Why
men are getting happier (and women more miserable)
Part III
While women work their brains out, men get more
and more 'neutral downtime.' Does this make them
the real beneficiaries of the women's movement?
The
counter-interpretation, say Stevenson and Wolfers,
lies in women's aspirations outpacing society's
attempts to accommodate them. In the 1970s, if
women told pollsters they were happy, they were
likely "comparing themselves to the housewife
next door," explains Stevenson. Today, that's
just not good enough. The educated, ambitious career
woman is now inclined to compare herself to the
man in the next cubicle — a shift in mindset
no enlightened person would regard as a bad thing.
That would be fine, says Stevenson, if perception
of women in the workplace had caught up to reality.
Instead, they still are too frequently treated
as second-class colleagues. "I have had this
happen to me," she says. "A woman says
something in a meeting and she maybe doesn't say
it quite as forcefully as she should and so a guy
picks it up and everybody says 'Damn, what a great
idea!' " Thirty years ago, says Stevenson,
women felt glad just to be allowed into the meeting. "Now," she
says, "you think, what the f---?"
WHATEVER
the reason for female unhappiness, the success
of women appears to be changing expectations
for males as surely as it is for females. Imagine,
for a moment, that you are Toby, a 27-year-old male
and one-half of a Vancouver couple whose now-defunct
relationship was recently described in detail to
Maclean's. While your girlfriend, Sarah, also 27,
works 60-hour weeks trying to get her small business
off the ground, you follow your dream of becoming
a musician, applying your time to playing gigs, smoking
pot and hanging out at her apartment — not
necessarily in that order. She is patient. "The
fact he was an artist made it seem legitimate or
justifiable," she later confides. "The
idea was that there was a higher purpose that could
also potentially pay off."
Article
continues below
Toby eventually gets a job as a barista at Starbucks,
but by then it's too late. She ditches him, and on
reflection he marvels that the good times lasted
as long as they did. But in the end, he's glad she
dumped him because the fact she made more money was
starting to make things kind of awkward. And it's
not like he really wanted to change his lifestyle.
While
the male layabout is an archetype in almost every
human society, the idea of an intelligent,
able-bodied North American man dedicating a good
part of his existence to non-productive activity
is relatively new. In the mid-1960s, men spent nearly
half their time on paid work or work-like activities,
according to Alan Krueger, a Princeton University
economist and author of a recently released study
comparing how men and women allocate time. By 2005,
that had fallen to 36 per cent while the amount of
time typically spent on unpleasant tasks declined
marginally, and men suddenly found themselves with
a surfeit of "neutral downtime," which
offers in relaxation what it lacks in character-building.
Forty years ago, watching TV and similar activity
consumed 14.5 per cent of an average American man's
day. Today it takes up nearly a quarter.
Some
of this is due to technology, notes Krueger; a
lot of former men's work is now performed by machines,
both at work and around the home. But it's hard not
to see the growth in their spare time with the concomitant
reduction in women's. Unlike men, women are spending
more time at paid work than they did in, say, the
early 1970s, while their downtime has been steadily
declining. To some experts, this points to males
gaining R & R at females' expense. More troubling
still, says Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at the
State University of New York, Stoney Brook, the behaviour
seems more deeply entrenched in each generation of
males. "Young men today see the lives of their
fathers as the opposite of fun," he says. "Sober.
Parental. Responsible. It's taking a lot of these
guys about eight years to commit to a career."
The
result, he says, is a state of drift among men
that in many cases doesn't lift until they reach
their mid-30s. "They come out of high school
with this incredible sense of entitlement," he
says. "Virtually everyone I talk to here at
the university thinks he's going to write for television
and move to Hollywood." Most of them eventually
snap out of it, adds Kimmel, but the short-term impact
on women can be disconcerting. Some girls simper
pathetically in the presence of dour slouches, preening
for a bit of attention. Others, like Sarah, wait
for emotionally stunted boyfriends to grow up so
they can get married, buy a house and have kids.
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by
Charlie Gillis & Barbara Righton Source:
http://www.macleans.ca
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