[Today’s guest post, the first in what will be an entirely unsystematic, unpredictable, possibly nonexistent series of guest posts from friends of Masculinity and its Discontents (FO-MAIDs, for short), comes to us from Hayley Wood, a Program Officer at the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in Northampton.
Hayley (or Hay-Wo, as she’s known to her friends) is "aware that MAID readers would rather read her husband’s methods for organizing web-porn, but she’s also hopeful that her feminist street-cred of having been the Managing Editor of the National Women’s Studies Association Journal back in the day when she was a graduate student will lend her observations the insight and authority readers of MAID have come to expect."
So … over to Hayley:
–the editors]
I recently read “Up with Grups,” an article by Adam Sternbergh in New York Magazine (available in its substantial entirety here). It joins a growing body of work that suggests that parenting in this day and age can be cool. Neal Pollack’s Alternadad: The True Story of One Family’s Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America, reviewed recently by our very own Daniel Oppenheimer, belongs to this subgenre.
Women, of course, have been writing about maintaining a sense of self after crossing the threshold into that most mundane category, parenthood, for years in magazines like Hip Mama, but Sternbergh’s recent contribution boils down to this: many fathers today who are in their late thirties/early forties are defying the previous cultural stereotype of the middle-aged, responsible adult and trying to hold onto some sort of youthful joie de vivre, which manifests itself in career choices, clothing, accessories, taste in music and parenting style, and in so doing they’ve both closed the generation gap and retooled adulthood as “a period of time defined by promise, rather than compromise.”
That’s so great. If you’re a middle or upper-middle class white guy who’s passionate (a word used very passionately in Sternbergh’s article) about, well, anything, but preferably something that has to do with the music industry or film, the world is your oyster, parenthood is totally fun, and you’re great at it. It’s masculine chest thumping in the key of “I have it all—I’m still interesting and I’m a dad.”
The implicit privilege becomes apparent when you compare Sternbergh’s sentiment about the promise of new adulthood to this passage from “Dad Redefined,” by Neely Tucker, an article published as part of the “Being a Black Man” series in the Washington Post this past December:
Some 48 percent of all black children live without their fathers in the home, nearly double the rate of any other group in the United States. On his block, Tim Wagoner knows more guys his age who have been shot than who are married with kids.
Kind of deflates the whole idea of spending lots of time examining the Baroque details of white Gen X alternaparenting. But . . . too late. I read “Up with Grups,” I thought about it, and I’m a-sharin.
The article is more about asserting a male, cultural class identity than promoting an interesting and thoughtful set of parenting ideals, but there is a kernel of goodness and truth to the alternaparent stuff: not consuming the mass-media monoculture designed for children when you’re a parent is a good thing. Being yourself and focusing on having a life that is stimulating and not soul sucking is a good thing. Involved fathers are good things. If dads want a piece of the action in terms of storytelling and vocal roles in the cultural community of parents—good. Maybe Gen. X does have a contribution to make to the world.
“Up with Grups” posits that grups* (who are the latest in a longish line of snarkily labeled upper/upper-middle class white beings, starting with yuppies, evolving into bourgeois bohemians, branching off into hipsters, and now culminating in the parent version of an amalgam of them all), with their taste for expensive shredded jeans, rock band tee-shirts, and the music of twenty-somethings, have closed the generation gap.
Fashion and musical taste, it seems, were the only elements in life that divided 35-year-olds from two-year-olds. Grups are all white, city-dwelling folks who have managed to avoid the external trappings of responsibility: suit wearing and reporting to an office. They like it that way. All of them wear low-rider pants, and most of them are thin enough to pull it off. Their children are imprintable mini-me’s. who are to be gently persuaded that Elmo is too annoying for this world and that the Clash kicks ass. Their worst fear is that their children will grow up to be Republicans. Their children are hip accessories who often don clothing meant to reflect well on the cultural taste of their parents. It would seem that grups dwell on the eastern seaboard and west coast of the US—they’d never thrive in the midwest.
What do people of color think when they read about the latest flavor of white person? Do they want to puke? What do poor people think of this sort of navel-gazing cultural commentary? Does anyone with a household income below $100K read New York Magazine? The publishers don’t seem to think so. Don’t we have better things to do than to carve up, ever so minutely, the class-based identities of people who can afford every iteration of the iPod?
Perhaps the ire and the self-study that can be inspired by such writing are useful catalysts for more significant ideas: for instance, that adult lives full of personal interests and passions provide good models for children. Certainly the Grups article and other myriad titles now celebrating hip fatherhood are involved in the perpetuation of a value, one that I admittedly embrace: a new kind of family value in which the parents actively make time to do their own thing and take some risks in pursuit of freer and more interesting lives. Is this set of values luxurious in this world and the province of a specific income bracket and, it would seem, race? That seems to be the case as well.
*Name taken from an old Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk and crew visit a planet inhabited by children and no adults. The adults are referred to as "grups."
