In the Atlantic, Hanna Rosin recently defended the hookup culture as essential to female success and equality. Given the pressure of a high-powered career, she claims, “an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.” In order to carve out time for work, women need the same option men have long enjoyed: “the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career.”
Rosin may think she’s delivering a paean for the hookup culture, but she’s really giving a eulogy for intimacy. A life that has no room for serious romantic partners can’t have much space for deep friendships either. This should be the one culture war fight where we can all be on the same side: if careers preclude real relationships, something’s gone deeply wrong. Instead of arguing about how much of the void hookups can fill, I’d like to attack the root of the problem: the miscategorization of career as vocation.
The totalizing careers that Rosin describes are not uniquely the problem of women, nor are they limited to the banking industry she profiled. Women like Anne-Marie Slaughter notice the impossibility of having it all because they had higher hopes than men to start with. Male CEOs are not asked how they will balance the responsibility to their jobs with their obligations to their children because it is assumed that a parental relationship is a luxury for men at the top. Women entered the workforce, but didn’t submit to its disregard of the family, so they are achingly aware of the tradeoffs. And we’re better off feeling that pain and steeling ourselves to fight than accepting the status quo and not noticing a sacrifice is being made.
Today, many of the most high-status jobs for the well-educated make a virtue of intensity and commitment. Investment banking boasts 80-hour work weeks; Teach for America’s emotional crucible results in a high burnout rate; and jobs in the political sector spawn articles like Anne-Marie Slaughter’s cri de coeur. Have a Type A personality? These jobs are ready to push you to (or past) your limit, and isn’t that what excellence is all about?
There’s a word for people who turn over their entire waking life to one cause, and willingly sacrifice the possibility of a family for the opportunity to serve: monks (or, more archaically, oblates). Just like the driven twenty-somethings of Rosin’s article, monks and nuns have made a commitment so total that it precludes marriage. But in the case of vowed religious, the form of their service is meant to be elevating, not just useful. I seldom hear people claim that spreadsheets are good for the soul. Even for people doing high intensity work for the public good (the teachers, the social workers, the public interest lawyers, etc.), the form of their work may still be deadening.
Most careers aren’t vocations, so we need space outside them to grow and love. It’s possible to make a short-term decision to put life and relationships on hold, in order to make a high-intensity commitment to a cause (this is the model for the oft-touted national service draft), but it’s unhealthy to let these crisis-mode jobs give shape to your life.
If we were honest about what these jobs entail, we’d talk less in terms of success and more in terms of sacrifice and seclusion from the world. If we recognized the single-minded focus that drives Rosin’s interviewees to think of intimacy as obstacle, as life-thwarting, we might not hold it up as the ideal, the logical next step for the best and the brightest. Or, if the work is truly important and can only be done by using smart, high-energy graduates as emotional cannon-fodder, maybe we’d start thinking about how to reintegrate them into normal life, once their time of service was up.
We might find a guide in the Mormon model for missionaries. Mormons do have a culture in which young people are expected to give over two years of life to a higher cause, but the isolating, exhausting life of a missionary isn’t meant as a permanent vocation. When their two years are up, Mormonism’s oblates return to a tightly knit community that serves as a reentry program to intimacy and marriage. There is no secular equivalent.
After graduation from college, young adults lose their deadlines. We stop making transitions as a cohort, and are expected to figure out when new stages of life begin on our own. Maturity, we’re told, is a kind of existentialist skill, learning how to define and describe your life. But we could use some better archetypes to draw on. There’s no more weakness in being part of a tradition and a structure than there is in an author drawing on one of Joseph Campbell’s narrative types.
The high-commitment jobs that drive Rosin’s interviewees to forgo intimacy and that sunder Slaughter and her peers from their families are pernicious because we don’t yet have an expectation of when and how to leave them. There’s no exit strategy, no moment when your life as a turbine ends, and your real life as an adult with responsibilities and vulnerabilities begins.
Traditions are hard to build from scratch, but if writers like Rosin and Slaughter keep showing us sickening portraits of the sacrifices we don’t quite acknowledge as such, we’ll have to own up to the ugliness of the system we’ve built. We have to move beyond examining and debating the coping measures that Rosin describes and start talking about new models of excellence—not focused on seeing how much you can bear before you break, but on how much you’re willing to admit before someone else that you’re already broken and incomplete.
Leah Libresco blogs for Patheos’s Catholic Portal at Unequally Yoked.
RESOURCES
“Boys on the Side,” by Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic, September 2012
“Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic, July/August 2012
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Comments:
This article is nothing more than an exercise in feminist and sexual revolutionary apologetics..
It starts with the necessary straw-man caricature of devolving sexual standards that shoe horns a unavoidable reality into a politically correct narrative that allows its authors and feminism/sexual revolutionaries to avoid blame & the problem to go without address.
"Sexual liberation, goes the argument, primarily liberated men—to act as cads, using women for their own pleasures and taking no responsibility for the emotional wreckage that their behavior created. The men hold all the cards, and the women put up with it because now it’s too late to zip it back up, so they don’t have a choice."
I have never heard anyone paint the results of the sexual revolution so one sided or female victim centered as this. No Christian or socially conservative thinker or writer approaches the issue in such simplistic fashion. Clearly this is the straw man that is necessary to give this article its reason for existence. But since no such critique actually exists, this straw-man becomes the excuse for apologizing and cheerleading the degrading of standards and the collapse of our marriage culture that this article ultimately ignores.
Now watch for the boilerplate bromide that says (somehow) that all this wont effect there lives and marriages/lack thereof in the future. Virtue is not habit acquired, every man/woman is an island onto themselves, what me worry...
"Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women. Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them."
What husbands..? Have not trends in marriage become clear to the author. What about satisfaction in marriage, stress in households, demands on woman & men and the willingness of men to marry these woman? Are the men just amiable dolts who have nothing to say about this female led time of no commitment and sexual licence? Are the really woman unhindered and unaffected by these causal encounters? Are no ill-effects possible much less being experienced? Are these good habits for future marriage...? For finding a suitable mate? Does this increase fidelity and contentment...will they get these years back??
You are right. We must go to the core. We must really begin to see *the human person* at the heart of what we value in our society. We must affirm the primacy of being; the reality of the person has immeasurably greater value than his or her accomplishments, successes, or failures.
I can't help but feel that that wouldn't solve anything. In those kinds of high-pressure working environments that she describes, there will always be ambitious people (men and women) who are willing to ignore their friends and families to achieve secular success and will willingly shoulder huge workloads. So people who care about both work and family (and thus want to limit their job's workload to spend time with their family) will always be at a disadvantage in those arenas, and that will always be more of an issue for women, who tend to be naturally more family-oriented than men.
We can't have it all. We can't make millions of dollars, become Olympic-caliber athletes, be great fathers/mothers/husbands/wives, learn 5 languages, have a strong relationship with God, etc. There are only so many hours in the day, and we have to choose what is really important to us and give up our lesser dreams. I think that's one more justification for traditional gender roles: two specialists can do a better job than two people that both try to do everything and inevitably spread themselves too thin.
Notably, Rosin's piece focuses on young women who believe they'll have time further down the road for marriage and children -- but the unhappiness gap widens as these deferred hopes become increasingly elusive. The hookup culture and the wider sexual revolution that Rosin celebrates for young women is undermining the long-term hopes for happiness that these young women believe will be there for them sometime later on.
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I got married a month before I left grad school to start my career, and I'm convinced that I would have found much more success in my career had I remained unmarried. Though I didn't have plans to have children, I'm certain that most employers had already painted me with a baby bump; subsequently, I was passed up for promotion time and time again. When I did get pregnant, 9 years into my marriage, many people said, "I'm so happy for you. I know you two had been trying for quite a long time." We were never trying, but a lot of people assumed we had traditional desires. When I told my supervisor I was expecting, pretty much the first words out of her mouth were, "Now you need to decide if you're going to come back to work or become a stay-at-home mom." (!!!!)
I'm truly shocked that these attitudes are still part of the prevailing, secular culture. Maybe that means something; I know that I for one am still trying to figure out what role women are called to play -- are they to be identical to men; are they to be mothers; are they to be some blend of these two extremes; or is each individual's calling completely individualized? I think very highly of Slaughter's piece (I haven't read Rosin's yet), because it's at least a very honest look: if you pursue a career at all costs, other areas of your life will suffer. It's a wake up call of sorts: Women, decide who you are and what you want out of life, and then take action accordingly. Just know that you will likely not be able to "have it all," so you will need to make decisions about what matters most.
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I'm so happy that you divorced the ideas of vocation and career because they have been married in my mind for quite a long time. (Thank you, evangelical youth group...) God has clearly called me to be a mother, and I'm unclear what He's calling me to in terms of my career. But I can rest satisfied now knowing that I indeed have a vocation that I'm pursing and one that is immeasurably rewarding beyond anything a career has ever given me.
Judging from what I see people doing today, unfortunately, not much has changed--except there've been a couple of generations of "sheep" who have nodded their heads enthusiastically at an interview like that, rather than having the sense to get up and leave. So what were they taught at HOME about the priorities of family, of relationships, and of what matters in life? Surely that has a heavy bearing on what they're telling themselves they "have to do" in order to "matter." Right?
Once again, the solution begins at home. Now, if we could only get some folks to STAY there long enough to teach those solutions...:-)
Do we really have more manly leaders? On a scorecard of male and female that may be the case. But I would argue it is not the case on the masculine/feminine scorecard. We live in an androgynous culture that is confused. Women take birth control hormones in the hopes to be more like men when in fact they lessen their fertility making them even less like men. Women get promoted for using human ungrowth hormones and men get investigated. We pump males full of ADD/ADHD drugs hoping they will act more like Sue and wonder why they turn out without spines for courage.
Different topic. The Mormons do have one up on us with the young missions. This would be a cool thing to consider for the Catholics. Another mission comes to mind, the Peace Corps.
Ms. Libresco offers a broader framework. Maybe we should not just elevate expectations of men and women but of the jobs they work as well. Maybe feminism should not be about more female CEOs in today's workplaces but rather workplaces that are more human, on all levels.
Perhaps the most pathetic sound is when these women turn 50 and are still single and alone. Then bubbles up the plaintive wail, "Where are all the good men?"
And they have their answer ... there in the silence.
PS Hook-up culture IMHO, what I witnessed of it in my college years, hurt women more often and more deeply than men. It almost invariably caused them more hardship than it did the guys. But who know maybe many of today's young women have been taught to not expect that much from the men in their lives and to be good little girls and just accept whatever comes.
Again, great to see you here.