Dads Dissed at the NYT
I guess it's appropriate that this piece appeared in the Fashion Section (The New York Times, 1/11/09). The people in it are nothing if not fashionable.
It's about how people cope when dad loses his job and mom isn't earning. Of course by "people" I mean Wall Street toilers who've seen their salaries slashed from $800,000 to $150,000 and must endure the agonies of cutting back from a full-time nanny to an au pair. Pardon me if I'm not moved.
But there's more to the piece than that. It shows us a bit about these people's attitudes toward sex roles. These are people who were experimenting with the dad being the sole breadwinner and the mom being the stay-at-home parent/homemaker. In short, they're doing the precise thing that Betty Friedan argued against so long ago, and which most people nowadays can't begin to contemplate.
And sure enough, with the meltdown on the Street, a lot of these guys have lost their jobs, making everyone in their family vulnerable. That was always part of the feminists' complaint - depending on one person to earn the daily bread makes the whole family dependent on him. So what if he dies? Gets injured? Gets laid off? It's not a very secure arrangement, so women should earn a living. The people in this article ignored that advice.
The piece concentrates on one couple, Scott and Tracey Berry (pictured with their children) , but in passing touches on others. And what I hear in the statements of the women is a definite sense of entitlement - in this case to be supported. One woman is outright hostile towards her husband because he dared to lose his job. Tracey Berry is less so towards Scott, but even she can't seem to get her head around the idea that they don't have as much income as they used to, so she might want to spend less.
Oddly enough, although the article is entitled "Daddy's Home, and a Bit Lost," Scott Berry is anything but lost. He's scrounged a consulting job and views finding something better to be his everyday job. He even dresses for work every morning even though all he's going to do is look for a job on the internet and make calls.
No, the only "lost" dads are the ones we don't see. We only hear about them from one Amy Reiss, a Manhattan divorce lawyer representing women who complain that when their exes lost their jobs, they just sat at home all day in front of the TV.
What more unimpeachable source could you ask for? Did it occur to the Times writer that people in the middle of a divorce may stretch the truth a bit? Did it occur to her that, even if all of these women were telling the unvarnished truth, they're a statistically insignificant part of the population and no conclusion can be drawn from their personal stories? Did it occur to the writer to ask any of the men in those marriages-on-the-rocks their side of the story?
If you answered 'no' to all of those questions, go to the head of the class.
So according to the article's headline, Daddy's a bit lost. It just doesn't get around to giving us a single example of that, and the example it does give contradicts the assertion. I guess denigrating dads must be its own reward, since apparently it makes up for the violation of Journalism Rule One - get both sides of the story.
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