Brent Curtis pens a front page piece in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald today on the rise in infant homicides in Vermont. The first few brief paragraphs present his thesis, after which he goes into examples. If you turn to the rest of the article on the back page, you get a fair amount of details, including the opinions of “experts” on the reason for the grim phenomenon. For example, conditioning:
“I think to some extent that in general girls are brought up playing with dolls and being taught to nurture,” she said. “Dads don’t always know how to do that.”
Stupidity:
“I think that in a number of instances, these parents come to the belief that ‘Gosh, that’s a successful strategy’ without fully realizing the damage they’re doing,” Dale said.
Stress, despair and poverty:
Dr. Stephen Sarfaty, a forensic neuropsychologist in Connecticut, said the two most common elements in child abuse cases are a lack of resources for the parent, combined with a feeling of helplessness.
Curtis himself adds, on the back page, that there “is no typical profile” of the abusers.
Why, then, on the front page and in the first few columns, which present Curtis’s thesis for the piece, does he make this statement?
Experts say young fathers are more likely to abuse their babies because they don’t have the emotional strength to nurture crying infants.
With all his research and quotations, and in the face of a serious problem, what does Curtis present as a front page thesis? That young men simply can’t handle parenting. Absolutely outrageous.
Firstly, his own article offers a variety of reasons, from a variety of “experts,” but the repeated theme seems to be economic – lack of resources, eductaion, etc. The common theme, as Curtis says, is being “pushed past the breaking point.”
But again, despite all this background, the conclusion he offers casual readers looking at the front page is:
Experts say young fathers are more likely to abuse their babies because they don’t have the emotional strength to nurture crying infants.
Clear. Unambiguous. Young men can’t parent babies.
This kind of essentializing nonsense is toxic. It’s needlessly insulting to all men, but in the long run it’s societal poison to women.
Why? Because essentializing an entire gender into neat little boxes like this doesn’t ever just work one way. You mess with the balance on one side, it affects the other. If men are told they aren’t emotionally as capable of handling parenthood, they simply will give up faster, as they’ll feel they’re at a hardwired disadvantage. If women are told that men aren’t emotionally capable of handling parenthood, they will be inclined to assume more and more of the parenting themselves.
And where does this take us?
1950, anyone?
Women’s place is in the home, men’s place is in the workplace. Period.
What’s particularly infuriating is the obvious linear connection to this attitude – which is still all too prevalent – and the very crisis discussed in the piece. Men still feel the pressure to be the breadwinner/provider, and still at some level question themselves and their identity if they can’t fullfil that archaic expectation. Common sense tells us that this is often going to be part of why, in situations where poverty is an issue and a family is in play, you see more men lose it and act out, often violently. Shaken baby syndrome is just one psychic rivet that could pop. You also see greater spousal abuse, substance abuse and suicide from men as you head down into the pressure cooker of poverty, where mental illness rates increase across the board. As you come out of poverty, gender differences that remain become less easily understood, but are still difficult to cleanly cast as nature over nurture in an effort to promote biological determinism.
So Curtis would spout a simplistic line to his audience that nakedly fuels gross gender stereotyping. And he does so even though it’s contradicted by reality, and the rest of his own article.
And at a time when a major economic downturn makes it all the more important that we get these things right.
With this thesis, Curtis adds whatever small amount of weight he has towards pushing us backwards, even though the real solution is precisely the opposite – men need to be encouraged and supported in sharing the burdens of economics, both in terms of their identity as men, as well as in terms of day to day living – and they need that support from their families and communities, just as women need comparable, mutual support from families and communities to move beyond their traditional gender/power pigeonholes.
Nothing is more crucial to our collective future than gender equity. In the 50s and 60s, that meant redefining duties and responsibilities. Despite much progress made on these fronts throughout the 70s and 80s, we still have a ways to go on. The only way to make that final progress is to start redefining the gender identities that still bind us to that past, and that keep pulling us back into the same pathologies and bad paradigms. And that means an end to obsessing over which gender has the monopoly on leadership, nurturing, aggression, compassion, courage or what have you.
Reporter Brent Curtis just did his part to work against that goal, and in an exceptionally crude and non-subtle manner.