Macht is worried that I am unfair to W. Bradford Wilcox, the UVA sociologist who has emerged as a leading defender of traditional marriage. I took issue with his Mother’s Day National Review article on Friday, and I wasn’t too happy with his stunning remark last month in First Things that Men’s comparatively fragile faith often depends on wifely encouragement to flower.
To be fair, I’ve said some nice things about Brad Wilcox before. In 2005, I reviewed his book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. I found many interesting parts to it, and enjoyed that in this text, at least, Wilcox seemed less interested in reinforcing the “myth of male weakness.”
In his book (which I do recommend to “family scholars” types), Wilcox argues that religion — particularly Christianity, and particularly conservative evangelical and Catholic churches — does serve to “domesticate” men and make them more committed to family values. His thesis, which is apparently backed up by at least some evidence, is that men who are active in conservative churches are more likely to remain devoted to their children and their wives than men who are nominal believers or largely inactive in any religious community. I’m not going to contest that, primarily because in the book, Wilcox suggests that the primary “domesticating influence” is religion and spirituality. In other words, in his book, Wilcox doesn’t make the case that he made in both the National Review and the First Things articles: that wives are responsible for their husbands. In the FT piece, it is women who are responsible for helping their husbands’ faith flower; in the NRO piece, it is women who play the pivotal role in keeping a man invested in his children’s lives.
This is an old pattern with Wilcox. In a Touchstone article a few years ago, he writes of recent social history:
Between 1968 and 1993 the percentage of men 25 to 34 who were married with children fell from 66 percent to 40 percent. Accordingly, young men did not benefit from the domesticating influence of wives and children.
Instead, they could continue to hang out with their young male friends, and were thus more vulnerable to the drinking, partying, tomcatting, and worse that is associated with unsupervised groups of young men. Absent the domesticating influence of marriage and children, young men—especially men from working-class and poor families—were more likely to respond to the lure of the street.
Yes, he used the word “tomcatting.” Here, Wilcox mentions the domesticating influence of wives and children. He fails, as he repeatedly does, to note that the greatest brake on bad male behavior is the presence of strong male role models (something shown repeatedly by virtually all social science.) It is the absence of those strong male role models that is the real problem, not the “domesticating influence of wives.” Those men who fathered sons and then weren’t present in their lives were absent as the result of conscious choices to abandon their children, not as the result of female bad behavior. But in Touchstone, as elsewhere in his articles, Wilcox seems enchanted by the supernatural domesticating powers of wives. When those wives abandon their duty stations, it seems, everything goes to hell in a handbasket. Lord knows, men aren’t responsible.
I’m an active Christian, heavily involved in my church and in the world. There is no doubt in my mind that God actively intervened in my life years ago to turn me from a path of narcissistic self-destruction. That I didn’t kill myself, that I am not still addicted to drugs and alcohol, that I am a faithful, devoted husband and trusted mentor today — these are gifts of grace, gifts to which I had the good sense to respond. But my marriage today is not the cause of my “flowering faith”, my marriage is the consequence of having already made a commitment to God. In his repeated suggestion that wives play a pivotal role in bringing men into church, Wilcox reverses cause and effect. Men don’t become better Christians because of their wives, but they may darned sure become better husbands because of their faith. That’s not to say that a husband and wife don’t mutually support and encourage each other, because in the best marriages, they do — but that support and encouragement is not unidirectional, from woman to man. For authentic believers, the faith journey of either spouse is not contingent on the success or failure of their marriage.
Being married changes people, men and women alike. It happens in same-sex marriages as well as in other-sex marriages. Any time two people make an enduring commitment to one another, sharing beds and bathrooms and bank accounts, perhaps bringing in children as well, their lives will be transformed by the process. I’ve argued that marriage can be an excellent vehicle for personal transformation for those who participate in it, though (especially after a thorough chastening in recent weeks on this blog) I do acknowledge that folks can also grow and transform in a variety of different arrangements. Where I break with Brad Wilcox is not over our mutual conviction that marriage is often a very good thing. Where I break with Brad Wilcox is over his repeated implication (unless he is a sloppy writer, and I don’t think he is) that men need wives to help them flower as men of faith and as fathers. Given that he never applies the reverse to women, it seems clear that Wilcox buys into a myth of male weakness, and more troublingly, buys into the appalling notion that women are in some way responsible for the spiritual and parental development of their husbands. As a gender scholar, a Christian, a pro-feminist and a husband I reject that implication entirely.
I’m not familiar with Wilcox’s work, so this is not a defense of him per se, just a caveat: I think it’s legitimate to observe, as a matter of pure statistics, that spouses and children DO have a domesticating/maturing effect on men, without leaping to the conclusion that you rightly find objectionable, namely that women SHOULD ensure that men grow up. In other words, the primary moral responsibility can remain with the men to choose opportunities for transformation, but we shouldn’t be afraid to spread the word that marriage (gay or straight) and fatherhood are a time-tested route to that transformation.
With respect to Brad’s claim that men’s fragile faith needs wifely support, again perhaps we can see this not as a gender-essentialist issue but as recognition that something in our contemporary culture is making it harder for men than for women to be committed to a religious life. Is it the way men are raised? The style of many church services and the doctrines they emphasize? I don’t know, but I have seen this phenomenon among my own friends: a lot of church-going women wishing their husbands were more interested in faith. Not all male weakness is a myth; some of it may be real. Wilcox’s solutions may lack appeal, but we can acknowledge that wives often do help husbands deepen their spiritual life, even if in an ideal world they wouldn’t need women to do this for them.
As I said, my complaint was NOT that you were being hard on him. And my complaint wasn’t that I thought you were wrong about him perpetuating the myth of male weakness. My complaint was that you accused him of blaming or faulting women when he did no such thing (unless you read him in the worst possible light).
Macht, I think if you look at the three articles (or even the two that are online), there’s a pattern to Wilcox’s language that does suggest that women are responsible for male behavior. I find the case fairly compelling.
Jendi, I’d agree completely that there is something in our culture that makes it harder for men than women to be committed to family and religious life. That “something” is traditional masculinity, with its emphasis on solitary achievement rather than community, “sturdy oaks” rather than vulnerable emotional articulateness. That traditional masculinity is passed on father to son, coach to athlete, teacher to student, rapper to fan. It is something that men do to other men, and it is men who are chiefly responsible for ending it.
I HAVE looked at them and I don’t see any language of blame, fault, responsibility, etc. There is a huge difference between saying “Absent the domesticating influence of marriage and children, young men … were more likely to respond to the lure of the street” and saying that women are to blame if they do respond to the lure of the street.
I think we can agree at this point, Macht, that we read this work differently. I don’t know if that can be resolved, but I’m grateful for the exchange.
So your response to my pointing out that the articles don’t use any language of fault or blame or responsibility is “agree to disagree”? That’s disappointing, to say the least.
I think this CAN be resolved if you give some indication as to how you get from “Absent the domesticating influence of marriage and children, young men … were more likely to respond to the lure of the street” to “women are responsible if men do respond to the lure of the street.” You are making a HUGE leap there and I don’t understand why you are making that leap. (Please see my marathon running analogy in the previous post.)
Macht, I read your marathon analogy. It’s not, it seems to me, what Wilcox is using here. His seems far more causal than that. To stick with the marathon analogy, I read Wilcox as suggesting that wives function as coaches to their husband, giving advice on how to train properly, what equipment to wear, what sort of training to do. (Or, in real life, on how to interact with the children, how to feed the kids when she’s not home, etcetera.) If a coach suddenly stopped giving advice to a runner after a falling out, the runner might make a poor decision to train too much or wear ill-fitting shoes. Then the runner’s failure would be at least partly the coach’s responsibility. The three cited articles very strongly make the case that women coach men in domestic affairs, not the other way around.
Husbands and wives ought to be teammates, but not coaches.
“Then the runner’s failure would be at least partly the coach’s responsibility.”
This is where I don’t follow you. A coach’s responsibility is for the people he or she coaches. If there is a “falling out” and the coach stops training a runner, the coach is no longer responsible for that runner (except, perhaps, for any good or bad habits the coach has instilled in the runner while they were training together). But once the coach and runner split, it’s the runner’s responsibility to either train him or herself properly or, if unable to, find a new coach that can.
I think the most you can claim about Wilcox is that he is perpetuating a myth that makes it easier for men to blame women. But I don’t think you can say that Wilcox is blaming women himself.
Following up on your runner-coach analogy (and I’m just thinking out loud here - I haven’t thought through it very much), Wilcox would be playing the role of a writer for Runner’s World. And his columns would be all about how runners need coaches if they want to improve their performance or break personal bests. His columns aren’t telling them to sit around and blame their former coaches because they couldn’t get along with each other. Rather, his columns are providing runners the information that he feels they need to be better runners. Now, if his columns actually did blame the coaches, that would be a different story - but I don’t see his columns doing that. If your analogy holds, that would be the role I’m guessing Wilcox would see himself playing.
Macht, reading this makes me realize something I need to post on (later, or tomorrow). It’s not so much a myth of male weakness that I see Wilcox promoting, it’s a myth of male domestic incompetence and emotional frozenness. I’ll work that out in a future post.
Hugo wrote: “there is something in our culture that makes it harder for men than women to be committed to family and religious life. That ’something’ is traditional masculinity, with its emphasis on solitary achievement rather than community, ’sturdy oaks’ rather than vulnerable emotional articulateness.”
Was the masculine ideal different from the above in pre-19th-century Western culture, when men played a larger role in church life (as clergy, lay people and theologians) than they do now? My guess is that such men would have seen themselves as sturdy oaks more than sensitive new age guys, but also would have been far less individualistic than we are now. Anybody have some real historical data on this?
Yes, it was very different — men were allowed much more intimate relationships with other men; the “sturdy oak” is largely a creation of industrialized society. Do see Michael Kimmel’s magisterial and indispensable “Manhood in America” for this.
I see a false connection here between a rejection of emotionalism and irresponsibility. If young men behave irresponsibly, it has a lot to do with social structures in place to facilitate and encourage that kind of conduct, at all levels. And our social structures encourage that behavior for a good reason: men who have no sense of the future, no commitment to others, make good impulse buyers and attractive targets for military recruiters. We encourage young men, or at least some young men to take on this rootless, futureless life because our current social structures need the soldiers, need the irresponsible consumer, need the uncommitted, uninvolved work force.
But I insist that this has nothing to do with the exaltation of emotion, and of buzzwords such as “community”, now common on the Left. Understanding and replacing our addiction to the use of military force, or thoughtless consumption, requires much more than getting in touch with our feelings. Indeed, the social structures which do the damage have a long history of exploiting those feelings. Military training feeds extensively into common emotions and the longing for connection. The word community fosters a sense of belonging; manipulative politicians and “community activists” use the same emotions to justify policies which foster injustice, exclusion and exploitation.
Emotion exalted over thought and action produces impotence: we see that most clearly in airplane cockpits and operating theatres, where lives depend on cold reason and upon keeping emotions clamped in iron control. But exalting emotion takes its real toll in circumstances where the crisis does not appear clearly, and an appeal to emotion obscures the reality of an act, or a failure to act, which facilitates an injustice. Young men caught in a cycle (a cycle our society sets up for them) of irresponsibility and futility do not need to feel; they need to understand and to act.
I tend to think that the reason that women are (generally) more domestic, religious, and committed to family is that we’re socialized to feel guilty and responsible for being perfect, where men are socialized to pursue their own desires more. There are ways that men are brought up to be that I think are really wrong (unemotional, macho, etc.), but I think the way that women are brought up to be are wronger.
I also think it’s changing (slower than some would like) and women are joining men in being more carefree, pleasure-seeking, and self-oriented. I think religiosity and marriage-mindedness are bound to decline as a result, and I think this is a good thing. (I am mildly anti-marriage.)
It is probably true that women have a “domesticating” effect on men, whether that’s desirable or not. You (Hugo) are arguing that men ought to domesticate themselves, while I would argue that we ought not to be domesticated at all. That’s an oversimplification of my position, but not by a huge degree.
John, I really think you’re conflating collectivism with authoritarianism.
labyrus: If you see me as “…conflating collectivism with authoritarianism”, then you’ll have to explain what you mean in just a touch more detail than you have provided so far. My concern has little to do with the individual versus the collective, or authoritarianism, but with first, seeing the source of the problem of rootless young men clearly, and second, coming to a just solution. If you see a dichotomy between collectivism and authoritarianism there, I can’t give you a detailed answer without a detailed accound of what you read out of what I wrote.