The humiliation of the American father
How we went from Don Draper to Phil Dunphy
Once, fatherhood was a very manly affair. It involved wearing a suit or a uniform, reading an actual newspaper, maybe in a recliner, maybe with a stiff drink by your side. That is, at least, the 1950s and 60s myth, which remains mighty, not least because we got to fall in love with it and critique it anew while watching Mad Men. Of course, flesh-and-blood dads were always more complicated. But for centuries, the commanding patriarch was at the center of family life. Dad was the decider of the domicile.
But in the half century since father knew best, dads have become witless, shiftless laughing stocks on TV and in movies, and in some cases even in real life. Their bods have gone soft. Their hats are lame. Their jokes are, well, a joke.
The 1970s sitcom All in the Family was one of the first TV shows to feature a lame dad: Archie Bunker, a crotchety couch-bound bigot whose primary function on the show was to very vocally lament the twilight of his own virility and of white male power in America. Though still presiding, sometimes aggressively, over his mini-fiefdom in Queens, his comments about “Commies,” “women’s libbers,” and blacks, were meant to give viewers the sense that a new world order was coming, and it wasn’t gonna be good for men.
Archie Bunker kicked off a trend. From the exquisitely oblivious Homer Simpson to the miserable, beer-guzzling Al Bundy on Married with Children, to the similarly named Phil Dunphy, Modern Family’s resident doofus, there’s no shortage of dense, distracted, or lazy dads in pop culture.
Many are, in the words of Slate writer Jessica Grose, “omega males” who’ve “either opted out or, if [they] used to try, given up.” Grose lays out a taxonomy of these guys, from grown-up video gaming underachievers to what she calls “liberal arts layabouts.” The common thread? A noxious combination of ineptitude and inertia.
But when did dads become so useless? According to many social critics, the decline began around the turn of the 20th century, when women began accruing a modicum of economic power through work, and then gained suffrage in 1920. But some take it back farther. “Not being overly gloomy,” wrote David Blankenhorn in his 1995 book-length lament Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, “but in some respects it has been all downhill for fathers since the Industrial Revolution.”
Actually, that is overly gloomy (and so is the title of Blankenhorn’s book.) Many fathers still enjoy quite a lot of power and authority in their households. But Blankenhorn was treading fairly familiar ground. Most 20th century theorizations of fatherhood were spawned in tandem with broader moral panics about the precarious future of the heteronormative family. By the 90s, diminishing paternal authority and rampant “fatherlessness” were among a host of issues over which conservative Americans regularly wrung their hands.
In 1974, the New York Times published a piece called “Whatever Happened to Father?” by a psychiatrist named C. Christian Beels. In it, Beels — drawing on 19th century German sociologist Max Weber — makes the argument that the decline of the dad has been gradual and has occurred alongside the increasing “rationalization” of family life. Rationalization is Weber’s term to describe the shift toward a society that prioritizes efficiency and rational decision making over more amorphous cultural values. In Beels’s words, the process is a move from “command to administration, from inspiration to planning, from magic to science, from impulse to routine. It is the sort of shift we in the West like to call ‘progress.’” As society “rationalizes,” more jobs that might have been done by the patriarch/king are delegated to individuals beyond the family. As Beels puts it, the father’s role has been “usurped by teacher, policeman, social worker,therapist and mother.” Yikes.
His piece also usefully points out the fact that life in the U.S. is especially atomized. American culture prizes individualism and the ideal of the “self-made man,” who achieves solitary success (read: wealth) without the help of a broader network of friends or relations. Here, in other words, it’s not supposed to take a village. So, while much of the work of old-fashioned patriarchs has been delegated to various modern bureaucratic agencies, dad himself may be loath to ask for help.
The outsourcing of fatherly labor to bureaucracies and the increasing mechanization of the workplace produced a new social reality and freed women and children somewhat from their traditional roles. By the time women went to work in large numbers, “the man who would be master of the house [was] a frustrated and retiring figure.” Women had jobs outside the home, did most of the active parenting of children, and in many cases worked the “second shift” doing housework in the evenings and on weekends. The paterfamilias wasn’t just knocked off his pedestal, he was replaced by supermom. And to many busy supermoms, dad was just kind of in the way.
Of course, reimagining the traditional family had been one of the chief aims of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. Women called for parity in the home, and many men heeded the call and began to pitch in, with mixed results. In 2013, a study published in the American Sociological Review entitled “Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage” delivered some bad news: couples who shared the housework had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than couples who didn’t. Meaning the prevailing notion that men doing housework is a powerful aphrodisiac for women might be quite wrong. And it wasn’t just that wives had less desire to sleep with their husbands once they were doing feminized labor in the home. As the New York Times summarized, “the more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.” Mowing the lawn? Hot. Washing the dishes? Not so much.
But is men helping with housework and child rearing a boner killer? Is this why fathers have grown lame? Between the TV dad-bros befuddled by Baby Bjorns and studies all but confirming that men vacuuming is not in fact porn for women, it would be easy to think so. Their active participation in family life might be seen as emasculating — by men themselves, and by women seeking more traditionally masculine partners.
The tendency to see dads this way was furthered by the 2008 recession, which left many men unemployed or underemployed. Trying economic times have exacerbated the sense, in households and in the culture at large, that the bubble of postwar masculinity has finally burst, and patriarchal power is in steep decline. That’s left a lot of men feeling humiliated, lost, and pissed. (It’s the heady emotional brew currently on vivid display at Trump rallies.)
In 2016, the answer to the question of whatever happened to father might be that he’s been upstaged by Daddy. The Daddy meme, which has been taking over the internet for awhile, is a naughty, tongue-in-cheek celebration of the lost art of hot, confident, manly power and detachment. Part of the appeal of Don Draper, that paragon of old school fatherhood, is that, though beset by existential dread, he isn’t confused about his role in the world. (Or at least he’d never show it.) He’s decisive, even in his lechery. Quite unlike other contemporary TV dads — who range from can’t-be-bothered to just can’t, period — Draper moves through the world smoothly, embodying the sexualized authority and arrogance of a daddy. He doesn’t need a honey-do list. He doesn’t even need you.
Where does all of this leave the millions of actual badass dads who aren’t mean daddies or caricatured omegas? The guys who are actually stepping up to help raise the kids, do the dishes, and be decent partners? I guess they’ll have to just put their heads down, work hard, and keep hoping for more nuanced representations of their lived realities. Like women have for decades.
