The Man Trap | Hacker News Reader

The Man Trap

1843magazine.com

90 pointsSirensOfTitan79 comments

> Women who behave like their male colleagues may be disliked for being “pushy” or “bitchy”, but these penalties are offset by the fact that they are also likely to enjoy more power and greater financial rewards. When men adopt the jobs and behaviours associated with women, however, they typically experience a loss of status with fewer perks and more social sanctions, especially from other men.

I think older (straight) men do not care about loss of status or social sanctions from other men. They care about loss of status from women. Especially when in long term relationships, there's the fear of an incorrect narrative where their partner often says that adopting feminine roles is appreciated, but subconsciously leads to less attraction. (with acknowledgement that the reverse is sometimes true for women's perceptions in the eyes of men)

[edit: it's actually in the article too ~3/4 of the way down, I should have been more patient]

Yes, I agree. Men are often told they need to be everything:

Successful yet don't work too much. Help with the kids, yet don't be feminine. Be strong, yet sensitive. Have hard employable skills, but also be an artist. Don't play video games, but be fun to be around.

All of these are difficult to balance.

The scary part is the a majority of divorces are ended by women.

I don't know the answer, but as long as we acknowledge the fact that both modern men and modern women have a long list of conflicting demands on them, I think we can show everyone more compassion.

"Don't play video games, but be fun to be around."

I was nodding along until I got to this one. What in the world do video games have to do with being a fun person to be around?

I think the point here is about interacting with a computer vs interacting with the people in the room.

Yes, except those two ideas are strikingly compatible :)

It's just an innocent figure of speech he used, I don't see the problem here.

It was probably a poor example but I read it as "don't have fun but be fun".

Yeah, it was poorly worded. I just meant it is difficult to have fun because of the expectation to entertain people you are around.

Perhaps one of the solutions is to acknowledge that you cannot have it all ways. In general, society demands that men have all the positive traits of masculinity, without any of the perceived negatives. A woman may marry a man because he is a successful career-orientated man. Later, she may divorce him because he’s not sensitive enough to her emotional needs.

Exceptions aside, certain traits tend to go together, for better or for worse, and this is the case with both masculinity and femininity. In this way, I wish people were more accepting and less judgemental.

Just watch the cycles: http://www.livescience.com/8779-fertile-women-manly-men.html

Why the focus on married women earning less than single women instead of focusing on household income?

Even if the single woman earns more than a married woman. For the most part, a married couple should have more disposable income after living expenses than her single counterpart. Married couples have a greater per capita net worth than their single counterpart.

In our case, because of choices we made together, my wife earns a little over 10K less than she did when she was single 5 years ago, but because I could depend on her to carry health insurance and she has more flexible schedule, that helps our family, I was able to switch jobs aggressively and I earn roughly $50,000 more than I did before we got married. We are both better off.

https://www.forbes.com/2006/07/25/singles-marriage-money-cx_...

https://www.google.com/amp/www.today.com/amp/money/why-marri...

Once they are married, the couples also are able to take advantage of economies of scale – anything from buying just one dishwasher to relying on one another’s health insurance. That allows them to build wealth more quickly than their peers who are single, divorced or living together romantically.

For example, a married man may be able to work 12 hours a day to please his bosses and get promoted, because he and his wife can divide household duties so he can get ahead. That’s not as much of an option for a single parent.

Your anecdote seems to confirm the dynamic described in TFA? You're making more money "aggressively", your wife is making less, etc.? You seem happy about it, but lots of men and women are not...

And I've seen the situation play out differently. I just left a job that basically had a 100% work from home policy. It paid slightly less than average for our geographic area, but the men chose to sacrifice maximizing their income to work from home because their spouses had jobs that required them to work late or travel frequently.

I would assume that most well functioning couples work together to optimize their career ambitions, lifestyle choices, and family relationships.

I think that money are simple and crude measure of achievement and social approval. E.g. If part of your motivation is competitiveness or passion for your profession, she is losing after each child. My husbands higher salary won't make up for my missed promotion or less interesting project, it won't make me proud of my skills, basically.

The article however was about men primary. Which I found interesting, because perspective of male who would prefer different tradeoff is rarely available.

Isn't that a lifestyle choice that spouses make together - whether to have kids, devote more time to each other, pursue their careers, etc.?

Depends on the couple, I guess. Optimally yes. But oftentimes both partners have different assumptions about what is fair contribution and how much free time is fair, don't talk about it really and resentments later on ensures. Like both of them believing they do too much simultaneously.

Other times one of them (can be also a women) takes advantage of the situation and the other one does not have much choice subsequently or figures it out only after a while maybe when it is too late. (If women hates her job, it is easier for her to claim that kids need mom longer/more to stay out of workforce longer which puts more pressure and stress on husband. If stereotypical geek claims that it is just not possible not to stay late, he can avoid some of boring housework. )

In other cases, the choice is made by tradition and peer/family pressure which prescribe proper roles (like in case of deeply conservative catholics I know - roles are strict and given by god end of discussion).

When you are married AND have kids, one thing that can happen is that the parent who is most concerned about the welfare of the kids has no choice but to simply buck up and do what is necessary for their sake. Quibbling with another grown adult about "fairness" and "equality" can be a great way to see the kids get shortchanged.

So, once there are children involved, it is not unusual for the wife to just suck it up and do what the kids need at personal cost to her. It often makes little sense to try to hold hubby's feet to the fire and insist on him doing his fair share at home or whatever.

This is not man-bashing. I am a woman and former homemaker. I do a lot of even-handed writing that tries to consider both sides of the picture. But this is a reality in many marriages. I do not self-identify as a "feminist" in part because, to me, "feminism" is about women wanting careers and to hell with any other considerations. This ongoing argument about equality of the sexes seems to mostly leave out the critical detail of the welfare of the children.

Unless and until we start talking about what works for the family as a whole, including kids, and society as a whole, including families with legal minors, this entire argument about men vs. women and so-called equality will continue to be sick and twisted and will tend to continue to crap on any parent that actually cares deeply about the welfare of their kids, regardless of gender.

>to me, "feminism" is about women wanting careers

Second-wave feminism lasted from 1960s to 1980s.

I don't know what relevance that has to anything I said. Aside from the cherry picking aspect of how you (mis)quoted me, I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I am 51 years old. I deal routinely with women who look down upon me because they chose to put their careers first. In some cases, they chose to not have children at all. In their eyes, I absolutely am not their equal and unequivocally not deserving of any real respect.

Dealing with such women is usually a worse experience for me than dealing with most men. Such women are typically pretty toxic.

Because these choices are very personal and people are very insecure about them. Does you staying home and being alright with it really means she is bad egoistic mother? Does some women liking staying home signify that world is moving back to homemaker side? Does me staying at home (and having to fight changes situation push on you) really means I am naturally lazy or less capable as conservatives like to suggest?

In a sense, no one talks about these considerations openly, ever. So it comes out indirectly through attitudes.

Everyone is supposed to be motivated only by positive things, you are supposed to stay because you are caring and loving not because you are sucking it up. That idea insults people. You are supposed to work because you love career, not because you don't want to be the lazy nagging stereotype - which you are pretty sure you would turn into if forced to stay at home.

I have plenty of hypotheses of my own as to why other women do this sort of crap to me. In the end, I don't think it matters. If you want to talk about making the world a better place and "equality for all," then shitting all over me because I made different lifestyle choices from you and this hits some nerve of yours -- well, get therapy and quit making it my problem that you aren't actually happy with the lifestyle choices you made.

If you want to call yourself a feminist and talk about getting equal rights for women, then I don't want to hear your crap about how your ideals only actually apply to women like you but still exclude large groups of women.

I think these are just bitter people who felt "It's a man's world and the least worst option for a woman is to not have children."

That's not an idealistic solution. That is not about making the world a better place. That is not about expecting more of the world. That is basically saying "No point in fighting evil. You can't win."

Turning around and shitting on me because you gave up years ago makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Feminism had always many competing branches.

I'm always iffy about articles like this because so much of the ground has been utterly salted by online "men's rights" activists that are more motivated by misogyny and antifeminism than actually righting wrongs.

It seems like a good read, but I would loved more data to crunch. The numerics of working long hours was a great example of how the mathematics of the situation make this stuff happen.

Anyhow, my wife and I actually do the fully-equal thing - she makes a bit more than me (teaching in Ontario is paid well and I'm not working in one of the Big Tech Market cities) so we have get to split things 50/50.

This actually presented a great opportunity: She wanted to go back to work early from her parental leave after the birth of our 3rd kid. So I did something new: I took the other half of the leave. 7 months off with my kids.

If you have the opportunity, do this. It actually made more money for us, in terms of strict income. Both of our employers provided a several weeks of top-up parental leave in which the government unemployment-insurance benefit is supplemented up to your full weekly paycheck. So by both of us taking time off, we got to double-dip on this.

And the experience with the kids was fantastic. I got to play boardgames with my son and teach him to ride his bike, and took my two daughters jogging in a double-stroller every other day. I practically lived in a ring-sling, even getting the stink-eye from greasy guys on a family trip to Manhattan. I got to properly get to know the parents of all my son's best friends and we're all still close. I was in the best shape of my life and had a great time, and my wife likes her job so she was happy to be at work.

I'd considered doing it on our 2nd kid, but friends and family had talked me out of it because of worries about my career. I don't even work in the same place I did when my 2nd was born. I quit that job later on anyways, so I missed out on that time for nothing.

To me, the biggest tragedy is the every-upwards climb of working hours for the household. There was a time when a family would live on a single 40 hour workweek. And what have we gained? I mean, for people who work retail, does the fact that they work on Sundays and every night to 10PM mean they actually sell more goods? Or does it just mean that retailers need to pay staff less per-hour because they're selling for more hours?

>"men's rights" activists that are more motivated by misogyny and antifeminism than actually righting wrongs.

What you think or told they are motivated by and their actual motivations are different things.

If MRAs were primarily motivated by actual concern for men's lot in life, they'd do more proactive work. Instead they are mostly reactive, coming out of the woodwork when something is mentioned about women. They bitch about how bad men have it in order to deflate the issue de jour, then are not to be seen until the next time someone talks about women.

The OP is utterly right in saying that the ground has been salted by these man-children. Men do face problems, but MRAs do little work and mostly just armchair whine. How many of them create working groups or petition politicians or similar? Compare to feminism, where while it has a share of whiners, is mostly pro-active; organising events, talking to stakeholders, starting discussions instead of derailing them. You see it here on HN, where a topic is about women, and the whiners come out to derail... yet these same MRAs don't post their own articles about men.

I always like to point at Movember. A solid men's-issue foundation with no whining, no association with mras, and it generates an pantsload of money for a good men's-issue cause with relentless positivity.

MRAs complain while the real men concerned by men's issues are actually doing something. Worried about the discrepancy between funding for breast cancer vs prostate cancer? Well you can moan about the nasty feminists and how society cares about women's suffering more than men's, or you can make a difference.

How to be "proactive" with widely accepted discriminatory practices and affirmative action?

>and the whiners come out to derail

Do they identify as MRAs though?

You and the OP are generalizing. You should apply the same nuance you show for feminisim to MRAs.

Well... feminism is something that has been around for a while. On the other hand, the "Men's Rights" banner (at least to me) seems much more recent, with most of the charges being led by the denizens of places like /r/TheRedPill (where they advocate some sort of extreme version of "every man should be a dudebro alpha male").

While it might not be entirely fair, if the majority of the visible "Men's Rights" proponents are the extremists, then they will end up being the ones to claim the banner for themselves as the term isn't as well established yet.

Well, most people that I've come across (online or otherwise) that wave that "Men's Rights" banner tend to be at the extreme end of the spectrum[0]. If they are the people that are the most vocal, they will be the ones that end up representing the group.

[0] If they are to be believed, all claims of rape by women are false, and should be taken with a enormous grain of salt. Also it's actually better to be a woman in society right now than a man because there's no downside to being a woman and a huge downside to being a man.

> I'm always iffy about articles like this because so much of the ground has been utterly salted by online "men's rights" activists that are more motivated by misogyny and antifeminism than actually righting wrongs.

That's in large part a result of the mainstream completely ceding ground to MRAs. When it's become socially unacceptable to talk about issues affecting men, because so much of the discussion has become framed in terms of privilige and patriarchy - what you're left with is the only groups willing to talk about issues that affect men in public are the socially unacceptable ones (and indeed, MRAs tend to be a nasty bunch).

But that doesn't change the fact that there's real issues, and when no one else is willing to talk about them that's what sustains the MRA groups.

The reality is, gender norms screw everyone over. And gender norms aren't the result of men today trying to screw over women; gender norms are perpetuated by society as a whole, men and women alike.

And you and your wife might have it all figured out; more power to you! But please recognize it ain't so easy for most people. The way you describe it you're living a lot of guy's dream/fantasy, _very_ few men have the option of taking 7 months of leave to be with their kids - or anything like a fully equal household, whether they want it or not.

You may have it made, but a lot of men feel trapped and unable to even talk about these issues.

"Men's rights," like feminism, has adherents with beliefs across a spectrum, from "reasonable things most people can agree with" to "wild and perverse antipathy toward the other sex."

Which is just to say that both groups consist of people and people vary.

When you say that there was a time that a family lived on a single 40-hour workweek... are you including housework and child-raising, or just paid work?

Of course just paid work. But also the amount of manpower needed to raise children has gone up as our expectations for supervision have increased. Letting a 7 year old walk themselves to school is no longer okay, for example.

> Letting a 7 year old walk themselves to school is no longer okay, for example.

This is the worst. Kids need to accrue independent skills early or you wind up with pathetically helpless college students. Self-sufficient kids is the whole point of parenting.

In the US at least, there are very few places where a 7 year old could walk to school. The town I grew up in the elementary school was ~20 minutes away by car for example. "Kids these days" as a whole tend to be more self sufficient (as a result of more dual working households etc); not less.

> Letting a 7 year old walk themselves to school is no longer okay, for example.

Why not? What's changed?

As the world got safer it somehow got more scary.

Maybe, but in general in the West it isn't a problem to let a 7 year old walk to school on their own. In fact, the few cases where someone makes an issue out of it are so rare they actually make national or even international news!

>Chase, a father in his late 40s who is a partner at an international law firm in Chicago. “When I see a woman who has children and I know she and her husband are working like crazy, that concerns me for the sake of the kids,” he says. “But when I see stay-at-home dads, I don’t think very highly of them. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want, but I think it’s kind of wimpy to do that. It’s checking out, not being in the game, not fighting for success. Those are the traits I value.”

Wow, Chase sounds like a real turd, I feel bad for his kids.

>> Coltrane has found that after controlling for variables like age and education, married American men earn significantly more than their unmarried or divorced male peers, and their earnings go up with every child they have. Marriage seems to make men more productive at work because it allows them to outsource much of the housekeeping to their wives.<<

I don't see how that last sentence makes any sense. Since when does one's earnings have anything to do with whether the housekeeping for one child or three children is "outsourced" to wives? I think it's far more likely that being a father to more children is correlated with being older and more experienced and therefore more highly compensated.

"...after controlling for variables like age and education."

Hmm, fair point. It just doesn't make any sense then that more children correlate to higher income because the housekeeping responsibilities fall to the wife.

There's no reason for them to assume it has anything to do with outsourcing housekeeping. Quite simply, an intact marriage and children are likely to provide men with the drive to produce for the sake of his family.

>Coltrane has found that after controlling for variables like age and education, married American men earn significantly more than their unmarried or divorced male peers, and their earnings go up with every child they have. Marriage seems to make men more productive at work because it allows them to outsource much of the housekeeping to their wives.

That's an assumption. IMO it's more likely to be that men with families out-earn their single and divorced counterparts because they're motivated to do so.

Particularly as compared to divorced men. There's no point in killing yourself at work if the ex is going to take half the money.

Luckily, in Texas, child support is capped and alimony is politically unpopular. So there is a motivation for divorced men to make more.

I think that in a couple, there is always some form of resentment towards the partner which does not work (is not pulling their weight) but I think that the level of resentment is many times higher if the non-working partner happens to be a man.

When I was in med school, married with two kids, every member of my wife's family told her to divorce me, not once, but on a regular basis. They all think I'm great now and wonder why we don't visit them much.

I think a big part of reckoning with these social pressures may be simply expressing them out loud. It seems to be a truism of therapy that "you should never be ashamed of your feelings," but the very real benefits that white men continue to reap on one level tend to preclude an emotionally honest reckoning on another level.

A lot of the negative effects documented in this essay seem to purely relate to cognitive dissonance. For example, the essay said that men would be more willing to accept certain "child-friendly policies" if they believe that it would not decrease their socially-perceived masculinity.

I can only believe that it would also help men to openly express these fears, to state out loud the dissonance in their self conception that (largely positive) social change has wrought.

> misogyny and antifeminism

What's wrong with anti-feminism? Also, misogyny is one of those catch-alls that's being abused to mean: "Does not complement women" as of late.

Found the MRA.

Not an argument. Feminism is an ideology and like any other has its good points and bad. You can believe in equality and not have to identify as a feminist.

Oh of course. Wouldn't want to be associated with feminism. But hey, you can still be a feminist, just don't call it that, right? Becauase just like men's deodorant and shaving cream, we have to have our OWN version of feminism, free from all of those WOMEN. Wouldn't want to be associated with women or have to navigate a space that isn't ours. Nope.

(Hint: this is sarcasm and feminism isn't primarily about men.)

So if "feminism isn't primarily about men" then why would (and even how could) I be a part of it?

You can also believe in a better world than the one we currently have, not call yourself a feminist and also not believe "equality" is the standard we should be caring about.

(In case it actually needs to be said again: I happen to be female.)

> complement

Typo? Hard to tell.

Please don't post like this. The unsubstantive+ragey combo forms an inflection point at which threads go from bad to much worse.

When a discussion turns into "yay label" vs. "boo label", there's no information left in it, and flamewars are the only thing left to do.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337198 and marked it off-topic.

I disagree with your view of what I posted. (it was not done with a unsubstantive+ragey stance) What I posted was a disagreement with the exaggeration of the alternative point of view they had. (Any article that doesn't agree with the popular ultra liberal women's positive view is "salted by mens rights [insert derogative terms etc]")

Being anti-feminist is not a bad thing. It is a conversation that could be had (is it good, is it bad, etc), the topic of the original poster leads to a conversatoin about this.

My concern with Hacker News is that it claims to be technology focused, and founder focus. However articles dealing with gender issues, like this, get promoted and kept up.

I completely respect and understand your stance that those topics tend to go badly.

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