BRENDAN writes:

I think that the piece from Alan Roebuck is quite on target in asserting that the current regime of holding tolerance, non-discrimination and personal autonomy as the new “gods” does not provide men with any real basis for motivation to achieve, to invest in themselves and in family life.

I think a closely related issue is the more or less complete destruction — in theory — of the male familial role. Of course, this role was, in our culture, largely based on religious ideas about the “roles” of men and women in family life — ideas which liberalism sees as oppressive, arbitrary (in being handed down from above rather than being the product of personal autonomous choice) and restrictive. However, if men do not have a defined role to play in family life — if, in fact, the role of men is irrelevant, as the spate of recent articles has claimed, or that men have no role at all to play, in essence, in family life, other than as a kind of “less competent woman” — they will simply not invest, either in themselves or in family relationships. The reasons for this relate to men and women alike, albeit each in a rather different way. By and large, men will not invest if there isn’t really a return, and if the “return” is to be considered a somewhat dysfunctional woman/mother who “helps” the “real parent” with tasks she delegates that he perform under her supervision and who is merely tolerated as a kind of court jester or sex/emotional needs provider for women, men will continue to flounder and fail to invest in themselves and their relationships, on a large scale.

Women are situated rather differently, precisely because the female role as mother (and despite the endless, breathless, insistence of feminists that not all women want children, the reality is that most, in fact, do, in a rather visceral way) is undisturbed and mostly undisturbable. The chaos of sex roles that has emerged in the past five decades has certainly attacked motherhood at times, but the social and legal role of women as mothers per se remains intact and has, in fact, been strengthened due to the severing of the mothering role from the fathering role — in other words, the “reduction” of the family to its “natural core” of the so-called “dyad of mother and child” results in an intact “motherhood”, per se, and one that is, importantly, detached from men. This was precisely the point of the feminist social engineers. And it has worked. Single motherhood is now at over 40 percent of births in the US and higher in many other Western countries. This is a subject, not of dismay, but rather often of celebration, precisely because it is an indication of the supposed “independence” of women — not a true independence, mind you, because it comes at the cost of dependency on the state for most such women, but nevertheless a real, personal independence from specific men — namely from the fathers of such children. In this way feminism, for all of its attacks on motherhood as an institution, paradoxically strengthened the identity of women, personally, as “mothers” in a sense of being such without the “ties” of a nuclear family or any commitment to the father of the children at all. Of course, this doesn’t only apply to women who are single mothers from the outset, but also to the millions of divorced women who similarly live this new lifestyle of motherhood being detached from nuclear families and fathers.

Fatherhood, however, unlike motherhood, is primarily a creature of marriage, social mores, religious mores and the like, at least if we are talking about “reducing” the situation to its primordial “natural,” “dyadic” core. As a result, if we trash marriage by making it inherently unstable through a combination of faulty expectations and easy divorce, if we trash fatherhood by claiming that men have nothing essential to offer families other than as being second-rank, semi-competent male mothers and emotional/sexual jesters, if we trash religion and its sponsorship of male roles and responsibilities as being false, tendentious, arbitrary and oppressive, and do much the same with social mores pertaining to marriage, sexuality and family formation — if we do all of these things, we have to expect that men will flounder. How could they not? The foundations of the very essence of masculinity — fatherhood — have been systematically undermined and in many cases destroyed. How could we possibly expect anything other than that these developments would have a disastrous impact on men.

The typical liberal and feminist response to this is that the issue is primarily one of “men failing to adapt.” But this grossly mis-states the issue. To what precisely are men failing to adapt? To being second-rate women, or second-rate male mothers? To having no distinct and respected role in families? If that’s the expectation, I’d submit that men have already adapted to it by underachieving and opting out of the responsibilities and life track that was associated with traditional fatherhood as a life expectation for almost all men. This has happened not out of cussedness or anger or resentment, but because unless these roles exist to motivate men, men simply willunderperform (aside from the smaller number of men who are naturally ambitious regardless of external incentives and roles). Women are not in the same boat at all, because their role as mothers — despite the attacks on motherhood in recent decades — is more inherently resilient and does not need the same marital, social and religious supports in order to exist per se. Of course, what the resulting contemporary “motherhood” looks like is very different than what it meant when it was also formed by the institution of marriage and the related social, legal and religious values, but nevertheless as an institution itself, motherhood-qua-motherhood is much more resilient than fatherhood is. It’s precisely because of this that when fatherhood was weakened by weakening the marital, social and religious mores that created and formed it as an institution, this in turn has weakened the entire envisioned life course — the meta-narrative as Alan describes — for all men, full stop.

I expect, unfortunately, that this trend will continue. The reason for that is I do not see the marital, social, and religious supports for fatherhood being re-established even in the medium term. Instead, I think we will see an intensification of the efforts to make men “adapt” to their new role of being inherently inferior, second-rate mothers,and expect this to be a strong [disincentive] for them to invest in themselves and relationships — and when they do not do so in the numbers that are desired, they will be browbeaten all the more for their “recalcitrance” and “failure to adapt”. We’re stuck in a vicious cycle on this issue, as a culture, really, outside of pockets of individuals who choose to live in a deliberately counter-cultural way.

Laura writes:

This is a superb statement.

Brendan and Alan Roebuck have gotten to the core of perhaps the most significant cultural development of our time: the retreat of men from success and traditional male accomplishment. When I posted statistics, here and here, on the lower male college graduation rates and declining male earnings, some readers balked, arguing that these are not accurate indicators and don’t really mean much. I stand by my point, a point which has been widely and confusedly stated in the mainstream press as well. Those statistics, along with anecdotal evidence of intelligent young men drifting and biding their time, indicate a major sea change in male initiative and effort. Men are more apathetic and less motivated.

Men don’t want to be women. In fact, they have a strong and irrepressible drive to differentiate themselves from women. If being a priest means being a maternal counselor, then fewer men will be priests. If being a teacher, means being a team leader and mommy, then fewer men will be teachers. If being a lawyer means being a negotiator and conciliator, a sort of legal therapist, then fewer men will be lawyers. If being a doctor means being a people person, excelling at compassionate nurturing rather than mastering a demanding craft and intellectual specialty, then fewer men will be doctors. If being a college student means sitting in a classroom for hundreds of hours and enduring dozens of tests, with nothing at stake but the possibility of a job in which the qualities of cooperation and teamwork are uppermost, and in which one’s superiors may be women, then fewer men will graduate from college. If being a married man and father means being a partner, not a boss; if it does not require winning and vying for the sexual favors and devotion of a chaste woman, then fewer men will marry and take on the role of fathers.

Wherever the feminine is exalted, men will retreat. As Brendan points out, this withdrawal won’t be complete, a fact which will help many in denying the phenomenon of declining male achievement. Plenty of men will still succeed, but the number of those who are drifting in some sense, perhaps by choosing some field that is daring or original but does not offer the remotest possibility of significant earnings or of supporting a family, will continue to grow.

The obliviousness with which many parents send their daughters off to college and into the world today is stunning.

They hail their daughters’ achievements and successes, but often ignore the reality these girls face. Their daughters are entering a world noticeably short of potential husbands and fathers. These daughters will sit in college lecture halls in which women significantly outnumber men. Many will be making more money in a few years than the men they meet and with whom they interact. A cheap and shallow form of motherhood, an institution sentimentalized, stripped of its higher essence because it is not balanced by the qualities of devoted wife, and yet, as Brendan notes, affirmed by the culture at large in ways that fatherhood is not: this will be their compensation in the years ahead.

A good society creates fathers and a barbaric one gets by with vast networks of single mothers and egalitarian marriages. Is it any wonder the press is celebrating the lesbian couple as the parental ideal? Why would a man – a real man – want to enter such an institution? Matriarchy wells up from below, with the gradual decimation of masculine motivation. 

                          — Comments —

Jesse Powell writes:

Motherhood is more resistant than fatherhood when the rules of social engagement change and become more hostile to productive and stable family formation, but motherhood is vulnerable too;  as society deteriorates mothers’ ability to perform the feminine function of motherhood declines in much the same way that men’s abilities to perform the masculine functions of creating the environment and providing the resources for women to do their best job as mothers decline. 

As evidence in support of this view, I will point out one of the figures in regards to family life in South Africa, that among Black infants 0 to 4 years old, when both of their parents were still alive, 17.0 percent of them lived with neither their mother or their father, but with some other relative, usually their grandparents. In a similar vein, during the crack epidemic in America’s black ghettos I’m sure you heard about grandmothers stepping in to save the day when their daughters became addicted to drugs unable to take care of their children, not wanting the children to end up in foster care, as wards of the state. 

This is from a research paper titled “Guardians and Caretakers: African American Grandmothers as Primary Caregivers in Intergenerational Families:”

“In African American families, it is not uncommon for grandparents to assume responsibility for the care of grandchildren and great-grandchildren when a parent is no longer able or willing to care for their children.” 

“Over the past decade, the crack-cocaine epidemic, HIV/AIDS epidemic, and incarcerations have all contributed to the dramatic increase in the prevalence of surrogate parenting by African American grandmothers.” 

Finally, I give you a paragraph from an article in City Journal: 

The next stage in black family disintegration may be on the horizon. According to several Chicago observers, black mothers are starting to disappear, too. “Children are bouncing around,” says a police officer in Altgeld Gardens. “The mother says: ‘I’m done. You go stay with your father.’ The ladies are selling drugs with their new boyfriend, and the kids are left on their own.” Albert’s mother lived four hours away; he was moving among different extended family members in Chicago. Even if a mother is still in the home, she may be incapable of providing any emotional or moral support to her children. “Kids will tell you: ‘I’m sleeping on the floor, there’s nothing in the fridge, my mother doesn’t care about me going to school,’ ” says Rogers Jones, the courtly founder of Roseland Safety Net Works. “Kids are traumatized before they even get to school.” Some mothers are indifferent when the physical and emotional abuses that they suffered as children recur with their own children. “We’ve had mothers say: ‘I was raped as a child, so it’s no big deal if my daughter is raped,’ ” reports Jackson.

Please follow and like us: