The world around him

Women, parents and employers keep it in place too, without meaning to.

The previous chapters were about the man, and about men among themselves. This chapter is about the world around him: at home, at work and in society.

Nobody does it on purpose. It sits in habits we barely notice, in a mother, a partner, a manager. And it starts with the people who love a boy most: his parents.

Researchers at Emory University had fathers of young children wear a small recorder for days on end, simply at home, and looked at what they said. With daughters, words like crying, tears and lonely came up. With sons, words like best, winning and top, and there was more rough-and-tumble play. When the child called for dad, a daughter got a quicker response. This study looked only at fathers. That mothers also talk about feelings more with daughters than with sons, we know from other research.

All loving parents. Nobody doing this deliberately. Yet the daughter learns to talk about what she feels, and the son learns to perform. That’s how a boy picks up the rules before he can understand them, without anyone ever explaining them.

Ask someone about one line and he shrugs. That’s not so bad, surely. On its own, every line does look small.

But a boy doesn’t hear them on their own. He hears them thousands of times, from everyone around him, from the day he is born. And every time he learns the same thing: a man is strong and steady, and keeps what he feels inside. And we pass that lesson on without noticing, because it’s how we were taught ourselves.

And it doesn’t only apply to men. Women have learned too what they’re supposed to find attractive: a man who absorbs everything, is always strong, never doubts. That carries through into dating, into relationships, into what is silently expected of him.

This isn’t a reproach. Men and women grew up in the same culture and pass on the same signals, while that lesson makes nobody happy any more. Seeing this is exactly where the unlearning starts, together.

And it doesn’t stop with the people around him. At work there’s a price tag on it too.

Giving up your job for your family costs, on average, more than a quarter of the rest of your career earnings.

On the talk show sofa we talk about the new man. At work we still reward the old one. Average from American research into the ‘flexibility stigma’ (Coltrane et al., 2013). For women it was 23.2%, and the difference between the two groups was not statistically significant: the system prices visible care, whoever takes it on. A Dutch replication is missing.

Almost every father wants to be there for his children. To be around while they’re small, to put them to bed himself, to know what is going on at school. Those years come only once.

It costs him, though, and not simply in fewer hours and less pay. Even at equal performance, men who care visibly are seen as less committed, and that counts in reviews and promotions. In practice the ideal worker is still the same man: someone without visible caring duties, always reachable, who leaves his feelings at home.

And the employer pays for that as well. Your best people are often the ones who keep up the act longest. Until they break down, or resign. And in a team where admitting a mistake feels like losing face, nobody dares put forward a better idea or contradict the boss. While it’s precisely working together and sensing what is going on that now count for more than what anyone can do on their own.

As long as that’s the price, going along with the old norm isn’t weak. It’s simply the rational choice for a family.

But that price isn’t a law of nature. Employers set it, and together we can change that. Just as we can change the way we tackle this as a society.

How do we keep her safe?

We have been asking that question for decades, and every time we look for the answer in her: make her more resilient, better protected, more alert. Necessary work. But once again it puts the responsibility mainly on the woman. We look at the place where the violence lands, and hardly at the place where it starts.

Valuable work has been done for decades, by the police, support services, shelters and schools. Still those figures barely move, not because that work falls short, but because it almost always comes after the violence.