Possibly a tautology, eh?
David Brooks is, I believe, the universally acknowledged master of pseudo-science, especially where it can be used to confirm his existing prejudices, more often than not those involving gender roles. So it was no surprise to me to read Mr. McBobo's* recent dialogue with Gail Collins in which they discuss whether more men might become "househusbands" as a result of the higher rates of male unemployment occurring during this recession. Brooks engages in gender essentialism throughout, albeit in the guise of "evolutionary psychology." Thus, when Collins discusses the idea of older women having relationships with younger men, initiated by the younger men, Brooks recoils:
This cuts against all sorts of genetic imperatives, by the way. According to evolutionary psychologists, in all human societies, males generally mate with younger women and women generally look for higher status men. A study of online dating found that a guy who is 5 feet 6 inches tall can attract as much interest as a 6-foot-tall man — if he makes at least $125,000 more a year. Don’t ask me why I know that.
I am guessing that Brooks takes great comfort in the fact that he makes more than $125,000 a year.
But he saves the best when dealing with the notion proposed by Collins that more men might consider staying at home with children given the greater levels of education and earning potential possessed by many women:
In theory, I agree with you. Men should be staying home more. But I do think for many working-class men, we will find ourselves running into some pretty stiff headwinds. I come back to evolutionary psychology, which suggests that women are just more nurturing. Let me cite an experiment I suspect will linger in your memory. Scientists took a bunch of research subjects and taped pads to their underarms and asked them to watch a funny or scary movie. Then they got another group of subjects to sniff the pads and predict whether the pads were from the scary movie group or the funny movie group. Both men and women could give the right answer most of the time, but women were much, much more accurate. The empathy thing.
Notice that it is "working class men" who will have problems with staying at home, not enlightened educated souls like Mr. Brooks. Except, of course, if you have ever read the Brooks' oeuvre (and I say that with all of the high-larious pretension I can muster), you realize that he is the one with an enormous problem with women who dare to assert their autonomy professionally, sexually, and socially, but understands at some level that it would be declasse to be too obvious about it. Evolutionary psychology is a wonderful intellectual out for Brooks -- he is just reporting what science tells him -- and it just so happens that science confirms everyone of Brooks's social prejudices on the subject.
I have been reading "Rebirth of a Nation" a compelling history of the United States from 1877 to 1920 by Jackson Lears. This is the age of "Social Darwinism," the pseudo-science that justified segregation, wars of empire, the denial of suffrage to women and blacks, and the brutal exploitation of working people. It is astonishing the degree to which the ideology of Social Darwinism and its enshrinement of the biological superiority of the white, northern European male and his American descendants is the defining narrative of the age. In its name, wars of conquest are fought, blacks lynched, strikers shot, anarchists hanged, and pogroms are carried out against Chinese laborers. And time and time again, these actions and outcomes are justified as manifestations of the scientific process of "survival of the fittest."
Now, evolutionary psychology in the trained hands of our Mr. Brooks is not nearly as sinister as this, but it is about as scientifically sound. Brooks likes to suggest biological imperatives for practices that are simply matters of longstanding social practice and cultural conditioning.
I have always hated gender essentialism (and its subtler cousin "different voice feminism"). In a country of 300 million people, I am always amazed when someone suggests that men are like this and women like that in these kind of sweeping, across-the-board statements like: women are empathetic, consensus building leaders who tread softy and listen well -- men are aggressive, hierarchical actors who like to lead alone. Stuff like that drives me nuts because it just doesn't conform to the world that I've witnessed. In the law, I've worked with men who were sometimes maddeningly consensus-oriented, who had very sensitive political antennae, and who were only aggressive if you could throw passive into the same sentence. Alternatively I have known women who were decisive, abrasive, and whose idea of consensus was securing their own vote. In short, they are individuals with their own personalities, strengths, and foibles -- neither simply men nor women, but human.
As people of the left, we very often focus on our defeats and failures, on the many imperfections that remain and likely will always remain in some form or fashion. But we should from time to time, take stock of our victories, and the progress that we have made in terms of promoting a culture of equality across racial, sexual, and sexual preference lines. Again, I hate to assert anecdote in lieu of data, but when I look around at my male friends who have recently become parents, I see tremendous strides in burden sharing and in an innate sense of equivalent responsibility for child rearing -- significantly more so than I saw nearly 17 years ago when I first became a parent and was one of the few men in my circle who really assumed an equal burden in terms of the housework and the doctors visits and the sick days and all of the other delights of new parenthood. I have one friend who is a teacher who takes the summers off and hangs with the kids because his wife is a nurse in a unionized big city hospital and can earn far more than he ever could in a summer job. I have another who took sole care of his infant child while his wife was overseas monitoring a recent election (and then became stranded by our terrible snow storm), and still another who stays home when the nanny can't make it because he is an established partner in a law firm and his wife is a relatively new associate.
I admit that this is not a representative sampling of people culled from a University of Chicago study. But it strikes me as consistent with broader trends ongoing among new parent couples.
Ultimately, the men in question have been inculcated in a culture of equality in which they have learned to start from the presumption that they bear equal responsibility for their offspring. These kinds of things are not genetically programmed into us -- they are learned behaviors fostered (or not) by the culture that surrounds us.
David Brooks, for reasons I can't really understand, is incredibly threatened by women who are autonomous sexually, professionally, and financially. He would like to turn back the clock and encourage women to return to a role of serving men and their children, to eschew having an active sex life while young and single, to marry and bear children young, and to make career advancement a minor, later-life goal. He tries to invoke science to back up his archaic world view, but one should not be fooled by Mr. Reasonable Conservative, the human face of patriarchy.
*And no, I never will tire of that bit of cartoon brilliance by Tom Tomorrow.
