's miniskirt power, cleavage power and flirtation power. Men do. The powerful woman tends to use these forms of power much more cautiously in the workplace because she has other forms of power.

Women interpreted men's tendency to earn more for different work as an outcome of male dominance rather than male subservience. They did not see it as an outcome of male obligation--obligation to go where the money was, not where fulfillment was. For men, following money was primary and fulfillment was secondary. For men, divorce also created a change: They still followed money to support a family economically, but they did so without a family to support them emotionally.

Simultaneously, feminists focused on the fact that women as a group earned less--without focusing on any of the reasons why women earned less (one reason is that full-time working men work nine hours per week more than full-time working women; men are more willing to relocate to undesirable locations, to work the less desirable hours and to work the more hazardous jobs). By being blinded to the whole picture--that when both sexes had minimal skills they commanded minimal wages in different types of meaningless jobs--women became increasingly angry. By calling the difference in pay discrimination and not explaining the reasons for the difference, feminists left women angry rather than empowered. Had women known the reasons for the difference, they could have made informed choices to boost their earnings.

When divorces occurred, women's greatest fear was of economic deprivation. Men's was of emotional deprivation. Modern divorce laws helped women to make a transition from economic dependence to economic independence. No modern laws helped men to make a transition from emotional dependence to emotional independence. (Which is why women rushed to the courts for economic support and men rushed to women for emotional support.)

When divorces meant that husbands no longer guaranteed wives economic security, the government became the substitute husband. It guaranteed women equality in pay and an advantage in hiring. It gave women Aid to Families with Dependent Children and provided other special programs like Women, Infants and Children. It gave women preference for keeping children and then garnisheed men's wages if child support was not paid. It gave special opportunities to women in college and in the armed services, to women artists and women in small businesses. But it severed the husband from future services from his wife, and no substitute for that was provided.

Women used to have only one option for economic security and men only one option for emotional security. Now, as noted above, women have multiple options for economic security (income by means of career, husband or government), while men have less than one: income by means of career minus child support, minus alimony and minus higher taxes to pay for the government as substitute husband. All of this kept the husband a prisoner of money, barred from exploring his interests.

Why didn't women protest workplace discrimination prior to the Sixties? When more than 90 percent of women were getting married and when divorce was rare, discrimination in favor of men at work meant discrimination in favor of their wives at home.

During the years I was on the board of directors of NOW in New York City, I did corporate workshops on equality in the workplace. The most resistant audiences I faced were not male executives but the wives of male executives. So long as the wife's income came from her husband, she was not feeling generous when affirmative action let another woman have a head start at vying for her husband's (that is, her) income. To her, that seemed like sexism. And to most executive wives, it still does.

Why? Almost 70 percent of the wives of male executives (vice presidents and above) do not hold paid jobs outside the home. They still get their income completely from their husbands. A corporate wife opposes a woman at work having an advantage over her husband, not only because it hurts her income but also because it discounts her contribution. She works hard to support her husband so that he can support the company.

As soon as discrimination began to work against women, it led to measures to protect women. In 1963 the Federal Equal Pay Act was enacted. The U.S. Census Bureau found that as early as 1960, never-married women over 45 earned more in the workplace than never-married men over 45. Data such as these--which imply a much different view than that of women as victims--never reached the public's awareness because only women's groups organized.

Although the salary bias toward men had worked for women, it was interpreted as a plot against women, leading us to believe that men owed women. This created a thoroughly modern form of entitlement: Women came to feel that they deserved compensation for past oppression. That prevented us from seeing the need for men and women to make the transition from survival-based relationships to self-fulfilling relationships together. The need isn't for a women's movement or a men's movement but for a gender-transition movement.

The gender transition from survival to self-fulfillment requires adapting our traditional roles to those that will serve us better in the future. Our old roles divided labor between the sexes, producing "opposite" sexes. Our future roles will allow for shared labor, producing sexes that will have more in common.

In the past, choosing the killer male to protect the family and society could be said to have led to the survival of the fittest. In the present, with nuclear technology, choosing the killer male as protector leads to the potential destruction of everyone. In the past, survival, marriage and the family all required the killer male. In the present, survival, marriage and the family will require the communicative male. For the first time in history, the qualities it takes to survive as a species are compatible with the qualities it takes to love.

The challenge for women is to create enough economic independence that they don't compromise love for an economic safety net. The challenge for men is to understand how preparation for the protector's role is really preparation for disconnection--from their families and from life itself. The traditional man had a role that was more disconnected from intimacy than was the traditional female role of nurturer. Which is why the challenge for men to enter the modern world is even greater than the challenge for women.

Within all of us, male and female, is the potential to be a killer-protector, and there is equal potential to be a nurturerconnector. When Vikings got approval to be fathers and husbands rather than conquerors, they soon adapted. The change was not impossible because killing to protect was just the Vikings' method of adapting to what gave them approval.

When we select a certain type of man or woman to have children with, each choice becomes a vote for the type of man or woman we want. It is a vote that begins with the type of man or woman we cheer for and admire. The children are the most important outcome of that vote. Next to our choice of mate and the children we create, all the values we create are secondary.

Women will continue choosing the updated version of the killer male--men who make a killing in their profession--until men protest. Men will not protest until they see the connection between that obligation and their earlier deaths from all 15 leading causes of death, including heart attacks, cancer and suicide. In brief, men will not protest until they see how their traditional role is making men the disposable sex.

"If he failed, he suffered humiliation. The more he saved his wife, the sooner he died compared with her."

"Unlike her, he failed to express his concerns. His concerns became ulcers, heart attacks and alcohol abuse."