Differences among men are rarely viewed through the lens of gender.
One of the great lessons of my life came from my old boss, Howard Smith, a columnist at the then widely-read Village Voice. I was his assistant in the early 70s, mostly helping with his weekly Scenes column, which documented trends before they broke, as well as his radio show, his consulting practice, and even the films he made, one of which won an Oscar. Today, Howard would be considered an influencer. He knew everyone, seemed to have a finger in everything that was going on in New York, and his tentacles spread to LA, Cannes, Paris, and Tangier.
Howard taught me that everyone in the world can be interesting, if you know what questions to ask and focus on what you could learn from them. This has served me in countless situations, even with people whose values and beliefs are the polar opposite of mine. I spent a fascinating afternoon learning about Arabic poetry while drinking hibiscus tea with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in a courtyard in the Zemalek district of Cairo. I also redeemed an otherwise agonizing hour trapped in a Key West lobby during a torrential downpour getting an education about fishing in Mississippi from a self-described good old boy with views on race and gender that were offensive to me.
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These lessons have particular value today, when people are fiercely divided. They provide the ever-elusive “how” for building those bridges we say we want but aren’t sure how to build.
I was reminded of Howard’s lesson again last week, when gathering my thoughts about the alleged war between women who work and women who don’t, a topic the media has begun flogging again lately. This purported conflict also cropped up as a theme in a recent article by Emma Goldberg in the New York Times, “How Conservatives Are Winning Young Women.” It highlighted participants at the tenth annual Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Dallas, which was hosted by right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and his wife Erika, a podcaster, real estate agent, and Instagram presence.
Goldberg interviewed a variety of attendees, many of whom had been influenced by the Make America Healthy Again movement, with its focus on “natural” family planning, vaccine skepticism, and avoiding seed oils and processed food. Political MAHA seeks to undermine the infrastructures of public health in favor of emphasizing private wellness. It stresses the need for women to protect their families from experts they view as corrupt representatives of Big Science, Big Pharma, and Big Food, which is best accomplished by their becoming stay-at-home mothers. Because what working woman has time to grow the family’s vegetables, make baby food, and police teenage Cheeto consumption? MAHA also overlaps with the home schooling movement, which relies on mothers to keep their kids free from the clutches of Big Education.
Many of the conference participants had been drawn to Dallas by wellness influencers like Alex Clark, a popular podcaster and associate of Charlie Kirk. Given that Clark’s mantra is “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity,” it’s not surprising that many of the attendees sought advice from the speakers on finding a husband who could support their desire to remain unemployed– a goal that Mr Kirk paternalistically affirmed “should” be their sole pursuit.
Goldberg also noted that many of the women expressed concern about family and friends who questioned their desire to marry young and immediately start having children.The conference speakers sought to allay this fear by assuring their audience that stay-at-home motherhood was the one true path to happiness for women– despite the fact that most of the women on the podium had high powered jobs, or huge, labor-intensive social media followings. As Mr Kirk declared, “Career-driven early 30-something women are the most miserable and depressed people in America!”
Of course, promoting stay-at-home motherhood is risky in a time of increasing economic insecurity for all but the most privileged. Especially given that 40%-50% of first marriages, and 60-70% of second marriages, end in divorce. Given this, friends-and-family concern for women who choose the path of dependence are genuine, not the result of feminist indoctrination. In fact, it was largely to protect themselves from this kind of vulnerability and dependence that women began entering the workplace back in the 70s.
Gatherings like the one in Dallas reinforce the false notion that women who go to work and women who stay home with children have nothing in common. The spectrum of female choice is absent, in favor of presenting opposing camps: lonely, frustrated girl bosses versus warmly feminine, deeply fulfilled full-time mothers. This siloing of people with different lives and values further reduces opportunities to come together, and gives them the idea that they have little in common and thus little to say to one another when they do.
Certainly I’ve heard women who stay home say they’ve felt condescended to by women who are “climbing the corporate ladder,” just as I’ve heard women who work declare that women who don’t have little to talk about but their kids. But to me, this qualifies as evidence that they need to try harder to be more skillful at learning to talk with people whose lives may look be different from their own.
This is where Howard’s insistence that “ if you find someone boring, you’re not asking the right questions” can be useful. Getting out of whatever bubble you inhabit requires giving others the benefit of your good will, and having a lively sense of curiosity. What can this person teach you that you have at least a marginal interest in learning? I didn’t have an urgent wish to educate myself about the best freshwater or saltwater fishing spots in the rivers and lakes of Mississippi, but I ended up enjoying waiting out a storm with the kind of guy I wouldn’t ordinarily have given the time of day to, and managed to form a human connection and learn something in the process.
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