A few years ago I was taking some classes at a university. One day the athletic department moved in across the hall. From that day forward the men’s washroom was a cesspool. Literally. Some days I wished that I had worn boots in there because the floor in there was so wet and disgusting!
“Damn!” I said to myself one day. “These guys can hit a three-pointer from half-court, but they can’t hit the urinal mere inches in front of them?” And then it occurred to me that what allowed them to make those three-point shots on the basketball court was the fact that they wanted to. They had an incentive to do so. Pissing on the floor, on the other hand, was no big deal to them. But it was disgusting for the rest of us – including, no doubt, for the people who had to clean it up.
Will. Not skill. In a previous post I wrote about a woman I know who runs a batterer intervention program. She says that in her opinion the reason that most men who are violent do not change their behavior is because they do not really want to. “It is,” she says, “not a matter of skill, but a matter of will.” Most men in the world know how to behave decently, she believes. It is just that some choose not to.
I have been thinking a lot about this compelling issue of “skill” versus “will.” Can it be applied to other forms of male behavior – behavior that falls short of overt violence but is undesirable nonetheless? There are several areas that I often hear women complain about when it comes to the behavior of their boyfriends or husbands. Is it possible that many of the areas where we men often come up lacking in our relationships are in fact issues of will, and not skill?
Women still doing a “second shift” at home after work. I know men who rarely lift a hand to do housework, but who keep their cars in immaculate condition. The fact that a man’s car purrs like a pussycat suggests that he has the ability to notice when the oil needs changing. Might not it follow that he should also be able to notice when the toilet paper roll needs changing? Another area where many men display excellence is in front of the barbeque. Why, then, do so many of these same men seem so utterly lost when it comes to preparing a meal at the kitchen stove? A lot of guys also work to keep their lawns immaculate. But if you can empty the grass catcher from your lawn mower onto the compost pile, one would think you could also empty a laundry bag into the washing machine.
Some readers might think I am engaging in negative stereotyping and the world has changed! So let me be clear… I know men who truly do 50% (or more) of the housework. But I know a lot more men who claim to, but who actually don’t. And the research backs me up on this. In the vast majority of heterosexual households, women continue to do most of the housework. This is true even if they work just as many hours outside the house as the man does. Men are getting better in this area – but only very, very slowly. And most women are still putting in a “second shift” after they get home – while their guy is kicking back and relaxing.
A good measure of this reality is the language we still use. As long as a man’s
household activities are still considered to be “helping out” around the home, equality remains a long way off. Don’t get me wrong, “helping out” is better than not “helping out.” But a far better approach is “doing your fair share.”
Sports: A vision of how men can be. A lot of men devote immense attention to sports. For many of us it is the only arena where we are allowed fully express the beautiful array of human emotions. In sports we can embrace passion, fear, frustration, joy, elation, heartbreak, love. Many of us know who is being traded, who is not, who will go early in the draft, who will not, who is better against left handed pitchers, who has a higher vertical jump, who has a lower ERA, who has the best pit crew, the best quick count, the most powerful left hook. Who takes the best penalty shots, corner kicks, three pointers. Who is the best kick returner. The best batsman. The most reliable setter. The best hooker. The best free safety.
We know what year our team last won the championship. And what year they came in second. And what years they did not even make it to the playoffs. Which years they had that great coach, and the years it seemed like they couldn’t find a way to win even against the worst teams. We well remember the extremely painful years they themselves were in fact the worst team. But we hung in there with them during the tough times, showing our great capacity for love, for loyalty, and for devotion. We were there for them when they needed us.
Many of us wept when they buried Rocket Richard. When Dale Sr. was killed. When the Great One first went to L.A., and then when he retired. When Magic said he had AIDS.
We men have such great capacity for passion, for caring, for paying attention to the tiny details of things that others are dealing with in their lives. So if we are not bringing this same level of attention to our own homes and our own families, I would argue that this again indicates a failure of will, not a lack of skill.
Show me the money! In 2001 the researchers Klein and Hodges conducted a wonderful study called “Gender Differences, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When it Pays to Understand.” What they found was that when you pay men – when you make it worth our while – we can be every bit as good at accurately reading someone else’s emotional state as women tend to be.
To me all of this suggests that for most men, any failure to perform as true partners is not a matter of incompetence or functional deficits. Time and again we men have demonstrated that we can in fact care deeply and perform heroically – when we have the incentive to do so. So the challenge becomes, then, for us to realize the great value of pursuing a true partnership within our relationships.
This is a lesson many men have yet to learn.
But if we can find the will… we can develop the skill.