{"id":2984,"date":"2016-05-19T08:57:09","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T12:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/?p=2984"},"modified":"2016-05-19T12:48:05","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T16:48:05","slug":"masculinity-and-son-preference-among-heterosexual-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/2016\/05\/19\/masculinity-and-son-preference-among-heterosexual-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Masculinity and Son Preference among Heterosexual Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

I studied a group of fathers\u2019 rights activists and men undergoing divorce, separation, and custody battles for a little over a year.\u00a0 Fathers\u2019 rights organizations were, for me, an interesting place to study anti-feminist gender politics because they are, in many ways, one of the most successful arms of the men\u2019s rights movement more generally.\u00a0 Fathers\u2019 rights activists and advocates are asking for things feminists have long sought from men: a greater investment in their children, a move toward a model of parenting that moves beyond the \u201cprovider\u201d model.\u00a0 And all of these things make fathers’ rights groups the most politically palatable and mainstream of the virulent misogyny that characterizes the men’s rights movement more generally.<\/p>\n

At the weekly meetings I attended, I regularly heard men pushing back against this stereotype, wanting to be \u201cmore than a paycheck\u201d in their kids\u2019 lives. \u00a0And in my experience, the men who gave up on their custody battles the most quickly, those who lost contact with their children, or failed to show up at the times designated by the court had one thing in common: most of them had daughters.\u00a0 In the group I studied, men with sons stuck with and struggled through really challenging custody arrangements and incredibly tense relationships with the mothers of their children. My study did not involve a sample from which I can generalize about this idea.\u00a0 But there is a host of interesting scholarship on how fathers in straight couples engage with their children contingent upon the gender of their children.<\/p>\n

Gender is a big topic of discussion when people have babies.\u00a0 It shapes the sorts of names we consider<\/a> (or don\u2019t).\u00a0 \u00a0It shapes the way we set up the nursery, what color we paint the walls, the infant clothes we buy and receive, the things we imagine our child doing one day (or not). And research suggests that, among heterosexual couples, fathers are more invested in gender conformity than mothers<\/a>. It\u2019s not uncommon to hear that heterosexual men want boys\u2014or are expected to want boys.\u00a0 Sex selective abortion is a really powerful illustration of son preference.\u00a0 But son preference can be measured in other ways as well.<\/p>\n

I just read a working paper by economist, Laura Giuliano<\/a> examining the effects of having sons versus daughters on heterosexual marriages.*\u00a0 The paper was initially published as a working paper in 2007.\u00a0 So, it\u2019s a little dated.\u00a0 But the data and argument are really fascinating, if frustrating. Children take a toll on marital happiness for both mothers and fathers (shocking, I know).\u00a0 Among heterosexual married mothers in Giuliano\u2019s sample, there was no meaningful difference in the level of marital happiness among mothers who had sons compared to those who had daughters.\u00a0 Among fathers, however, the story is a bit more complex.\u00a0 Heterosexual married fathers with sons had significantly higher levels of marital happiness than those with daughters (see graph below).<\/p>\n

\"Marital<\/p>\n

This makes men look like the problem here.\u00a0 But, Giuliano found that women are invested in this issue as well.\u00a0 She also discovered, for instance, that couples in which\u00a0 the fathers had higher levels of marital happiness but the mothers said that they would be as happy or happier NOT married were disproportionately likely to be couples with sons.\u00a0 This suggests that mothers in heterosexual marriages that make them unhappy are much more likely to remain married if the child happens to be a boy.\u00a0 One hypothesis for which Giuliano found support is that this discrepancy is produced by a collective perception that sons and daughters have different needs and that fathers are more essential in the raising of boys than girls.\u00a0 Add to this that fathers of sons in Giuliano\u2019s sample also engaged in different parenting practices.\u00a0 Fathers with sons were more likely to look after and spend more time with their kids and the wives of fathers with sons held more positive views of them as parents.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of literature out there on how we need to get men engaged in modeling healthy masculinity to the next generation\u2014showing boys that parenting and care work aren\u2019t feminine<\/em> practices; they\u2019re human <\/em>practices. \u00a0But all of this can’t be accomplished alongside an “androcentric” ideology that holds that boys and men are somehow more important than girls and women, more deserving of our time, attention, and apparently even affection sometimes.\u00a0 It\u2019s great that men are participating more as parents.\u00a0 But we have a long way to go if they\u2019re still waiting to see if the child is going to be \u201cMatthew\u201d or \u201cMegan\u201d before deciding whether to ask for a more flexible schedule at work.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

*I learned about this research from Emily Bobrow<\/a>\u2019s great essay in The Economist<\/em>, \u201cIt\u2019s a Boy Thing\u201d<\/a> (shared on social media by Philip Cohen<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I studied a group of fathers\u2019 rights activists and men undergoing divorce, separation, and custody battles for a little over a year.\u00a0 Fathers\u2019 rights organizations were, for me, an interesting place to study anti-feminist gender politics because they are, in many ways, one of the most successful arms of the men\u2019s rights movement more generally.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30335,55,34978,35058,3109,30344,26,32383,37960,144,37920],"tags":[37993,37995,37992,37994,3852],"class_list":["post-2984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminist-sociology","category-gender","category-gender-equity","category-in-the-news","category-motherhood","category-personal-stories","category-public-sociology","category-qualitative-research","category-quantitative-research","category-teaching","category-work-and-family-policy","tag-emily-bobrow","tag-its-a-boy-thing","tag-luara-giuliano","tag-son-preference","tag-the-economist"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2984"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2993,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions\/2993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}