Voices
LISA
BELKIN
HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
CARIN BAER/EVERETT COLLECTION
survey found that 53
percent of men would
like to be stay-at-homedads if their wives
could earn enough to
make that possible and
two-thirds of fathers
agreed with the statement “To me, my work
is only a small part of
who I am.”
SO, PROBLEM SOLVED,
right? After all, women
have always vaguely assumed that if men just
“got” it — if they felt the
helplessness of wanting
to be at home and at work at the
same time — then that would “fix”
it, or, at least, make it a badge of
honor. As Gloria Steinem famously
jabbed, “if men could menstruate
(they) would brag about how long
and how much.”
But while there is some reason
to believe empathy from men will
bring attention to women’s problems (gender pay gaps tend to
close at companies where the CEO
has a daughter, for instance) it’s
not looking like this new yearning
by men will topple the old paradigm any time soon. In fact, rather
than being able to bring balance
where women could not, it’s looking like men might paradoxically
have less success.
To wit, take Charles and his
wife, Sonia. The couple married two weeks after her college
graduation and the first of their
four children was born less than
a year later. That’s when Sonia
shelved a full scholarship to law
school in order to spend the next
seven years either pregnant or
nursing while Charles got his PhD
and entered academia. This year
they decided it was her turn. She
nabbed a prestigious, demanding fellowship at a Midwestern
statehouse while he works as a
visiting professor, which provides
needed income but no real possi-
Man Men’s
Don Draper
has few
qualms
about leaving
the house.