Jim writes (with deletions by me):
>The fact that many (most?) two-adult heterosexual families are
>nowadays dependent on both adults' incomes gives more women
>economic some econonomic leverage they didn't have in the past.
>(Men and women may not be competing directly in the marketplace,
>but insecure male egos suffer if the "little woman" is pulling in
>bigger bucks -- or even comparable bucks or even a rising chunk
>of the family change.) On top of that, there's the usual
>nostalgia seen during hard times: "things were better in the
>1950s, when men were men and women were women" and all that crap.
>
>Anyway, my point is that the male backlash is not simply based in
>economics but also sociology and psychology.
>
yes but there is more to the maladjustment than a "sick" desire to maintain
hegemony. men are victims as much as women of the manipulations of capitalists
and the recent command the cappos have had of formerly social democratic
governments.
in OZ structural economic changes (downsizing, flatter m'ment and all those
nasty words) have seen men in their 40s become unemployed in their droves. The
growth areas of the economy have been in the service sector, typically a female
segregated sector. the problem is that the displaced blue-collar men (muscly,
brawny guys used to being up to their knees in industrial squalor are just
not getting the jobs in the service sector (which themselves are being
casualised beyond belief). so the women in the families becomes the
breadwinner, and the family plunges into near poverty (being relatively okay
before all this happened) and the man has a major crisis of not being wanted
anymore. this crisis may have the jim-syndrome associated with it, but it also
is a separate problem of how capitalism uses gender for its aims and also only
ever wants a bit of us, for some time that is at the beckoning of the bosses.
kind regards
bill
--
#### ## William F. Mitchell
####### #### Head of Economics Department
################# University of Newcastle
#################### New South Wales, Australia
###################* E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
################### Phone: +61 49 215065
##### ## ### +61 49 215027
Fax: +61 49 216919
##
WWW Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/~bill/billyhp.html
