Equality begins at home
They get it in Sweden, it appears.
“I always thought if we made it easier for women to work, families would eventually choose a more equal division of parental leave by themselves,” said [former deputy PM Bengt] Westerberg. “But I gradually became convinced that there wasn’t all that much choice.”
Sweden, he said, faced a vicious circle. Women continued to take parental leave not just for tradition’s sake but because their pay was often lower, thus perpetuating pay differences. Companies, meanwhile, made clear to men that staying home with baby was not compatible with a career.
“Society is a mirror of the family,” Mr. Westerberg said. “The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve equality in the home. Getting fathers to share the parental leave is an essential part of that.”
Sholto Byrnes please note. The family isn’t some wholly private realm that has no effect on the broader society, for good or ill. Family law is not something that can be shrugged off as a minor matter that is not worth worrying about.
“The family isn’t some wholly private realm that has no effect on the broader society, for good or ill.”
And even if it were, denying a woman her rights in the home would still be wrong. It is wrong for sharia law to deny women the right to divorce their husbands if they want to, to refuse to recognize marital rape, to allow wife-beating in accordance with the Koran, and on and on.
And yet some people think it’s not wrong, or not entirely wrong, or possibly wrong but the business of the people who do it, or maybe wrong but who can interfere, or –
There’s a lot of non-thinking about this subject.
“The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve equality in the home.”
What a repulsive statement.
Carter, could you please clarify why that is a “repulsive statement?”
The imposition of equality in the home is grossly intrusive, he’s advocating it for the sake of a wicked and unachievable end.
I see nothing about an “imposition.” Where are you getting that?
What is the “wicked and unachievable end?” I’m not the proprietor here, but I’m pretty confident that She Who Is is not interested in comments that amount to nothing more than a pile of rotten eggs left on the doorstep with no explanation.
A lot bothers me about this gushing article (and I’m probably stepping on a hornet’s nest here).
There is a great importance in providing legal equality in access to the law. Unquestionably. But this concept goes far beyond that. It’s an example of extrapolating a principle into a rigid ideology.
And this is where the trouble begins, when well meaning governments decide using ideology to coerce (in Sweden’s case it is economic pressure from government allotments) behavior to match their arbitrarily chosen ideal, and in so doing is stepping in through a kind of social engineering into private details of how people arrange their family life. A new artifice is created, where males essentially have to, in a sense, pretend to be females, and females pretend to be males, to correspond to some ideologically driven ‘equality’ (more accurately, sameness). Why, in a supposedly free society, should government be stepping in there at all?
Giving mothers time of for child care is a good thing. Offering a similar arrangement to fathers, if they choose to do it, is good. But it’s not necessarily the best for everyone. Nursing and other aspects of infant care (we’re mammals and mammal young are tightly bound primarily to their mothers) are a natural for females. But in some cases the family is better off if the father can actually work more at that time, providing more resources, not less. There is also an odd thing that while economically pressuring women through subsidized daycare, to spend less time with their children than they might otherwise. Behavior priorities are different between the genders. The whole experience of reproduction is very different between the genders.
Evolution did not organize our species, or any species, around sexual identicalness (as someone once said “Mother Nature is no feminist”). Most mammalian females neither want nor need a male around to raise the young. Most mammalian females want nothing to do with males at all except when they are ready to be impregnated. A housecat mother stores enough food to manage the brief interval till the young are ready to move about with her. A male would just get in the way and be competition for resources.
Paternal investment is a recent reproductive adaptation in our family tree. But because it is there, it does not mean that fathers and mothers are now interchangeable, or that they have identical behavior programs. A couple of things changed along our evolution which made this shift possible, and desiriable. Humans have a much higher capacity to cooperate, and simultaneously the young take much longer to mature. Too long, in fact for the mother to store enough resources in her body. So during the time when she was limited in capacity to hunt or gather, her mate pretty much had to work a bit extra. They both contribute to the success of the young, but not necessarily in identical ways.
[Here’s a side thought too. Somewhere about this time there was a change. Unlike many mammals, human females remained sexually receptive even when not currently fertile. Biologists tend to use terms like ‘fertility hiding’, which while accurate, slides past an ‘aha’ moment. By her remaining sexually active, the male was not chased away, indeed was much more likely to stick around even after impregnation. His sticking around meant more resources for her and the young. By this simple ‘program change’, evolution created (and subsequently selected for) a survival advantage. Human young were huge consumers of non-productive resources. Sex, in humans became associated with acquiring resources. When you think about the origins of non-procreative sex in humans, a lot, from marriage, to gold-digging, to prostitution starts to make more sense. We can see why these things play out the way they do]
Jay, you’re talking nonsense. No one’s forcing these men to do anything. On the contrary, it’s giving them freedom, which you are calling “economic pressure.” But in fact it’s the companies who refuse to allow parental leave for men who are creating “economic pressure.” You have a very odd definition of economic pressure if you think removing companies’ right to pressure men into working is coercion. All the government is doing is giving the same opportunities–remain at work, or take parental leave, whichever you choose–to men and women both. It is removing the coercive default presumption that fathers must work and mothers must not.
Your entire comment is full of factual inaccuracies. Men can–and DO–do all the parenting tasks women do, except the strictly biological ones (gestation and breast-feeding). Humans are far more diverse and adaptable than most mammals in this regard. Your talk about how behavior patterns aren’t identical is just plain false. Given similar incentives, they are identical! In Sweden, they obviously are–not because of coercion but because of government removal of coercion and equalization of incentives. If this were so unnatural–such intrusive “social engineering”–then it wouldn’t have caught on and become expected so quickly. You’re full of sweeping, absolutist statements about “turning males into females.” Well, if that were true–if we were talking about strong biological imperatives that the government shouldn’t mess with–then men wouldn’t have so quickly latched onto it so easily, and they wouldn’t be demanding *more* paternity leave(as some Swedish men are). A short period of government subsidies is pressure enough to outweigh the force of hormones AND thousands of years of culture? No way. If anything, the response of Swedish men suggests that the previous status quo was unnatural, and the government’s actions have finally freed the menfolk to act upon their natural urges!
And even if you were right about the biology of reproduction, jay, there’s still the question of social power and equality. Yes, it’s good to have social engineering to counteract male biological impulses, if the alternative is making females a suppressed political class. Even if women are more inclined to nurture children than men, it doesn’t follow that women want to be devoid of sociopolitical power, which is what happens when there’s an income gap resulting from women bearing the bulk of home responsibilities.
Really, all this talk of “pressure” and “coercion” and “social engineering” is just hilarious! The more I think of it the more I want to laugh. On the one hand, we’ve got all these hardline statements about evolution and biology and Mother Nature not being a feminist…
…and yet, all of these *natural*, hard-wired impulses are being overridden in such a short time by a government subsidy?
Give me a break! Having sex is a biological impulse–that’s why people do it even if they’re risking social ostracism, “honor” killings, imprisonment, STDs, unwanted pregnancy, etc. But all it takes to get men to violate their biological male nature is a bit of fiddling with their economic incentives? Right.
@Jenavir #8
They have on occasion done that, too.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-males-can-lactate&sc=rss
Oops, sorry about that blockquote fail. So used to having to type the codes myself…
Sorry for the delay, I’ve been away from the modern world for a few days
@Jenavir
Your post is perhaps what I anticipated when I responded, that the arguments would be more ideological.
Jay, you’re talking nonsense. No one’s forcing these men to do anything. On the contrary, it’s giving them freedom, which you are calling “economic pressure.”
No, I was referring the to the loss of benefits for men who did not take the leave. I whole heartedly supported the option to take leave and said so in my post.
Men can–and DO–do all the parenting tasks women do, except the strictly biological ones (gestation and breast-feeding)
Duh. Yes. Humans are incredibly adaptable and can do a lot of things when the need arises. Single mothers and single fathers can successfully raise young. Gay couples of either gender can successfully raise young.
But that does not mean, that on the whole, males and females will gravitate into identical roles. Naturally selected, gender related behavior is universal in mammals. Why should humans be exempt?
A short period of government subsidies is pressure enough to outweigh the force of hormones AND thousands of years of culture? No way.
True. Just like government pressure will not create abstinance, or make gay people straight. The issue is that the government should not be in the business of trying to second guess biology for the sake of ideology. Step back and see how the government engineering you are willing to accept in this case is not, at core, different from the other two examples in this paragraph.
When there is actual victimhood (women abused for example), you have a case to challenge the specific problem. But in arguing for official discouragement of benign, freely chosen, (and evolutionarily selected and possibly constructive) behavioral differences for some abstract ‘good of society’, we are opening a door to intrusion that might not be so nice.