There was a Twitter mentioned on DailyKos’s Abbreviated Pundit Roundup about a study showing Millennial Men are making less than their spouses, and the women feel bad about it. The Tweeter was annoyed that they did, because it was about time, and the men should just put on their big girl panties and get over it. I objected in far too much seriousness at the time, because I pointed out that the study didn’t show the men objecting or feeling bad about it.
Then, this morning, on BBC, I heard “What’s Mine Is Yours,” where the host, Emily Thomas, went in search of men who felt emasculated by their wives who made more than they. If I sound jaundiced in my summary, it’s because the host’s interest was overt. She was supposed to be investigating the situation of women making more than men, but she could only do so within a frame of “men must resist loss of power as loss of sex.”
She interviewed a wonderful young couple in New York City, and I was in tears by the end of it. The wife makes $220,000 a year. The husband is a consultant and makes, some years, $30,000 and, at his best year, $55,000. They don’t keep a single account. Instead, they act like housemates with their income, so he pays the electric and cable bills and puts in every penny he can toward rent. Thomas kept asking him about how he felt about being poorer than his wife, and he kept answering, doggedly, that he really didn’t care about money, that he really didn’t measure his value by money. The wife kept talking about how much she loved her husband, how she texted him ten times a day, but, of course, she could go out for drinks after work without a thought, buy clothes without considering cost, and simply be free, while he would hang out with friends in places that didn’t cost anything and only very occasionally go out.
So then Thomas went into the classic, “But who does the household work” line. Instead of answering in the lines she wanted, the wife said that she was “in charge” of ordering when the two of them would do cleaning and laundry.
So, why was I brought to tears by this? (Oh, and Thomas quickly went on to find Indian men who felt threatened, Chinese men who divorced over income inequality, etc.) (It’s easy to prove a thesis as hoary as this one, especially because it’s so close to the truth.)
For my part, I can’t imagine being in a marriage that doesn’t have a summing of incomes and division into thirds (.3 per person and .3 common debts). I know that creates its own Hell, because each partner is guaranteed to complain about the other’s frivolous spending of “my” money, but I can’t imagine being married to someone who thinks of herself as her money, or her money as herself. In the old single income model, there was a single pot, and the wife was as rich as her husband. In divorces, family courts treat the marriage as a partnership and dissolve assets without regard to who was male or female. But that’s me.
Oh, but I hate money. I know what it is, but I loathe it. One thing I like about here is what I liked about Wikipedia in the early days: what reputation I have is only from my thoughts and my words. It doesn’t come from my looks, my clothes, my cologne, my self-confidence, or my degrees. Those who like me do so because of what I have shown, not what is stamped upon me. Money is not earned, generally. If you happen to be interested and talented at something many people want and few others are, you will get a great deal of the stuff. If you are talented in something few want or that many are also talented in, you will get none.
Here’s the thing: I’m poor. I might be at the bottom of middle class by the IRS codes. I will reveal that I have finally gotten up to $35,000/year. I don’t actually make that in a real gross, because my health insurance takes $1,800 in premiums and then pays zero until a $5,000 deductible is met (and that’s without a negotiated price, so I’m hit with the bill the hospitals and doctors send out that they expect to have denied), so I effectively make, gross, $28,000.
When you’re poor, you’re conscious of it. You’re conscious of it every day. You lose liberty. You lose choice. Every offer you hear of happiness and fun is a lie. When you meet peers, they all have cars that work, houses that they own, clothes that they can buy on a whim, and they go on vacations. They don’t know that you’re poor, but you do. They think you’re eccentric for keeping a vehicle from the 1990’s. They think you’re quaint for living in a leaky 800’ house.
I stopped going to my church over hearing about the “pledge units” (people) dropping off and knowing that I can’t even give to my church. The men’s group invited me out and didn’t understand why I wouldn’t go to the $40/plate dinner with them. I’m unfriendly!
So, what is it to be poor? Is it emasculating? If it is, then what does it do to women, because they suffer even more. No. It denies you a chance to be a person. If your spouse is doing well, you have a daily reminder that you are not free. It isn’t dominance. It isn’t power over the partner. It’s self-worth.
Honestly, people, is it really necessary to point out that we know that unemployed people kill themselves, that newly impoverished people die, that the power have stress levels that kill them, and then say, “Oh, golly, every day this person is reminded of his failure to have, and he’s stressed out? I bet it’s about sex.” Is it the case that every one of the people making these analyses is rich and therefore can’t even imagine what it means to start out, to be at the bottom, to be so overly extended that you’re poor even with a good salary?