Alan Beggerow here. Great discussion you are having here!

Due to the space limitations of the NY Times article, much was not said that perhaps needs saying. You can read these clarifications here:
Go visit Some Clarifications…

Also I’d like to tell you all that I’ve recently begun math tutoring, and there are some opportunities coming my way that I can utilize my music and writing abilites towards. So things are looking up.

By all means keep up the discussion. This is an issue that is long overdue for debate. The way my wife and I are living now is of course risky, but so was working in a steel mill for 30 years. My wife and I have come to take life one day at a time. After her near-fatal auto accident and the ensuing disabilities she has, and the frustrations I’ve had trying to re-enter the workforce, we just decided to say to hell with it. At least for the moment.

The really sad fact is that there are many that I personally know that have experienced age and ex-union member discrimination, with many having it much worse off than us. It is for these people just as much as myself that I agreed to do the NY Times interview.

Much has changed since I first started working in 1971, with much of it for the worst instead of better. It was just not in me to start all over again, and at least for the moment I remain retired. So I hope that the interested read the entry on my blog, and my entire blog for that matter. I will have further entries there as things gel in my mind. This has been a most interesting experience indeed!

Good luck to you all!

Sorry for not replying sooner.
I just can’t see not working. Taking a short time not working is OK but not an extended time if money is critical. The longest I have been out of work is about a month.

The worst experience was taking a job that was way “beneath” me and still falling further behind. Frankly that sucked. But it was a slow motion fall rather than getting the financial slam into poverty.

So I sucked it up and got two and a half jobs. Driving cab in a bad part of the greater Chicago area was more interesting than I liked but I got paid in cash immediately so I didn’t have to wait for a check. The bad thing is all my fares knew this too. It got interesting but it did put food on the table.

Kate, have you tried sitting him down and telling him that the situation is not tolerable and is unfair to you? (Full disclosure, I had a similar situation with Mr. Mythago following an extended period of unemployment. When I offered him the choice of shaping up or life as a single parent, he wisely chose the former.)

Just you wait. One night you’ll sit bolt upright in bed and gasp out something incoherent about supply-side economics. That will be the beginning of the end. You’ll read and re-read “The Nation” ever more frantically, but something about Katha Pollitt will just seem…off. You’ll find yourself biting your lip when soon-to-be-former friends talk about the cops. The end will come when you snap “maybe if you spent less time worrying about the man and more time developing your entrepreneurial skills, your life would turn around” at some deadbeat. Then there’ll be nothing for it but a move to Scarsdale, marriage to a podiatrist (or making your existing husband become a podiatrist), 2.7 kids and a Humvee. (Get the A/C and leather seat package, it is TOTALLY worth it.)

On the actual subject of the post: something nobody has yet mentioned is the interplay of status effects. I wonder how the dynamic of guys like this would change if men got more status among other men for housekeeping and childcare tasks. (We get some status from women, but status from women isn’t very important to most married men - and I mean status in the larger world, not appreciation from the wife/partner in question, which IS important.) The impression - and that’s all it is, I have no real data - is that the breakdown in status received from other men goes something like this:

* not working any job at all - slight negative status, but not very much. (This is what I think vanished/is vanishing with the old patriarchy - this used to be a fairly big status hit.)

* working a low-end job that’s the best you could expect - modest status

* working a low-end job after a high-end career - negative status because you’re a big ole’ loser - in fact, more negative status than not working at all. (Anecdote: several years ago after the tech crash, I went through a period of unemployment, followed by a period of working as a pizza delivery guy, before making my own job. My wife’s ex-husband knew of all these changes via the kids. When I was unemployed, he didn’t say anything about it. When I was working pizza, he referred to me contemptuously as “pizza boy”. Luckily for my self-esteem, I still got that old-school patriarchy going on, and I was putting food on the table, so I was OK.)

* doing housework full-time or substantially - zero status. (An improvement from the olden days, when it would be negative status in big heaps, because it was thought of as the same as…)

* homemaking - major negative status. What are you, a woman? For Christ’s sake. Take off the apron, turn off Martha, and go play John Madden Football or something. You might have to run a vacuum, but if you enjoy it, you’re Wrong and Bad. My guess is that this is a protective effect - if guys start saying they like homemaking, women might expect men to do more housework on the grounds that we don’t really hate it as much as we claim, because look at that nice Todd up the block… So we must Ostracize the Wrongdoer.

* childcare - slight positive status, and some envy among the more family-oriented guys.

I suspect that the status accorded to men who do childcare will increase, especially as the economy becomes more entrepreneurial and the 9to5ers die off. Men recognize that this is intrinsically important work, and the more guys who do it, the more status it will receive. (Kind of like how secretarial work used to be relatively prestigious when it was an all-male job.)

I doubt the status accorded to housework will ever increase, for reasons that we’ve been over before.

Feminists/women in general can’t do much about the status beliefs of married/partnered men, but single guys (for whom status-with-women is HUGELY important) might be acclimatized.

Now he is back at work, and he still does most of the laundry, and takes the kids to the majority of their dr’s appointments and after school activities.

My ex-husband didn’t work after the first year of our marriage, and didn’t do much of anything in regards to the basic maintenance of the household. That all fell to me.

As far as taking work that is beneath me… I can’t say that I would be thrilled about having gone to school to get a degree or trade only to find myself working for minimum wage in a job that I held in high school. I would do it to keep food on the table, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be depressed and frustrated. Job loss tends to create depression in men more often than women, and since most men are taught to keep their feelings in they don’t often grieve the loss so the depression can worsen.

What is funny about the new patriarchy is that it seems to only require loyalty to self? I don’t know that this is rational. To me it would seem rational to want to maximize income and minimize expenses, having a working women seems to help maximize income, which I think most men would want. Moreover, who are these guys going to have as they get older?

That is a good point…a sort of group mentality as opposed to an individualistic mentality would likely change some of this sort of behavior.

Sorry, I’m venting here. I’m one of the “friends” Rachel is referring to. My husband lost his job almost a year ago, through no fault of his own. Since then, I’ve had temp secretarial positions (which are “beneath me” given my education, experience and knowledge), had multiple jobs at one time to pay the bills and he continues to be unemployed. He does do housework and takes care of our young daughter, but given the financial situation we are in, he also needs to be working. He is resisting looking for a job because he doesn’t want to do something beneath him. I’m just frustrated by the premise that it’s ok for the woman to lower her standards and not ok for the man, and I can tell you from experience it is extremely painful to my pride to do what I am doing, but I do it anyway.

This really looks like it’ll boil down to the same conclusion that’s come to in rape discussions: only men can fix it, since they’re largely the perpetrators.

Well yes and no. They very often do it half-assed and with a lot of resentment. And then if you get bummed with their lazy asses and want to throw them out, they can repackage themselves as “stay-at-home” parents who will get custody. The courts are not biased toward women per se, but they are biased toward “continuity of care” and “stay-at-home ” parenting, even if his parenting is sleeping while the kids watch TV and eat junk food with no supervision. With welfare reform and little to no public support for quality child care, lot of mothers are being forced to turn to these unemployed bums for babysitters. Which is dangerous in many cases, because these lower-educated, out-of-prison, low-frustration type dads are very high risk for shaken baby syndrome and other forms of child abuse.

This form of patriarchy–women doing all the work while the men bark order and get fed first–is not really new. It’s common in Africa and other developing countries. It’s just as the US slides into a third world type society–enormous wealth for a small slice at the top, poverty for everyone else–we’re developing social relations that reflect that.

And no, without Sharia-type laws locking women into relationships like this, why should they partner with someone who contributes nothing to the household?