Where Are the Men?

Taos Pueblo, Helmut Naumer, 1935-36 (wikipedia)

In the many debates I’ve been reading and hearing about the criminalization of abortion with the overthrow of Roe v. Wade, there is a major deletion: men. It sometimes seems these unwanted pregnancies are created by women alone. Only the Catholic Archbishop of Santa Fe mentioned the huge problem posed by these absent fathers. How can we consider the issue without talking about the men?

There are many reasons for a women to choose abortion and all of them are legitimate. The absence of a father to help share the work and the expense may not even be the most important factor, but it certainly weighs in the decision. For women who work, for women living below the poverty line, for women suffering from age-old, unrelenting discrimination, a partner would make a substantial difference. We don’t even know why these fathers disappear, and there are certainly many reasons. Why are these questions not being asked?

Perhaps the picture is distorted: perhaps the fathers are more often present than these one-sided news stories reveal. We have no way of knowing.

So it seems that women are being blamed again, by the anti-choice people, for a mistake they surely did not make alone, if it was a mistake. Part of reframing this raucous debate must include thoughtful discussion of the nature of this mistake: why do men so often refused to use condoms? Why do we so often not insist? Why do we trust manifestly unreliable men with access to our most intimate selves? What role do liquor and drugs play in dismantling our judgement?

Remembering my two abortions years ago, I have to admit that delusion about what I imagined was going to be a permanent relationship—with a long-married man with four sons—was what caught me. In the other case, I was also not married to the father and embroiled in a public battle that would have made my pregnancy another liability. It was not wise to become pregnant in either situation, and it was a great blessing that I could find a safe, legal abortion.

Much depends on the sense of prudence and responsibility we mothers often fail to teach our sons. Women who feel powerless may admire and even worship the apparent power of an insistent, potent man; we may secretly enjoy watching our sons act irresponsibly—“Boys will be boys.” Women who, for many reasons, feel powerless in this culture may imagine that the power we glimpse in our sons will somehow transfer to us, or at least protect us. How many of us are able to argue strenuously for our sons’ essential responsibility as mature adults when their girlfriends become pregnant? Too often we fall back on blaming the young women.

Our worship of male power, or what we think is male power, is nearly inevitable for women who are not feminist. From our earliest days, the illusion that romance will save us is drummed into our heads and hearts by popular culture and its seductive ballads. Romance novels, that bastard genre, sell widely, even to women who know from our own experience that such illusions are false. Fashion magazines ceaselessly reiterate the importance of our looks, our clothes, our sexuality. Is it surprising that we fall for this baloney?

Let’s begin asking this essential question: where are the men?

Otherwise we have no recourse against the age-old training of little girls to comply, concede, compromise. My most recent example came yesterday when I hiked through a forest campground, fascinated by the monstrous houses-on-wheels named things like Eagle, Monster, Predator.

Near one of these habitations, parents had set up a little playground for their daughter in the woods: a tiny pink tent and a tiny pink accordion tunnel. I wondered if this child might have preferred to wander in the junipers and pinions, gathering pine combs and looking up at the blue sky.

No pink there…

But, thank God, there are always examples of cooperation between men and women to correct my gloom. Here in Santa Fe, we are enjoying the amazing annual event, The International Folk Art Market, powered by 1800 volunteers, men and women. The craftspeople who come largely from South American countries display their astonishing richness of textiles, ceramics, woodwork, feather work, glass. The volunteers are each assigned to a craftsperson to provide care, food, water and, when needed, translations. The friendships created in this way endure, knitting together our fractured world.

I’m also privileged to live in the midst of the Eight Northern Pueblos, the phenomenally successful indigenous villages whose inhabitants, over the centuries, have preserved their way of life and their sacred traditions in the midst of often hostile hordes of white people. Their privacy is essential to this maintenance and so, as an outsider, I can only report, tentatively, that the pueblos seem to have worked out the relations between their men and women in a way we might do well to imitate.

With very few exceptions, the men occupy the ceremonial positions—head of the tribe, War Chief and so on, and lead most of the ceremonial dances. But this is a matrilineal culture: houses and fields belong to the women and are inherited from them. This, is seems to me, is the real seat of power, and this is what ensures the dignity of the women even in the midst of severe poverty, violence and abuse. Strong ties between women are also conspicuous and lend their hard labor a special sanctity.

Maybe we white people could learn a few lessons here.

In Women, Politics Roe v Wade folk abortion