Are Men Necessary?
The author says yes—but then, he would.
(Page 3 of 4)
Once again, in the clamor over child abuse, the finger of accusation has been pointed at men—more evidence of male depravity. However, the majority of calls received by the child abuse hotline at the Texas Department of Human Services involve complaints against women. A 1977 study by Suzanne Steinmetz, a sociology professor at Indiana University, found that mothers were 62 percent more likely than fathers to abuse children and that male children were twice as likely to suffer physical injury. More recently, her findings have been corroborated by the National Family Violence Surveys, which revealed that violence against women actually decreased between 1975, when 12.1 percent of all women complained of at least one violent incident, and 1985, when the figure was 11.3 percent. Violence against men by women, on the other hand, remained steady at 11.6 percent over the same period.
Many women dismiss female violence in the home either as innocuous and different in nature from male violence or as self-defense, but Steinmetz found that some men become targets of abuse when they attempt to protect their children from the mother’s violence—the reverse of the stereotype. Other studies have concluded that women typically are just as assaultive as their husbands. Although the men characteristically cause more injuries, wives strike the first blow in 48 percent of the cases, according to one study. The effect of using inflated and, in some cases, falsified statistics to make rape, child abuse, and wife beating seem more prevalent than they actually are—to make them seem, in some dreadful manner, the norm—is to slander the character of men, who are presumed to be the perpetrators of domestic violence, which is not an exclusive feature of male character.
Women also have power that they sometimes discredit. Most men I know feel overwhelmed by women—and by their own need for women. Therefore the rage women feel at men can be terrifying and sexually daunting. Lately I hear women complaining about wimps, about men being uninterested and emotionally withdrawn and sexually unavailable. The ancient stereotype of the frigid woman is being replaced by that of the impotent male. It’s not just a fear of intimacy that causes men to founder sexually, nor the dread of AIDS. Men are discovering what women have always known: Sex is a dangerous theater. When women felt powerless, they were sexually passive. Increasingly, now it’s the men who are passive and for the same reasons women were in the past. They’re afraid. They’re afraid of being punished, of being engulfed by women’s anger. They feel paralyzed by changes in the social fabric that leave them confused about how to behave around women or even how to talk to them. They sense that the relations between the sexes have become politicized and legalized as never before. Men are going to have to learn how to come to terms with powerful women, how to get used to women with muscles and anger and sexual demands. At the same time, women are going to have to find a way of celebrating manliness without putting it down.
MY WIFE HAS FIFTEEN CHILDREN in her kindergarten class, and it’s rare that she has more than two with a father at home. Sometimes when I visit Roberta’s class, the children stare at me as if I were another species. Until a male art teacher arrived last year, I was the only man many of these children would see all day. “You look like Superman in those glasses,” a five-year-old boy told me. He meant Clark Kent. I’m an average-sized man, but to children who rarely see men except from a distance or on television, all men look alike—huge and forbidding and hiding explosive, supernatural strength. This is just one of the harmful effects of the absence of men in children’s lives: We’ve become mythologized.
Here in public school you can see the appalling truth that the traditional family is dead. The men have gone; in many cases, they were never there in the first place. There are five million children in Texas, and nearly one out of four lives without a father. The feminist critique of divorce is that it is a positive indicator of the growing economic independence of women. If one accepts the notion that all men are perverts, then the faster they are booted out of the home, the better.
“The more independent women are financially, the less likely they are to tolerate abuse,” Christine Williams, a University of Texas sociology professor, told me. And yet the nationwide poverty rate for families without fathers is 32 percent. About half of the women who are supposed to receive regular child-support payments get the full amount. In Texas fewer than a quarter of the women do, despite the efforts of our last two attorneys general to raise the level of support.
Williams and UT sociologist Debra Umberson undertook a study of why men disengaged from their children. “We wanted to interview fifty divorced men who did not have custody of their children,” said Umberson. “It took us a year to find forty-three. The reason is it was too painful for them to talk about. When you finally reach them, you hear a lot of complaints about the system, how they are treated as ‘just a pocket,’ a source of money. They’re not invited to be a part of the family, and they don’t feel the system appreciates the effort they do make to take care of their kids.” The men pointed out that if they miss a child-support payment, they can be locked up straightaway, and they were frustrated and upset because they were being deprived of their rights as fathers by what they took to be legal bias in favor of women. (A National Institute of Mental Health study found that 40 percent of mothers interfered with a father’s visitation rights during the first two years following divorce, for punitive reasons.)
“Was there anything about this study that surprised you?” I asked Umberson.
“Well, yes,” she said. “It was that some of these men were so involved with their children—their kids were really incredibly important to them. That surprised me, because when you read the literature, you get the picture that men just don’t care.”
It’s true that traditional male roles have been compromised or usurped. “The feeling men had that their home is their castle can’t be sustained any longer when more than fifty percent of married women work outside the home,” said Williams. “Men don’t get their authority handed to them on a platter anymore. Women demand to be listened to now. It’s no wonder that men feel under siege and that the sense of gratification in being a man is being taken way from them. And who better to blame than women?”
But blame is not the point, for men or women. The point is that families without men are more likely to be poor, and children without fathers are more likely to be deprived—not just of the material comforts but of the sense of the mutuality of the sexes.
Somehow men have got to find a place for themselves again in the family. We’re only beginning to see some of the consequences of fatherlessness, especially where boys are concerned. My personal fear is that fatherlessness will have unanticipated political and spiritual consequences, such as a longing for authoritarianism and a further lack of attachment between the sexes. The rise in gangs seems to be connected to the absence of male role models. There is a well-established connection between children of broken homes (a term that seems quaint these days) and the likelihood of committing serious criminal offenses. In any case, children who grow up not knowing who men are pay a price as well. I’m not saying that single mothers—or single fathers—can’t do a good job of raising children. But a society of children who don’t understand men produces men who don’t understand themselves.
Increasingly, women are not even bothering with the interim step of marrying a man who probably won’t stay and who may not be welcome in any case. The number of never-married mothers aged eighteen or older has more than doubled since 1979, outstripping every other category of marital status in its rate of increase. Last year nearly one out of four women who bore babies was unmarried. What worries me is that we are actually reverting to some kind of primitive state in which the family unit is discarded. There would be nothing unnatural about this arrangement—indeed, that’s what frightens me. The family is a structure we have built to guard against our own natures, particularly male natures. Without the family, men will return to the essential mammalian struggle for dominance and for access to as many females as possible.
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