Gay Married Terrorists Are Saving America!

This clip of Fox News dinosaurs experiencing some kind of male hysteria (testeseria?) about female breadwinners is very amusing. What could these boys have their boxers in such a twist about? A Pew Research study showing that four out of ten US households now have a female breadwinner. Their comments reveal a deep rage at the idea that almost half of American households are no longer  economically dependent on men. 

'We're watching society dissolve around us!!!'

'Something is going terribly wrong in American society - and it's hurting our children!'

'The male typically is the dominant role... the female is a complementary role. It's bad for kids and bad for marriages. It's tearing us apart!!'

'Bottom line: it could undermine our social order!!'

(Exclamation points added to convey testeserical tones in which these statements were delivered.)

Erick Erickson's reaction is the most revealing, with his weird belief that nature has ordained a certain order to male/female relations that this trend of female breadwinners is turning on its head. That one is as old as the hills. It must be wonderful to have such certainty that you belong at the head of a structure, playing a dominant role and that 'science' has ordained it to be so. 

Nobody go telling this guy about bees now! Or birds or bears! Or even large primates, for that matter, who live in groups where, yes, there is a dominant male but where the rearing of the young takes place in the group and the group as a whole forage for food and resources.

What is possibly ordained by nature for humans is a hunter-gatherer scenario where men and women live in a tribal group of closely related people. The children are cared for in a group setting and resources are sought and shared within the group. The modern equivalent of this 'traditional' way of life would be homeless people who move from place to place to find food, dumpster diving and 'grazing' at food banks. I hope this Erickson guy is prepared to give up his home and cooked meals and don a pair of fingerless gloves and a dumpster diver's satchel so he can stop destroying America and start living a traditional way of life that is ordained by science. It would certainly help him to lose a few pounds anyway.

I have some good news for the Fox talking heads, however. A recent article in The Atlantic magazine shows that one group in American society is fighting to save traditional values: gay married couples. 

In debating this issue, Slate podcast commentators note that Mundy's research showed that there are more stay-at-home parents among gay couples than among straight couples. Whether it's because gay men tend to be higher earners and so can afford a single-income household or whether it's just because gay couples feel less oppressed by the housewife stereotype than straight couples do, this is a growing trend among gay married couples. My guess is that it might be due to the fact that many gay couples adopt their children and having a stay-at-home parent helps their chances in being considered as adoptive parents.

As Hanna Rosin comments: 'We're choosing the conservative, traditional path and gay people are finding a way to make it cool for the rest of us'. 

So men of Fox news: take heart! There are still 'traditional' marriages in America. They just might not seem that way to you at first glance.

What I'm Listening To: 'Walking Across America'

This American Life is one of my favorite podcasts. Every Monday morning, I look forward to loading it up on our Apple TV and finding out what new stories Ira Glass and his team will have for me. 

I discovered This American Life completely by accident before I ever moved here. It was one of the top podcasts on iTunes so one time I downloaded a few episodes out of curiosity. When we had just moved into our new house and had no internet connection yet, I listened to an episode while setting our new kitchen to rights and was instantly hooked. It was the slow storytelling that drew me in and the sheer quirkiness of some of the stories featured. Most of all, however, it was the slow pace of the show, the fact that every story was given its chance to unfold as it needed to without the pressure of advertising and soundbites and zingers and driving web traffic. 

Now that I actually live in America, my appreciation of 'This American Life' has changed as I can set it into its cultural context. It turns out that Ira Glass is not a twenty-something guy doing a low-key public radio gig, as I thought when I first heard the show, but is something of a left-wing cultural icon. It turns out that NPR is a national cliche for being right-on and wholesome, although you could kind of tell that from the content of the show already.

I have noticed recently that TAL has been running more repeats or re-hashing old episodes and splicing them together with newer material so that does make me wonder if the show is being affected by budget cuts or if this was always the case and I'm just noticing now because I've been listening to the podcast regularly for a couple of years.

This week's episode, Hit the Road, was a great example of how good This American Life can be when it airs fresh material from new writers, however.

The first part was dedicated to a project by a new writer, Andrew Forsthoefel, who decided that, at 23, he would walk across America instead of continuing in his graduate job. What's interesting about his journey is that he spends his time listening to people's stories along the way and gathering their memories of their own lives. He wore a sign 'Walking to Listen' on his back throughout his journey. Something about this story really appealed to me. It had a very Studs Terkel feel to it, focusing on individual experiences to build a picture of local history. 

The whole project is available here with videos and photos of his trip. Forsthoefel is also planning a book about this journey and, I say, more power to him.