Real men don't need to 'man up'

Caryl Rivers is a journalism professor at Boston University. This is from Womensenews.org.

In her Alaska reality TV show, Sarah Palin has a close encounter with grizzlies, kayaks down swift-moving rivers and climbs tall mountains. All in all, she appears to be trying for a single-handed re-enactment of "How the West was Won."

She also appears to be telling the whole nation - as she formerly told Republicans on the campaign trail - how to "man up."

Her "man up" message spread to other right-wing female candidates this year. In Nevada, Sharron Angle told Harry Reid to man up, and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware gave the same message to her Republican opponent, Mike Castle.

The phrase hasn't yet run its course. In a recent episode of "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough decreed that the whole country needed to man up.

The high-testosterone talk suggests a tide of nostalgia - not only for the good old days of prosperity and high-paid manufacturing jobs, but for a gone-but-not-forgotten era when men ruled the roost, in politics, business and, of course, the household. It harks back to a time when men could simply pull up stakes, grab a rifle and head West if they didn't like the way their lives were turning out.

Tea party women today seem like the feisty females in the old Warner Bros. Westerns who urge their reluctant men to ford raging streams, get the money from the cattle drive, confront the bullying sheriff or stand down the gunslinger in the street in front of the saloon. It seems we haven't forgotten the frontier, when - if only ever in popular imagination - the West was the place where a man could escape his past and control his destiny.

But the frontier has been closed for a long time. Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt are long dead. Palin's America is the America of yesteryear, seen through a golden haze of myth. Her idea of "manning up" isn't going to solve our current predicaments.

There are plenty of men who would like to do the jobs that Carl Sandburg wrote about in his poem Chicago: "Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders." But the jobs those big shoulders did were shipped off to China and Bangladesh. We still miss them.

American men today may not be strong, silent unemotional John Waynes, but they are manning up in a different way, spending more time with their children, being supportive of their working wives.

Millennial fathers (those in their late 20s to early 30s) spend an average of 4.3 hours per workday with their children younger than 13 - nearly double the time that men their age spent with their children in 1977, according to the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce.

Men took more overall responsibility for the care of their children in 2008 than in 1992, according not only to themselves but also to their wives and partners. That means not only providing one-on-one care, but also managing child-care arrangements, according to the study.

"Men are also doing more of overall family work," the study reports. "It has clearly become more socially acceptable for men to be and to say they are involved in child care, cooking and cleaning over the past three decades than it was in the past."

None of this is making men miserable. As the wife works more, the husband's marital quality of life goes up, notes Rosalind Barnett of Brandeis University, director of a major study on dual-earner couples. There's less pressure on him to be the sole breadwinner and this gives him more time with the family. More and more, men and women have become true partners in supporting and parenting their families.

Palin's ideal man may be wrestling grizzlies to the ground, but for a lot of other Americans, it's the guy doing the grocery shopping with his baby in a Snugli who is really manning up.