What is the incentive for men to change?

[mcmooncup]

Or indeed what is the penalty for not changing?

I was watching this Louis CK clip about white male privilege and yes I like his openness about his privilege about being white and male, however what struck me was the part where he basically says.....this is awesome and I am going to milk it as much as I can.

It reminded me of a conversation with my (to be fair total twat) ex-h when I was trying to explain to my DS about males privilege and DS said, well if I get into a position of power I will do good things with it and share it, and my ex-dh said "well you won't have that power for very long then will you".

There are a couple of questions for me on this:

1. Are men really so conscious of their power and privilege?
2. What actually are the incentives to change? Why should they relinquish some power - or maybe not why should they, but what "is in it for them?".

Sure - although you won't be on maternity leave forever, and so the pattern of parenting/work/main carer can change after that....

I think that's half of the problem for families in general tho. The template of main carer/secondary worker is set during maternity leave and it doesn't change even if/when the mother returns to full time work. it is still in the vast majority of familes the mother who does school drop offs and pick ups, takes time off work when kids are ill, is the main point of contact for school, other parents, extra activities etc.

I do sympathise with the self employed thing - me and my dp are both self employed and while that has always involved a degree of insecurity, at least it means we both have some flexibility. Crucially, for me, it means my dp cannot argue a case for doing less or being less available than me.

When I was growing up my mum was main carer when we were young, then she went out to study then work and my dad set up his own business and worked from home so in secondary school he was the one we saw after school and who cooked dinner etc.
I think that's a lot easier than trying to arrange jobs for 50/50 parenting when the children are very young.

I think the difference in profession starts a lot younger than 17 though. By 17 the gender divide in A level choice was marked - girls did english, history, french, boys did maths, physics and economics.

I mostly agree with that badguider (that equally divided parenting when children are babies is hard to achieve - I've bf-ed all mine, that obvs makes a huge difference in what each parent does). A model where a mother is the primary carer earlier on and then a father is the primary carer when older is perfectly good as a model of 'equal' parenting.

The problem is... it doesn't happen like that in the vast majority of families. Once the template is set in the early days, that's the way it stays. That's largely why the raising of children (not just looking after babies) is such a female world.

Out of interest - do you think that when your dc are older, your dp will take a step back career wise, and either change career or scale back what he does (while you take a step forward workwise, like your own parents)?Or will the understanding be at that point that if it is hard for him to change career when in his early forties, that doing it when he is in his late 40s/early 50s is even harder? Would you personally want to follow the example set by your parents? What does your dp think?

In my own case, we are going down the route of 'both careers will take an equal hit' now, or as near as we can achieve that, so that both of us share caring from an early age.

I don't want to be in the position of 'expert' carer as a mother. I want it to be shared and feel that is is shared. I wonder if this is related to me being the main earner. I don't think I can cope with idea of being main earner/main parent as well. I should add, I also don't want to be the SOLE earner in the family. I want dp to share parenting but have never been interested in him being a SAHD.

I think that whether or not my dh can change career in ten years depends on how badly hit my career is in the next five years.
If I survive with a business intact (self-employed) he'd live to leave his profession and do something more aligned with family values.
If my career dies and he becomes sole earner then that might not be possible :(

So we both have a strong vested interest in my business continuing which means he has to do as much nursery pickup and illness covering as possible.

I just find it quite hard to see how we could have avoided this situation. Even with me taking hardly any time off he's still having to "lean in" to his career to fill the gap at exactly the time he'd rather be spending more time at home.

The incentive for men to stop oppressing women is full humanity. Men cannot be fully human until they see women as fully human.

It seems though that men as a class currently prefer male privilege and the domination of women to finding their (men's) humanity.

Doesn't that assume that to be human equates with being good? Given that the history of humanity is littered with war, slaughter and oppression, perhaps this is our natural state.

You could say exactly the same about racial equality, or disability rights.
Let's hope it works eventually.

Yes, you could Eyesunderarock. I completely agree.

CiscoKid it isn't about being good. It is about being humane. Are you arguing that men are naturally "bad" ?

Sorry that was a little cryptic. What I mean is that you said;

the history of humanity is littered with war, slaughter and oppression

But it isn't the history of 'humanity' is it?

It is the history of male supremacy .

Which then led me to wonder if you are arguing that men are naturally bad and inhumane.

1. Are men really so conscious of their power and privilege?

No, they aren't. They are subconsciously aware of it as a sense of potential loss when it is challenged and they angrily resist - but if you were to ask them why they are resisting, they wouldn't consciously be aware enough to say "because right now I have more material resources and opportunities and freedom than you, and I like it like that".

1. What actually are the incentives to change? Why should they relinquish some power - or maybe not why should they, but what "is in it for them?".

Right, completely correct to separate the ethical question from the incentive question.
(Although for some, doing the right thing is in itself an incentive - though not for all)

Some men on another message board wrote interestingly about how crippling it is to be trained to be "masculine" about emotion; about how you can't grow as a person if as a child and teen you are taught not to admit to certain feelings and eventually even not to feel them. Many of the men posting about this had done a lot of work in therapy to try to recover from this and were aware of how they had been damaged. Are most men aware of this? Do most men suffer from this?

Thinkaboutittomorrow:

"If you view a couple as a financial unit then it seems crazy that a man in a heterosexual couple would be ok with his partner earning less for the same labour than someone else. He should want his co-income earner to bring in as much as possible to lighten the load and improve both circumstances."

I think what you are missing here is that a woman's traditional lack of access to material reward for her labour is exactly what makes her labour available to her partner for free. He doesn't want to pay her for her work, or by extension, anyone else to, because if she is not payable - if she is not in the economic system - she is dependent on men for board and must work for free.
We now have a system where women are about 70% payable, so still not on an equal footing and this is arguably why they are still doing more unpaid domestic labour

I actually think that the real reasons and incentives for men to change are too subtle for many of them. It is like choosing a healthy, happy Saturday morning over a boozy Friday night. Asking men to stop hating and using women because they will have better relationships and because it is the only way to look the world in the eye with a clear conscience will work on some people, but not others. Some will just be all "well my dad never washed up / I want porn / it's fun to bond over denigrating women / everyone does it" which is the equivalent of looking at the pints lined up on the bar and saying "fuck it everyone needs to cut loose now and then"

I really don't know for sure if men as a gender are inherently bad. I think the human psyche is a constant battle between self interest and social co-operation. Male domination allows us only to see how men as a gender behave when in power, and the history of male domination is littered with pretty awful stuff - greed, violence and oppression is a constant theme.

I don't believe that men and women are fundamentally different though. I think that women have just not had the chance to show what they can or would do in similar situations of power. I don't imagine it would be much different.

History is littered with religious and quasi-religious movements which have attempted to liberate people from the misery and exhaustion of being mean to other people. They don't stop doing it though.

All animals are selfish; we are, all of us, selfish - male or female, child or adult. This doesn't equate to being bad. It does mean we need carrots as well as sticks to elicit change. Men are not going to suddenly give up their 'privileges', they'll need a mix of appeals to empathy, sticks (laws) and carrots (....).

Good post curryeater.

Exactly badguider

Just do it, men! If you want more quality time at home, to take a common example - instead of just mouthing it, walk into your bosses office, diinosaur and all as s/he is and ask for it, and negotiate doing more work for less pay or whatever it is they wring from you. It's not like women haven't been doing this for 40 years, and it's not easy for us either actually. Talk is cheap.

After watching the arrogance of Toby Young and that daft lawyer speaking against Laurie Penny these last few days I think it's because they haven't experienced the vulnerability that women have and they can't really know what it's like.

To them it's clear cut. A woman wears a low cut top - she's fair game to be leered at. They don't understand the complexities of the culture that women live in.