masculinity and children

This is just such an interesting article. Mainly it's about men being fathers and the way that plays or doesn't play with fatherhood. But there are a few more discursive bits which touch on wider themes, rightly, like this.

While childbirth is an exclusively female rite of passage, masculinity is a religion that worships endurance. Boys are taught in the playground that there is virtue, heroism even, in the stoic tolerance of pain. That is why men talk up the physical demands of fatherhood. Secretly they would like to be initiated into parenthood with something as bluntly agonising as labour. Denied that opportunity they have traditionally embraced the idea of self-sacrifice using the only tool available. They have gone straight back to work.

There may be something in that. Add it to the French psychoanalytic feminist idea that men suffer from separation anxiety and womb envy ... which seems as plausible to me as penis envy... Anyway it fits with the oft-stated reason men have traditionally given for neglecting families for work; it's to earn money for the rest of the family. Which is interesting, because if it is to work as a dynamic of self-denial, it must mean that somewhere, deep in the masculine psyche, staying around to be with wife and kids is normally understood to be good, fun, interesting, worthwhile. So to help deal with the whole equal parenting thing, we need to be addressing the reasons why men might see work/family-absenting as an act of heroic self-denial.

Of course it's not the only issue and it's not to say that some men just take the opportunity to be away from things that they don't like or close to things they do, but it does seem to me to be plausible. And the implications for men's spirituality and for the sharing of the gospel among men are interesting.

Perhaps what needs challenging is the myth that earning more and more money is good whereas personal presence, and sacrificing some career prospects is good. But of course, some of that is undermined by a sense of the potential/likely impermanence of marital relationships.
The Observer | Woman | Is being a good dad ruining your career?:
Filed in: masculinity, spirituality, fatherhood