People Can't Have It All

There is an article in the Atlantic entitled Why Women Still Can't Have It All.  It's a good article and comes to what I think is the sensible and prosaic conclusion.  Unless you are some superwoman you cannot raise children in the manner you would wish and become a professional at the very top level (and often substantially below this.)  The basic premise is that there simply isn't enough time and effort available to do both.  You can't simultaneously work late into the night on a regular basis and be at home for dinner every night. I am glad that this basic fact is beginning to sink into the consciousness of serious feminists because it means that there is a chance that practical things can be done to make this situation easier.

My problem with the article is it comes from the assumption that "having it all" is an exclusively female desire.  In the article it explicitly states that it is easier for men to have it all than it is for women.  I think this claim is spurious.  Do men not want children?  Do they not want to spend time with their children?  Do they not want a career?  Is it somehow easier for men to both spend time with their families and work very long hours?  I think that generally men want all of these things and don't have an easier way of achieving them.  The article simply says that men don't want these things as much as women.

I wrote a post in which I declared that I was a feminist.  In it I basically said that if women want a fair shake in employment and politics with regard to men, they have to behave like men, at least until they have enough people in charge to require all the men to behave like women.  In it I also declared myself a masculist in which I declared that men should have equal opportunity to pursue a stereotypically female path in life, but would have to do behave like women to do so.

Why is there in the article this assumption that this discussion is about women?  It is because the driving force of social change in this area has been women demanding equal opportunities (good for women!)  Forty years ago the default position was for men to go out and work and women to stay home (and work differently, but you get what I mean.)  This is no longer the default position for women, but it is for men.  It is still an assumption that men will go to work and not doing so is weird.  What has happened is that the feminist movement has achieved great things but there has not been close to an equivalent masculist movement.

The article does a fine job of suggesting ways that the difficulties of having it all can be ameliorated.  Changing school hours to match work hours.  Working from home.  Changing the culture of working success from how hard you work to how well you work.  Reducing the force of the idea that success means getting to the top as soon as possible.  These are all great ideas.  It is possible to make life better, happier by simply taking some simple steps.  Why companies pay rent for a large building so that people can drive to the building and sit in front of a computer all day when everyone could work from home and do the same job baffles me.  Think how much less people would have to be paid if they could work in pajamas at home and live anywhere they wanted?  The thing is that all of these suggestions work just as well for men as for women.

You cant have it all, no-one can.  Men have known this all along, to such an extent that they don't think about it much as a concept, you just have to make choices.  Women, traditionally oppressed and devoid of these choices, have worked wonders to get to this point where they can now reasonably realize that you can't have it all.  Women will now be a catalyst for a movement that I truly wish for very deeply, a movement that makes work/life balance the important thing, that values wellness and joy as much as money and power.  What I wish is that this movement includes men as much as women.  Let us have male and female professionals working from home, sharing the raising of children and the search for happiness