Incredible Shrinking Men

Simulating the pursuit of honour creates a deathtrap for real-world solidarity

image h/t @blablafishcakes on Twitter

The image above depicts three males of roughly equal height, two of them artificially feminised, plus three artificially masculinised females also of roughly equal height. Officially, though, it depicts four men - three of whom are for some reason unusually short.

I keep returning to the image with a sense that the three tiny, smiling ‘men’ capture something about the diminished nature, in a high-tech society, of masculinity as such. This was brought more into focus for me this week by a sad little video, capturing in a nutshell a modern relationship problem that seems all too common:

What happens when you have a baby, you feel like you’re drowning, and he won’t lift a finger? Mum has a baby on her lap; baby tips bowl of baby food onto floor. Meanwhile in the background Daddy is immersed in his video game, wholly cut off from awareness of either his partner or their baby - let alone any desire to relieve her evident state of overwhelm.

Leaving aside questions of how staged the scenario is, there are some reflex responses to the predicament it captures, from the woman’s perspective. From the Left, we might expect “Lazy, sexist men should help more with babycare”, or just “divorce this manchild”. From the Right, a pitiless individualist one might be “it’s on you if you choose to have a baby with someone this feckless and self-absorbed”. All these boil down to broadly the same message: women should cut ties (or not even form them in the first place) with a man who won’t do an equal share of domestic duties within family life.

TikTok divorce lawyer Dennis Vetrano reports that many are doing just this. Of those cases that cross his desk, he says, the big trend is mothers who are doing it all - work, domestic duties, care of children - while their husbands simply check out and enjoying the ride.

@drvlawThe major theme I’ve been seeing? Women are TIRED #divorce #divorced #divorceparty #divorcedlife #divorcedmom #divorcesucks #divorcecoach #divorcedparents #divorceattorney #divorcesupport #divorceparties #divorcehelp #divorcerecovery #DivorceForce #divorcecourt #divorcecommunity #divorcedonedifferently #divorceddad #divorcechaos #divorceproceedings #divorcedmoms #divorcee #divorcecoaching #divorcees #divorcecake #divorcelawyer #divorceeducation #divorcesurvivor

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

There are few things more destructive to mutual trust than the sense that one partner is free-riding. But it struck me, watching the clip, that missing from the reflex critiques above is any questioning of the scope of family life as such.

Very broadly speaking, in terms of the way men and women distributed the work of family life until around half a century ago, women would be more likely to focus inward on immediate social and domestic matters, while men would be more concerned with the pursuit of resources and honour in the wider world. Many satirical postcards from the age of first-wave feminism - the suffragist era - turned on a fear that these roles would reverse, with the result usually being depicted as humiliating for the man:

Taken from Vintage Tweets: Suffrage Era Postcards ed. Carol N. Crossted. NY: Rochester, 2019

In practice, though, what seems to have emerged recently - and not, I think, directly as a consequence of the suffrage movement - is a different scenario: the Incredible Shrinking Man.

Of course we don’t get any information from that little video about what their life together is like overall. Perhaps he has an incredibly stressful job, and this is his one half-hour of downtime on a Friday night. But let’s say it isn’t, and this is one of the scenarios Dennis Vetrano describes. And looking at that clip, it struck me that in terms of normative sex roles, the man is slacking - but also he isn’t, not precisely.

In terms of what modern life in general asks of families in general, she is very likely capable of covering nearly all of it: gathering resources, managing the household, overseeing care of children. That is: she’s probably able to cover most of both the traditionally female role of care, and what remains of the traditionally male role.

Meanwhile, although he is not helping with these tasks, he’s still utterly absorbed in what he’s doing. And what he’s doing is a form of intense, concentrated activity that - on its own terms - requires skill, competitiveness and focus. A well-designed game will be enjoyable to the extent that it delivers, for the gamer, so emotionally satisfying a simulacrum of resource-gathering, status-seeking, and peer competition and cooperation that the player may well feel as though he genuinely is doing his part - at least according to ancient, probably somewhat evolved differences in male and female contributions to family life.

In other words: at the emotional level at least, they’re both hard at work in something not unlike ‘traditional’ normative sexed roles. It’s just that he’s performing the ‘male role’ in a simulation.

And we can perhaps generalise this, to suggest the following update on the suffrage-era anxiety: that men have not, in the end, been feminised in the sense of replacing women as domestic drudges. Rather, an increasingly common scenario is the one in which women do everything in the real world - the earning, the public life and the domestic one - while their male partners find their roles radically shrunk, such that they can continue pursuing honour in the classic masculine style only in virtual domains.

To a great extent we’ve found ourselves here because a plethora of technological changes have gone some considerable way to making traditionally male jobs and roles - those involving brute strength, protection, hunting and so on - largely obsolete IRL. That the inventors were men makes this all the more ironic: men have innovated themselves out of a job. For families in which both parents would be expected to do knowledge-based work, the remaining fields of meaningful life in common are domestic and money-earning work, in both of which women often thrive as well or better than men.

And this shrinking field for male aspiration seems to be tempting many to forego IRL altogether in favour of glory in the simulation. A growing number of reports document the phenomenon of young men dropping out of everything - real-world ambition, family formation, the works - preferring simply to make ends meet and focus their energy only on the simulated pursuit of honour via gaming.

In all this, I don’t want to make light of the frustration experienced by those women who ended up becoming ‘mommy gf’ only to discover how incompatible that role is with being an actual mother. Nor do I want to suggest that men have no agency in this situation and are mere helpless pawns of systemic changes. Nor am I suggesting women should “get back in our box” in some way. It doesn’t follow from any of this that, as some antifeminists claim, if only we took the vote off women again things would all come right again. There is no going back. But equally, it seems clear to me that no one is particularly happy with the situation.

I don’t know where we go from here, but my hunch is that simply demanding that men try harder to embrace the domestic sphere may not go very far. My hunch is that somewhere near the heart of the problem is the fact that the pursuit of honour is really, really important to a great many men - more important, in many cases, than keeping your partner happy - and that this remains true even when the only emotionally satisfying place to pursue honour is within a simulacrum.

If this is so, I suspect that one of the missing pieces is more space for men to seek honour in real everyday life. That is: we might get further in resolving the argument if we looked for solutions that were geared not toward further blurring the roles - and conflating the typical motivations - of men and women but to acknowledging those ways we are, on average, a little different.

What would it look like to try and restore the pursuit of honour, for men? What would it look like to try and re-orient that pursuit of honour to wider prosocial aims? Because it seems clear enough to me that no one benefits from pretending that this desire for honour is illegitimate, then sidelining men’s pursuit of it into a world of make-believe while their partners silently, furiously do everything else.