While continuing work on the Ambiguous Family sculpture, I had NPR on in my shop. Completely serendipitously, the program was “The End of the Macho Man?” on Talk of the Nation. Neal Conan was interviewing Guy Garcia and Hanna Rosin , two authors who have written about the changing role of men. The basic consensus was that jobs often held by men are disappearing (manufacturing heading overseas, for example) and jobs traditionally held by women are increasing (nursing and teaching). This labor shift, along with data showing that more women are enrolled in higher education than men, portends a shift in men’s roles in society. That shift means that the provider and protector roles that men have traditionally had, and had been modeled by their fathers and grandfathers, will need to be met in other ways now that many men are unemployed or will shift to ‘unmanly’ jobs.
It got me to wondering if the arguments against gay marriage and hostility towards gay couples are fueled by a societal fear of the changing role of men. It seems that two men having a family would be a very obvious lightning rod for latent angst over job, direction, and gender role loss. Of course this in no way excuses the blatant bigotry involved with anti-gay proponents, but it does offer a theory of how it got that way.
NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130190244&ft=1&f=5
Guy Garcia’s The Decline of Men:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/item_e2dpetSthO3HZcGrWR2ZUK
Hanna Rosin’s The End Of Men:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
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