Re: "DH says I've turned him into a chauvinist."

I think that the 70s was a good time to be growing up, maybe?

Between the traditional gender roles of the previous decades, at the start of real inroads into equality, a female PM (yes I know who it was but still), and then after us things seeming to go downhill, back into gender roles for children (so sort of catching them young to make up for the fact it won't happen later), the whole sexualisation thing, a lot of people thinking that feminism has done everything it wanted and let's stop now.

In teh 70s girls climbed trees with the boys, everyone wore brown corderoy dungarees and did woodwork, and had the same bowl cut, happy days, happy days indeed

Interesting thread.

DH and I have a pretty equal relationship I think. I am 36 and he is 32.

The thing that occurs to me, is that as women who contribute to the feminist section of MN< we are probably a bunch of women with certain ideas about how relationships should be and have selected mates who fulfil that criteria.

I look at some of the things my friends put up with - partners who do not change nappies or ever get up in the night, ones who bugger off for sporting weekends at the drop of a hat, ones who never ever pick up after themselves etc adn wonder how they put up with it. I wuoldn't put up with it - which is why I didn't choose someone like that IYSWIM.

Not that DH is perfect, by any stretch, and nor am I. But I think we are reasonably fair.

I am afraid that I don't think the posters on here are a fair representative of how male/female family dynamics work in any generation and certainly not in mine (I'm 33).

DH and I have what I think is an equal relationship broadly speaking. but one of his issues is that he doesn't feel he contributes enough professionally - he is fine with me earning more money than him, but he doesn't like feeling he's not contributing enough. he puts this down to being raised to believe that the man should always take responsibility. He's moved away enough from that to accept and appreciate it doesn't have to be done alone, but he still struggles. So he has an emotional or intellectual response that is sometimes at odds with his behaviour.

Having said that, the reason it works is that we do share household and other responsibilities - split at least in part by interest and skill. So I do more cooking and organising because I'm better at it and enjoy it but he does way more tidying up and cleaning than I do because he cares more about that than I do. Tasks we both don't enjoy are split according to who feels like being nice to the other that day - eg shopping. However, this is not the norm in our circle. Most of our friends have strong relationships, but it is undeniable that the women take on more responsibility as well as more actual work for household and childcare. And its the women who talk about taking time out to look after the children - it doesn't even come up with any of the men.

My DH is likely to be a SAHD in due course. He is fine with that but I know that deep down he is slightly concerned about how other men will react to him.

Oh, and in a few years when we/he is back earning a 'normal' salary we have already discussed the possibility of his working part-time so that he can be around the kids more. (I know we are still waiting on our first but hey, we can hope!) If that means less money, so be it.

Ditto what RobynLou said, even down to the ages.

We are expecting our first child (due in August) and I am seeing a whole new side to him now which just amazes me (in a good way!).

I would say we genuinely are a team, at the moment we both work and earn the same (both retraining) and in the past these roles have swapped both ways. We have seperate accounts but also a joint one that I tend to look after, and I tend to look after the saving/spending for big projects, like kitting out a baby etc. When I finish work I think I will be a SAHM for a few years, for personal reasons we both believe it is the best thing to do but equally if I were to decide to return to the workplace next year he wouldn't bat an eye. When I stop working his salary will get paid into the joint account as will my SMP, child benefit etc etc and we will just share it. His role in the family will be going out to work, mine will be staying at home to do it!

I think that while we both do have fairly 'traditional' views on marriage and child-raising (we are from very similar backgrounds in this respect...trained yet SAHM, professional fathers etc, life-long marriages) we are very much equals in our relationship. I couldn't be with him if I didn't trust him and respect his judgement and ditto. He isn't leery, doesn't eye up other women or harbour any secret desires to go to lap dancing clubs. Just a normal, straightforward, highly intelligent bloke. I am harder work that he is I think, I can be quite emotionally disruptive at some points...cause arguments etc and have a tendency towards anxiety. I think this was brought on by a traumatic few years in my family, but I try hard to conquer my irrationality. It is at these points that the fact that he is a laid back, yet very straightforward man is both a blessing and a curse...I want him throwing plates and shouting to give me the response I want yet that is the last thing I need!

Waffle waffle waffle.

Oh, but, re the stag do thing - if by 'sleazy stag do' you mean hired strippers in a private room, or anything involving sexual contact with other women, he would absolutely not participate. I'm talking about nights where the blokes have ended up in a strip club for the last drink of the evening, watching only I think. Slightly more removed, and less power differential.

Grace, we are unusual in the larger societal sense, but amongst my close group of friends it's fairly common for the couple to have downsized their careers so they can share child rearing, or chosen jobs with flexible hours, or whatnot. I don't know how many of the men would call themselves feminists, but we are an inclusive sort of bunch; strictly non-homophobic, non-racist, etc (although we're a bunch of mostly-hetero middle class white folk, naturally). A lot of my friends have dabbled in polyamory and the like, which I suppose shows a willingness to step outside normal societal molds and try other family structures on for size?

I also work in a very family-friendly law firm (rare for the industry). Half of the solicitors here are working mothers with preschool-aged children, and all of us work part time - from 0.5 to 0.8 which is what I do. That is vanishingly rare, and we are known for it around town.

I don't mean to sound as if sharing childcare is the cruz of it all, but I talk about it a lot because I think that, for us, it's made an enormous difference. A lot of couples find that the veneer of equality breaks down after children come into the picture, and we've avoided that almost entirely.

I had a very strong feminist role model in my mother, who raised us singlehandedly without allowing her bitterness at my father to infect our attitudes towards men. My husband comes from a family with a loud, blustering, obnoxious father but the real strength lies in the women - classic power behind the throne stuff, his Mum's always worked and renovated and pursued hobbies, etc. Most of his family are female, so he's more comfortable interacting with them maybe?

My husband has gone on a couple of stag dos that have ended up in strip joints - perhaps 3 times in the 11 years I've known him - although the last time he did so he came home feeling really uncomfortable that it had ended up there; there were only three blokes as lots of people had cancelled, and he felt that to go home would hurt the groom further when he already felt rejected, and he (my husband) knew that it wasn't something that was going to bother me at all anyway. I do think that if I said to him that I really disliked him going to one, he wouldn't. His own stag do was a laser skirmish thing following by a jazz club, and was mixed sex because he thought it was stupid to only see his male friends.

and a quick note - I don't think my generation has got it right, I just think we're screwing up in different ways than our parents and grandparents (ie, swinging too far towards acceptance of the pornification of, oh, everything and, even worse, trying to tell ourselves that it is empowering)

I know that DH and I are unusual, but as I mentioned on the other thread, we were both raised in a fundamentalist Christian group and so those were the people we were around. We consider ourselves lucky to have found each other, but the truth for me is that I would have kept looking until I found someone like DH, even if it meant I never found him. DH's mother is a retired neuropsychologist and his dad was (in his mind) the "bad guy" in their split, so he has a feminist streak in him that goes back to childhood

I didn't chime in later on the thread because I don't want to scare the OP away. I WAS in an abusive relationship, but I didn't realize it was abusive until several months after I got out - it took me THAT long to see how controlling he was. The truth of the situation was that my abusive boyfriend had eliminated any resource I may have gone to for comfort or advice because he thought they would be a threat (and rightly so). It meant that after six months with him I didn't feel like I had ANYONE I could really talk to and get support from - even my family and childhood friends who I saw regularly, so I had pieces of support scattered around different aquaintances - who I cut off as soon as they came to the boyfriend's attention. I'm rather sad she showed the thread to her H. I suspect she was reaching out in a truly anonymous fashion (we're just a bunch of women, she won't see a support group because that is akin to admitting there is a problem), and the H will "discourage" her from coming to this site now. We ARE the women he finds distasteful because we will point out ugly truths.

Actually, I'm rather grateful for that abusive relationship (in hindsight) because I realize that, once I found myself again, I KNEW who I was and I KNEW what I would stand for, and if I even got a whiff from a guy that he wasn't going to give my boundaries a wide berth, I stopped the relationship right there. I didn't make it past three dates with any guys after that boyfriend for two years until I met DH. It also meant I KNEW when it was right and went for it (after three years of DH gently massaging the idea of marriage into my mind ). I know several women who are going through that process now, and finding that they don't like their lives, but they have already married and had kids and so feel trapped. I'm VERY grateful I went through it when I was young.

Career-wise, I work in IT specifically because it is male-dominated. My dad was the one who got me in to it because he's been in computers forever. I used to trail along to the conventions and training courses with him. We used to joke that I was his oldest son, taking over the family business. I remember he told me when I was considering jobs to take the "high tech" ones, because the bosses wanted women and I could use that to my advantage. I took a lot of crap from a lot of men over the years, but NOT ONE, even during the years of the worst sexual harassment I endured, would have dared to say the horrible things that poster's husband has come out with. She has a real problem on her hands and I feel for her and doubly feel for her baby.

Unusual? Erm, I dunno! DH's mother was at Greenham Common when he was tiny, apparently. So he might be a BIT of a rarity in how he was raised. He reads feminist blogs and we swap links and so on... erm. I think he's a bit rare (compared to, say, his colleagues) in how thoughtful and active he is in his pro-feminist stance. He doesn't always get it right, but he looks at the world and actually sees the patriarchy, not the matrix.
So maybe he's very rare.

It's hard for me to know cos most people in my job are lefty-liberal types who must at least pay more than lip-service to anti-racist, anti-sexist principles, so all my male friends and associates are, like DH, thoughtful allies....

We might live in a lovely bubble. But if so, I can't say I want to come out of it! I am struggling to remember what it was like in my temp jobs (at call centres and the like), but I just can't. I haven't worked at one of those since 2002ish, and I wasn't as coherent a feminist, then...

RobynLou: "I expected to be equal to any man, I couldn't ever be with a man who didn't see me as his equal - I couldn't respect him."

This, really. What seems wrong in the other thread is that the OP hasn't lost any respect for her DH even though he doesn't seem to have much for her (or as he says, other members of her gender but not her). I think respect should ideally be mutual and equal for a healthy relationship.

I am of BertieBotts's generation and I think that for people of our age there has been a definite shift in expectations within a relationship. It's hard for us because we are likely to be influenced most by our parents, who were of a generation where roles were more clearly defined, and at the same time we are expected to have more "modern" relationships in which the roles overlap a lot more. In 30 years time perhaps things will be very different as we will be the grandparents rather than those who had kids in the 70s and 80s.

Oh wow I just read that whole thread.

I could NOT respect a person (male or female) that had that kind of views about any marginalized group. I couldn't 'agree to disagree' with them. I'd find their views repellent and a tad threatening.

Wow. Okay, I'm sitting on my fingers and not posting over there, cos the OP seems pretty happy with her lot. I do feel for her DD, though.

If the male partner in an enlightened young couple was invited to a sleazy stag do, how would that play out? Mine wouldn't go, and he'd explain why not (in clear, hectoring terms - hey, I didn't say he wasn't sometimes obnoxious!) and moreover, I think it would make him question the friendship a bit.

Interesting he went on a non-sleazy stag do in March, and hated it. They did some macho climbing activity, then drinks-and-cigars, then fancy steak dinners and heaps of booze... and he was just so uncomfortable with the gender-segregation, and so weirded out by the whole thing. Several of my friends that were on this 'traditional' stag night felt the same - it was very frat-boy, very immature, and kind of boring.

I went to the hen night of the same thing and it was a blast: Nice party in someone's flat then on to a club (which I didn't do, being pg and tired) but I missed having our male friends there, and I felt sad for them that they missed out on all the fun and laughs... absolutely none of my socialising is gender-segregated normally, some of my closest friends are men (and some of his are women) so it felt very odd to have half of our 'gang of mates' not there.

Anecdotally, another friend was planning his mate's stag do as a big night out in London and the groom-to-be said in no uncertain terms that all his jokes about the Spearmint Rhino had better be just that: jokes. The groom-to-be would be completely horrified if there was a stripper, and he'd find it miserable and it would ruin his night and their friendship. I know that couple well, and their marriage is rock-solid and extremely egalitarian, too.

She won't hear them from me... I'm having a hard time not indoctrinating her to the "men are a waste of time" ethos that I inherited from my mother!

BDSM: I should think she has a better chance than any of us.

Oddly, when I got married it wasn't my DH's expectations of wifely behaviour that I had to fight - it was my mother's expectations from inside my head. (She's a real 70s housewife, whom the 2nd wave, and ALL waves passed by. When my dad empties a dishwasher there's a parade, despite the fact that she's started her own business from the home and works harder and longer hours than him now...)

I suspect that the key difference between her and me is that while we both heard the voices of generations of women saying "Your husband looks so tired! He works so hard! Make him dinner! Cherish him to show your love! You've still got a bit of energy left...", she listened to the voices and I evicted them.

Your DD won't even hear them, I imagine (and I hope). She's going to do better than any of us.

It's a relief to think that I might be a member of the last generation to have got it so wrong! You "younger" ones seem to have it sussed. I'm rather envious, actually, but also happy that my DD (who is still on 2.8) may have a real chance of an equal and "true" relationship.

Also, right now DH and I seem to have very traditional "roles" but, as an example, I didn't change a single one of DD's nappies until DH went back to work after paternity leave.

His mother says his father would NEVER have done such a thing and that when DH was a baby ('78/'79) husbands wouldn't have been expected to.

For our part, I never asked DH to change DD's nappies, he just decided that since I had done childbirth and was handling all the "input" (feeding), the least he could do was handle the "output."

I think that may be where we see the fundamental generational disconnect from the couples who have come before us. The older generations were fufilling gender roles (men don't change nappies), and the subsequent generations were rebelling against them (look what a modern man I am! I'm changing a NAPPY!), and our generation has ignored them and done what we see as practical.

My only reservation with this is that I fear we will forget what women have fought for, and forget the battles that have been won (and why) because we've not been alive long enough to know what it was like before. Looking at the women and men I know, I fear that we will forget why we needed feminism in the first place, and will then be doomed to repeat our past mistakes.

RobynLou what you said. Nearly every word of it.

I am 28. DH is 32. He is on the cusp and I am typical of what they are calling the 'millenial' generation. My mother is 47. My father is 51.

I actually posted on that thread a little about my upbringing, which was, I suspect, a backlash to the Equal Rights movement (which my parents' church opposed). I also mentioned that I had seen an abusive relationship from the inside.

Lately I have been reading lots and lots of statistics about my generation and a couple of things stand out: typically speaking, they see equality as a given - ie the idea of "women's role" is foreign to them; and they tend to be extremely family-oriented, partcularly wrt marrying older and generally having lower divorce rates (DH bears this out as his parents had an extremely ugly divorce when he was very young; mine are still together).

I don't know what that means for the long term, but I have hope.

(as far as my personal situation, DH had major spinal surgery a few months back, so I do all the housework and all the heavy lifting too! DH has good intentions but is utter rubbish at housework. His mother had a maid when he was younger, so he's never really learned to clean anything properly. He is slowly making progress, but I have been warned by his sister that it took her husband eight years of coaching to get her to really see the mess the way normal people do. In the meantime I clean round after he is done and try not to piss on him for trying to help me out )

I'm just coming up to 40, so a generation younger I guess. My dh has made some seriously crappy decisions in the 20 dd years we've been together (and yes I'd agree it's probably a good idea to grow up before committing to a long term relationship - dh and I met at university and have been together ever since!) but despite that I'd say that we have an equal relationship with few assumptions (certainly on the grounds of sex). When our children were little we both worked and did about the same amount of housework, and then dh has been a SAHD on and off, something he is very happy with (and I hate). I don't know anyone else with such unusual roles, but most of the guys I know are fairly hands on parents and there is an expectation that that is right and indeed enjoyable. I don't know many people (male or female) who actually enjoy housework though!

Well, you've saved me the effort, actually. My relationship is a lot like yours, and post-child-having it's carried on that way.

We still do most of the errands and cleaning together on weekends - Friday nights he picks up our daughter from daycare and meets me at the supermarket after work, and we buy the week's groceries and grab a 'picnic' and take it home and have it in the living room with a glass of wine. Unless one of us is really exhausted, we always have dinner together and then share bathtime/bedtime duties, because our toddler adores bathtime and it's a nice fun family time of day with us sitting on the side of the bath and chatting while she plays with her ducks.

After she goes to bed we whip around and do the kitchen and tidy the toys and run the vacuum around. One or the other of us is usually home with her during the day, and they keep the laundry cycling and maybe start dinner, but generally we take the view that looking after a toddler is a fulltime job and the rest of it is done when we're both home.

I'm sure that when we have a second one, we'll have to divide and conquer a lot more, bbut so far we've got by happily by sharing as much of the family tasks as we can, which turns them into family activities instead of chores. And if one of us is tired, or ill, or swamped at work, the other just steps in and picks up the slack. We don't have assigned chores, we have a sense of what needs to be done in the household and we do it. I call it a socialist model; from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

tortoise That's what I thought she was asking. But I just wittered.

Grace, I think I'm suffering from Reading Comprehension Fail today. Are you asking us to describe our relationships to build up a snapshot of where equality exists and how it looks in real terms?

I mean, goodness knows I'm happy to waffle on about mine, but since I have a tendency to do so, thought I'd make it sure that this is what you're asking first.

I was born in '79 and DH in '80 - dunno what generation that makes us, but it does mean I was nearly 11 when I first saw a MAN in 10 Downing Street. And I remember a girl about 3 years younger than me in school saying, wonderingly, "I didn't know that men were allowed to be prime minister." And knowing, from the way grown ups reacted to that, that actually, it was women doing it which was unusual. (Don't get me wrong - I have no love for Thatcher, but if anything could have molded us as a generation...)

DH and I are a team. I tend to take the lead socially, and he's a bit less forward and chatty than I am. He's (I think) a bit more emotionally intelligent than me, very perceptive, very able to talk about his feelings (more so than me). We both work, we are both very proud of each other's careers and we value each other's input into things like going-to-the-work-drinks or attending-the-end-of-semester-party. Sometimes we run from grim social events giggling to ourselves, thanking the other one for coming along and helping us out.... We laugh a lot - a lot - and we share hobbies (videgames, boardgames, am-drams - really nerdy stuff ;) )

So far (no kids for another 2 months) we split the unpaid domestic work fairly equally (though he's happier with dirt than I am, and I'm happier with clutter than he is). I work from home 2-3 days a week and he commutes an hour, leaving at 6.30am. I do a bit more domestic stuff during the week (might have made a start on dinner before he gets back, or unloaded the dishwasher, or whatever). In turn, he does all the laundry at weekends, washes the dog - erm, I do the early morning dogwalk and he does he late night one....

I'd say one area of inbalance is that I do more social-emotional work (replying to invitations, writing thank-you letters) and he does more financial-administrative work (bills in his name). That came about cos I'm a bit more obsessed with things like thank-you notes, and the bills were in my name in our last flat, so this time I told him it was his turn... I don't miss it! Financially, we're also a team, and (since money is always a bit tight) we talk over all purchasing decisions and think about money carefully. We have a joint account and a separate account each, and we split bills on a percentage according to what each person makes. At the moment, he makes more money than me, but when I'm qualified I'll make a lot more than him. He regularly tells me how much he can't wait for that part. He also wants to spend some time at home with the DC (it's a long-term plan, a lot depends on where my next job happens).

We do a lot of the more boring stuff (supermarket, big cleans) together at weekends. It cuts into our social lives but frankly, it's more fun than doing it on our own, and afterwards we can have a beer and play on the xbox together...

Erm.. This is a novel, sorry! I'd tell someone 10 years younger than me (like your nieces) that your 20s is a fantastic time to have lots of great sex and work out what you like in a relationship, but hold out for a feminist to actually marry. Being expected to keep a reasonably hygenic home AND a pretty demanding career going at the same time is hellish hard work imo, and I wouldn't do it with someone who expected me to do it for him. The fact that DH had lived on his own for a long time and was a good cook and housekeeper in his own place was a pretty damned attractive thing. The fact that we share political viewpoints and feminist ideologies was an absolute must. Taking on another adult's baggage is quite enough. Taking on a man-child is out of the question.

It's not all sunshine and flowers by any means, and I'm sure I'm difficult to live with too - but we listen to each other. I think he's really extremely intelligent and I greatly respect his judgement on things. I know he values and respects my thoughts and opinions, and above all, we anticipate our lives and roles shifting and swapping a bit in the future - when I'm making more money he's indicated that if we can work out how to live on x amount, he'd like to spend time at home with the kids, or whatever. It's not either one of our roles to be the breadwinner or homemaker, it's our purpose to support and nurture each other, and respecting that the other person is a person is an enormous part of that...

Arrghgh! Ok, I am going to be very brave now and post this before I re-read it and decide it's terrible drivel and should be deleted! Well done to anyone who finished this massive tome - I am really interested in hearing what people expect from and enjoy in their relationships, so I hope to inspire mega-posts from everyone else, too!