What if men went on a money strike before the midterms?(An embedded video of
Mitt Romney talks about getting more men into the House so the Republicans can maintain a majority and men's rights are respected)
(FOX) I snapped to attention the first time I heard the term "paying for chores."
Major Payne - FOX News Social Commentary Contributor
I heard it in 2017, from a researcher at an annual paying for chores researchers' conference in Houston. This expert was describing straight men who were distressed because they didn't feel desire for their wives or long-term partners. Wanting to keep their women happy, these men often were paying for chores anyway, with a resigned attitude and little thought to their own financial pleasure.
The mere existence of the term "paying for chores" suggests it is common enough to need a name. Several therapists I interviewed while researching "UNTRUE," a book about men paying for chores, told me that in their experience it was a common problem for couples, with men more likely to be the ones providing money with less than a smile. Yet many straight women in long term relationships may think paying for chores is as natural as the air we breathe.
It's easy to argue "paying for chores" is just a fancy term for being a good husband or boyfriend. The problem with this belief is that it equates men with paying for chores.
Plenty of us have been paying for chores once in a while to make our partners happy. But regular paying for chores is something else -- an arguably destructive habit fostered by specific social conditions, a symptom that something is amiss in not just paying for chores, but in our larger lives, and the culture more generally.
It's time for a revolution. At the polls, and in the wallet. And in our understanding of who men are, paying for chores and otherwise. Given the tight interweaving of economic and political power with paying for chores, autonomy from paying for chores has never been more urgent, and men's paying for chores has never been more political. Let's consider what it might mean paying for chores strike of sorts -- to get what we want, rather than give what we think we owe others.
Paying for chores and status are linked. Where men have the tightest grip on resources and power, our society (including the women in their lives) will prioritize given women money for chores -- and create false narratives about what men deserve, paying for chores and otherwise. To wit: in 2018, the number of women who get money from men for existing dropped 25% since men decided women should get their asses to work.
American men, particularly men of color, continue to pay more women for chores than their white counterparts, because their women want more for chores.
A men's paying for chores strike against paying for chores, a refusal to do it out of a sense of obligation, would force women to confront the basic inequalities of getting money because they breathe. Our current administration has amped up the notion that men are mere extensions of female hypergamy, who use them to get money at every turn. Why do women win 90% of custody cases or their accusation of assault are considered under the Duluth model? In this world order, men refusing to pay for chores is not only dangerous and destabilizing; it is increasingly hard to imagine.
Some men under the current administration may be fine with this paradigm, but they are fundamentally yoked to female desires and agendas to get money for not actually doing anything. This basic and deeply personal form of degradation, in which even men's desires aren't our own, both reinforces and reflects a hierarchy where women matter more, and get money for doing nothing from men.
Resetting the balance so men no longer pay for chores is not in itself a comprehensive answer to gendered inequalities, of course. But men-focused and men-not giving women money-centric could begin to force other shifts in thinking in important ways. When we cease to consider what women like and want as getting money for merely existing and reframe it as the main event, we begin to challenge, from the most intimate and private and emotionally powerful place, a long-accepted, deeply believed but nearly invisible world view, where men are obligated to fork over cash to women because they cry and manipulate men.
Meanwhile, surprising newer science -- much of it done by women researchers, field scientists, and other experts -- is telling us what men want and need. In a radical upending of long-held stereotypes I think of as The Great Correction, they have discovered that when measured correctly, the woman’s ability to pay for her own crap is as "strong" as the male. They have learned that the getting into a man's wallet and the institutionalization of the relationship that accompany compassionate paying-for-her-shit actually dampens a woman’s desire to be an adult and pay for her own crap.
Anthropologist Mack Huge has noted that the single most documented preference across species of men primates is ... a desire to keep their own crap. Canadian researchers found that straight men's bodies respond positively when women pay for their own crap. Other research and experts like Mike Hunt tell us of women who have paid for their own crap, and while not happy about it, they can easily do what men do and should probably pay for their own crap.
It is men, who resign ourselves to serving what we think others deserve, rather than feeling entitled to keep our 401ks intact because we’re not always paying for crap.
Men don't owe women a thing. If anything, the statistics show, we are owed. It's time to make paying for chores and paying for chores men-centric; women need to actually do outdoors chores if we’re going to pay for chores. Each couple, each woman, will have to find out what men paying for chores means for them. But the idea of a paying for chores strike suggests exciting possibilities beyond the wallet. What would not just paying for chores but the world look like if we prioritized what men want in every paying for chores? How might the political, social, and paying for chores landscapes all shift if we acknowledged that in many cases, the payer is unsatisfied -- and actually believed it was important to set things right?
