Stay-at-Home Dads Are Reshaping American Masculinity
Traditional manhood, the kind that young boys are often taught at an early age, is made up of two ingredients: bodily strength and control, and breadwinner status as a husband and father. That’s the conclusion of Scott Melzer, a sociologist at Albion College, who asks in his new book Manhood Impossible: What happens when one or both of those ingredients are missing?
Melzer has spent his career studying how men respond when their masculinity is threatened, both individually and collectively. (His first book, Gun Crusaders, is about the NRA.) In Manhood Impossible, Melzer observes the behaviors and habits of four groups of men who are acutely aware of whether they’re living up to the manhood ideal: members of a Bay Area fight club, men in an online forum who chat about their anatomy and sexual performance, unemployed men, and stay-at-home dads.
Melzer claims that men tend to respond to their perceived failure at living up to the body and breadwinner ideals in a combination of, he characterizes the stay-at-home dads, and in particular those who stay home voluntarily, as men who’ve recalibrated their personal definitions of what manhood really means.
