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The Biological Cash-Register | Working Hours | Workplace Safety and the "Boys' Club"
Men are brought up to think in terms of how they can support family; even as teenagers, boys are made to think about how they can get a "good job" (not a fulfilling or pleasant job, but one which pays the most money). Before they are even old enough to decide what they want to do with their lives, they are already being primed to support a family, and their lives are being moulded around the wife and children they don't yet have. Much of what a man does, he does with the thought somewhere in the back of his mind of how much it will cost, or how much he will gain from it (often in money, although power and status are other means of achieving similar ends). If women have to contend with a biological clock, then men have to deal with a biological cash-register. And just as women feel they are being unfairly judged by prospective male partners on their age and looks (in nature, both correlated with reproductive potential), men feel that their attractiveness to a woman depends on their wealth or the ability to acquire it, and their willingness to spend it on her.
For this reason, the sharing of expenses in a relationship or when dating is a bigger issue for men than women will generally acknowledge. A woman who says she wants equality, but still allows a man to pay her way, is like a man who says he respects womens' right to a career, but constantly reminds his partner that her child-bearing years are running out. Sharing expenses when stepping out together is to the mens' movement, what having a seat on a bus was to the civil rights movement in the United States; while seemingly trivial in itself, it reflects a vast range of underlying issues. Restaurants and cafes that refuse to give separate bills, for instance, are discriminating against men by making it easier for women to foist the traditional role onto men, without taking responsibility for their economic oppression of men (the women are given plausible deniability).
Expecting a man to buy an engagement ring when he proposes, which she may keep even if she turns him down, is another example of the economic exploitation of men.
"Provider issues" for men are not so much the need to be the provider, as to know that the family is provided for. Therefore the recently unemployed man who compares his future earnings to the value of his life insurance, then goes out and wraps his car around a tree, or the american black man who calculates that his capacity to provide for his family is less than the governments' willingness to support them if he leaves and never sees them again, are both expressing their love for their family in a uniquely male way that is too seldom acknowledged.
The average working week for men is longer than that for women. Men first and foremost feel the need to ensure that their family is provided for, so not only spend more time doing overtime, but are easily pressured into working longer hours by unscrupulous employers who can exploit male concerns about job security. The argument by Eva Cox that men who work longer hours should be penalised completely misses the point; men are already disempowered by the expectation that they will provide for their family, and further disempowered when they are treated as if their long hours were their own choice.
The worst jobs (the most dangerous, physically unpleasant, etc) are also the most male "dominated", that is, there are numerically more men than women. The explanations usually offered for why women rarely enter these fields tend to refer to sexism in the workplace, the reluctance of women to enter a "boys club", the lack of encouragement for women to take on the really nasty jobs; in short, they suggest that women would eagerly do all the dirty work if only men would let them. It is hard to see how male privilege is reinforced by denying women such career options as garbage hauler, sewerage worker, and mine sweeper, or to imagine men being "encouraged" into any of those fields. And while firemen, combat troops and SES volunteers may have some glory attached to them, women would have to enter their workspaces before being able to judge it as a sexist hostile environment; I have yet to hear of a woman joining up and then quitting because of sexism from her colleagues. A rather more plausible explanation is that women are more reluctant than men to expose themselves to physical discomfort and danger; rather than acknowledge female cowardice, women coined the term "macho" in order to blame the discrepancy on men. It is not, they imply, that women are unwilling to share the responsibility and the risks while men are self-sacrificing, it is that men are being macho and hogging all the macho jobs for themselves.
Even in jobs that are not obviously hazardous, men are more likely to suffer workplace accidents and work-related illness (eg. stress) than women. Again, the term "macho" is generally applied in order to blame the victim, rather than acknowledge that men are more committed to their jobs than women, more strongly pressured to get on with the job, and less likely to put their health first. It is usually not until a woman is injured, that the employer or authorities will act on a workplace safety issue.