Jay, guest posting at Feministe, just cross-posted something she wrote on her home blog, Two Women Blogging, back in 2007. It was good then, it’s good now. It begins (emphasis hers)...

“Aren’t you lucky! He helps around the house!”

Yup. He helps. Because picking up his laundry, cooking his meals, paying his bills, and raising his child is by rights my job. Of course, my laundry and bills and meals are my job, too. Along with the playdates and the grocery shopping and scheduling babysitters. But he helps! Wow!

“You must have trained him well”.

That’s it. Exactly. I held a chocolate chip cookie in front of his nose, and every time he washed a dish or put away a T-shirt I gave him the cookie, patted him on the head and said “good husband! Good boy!” until he wagged his, um, tail.

She said it here.

It gets better from there so go ahead and read the whole thing.

And here’s the tricky bit. For all the years I’ve been a stay-at-home dad, and for all the years I’ve heard people say similar things to my partner, I’ve never heard a man say them.

In fact in all these years I think the only man who wasn’t also a stay-at-home dad who’s really said anything about it that’s registered was my father who told me his biggest regret was that he didn’t have more time to spend with us when my siblings and I were little… that the courses for he and my mom had seemed foreordained… that I might never know how lucky I was. But I digress…

I don’t think there’s anything laudable about men never commenting on my “helping around the house.” Surveys suggest men either think they’re doing their part by bringing home the bacon, or else they think they’re contributing something closer to 50% of domestic tasks… even though the actual figures are closer to 25-33%.

But boy have I heard those “you’re so lucky” remarks from other women. And those “you must have trained him well.”

I don’t even think there’s anything particularly ominous about that either. Women, even professional women, even women who themselves have never done a day of housework but instead hire out housecleaners and nannies, perceive other women as primarily responsible for the domestic sphere. Even when their partners don’t hold them responsible for it other women do.

The point being that patriarchy is a co-ed affair. The point being that the establishment of privilege is too. The point being that it’s not enough to fighting stereotypes of women.

Jay concluded her post with

If [her partner] Sam were writing this, he’d rant about the people who think he’s “babysitting” when he takes care of his own child. He’d tell you that men who can’t be left alone with their infants should be ashamed of their incompetence. He’d repeat the story about our first post-adoption visit with the social worker, the one who asked him what parts of parenting he didn’t participate in. He always says that at first he didn’t even understand the question, and then he got angry at the suggestion that he wouldn’t be a full part of parenting our child. And he’s sincere about all of it. He accepts housework as part of his responsibility, just like it’s part of mine, and he loves to cook as much as he enjoys building fences. He’d also point out the flip side of this assumption – that he’s somehow less a man because he “helps”.

But all of that serious talk might make male privilege visible. It might make women actually think that they don’t have to do all the housework, that their male partners could participate and the world wouldn’t come to an end. And we can’t have that. No making the patriarchy uncomfortable; wouldn’t be prudent. Besides, I have to go set the table now. Sam made dinner, and emptied the dishwasher, and fed the dogs while I was writing this. And he went to the grocery store this afternoon so I could stay home and watch the baseball game. I am lucky; he’s kind and generous and he’s a damn good cook. But don’t tell me he’s helping.

It’s not just women who are “lucky” to have partners like Sam who’ll share the burden. First of all, it’s hard to even call it a burden when it’s shared — then it’s not about being a woman or being a man, it’s just about being alive in a world with entropy in it. Second, though, is that, as my father, said Sam’s lucky. I’m lucky. We get to do what we are good at, instead of what fairy tales say we’re supposed to be. Same with our partners.

The trick is that, sure, a lot of men don’t get that. But a lot of women, even women who ought to know better, don’t get it either.

That’s part of the work too.

Monica Potts of TAPPED nails the right policy solutions for an otherwise typically, sullen, stupid MRA policy initiative — “financial abortions” for men who don’t want to be responsible parents if their partners become pregnant.

This seems like the wrong solution to a very real problem for low-income fathers. It assumes men should be able to decide not to be fathers but that they can’t do anything to prevent it, i.e., using birth control regularly. That’s an argument for male contraception — a male pill, but also an argument for making condoms increasingly pervasive and expanding access to sex education. It’s also an argument for helping low-income fathers provide the financial support they’re required to by assisting them with services that would help move them out of poverty, or make poverty less devastating.

She said it here.

The problem for men is real enough. Aside from condoms, vasectomies, and not having fluid-exchanging sex there really isn’t much heterosexual men can do to avoid unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. And one result of that seems to be a sort of passive-aggressive resentment that meshes all too well with the traditional view that everything related to pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting is womens’ responsibility. Which is why I like Potts’ take so much.

Aside: This isn’t the main point but she mentioned it first: Potts is right that men really do need more contraception options. For all the whining about men’s irresponsibility for fertility I remain seriously confident that if men had additional options that fell between the permanence and convenience curves of condoms and surgery they’d stop being so passive-aggressive about it and stop being so blazé at other men’s learned-helplessness about it. But that’s not what this post is about. But I digress…

What’s even more important, and even less broadly recognized than the limits on male contraception, is Potts’s point that low-income fathers, as well as pending and potential ones, need financial assistance as well!

I don’t know how many of you have studied the history of welfare or financial assistance but one of the reasons it’s been historically so draconian for women has been a social construction that mandates men as providers. In the 19th Century aid societies initiated the practice of surprise and midnight “bed checks” of women with dependent children to insure they really were widowed or abandoned. The idea that an able-bodied man, no matter how destitute and no matter how unemployed, might benefit directly from charity was anathema. As was the perhaps even more shameful and/or “immoral” prospect of his wife and children receiving food or shelter that he “should” have been able to provide.

And who knows, maybe you could make a case that it made sense back when women could only earn 7 cents for every dollar of equal work men could earn rather than 77 cents today. But income parity really is converging especially in the low-wage/low-income environments we’re talking about, it makes less and less sense to do so now that the “breadwinner”/“homemaker” dichotomy is even more mythical than it once was.

Anyway the whole notion of a “financial divorce” from child-rearing is such a psychotically gendered notion in the first place! Current biases against preparing low-income men for possible single and/or unmarried-to-the-mother parenthood are also similarly gender biased. And in both types of bias not only do men remain alienated from their own progeny, and not only do they maintain assumptions about mothers as “nurturing” and fathers as either supporters or abandoners, they also rather perpetuate policies that are intentionally (“financial abortion”) or unintentionally punitive against women and children.

While we’re on the subject of sex-related vocabulary, Holly of The Pervocracy reminds me of a tic that annoys me to no end.

I hate it when people call women “females.” I have one friend who does it because she was in the military and it was standard practice there, and occasionally I’ll say it when I specifically mean biological females rather than women, but 98% of the time it’s douchebaggery. Rule of thumb: if you say “females and males” it’s okay, but if you say “females and guys/men,” you’re probably a douchebag.

She said it here.

It really isn’t exclusive to misogynists: for instance the otherwise perfectly accessible bell hooks has the same completely annoying tic going the other way, and as Holly says they do the same thing to both genders in the military and, to a lesser extent, in police organizations.*

In the military or police it makes a little sense to put that layer of abstraction — it’s way easier to see or say (or, yikes, do!) when you can say something like “minor female down” rather than “a little girl is badly injured.” But whereas that sort of psychological separation might make it easier for soldiers, police, firefighters, or EMTs remain dispassionate in emotionally-charged situations, that kind of distancing is problematic in the extreme when you humanize one sex but “animalize” or objectify another.

At the very least it sounds alienated. At worst it sounds ominously creepy.

* While walking through a shopping mall I once overheard a mall cop pretentiously instructing a janitor that there had been some sort of disturbance “in the females’ restroom.”

Quick follow up on that post about Jonah Goldberg, who wishes (coughthirdworldcough) women could have a little more power so they could “civilize” their men.

Goldberg actually has it exactly backwards. It’s not that women civilize men, it’s that oppressing women uncivilizes us.

When men have the idea that we automatically have dominion over half of humanity an obvious question becomes “why not have dominion over the rest?” And when men believe we can automatically ignore the agency of half of humanity, rob them of their power, and use them as objects of our own convenience or gratification it’s a quick leap to “why not make similar use of all of humanity?”

Where Goldberg goes wrong is he thinks that just giving women enough power to better withhold sex creates civilization. Instead it’s that taking away any power from women as a class makes us all uncivilized.

And once you get that it’s easy to see how, in this case, his plea to give women a little bit of power so that they can trade sex instead of just having it taken from them, is completely anti-feminist. And uncivilized.