From Wikipedia's article on Philip Wylie: "The Disappearance (1951) - An unexplained cosmic "blink" splits humanity along gender lines into two divergent timelines: from the men's perspective, all the women disappear and from the women's, all men vanish. The novel explores issues of gender role and sexual identity. It depicts an empowered condition for liberated women and a dystopia of an all male world."
For maybe half of us, that has happened. Unable to create or maintain marriages, men and women have gone their separate ways. In most cases, I've read, when couples split up it's the woman who leaves. Whatever women expected men to be, apparently we aren't. Millions of us are headed into old age alone, the leading edge of the post WWII baby boom. A quiet social tragedy, with no end in sight.
I think this trend has been greatly pushed by the growing inability of men, particularly working-class men, to make a living. We've lost the main function we had for women and children. Women are having children alone rather than depend on men who can't support them. We tend to look at the long-standing "war between the sexes" as being about gender roles, which we imagine are changeable, but economics are probably more important.
Whatever happens to be going through my mind at the moment.
“The female of the species vanished on the afternoon of the second Tuesday of February at four minutes and fifty-two seconds past four o'clock, Eastern Standard Time. The event occurred universally at the same instant, without regard to time belts, and was followed by such phenomena as might be expected after happenings of that nature.” Yeah, I hate it when that happens. http://www.amazon.com/Disappearance-Bison-Frontiers-Imagination/dp/0803298412/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367627924&sr=1-5&keywords=philip+wylie
ReplyDeleteFrom my perspective, men don't keep up their half of the energy output required to maintain a relationship or support a family. Women working outside the home with young ones usually find themselves still grocery shopping, making meals, cleaning the house. If the man is also employed, he doesn't contribute 50% to these tasks. If he is unemployed, he rarely contributes 100% to these tasks, while a woman does it 100% if the man is the sole external income provider. This is true in my experience, which is lower middle class and working class baby boomers. It may be different with the professional class in that generation, and it is most certainly different with the generation now in their 20s and 30s.
ReplyDeleteYes, I've read that this is usually the case. In the 1970s real wages started going down, while we were sold on the high-consumption "American way of life". It was no longer possible for a man to support a family, in the style to which we all wanted to become accustomed, so women in large numbers went to work, increasing the competition for jobs and further lowering wages.
ReplyDeleteMen didn't buy the idea that they should work all day and then come home and help with the work that used to be done by housewives. They reluctantly did some of it, but not enough. That's wrong, but we should be questioning the basic premise that this was ever a good arrangement. All that work, both on the job and at home, is only necessary to maintain a certain standard of living. We would be better off if we lived cheaper and worked less. Otherwise, everyone gets exhausted, especially women, and couples don't get along.