Abigail Rines weighed in with a terrific post called “Feminist Housedude,” complete with a picture of her bearded, tattooed husband vacuuming with their son strapped to his chest. She describes her husband as “a cloth-diapering wizard, an amazing cook, a master gardener,” explaining that he has established a “seamless rhythm” with their son that is simply beautiful to witness.“ The dads who write for Dadwagon have been insisting on many of the same points - that they are not only just as good as their wives but often better. Matt Vilano wrote a great post on Motherlode entitled "I hate being called a good dad,” pointing out that women stop all the time and tell him what a good dad he is when he is doing absolutely basic parenting tasks for his daughters. He notes the “heinous double standard,” that he is praised for behavior that in a mother would be regarded as routine, and that “the act of labeling someone ‘a good dad’ suggests that most dads are, by our very nature as fathers, somehow less than 'good.’”
I’m quoting this not because I think it — or any of the articles it cites — is especially insightful, but simply in order to register my frustration with this whole debate. In our 32 years of marriage Teri and I have never had one single conversation about what “men” or “husbands” or “fathers” or “women” or “wives” or “mothers” should be doing. We’ve just looked at the situations we’ve been in and tried to figure out how to divide the labors in ways that worked, in terms of efficiency and also in terms of our happiness.
For instance, when Wes was a toddler I had all my classes in the mornings and Teri worked in the afternoons. She didn’t get home until nearly six, and it was a high-stress job, so it made no sense for her to cook. If I cooked we both enjoyed the meals better, and then she didn’t mind cleaning up afterwards. So that’s the pattern we fell into, and after a while I became a pretty good cook. But in the past couple of years Teri has not been working outside the home, in part because of some health issues, but she has generally felt good enough to cook, which has been great for me because it’s been a very busy season of my life. When her health hasn’t allowed her to cook, I’ve picked up the slack.
None of this has anything to do with gender or even with roles as such. It’s just about figuring out (a) what needs to be done and (b) who, at the moment, is better placed to do it. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that, does it?
Nature and truth. Money and markets. Men and marriage. Faith and reason. They’ve all ended. Power ended in March, but that makes sense because leadership ended last year. History ended more than two decades ago, while the future ended just two years ago.On the plus side, illness has ended, along with poverty, racism, war — even homework.
If you thought these things were still around, just pick up “The End of Sex,” by Donna Freitas, published last week, or Moises Naim’s “The End of Power,” which came out last month. Try David Wolman’s “The End of Money” or David Agus’s “The End of Illness.” Those came out in 2012, the same year that Hanna Rosin affirmed “The End of Men” and John Horgan imagined “The End of War.”
One could dismiss this proliferation of “The End” as a plea for attention by publishers, magazine editors, authors, bloggers, TED talkers and the rest of the ideas industry — a marketing device signaling little more than the end of imagination.
But it is more than that. “The end of” is also the perfect headline for our age. It fits a moment that fetishizes disruption over stability. It grabs an audience enamored of what is next, not what is here. It suits a public debate in which extreme positions are requisite starting points.
But I also think culture and economics, ideas and incentives, are all entangled at a deep level, working in cycles and feedback loops rather than in simple causal arrows — and thus it’s a mistake to treat changes in what people believe, and particularly the sweeping generational changes in how Americans conceptualize the links between sex and marriage and procreation, just as epiphenomena of economic pressure. And it’s a particularly convenient mistake for social liberals, because it enables them to downplay the fact that these changes are also their own ideological victories — victories that have been accompanied by, well, many of the negative consequences that social conservatives warned against in the first place. In large ways and small, and now at a suddenly-accelerating pace (today gay marriage, tomorrow marijuana legalization, etc.), we’re getting the culture that social liberalism wants — less traditionally religious and more socially permissive, with fewer normative ideas about how sex and love and childbearing fit together. And if conservatives would profit from acknowledging the economic forces shaping these realities, liberals would profit from acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, a cultural transformation that they’ve long favored is coming at a cost.
Morozov’s essay eviscerates O’Reilly’s career in order to out him as a fake progressive who confuses entrepreneurialism with political freedom. In this story, O’Reilly is the indie rocker who sold out — or maybe the hipster marketer who induced other indie rockers to sell out. Either way, O’Reilly’s foundational crime is taking something radical and transformative like free software and mainstreaming it by making it palatable to entrepreneurs and consumers. And this is the kind of mainstreaming that also turns participatory, responsible governments into pathetic tools of crony capitalism and (in a worst-case scenario) privatized military forces.As I said, the essay must be read as an allegory about a set of memes, not as a profile of a man. But Morozov is correct to identify a disturbing slipperiness at the core of the “open government” meme. It sounds like freedom but is really just another way of turning you into a passive data point, easily mined by the highest bidder.
Some form of détente in the culture wars might once have been possible, recognizing that neither gays nor conservative Christians are going away anytime soon (or are entirely mutually exclusive), when the fight was more evenly matched. But a defeated group of traditionalists who evinced little concern for prerogatives of their opponents won’t be in much of a position to make bargains.Which brings us to what might be the biggest political miscalculation of the Christian right: entering politics to make sinners virtuous rather than to defend their own freedom of conscience.
So remember: 12:01 a.m., May 26. The schedule after that will be approximately as follows: the first animated GIFs from the first episode will appear at 12:01 and a half, people will complain that Netflix is down at 12:02, spoilers will begin appearing on Twitter at 12:03, angry tweets about spoilers at 12:04, think pieces about how this distribution model affects spoilers at 12:05, think pieces about how this distribution model might result in the return of Firefly at 12:06, listicles of 10 more shows that Netflix should revive at 12:07, complaints that these episodes “suck” at 12:08, complaints about haters at 12:09, questions about why people who are so into Arrested Development refuse to watch Community at 12:10, and 25 pictures of cats watching Arrested Development at 12:11.
I wish that I could be as charitable as you are and say that Morozov is raising good questions. He could be, but he works so hard to make dialogue impossible that he actually impairs discussion of the questions he purports to raise. And his misrepresentations, accepted by those who don’t know much about the topic, do harm the work of people who happen to fall in the crosshairs.It would be terrific if Morozov were saying that there are people co-opting the idea of open government, or web 2.0, or open source, or whatever, and rendering these terms less useful, pointing back to their original impulse and real meaning, but instead, he uses the presence of pretenders to deny that there was ever any merit to the movement in the first place.
I find it rather sad that the kind of attack media that has degraded our politics is now being unleashed on the technology world. We’ve now got our own Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. I don’t think public discourse about important topics is improved by any of these figures. Polarization is their game.
The terrible news that Iain Banks is officially very poorly arrived today. Unlike others on these pages, I don’t know him personally, but his books have been a source not only of delight, but of inspiration.I’m not a literary critic, so I won’t say any more about the writing style than that it makes me want to read more of it. Also, while I do (mostly) love the Iain Banks books, it is the Iain M. Banks version, and particularly The Culture, which has had the most impact on me, and which makes me want to write something, having heard that news today. In his Culture novels, Banks has created what as far as I know is the only convincing utopia in print.
Iain M Banks, and what we might be when we have nothing to fear.
If you think the Culture novels are simply and straightforwardly utopian, you’re not reading as carefully as you should.
Baseball Season: Marianne Moore throwing out the first pitch 1968.