Decades ago, my mother was forced into bed rest with her fourth child. My dad had to pick up the slack. He was a dedicated worker, often trudging through sixty-hour weeks meeting clients, but always found time for the kids and his handyman skills were enviable. Domestic tasks, though, he wasn’t apt at. He married at nineteen and never really lived on his own, so his capabilities in homemaking were marginal at best. For dinner, we had what Dad called “tuna glop,” which was toasted bread topped with cream of mushroom soup and tuna. We also had tons of convenience-store pot pies he would so graciously cook every other day. It was the epitome of Drunk Wisconsin’s Dadslop. Dad was a boomer, the last generation with a clear delineation in gender roles, and it showed.
Fast forward to today, and it’s a different story. Back then, his worldview and competencies were common among husbands. Today, among married Millennials, it’s a crapshoot which person is more apt in the kitchen. Often, the husband does the cooking because he enjoys it, can do it far more efficiently, or is just sick of hearing about “mental load” from his wife. A colleague of mine explained once how it put him into an absolute rage watching how slowly his wife cut carrots. Another can whip up a dish with whatever’s lying around with a skill that would impress my great-grandma. While there are always generational issues in relations between the sexes, the rapid changes of modernity have sent these conflicts into overdrive as the implicit rules of previous generations evaporated before their eyes.
This goes for other domestic areas, too. The husband is doing far more care work around the house than in previous generations. He’s doing significantly more child rearing, though this is often invisible to his worrying wife. On the other hand, there are many more mothers in the office, including management positions. We can see the blurring of gender roles in all areas. Good or bad, it is a distinct change, and a great inversion of previous norms.
While a significant amount of modern rhetoric points to social engineering that elevates women in the workforce and a media environment that advocates more male help in traditionally female tasks, alongside a push toward egalitarianism, there’s a more fundamental evolution that has occurred. It’s been said that motherhood feels even more onerous than it used to be, even though appliances and services make housekeeping easier than ever. There are always conversations about mental load, different stressors, and a multitude of other worries that the mother has to deal with. While some of this could be moms whining online, hoping that guilting others will get more tasks offloaded, much of it seems genuine. For men, laundry is as simple as throwing stuff in a magic machine that washes it, but a pile of laundry on a dirty bathroom floor unleashes a wave of anxiety for some women.
While there’s a lot of stereotyping going on here and personality profiles exist on a spectrum, we can say that women are more oriented toward detail and relationships, but they also have a more neurotic streak than men. Men want to find a problem and fix it, want a clear hierarchy, and they aren’t so concerned about consensus. They want to follow orders or give orders, and they want to get things done as fast as possible so they can continue to the next task or relax and conserve energy. It’s a goal orientation instead of a relationship orientation.
And men are just as relaxed as they’ve always been. While they’re more involved with their kids, they have far less stress than their female counterparts. They’re not as worried about making sure their kids are wearing the proper clothing. They’re not fussing around the kitchen all the time, yet still make good meals even if they cheat and get delivery every once in a while. They’re not obsessing over cleaning, yet the floors are swept and they also have a lot of free time. When you go through parts of Twitter, you see many dads exclaiming, “I don’t know what’s so hard about this.”
Consensus and Compliance
You see countless men agitated and thrown off by what they would call bullshit meetings designed more to manufacture consensus than to solve problems: constant talking, constant back and forth, and constant negotiation. This goes starkly against men’s instinct of getting or giving orders after getting the necessary information and getting stuff done. There’s a valid point about corporate office politics, but it’s also true that our society has formed more of a relationship with consensus and making sure people get along, and accepts the tradeoff of less efficiency. The usual top-down hierarchy in corporations and elsewhere has been subsumed by a more collaborative structure. A significant amount of this comes from complying with opaque work regulations, and a lot has to do with a growing labor pool working in much softer roles. As corporations get larger, their risk aversion increases, and they prefer stability over an effective but rogue employee.
In this respect, women seem to enjoy the office much more than men, and I don’t think it’s just indoctrination that explains why many women prefer the office to being at home with their kids. So what’s happened in the last few decades has inverted things. It seems like dads have a much easier time at home, and women have a much easier time in the office than in ages past. Even when everyone is bored out of their minds in a useless meeting, women seem to handle the monotony better. They have an easier time with tasks that feel like useless busywork. To them, it’s just a part of the social game. Men, on the other hand, look ready to rip someone’s lungs out on the corner chair trapped in an hour-long working group session that should have been an email.
Guys want to get stuff done well and with minimal fuss. They don’t want to deal with talking to all these different departments, all these different heads, all these various people with overlapping job descriptions. This is especially true with compliance, when you have onerous regulations to go through. You need concurrence from city or state governments. You need constant back-and-forth discussions with a vendor to reach a conclusion. This requires an enormous amount of detail, more patience, and more small talk. And many guys would rather jump out a window than deal with it daily.
Helen Andrews made waves a while back with her article “The Great Feminization” that put forth the argument that an increasingly feminized work environment is the outcome of civil rights law and fear of litigation, forcing everyone to follow draconian policies to avoid being a hostile work environment. She’s right, but it’s only part of the picture. In a managerial system where the focus is on incremental improvements over radical discovery, consensus is more stable than sparring over drastic changes. Most companies are not SpaceX, and most employees don’t need the temperament of Elon Musk. He is just the guy to be a trailblazer, but would be a disaster running a well-established paint company. It’s not a matter of out-competing men in a marketplace of skills, but having a temperament better suited for a mildly sclerotic office tasked with making minor process improvements, which is the vast majority of work being done. Everyone wants to believe they are a pioneer, but few are.
Father Knows Best
In child rearing, women’s neuroticism was once beneficial. If you didn’t keep things clean, your baby might get sick and die. The world used to be more dangerous for children, and if you weren’t watching over your child like a hawk, he might get killed in some random way. As society has become safer and more predictable, this neuroticism hinders child-rearing more than it helps. Now, their fears focus on making sure they have the right clothes, whether a kid’s Halloween costume is offensive, and spending hours cleaning the house for the next-door neighbors to visit. The mental load is worrying about and fussing over details that don’t matter, a holdover from when domestic life really was complicated and monotonous, when cleanliness and neighborly relationships could be life or death. Kids don’t really have to be watched like a hawk anymore. As long as you have safely stored your knives, you can just relax and let the kids run free. You don’t need to go on DEFCON alert and frantically clean because guests are coming.
Add this to the loneliness of modern domestic life, and it’s obvious why homemaking doesn’t have the appeal it used to. In earlier times, neighbors walked in and out of one another’s homes without stress, and there was a cohort of local, similarly minded women to share the load. The suburbs destroyed it. People also travel more and more for work, so the grandma who could walk in and help at the drop of a hat is gone. The home is more isolating, which allows neuroticism to fester. Men often like the solitude, but it drives women nuts.
Probably the greatest strength men have in the home is discipline. While women are much more apt to deal with children two and younger before they understand consequences, men are far more consistent in establishing boundaries. Women create many boundaries, lightly enforced. Men create fewer boundaries, harshly enforced. Guys may not care if you jump on the couch, but heaven help you if you run on the road. The kid’s room may not be as tidy, but they know that if it gets too ridiculous, Dad will just walk in with a trash bag and disappear half their stuff. Mom’s approach produces children constantly testing boundaries and a tired parent unable to enforce them consistently. With Dad’s, the kid quickly understands the rules. Also, previously women rarely had to instill discipline in a teenager bigger and stronger than they were. A teenage son might love his mother, but often stops recognizing her as an authority figure. Earlier, the son would enter the domain of men and be provisioning for the tribe far younger than what is possible today, thereby avoiding this conflict.
When dads say they can just crack open a beer and relax after a few hours of housework, meal prep, and playing with the kids, they’re right. They are much faster at preparing meals because they simply get the job done, while also being excellent cooks much of the time because they are not encumbered by the nagging worry a dish will be ruined if a measurement is slightly off. There’s also a lot less focus on status, on trying to keep up with the Joneses and feeling like they have to put on elaborate events to show on Instagram or to talk about with their friends. Dads just don’t care. If they want company, they put a few beers in the fridge and call their friends without elaborate prep. Men know what’s necessary, know how to accomplish it, and move on with their lives. They are much better at prioritizing what’s immediately important.
The domestic sphere used to be focused on collaboration, where moms would talk with other moms, discuss things, and form consensus. It was also built on a heavy focus on safety. Now, parenthood is much more atomized, and there isn’t as much need for a focus on safety as there was in previous times. Therefore, the type of person who can just take action, know what’s important, set priorities, and get stuff done is going to be much more relaxed in the domestic sphere than someone who worries about things that, evolutionarily, just aren’t that important anymore. The main strengths of the domestic and provisioning spheres have inverted.
No Solutions, Only Tradeoffs
Where do we go from here? How do we deal with this great inversion? It doesn’t mean dads should just stay at home with their kids and moms should just go into the workforce. The statistics point another direction: women want men who make more money than them. Men don’t really care about women’s jobs or credentials. Men are also much more apt to cheat when they’re stay-at-home dads, and divorce rates are actually higher for dads not working full time, which likely points to a lack of the risk and adventure men need. I know a couple of stay-at-home dads, and while they got everything done, their wives resented them for being home. They both ended up going back to the workforce since it was misery, not from the labor, but from unmet implicit expectations. The arrangement didn’t feel right. I don’t think that’s the fault of the women; it’s just natural instinct. The only arrangement I know that works involves a tradesman who puts in 80-hour weeks for a few months and is mostly idle the rest of the year. In the offseason, he takes the homemaking role, and it works out. While modernity wants things a certain way, biology wants it another way. There are graveyards filled with divorced dads who were good fathers, and nursing homes with never-married women who had successful careers.
Modernity has created something much more egalitarian. Some of it was conscious, but a lot was a secondary effect of technology. Instead of a strong separation, there’s much more gray area about who is suited for each task. We’re not going to go back to a time when kids could randomly get killed and you needed a high level of neuroticism. We likely can’t go back to a more militaristic office, because, simply put, there’s a lot less manual labor, a lot fewer skilled trades, a lot less strength required, and more necessary collaboration. The office isn’t exactly a masculine place, as it is largely bureaucracy, and women are very good as low- and mid-level managers who can keep up rapport, communication, and relationships. It will be hard to go back to old-school dynamics like the ones in this old documentary:
The girl boss trope exists for a genuine reason, and while the wife-guy trope is mocked, there’s a reason more relationships have this dynamic. In this state of confusion, it’s less and less clear what the expectations should be. Because of this changed dynamic, we have the gender war going on right now. People just don’t know how to deal with the new modernity, and there’s an assumption that the clear separation of work and domestic life that existed a hundred years ago can still exist.
What do you do when modern structures form that conflict with one’s biological instincts? You could wait a thousand years for the proper adaptations to take place, but that hardly helps us now. At best, we have small remnants following a “trad” life in a modern context by trying to live through old forms.
The sexes aren’t getting along, and a lot of the anger stems from frustration over the mate they want and confusion about the conflict between biological urges and success in the modern world.
It’s easy to post gender war slop berating crazy, lazy wives or men who aren’t “stepping up.” There is a lot of truth to how our legal and social framework is foisting an egalitarian mindset on all of society, forcing compliance in the corporate sphere. There is a lot of truth to media encouraging women to act masculine, and men more feminine. What is lost in these bouts of rage are the changes in domestic life that make one’s natural impulses weak where they were once strong, and strong where they were once weak. Dads can do more than serve tuna glop, and moms can do more than secretary work. Until we understand this transformation, we will keep arguing in circles and fail to make necessary compromises.
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Solid perspective, when it comes to elementary aged kids who are in school, or older kids who don't need as much hands-on attention. But the very tendency to rush through work to move onto relaxation time makes me skeptical that men are better suited to care for infants and small children at home.
This is the masculine perspective you describe, as I've seen it in action with small children:
- Showing an 18 month old how to put on his own clothes is tedious. Easier for me to just get him dressed; he'll learn when he's bigger.
- Allowing a 6 month old to start feeding herself creates huge messes. I'll just hold her hands down and put these solids straight into her mouth until her motor control improves.
- Potty training is horrible. I'll change his diapers until he's ready to use the toilet on his own.
- I already told my two year old that we'll go to the park after naptime. Why's he asking again? He will receive a verbal update when the status changes; I'm busy gaming.
Small kids require huge amounts of time investment, and you can't rush through some of these tasks without deleterious long-term consequences. Language development in particular seems to be excruciatingly painful to a man who dislikes constant interruptions and repetitions. If your toddler has extensive exposure to older, speaker humans, then it's not a huge deal. However, if the stay-at-home parent is the primary source of language development, then in this instance, women's neurotic tendencies (as you called them) are superior.
As I've commented on many other similar articles and podcasts: The truth is that women (generally) will complain no matter what is happening. It's just like breathing to them. The internet has given them all a public forum in which to do this complaining so it's much more visible to the world now.