The Response To This Tide Commercial Says A Lot About Why Men Are Struggling
Men moaning about how hard their life is, is nothing new. What they don't seem to want to look at, however, is WHY their life is so hard. This commercial explains a lot.
Recently, Jason Kelce, football player and potential future brother-in-law of Taylor Swift, was featured with some of his Philadelphia Eagles teammates in this Tide commercial. This isn’t the first time the Eagles have been linked to the famous laundry brand, but just like the last time, their predominantly male audience had some thoughts. Not surprisingly, the comments of those that loved it and those that hated it were spread almost directly down a distinct gender divide.
Also not surprisingly, the man put off enough by this commercial to actually write an entire article about it, preferred this commercial for Beats by Dre headphones featuring Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts. The question is, what is he really responding to, the fact that one ad is “bad” (in his opinion) and the other “good”, or that one is for what should be a “woman’s product” while the other is for a much more appropriate set of “man toys”?
This commercial is by far not the first time an advertisement for a cleaning product has invaded NFL airspace. In 2017, a sexy Mr. Clean took the Super Bowl by storm and in 2021 Proctor & Gamble created a spot for the Big Game featuring Dawn dish soap and Swiffer products. In it, they sought to address the “chore gap” by encouraging families (not just men) to participate in cleaning so it doesn’t “all fall on her.” Meaning, it’s her work, but come on guys, we can help out too, right? None of these commercials sparked outrage, so what was it about the recent Kelce/ Eagles commercial that seems to have so raised the hackles of a certain brand of men?
Could it be perhaps that this commercial in particular was aimed directly at men? Whereas the Mr. Clean commercial was clearly aimed at women and the Dawn/ Swiffer commercial implied that helping a woman clean the house is a good dude thing to do, the recent Eagles Tide commercial literally featured no women whatsoever in the entire commercial. The very pointed implication being, of course, that perhaps men can do laundry. Which might go a long way towards explaining why so many men seem to have gotten steamed about it.
Not all men got steamed about it, some even found it funny and humorous. My guess is that the same men who spend the most time screaming about how hard life is for them are also the ones screaming about this commercial. How dare someone imply that they might lower themselves to doing laundry, which is, after all, women’s work.
Books and articles being written about the dire plight of men (particularly aging white men) is nothing new. In 1990, Robert Bly’s Iron John suggested the answer to man’s plight was to return to their deepest “wild self”; which was echoed less than a decade later for Evangelical Christian audiences in John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart. In 1992, John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus became a best-seller by suggesting that men and women are basically just from different planets and we would all get along so much better if women would just understand men a little more.
Although it purported to be a dating and relationship book for women, the underlying theme of Steve Harvey’s 2009 best-selling book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man was that women would be so much more content in relationships if they just understood what men want! What’s interesting to me is that most men will tell you themselves that when it comes to relationships, women are the experts, yet again and again it is men writing all the best-selling dating and relationship books. Everywhere you turn, there are books, movies, podcasts and even videos on YouTube all bemoaning the plight of men and trying to educate women on how to treat them better.
In 2022, Richard V. Reeves wrote yet another treatise on the topic called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. The New York times has run a dizzying number of op-eds, including this one written by Michael Ian Black in 2018 and this one by David Brooks in 2022. Also in 2022, Andrew Yang published a supposedly “data-driven” article in the Washington Post.
What is particularly interesting about his article is how often he completely ignores certain data in the very articles he links to, which actually contradicts many of the points he tries to make about why boys are struggling. In fact, only a few data points are even about boys at all, but rather about the plight of men, which seems to really be what he’s mostly pissed about.
In it, he bemoans the fact that men’s wages are stagnating, while conveniently overlooking the fact that women are still paid only 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man for the exact same work. He links to an article claiming that schools are failing boys, while conveniently ignoring that girls (and both Black men and women) have literally had to fight every step of the way to even be granted an education in the first place. Something that is still an ongoing struggle in most of the world. In fact, the modern classroom system was developed specifically for white/ European boys in the 17th century, when both girls and non-white boys were excluded. So why are so many white men complaining about something being so hard that was specifically designed by and for them?
Are schools and colleges on some kind of mission to keep men out of their classrooms? Experts say no. According to a 2018 study conducted by U.S. News and World Report, most colleges and universities strive to create an equal balance between female and male students.
Among the 478 ranked national undergraduate institutions which accept both men and women and reported admissions data to U.S. News, the average discrepancy between the male and female acceptance rate was a 2.6 percent advantage for female applicants.
If anything, the fact that colleges strive to achieve an equal balance between male and female students actually weighs heavily in favor of boys, since fewer males than females are even applying, largely because they are increasingly less likely to complete high school. This is, of course, is once again attributed to schools not being “designed” for boys (which they 100% were) and boys being more likely to be “disruptive”, particularly when they come from “broken homes” (read: the children of single mothers), which leads to a higher rate of suspension, which apparently leads to higher dropout rate. But, boys will be boys, so the answer (of course) is not to question whether boys really have to be disruptive but how schools can better accommodate beings who are, by nature, “disruptive” - even though those systems were actually created specifically for those “disruptive” beings in the first place.
If it were true that schools simply don’t accommodate boys, then all boys should struggle in school. The Brookings Institute, however, conducted a study to determine how students are faring not only by gender but by race. What does remain consistent is that in every single instance, from state to state and race to race, girls graduate at a higher rate than boys. What is also true, however, is that in every single instance, Asians had the highest graduation rates, with Asian males outperforming even white females. They also had the smallest gap in graduation rates between boys and girls, with girls being only 3 percent more likely to graduate than boys.
What this shows is that boys absolutely can perform well in school, they just aren’t. If 93 percent of Asian boys can graduate from high school, why can’t White, Black and Hispanic boys? Is it really because the school system is broken, or is it perhaps our culture that is broken?
In Yang’s article on why “boys” are struggling (by which I think he actually means men), he points out that more than two-thirds of manufacturing jobs are performed by men, which has seen a decline of more than 5 million jobs. He claims this has led to a high rate of unemployment among men, but what he’s not looking at is whether or not there are other jobs taking the place of those manufacturing jobs. Just because manufacturing jobs may be on the way out doesn’t mean there are no other jobs that those same men are qualified for. That’s like saying men today can’t get a job because farming is now done by big agricultural corporations.
The Beveridge Curve measures the difference between the number of jobs available and the rate of unemployment. In December of 2000, the unemployment rate was almost exactly equal to the number of jobs available. Between 2001 and 2009, however, the number of available jobs slowly shrunk, while unemployment slowly rose until reaching the widest gap in October 2009 when the unemployment rate was nearly four times higher than the number of available jobs. So, in 2009, men had a legitimate reason for saying they couldn’t get a job.
Since then, however, the trend has reversed with the number of available jobs slowly increasing, while the unemployment rate has steadily decreased. By 2015, there was less than a 2% gap between the number of jobs available and the unemployment rate, and by 2017, there were more jobs available than there were people out of work. The percentage of jobs available actually continued to outpace the unemployment rate until March 2020, when unemployment skyrocketed due to lockdowns and other measures that took place in the midst of the pandemic. By April of 2021, however, those numbers had stabilized and once again there were more jobs available than there were people that needed them. By January of 2022, there were almost twice as many jobs available as there were people out of work.
Between 2002 and 2022, labor force participation among white men decreased by 6.7 percent, while participation by Black men only saw a decline of 2.6 percent. This is even more remarkable when you consider that the gap between labor force participation among Black and white men was already at 6.4 percent in 2002 but had narrowed to only 2.9 percent by 2022. When you add in the fact that Black men have the lowest graduation rates in the U.S., it kind of puts to rest the notion that men can’t get a job or succeed without an education. Asian boys are doing just fine in school and Black men (who have the lowest education rates) are finding jobs at almost the same rate as white men, so who is really “struggling”?
It would seem it is mostly white boys and men who are struggling, who - arguably- have historically had the greatest advantages. Which might go a long way towards explaining why they are struggling. Perhaps they are struggling simply because they expected themselves to be handed something on a silver platter, which suddenly isn’t just being handed to them anymore.
Yang states that “Research shows that one significant factor women look for in a partner is a steady job. As men’s unemployment rises, their romantic prospects decline.” What he conveniently leaves out, however, is that while roughly 80 percent of women want men to have a steady job, nearly half of all men surveyed also want a woman to have a steady job.
Like so many men that write articles of this nature, the reason for their unhappiness seems to be that their inability to get a good education is leading to an inability to get a good job, which in turn means they can’t land a wife, which means they have no one to take care of them, which is leading to their misery. So, one way or another, women seem to be the cause of all of their unhappiness.
Conversely, men also frequently refer to wives with such endearing terms as “the old ball and chain” and are nearly twice as likely as women to cheat on their spouses. So, it doesn’t seem like they have much interest in instructing each other in how to be good husbands and fathers, but rather simply whining about how women getting ahead of them in life is ruining their happiness.
While women have made great strides (at great personal cost, I might add) into what used to be predominantly masculine fields such as STEM, there has been no corresponding movement by men into fields that have become associated with “women’s work,” sometimes referred to as HEAL (health, education and literacy) or HEED (healthcare, early education and domestic) jobs.
Once again, it is important to remember that women and minorities have not been guaranteed an education for all that long, which means that it wasn’t that long ago that secretaries, nurses and even teachers were all men. Every time women began to move into those fields, however, not only did the pay drop but the status did as well.
Research shows that although we recognize the importance of addressing the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields, we are not so keen on addressing the underrepresentation of men in HEAL or HEED fields. In other words, women want jobs in STEM fields, so we are willing to invest money and resources in helping them succeed, but men don’t want jobs in HEAL or HEED fields, which means we aren’t all that interested in helping them get jobs they don’t want. Nor do men seem to have any interest in telling other men stop whining, suck it up and take the jobs available.
In Michael Ian Black’s op-ed, he claims that
The past 50 years have redefined what it means to be female in America. Girls today are told that they can do anything, be anyone. They’ve absorbed the message: They’re outperforming boys in school at every level. But it isn’t just about performance. To be a girl today is to be the beneficiary of decades of conversation about the complexities of womanhood, its many forms and expressions.
Boys, though, have been left behind. No commensurate movement has emerged to help them navigate toward a full expression of their gender. It’s no longer enough to “be a man” — we no longer even know what that means.
Too many boys are trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity, where manhood is measured in strength, where there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated, where manliness is about having power over others. They are trapped, and they don’t even have the language to talk about how they feel about being trapped, because the language that exists to discuss the full range of human emotion is still viewed as sensitive and feminine.
Men feel isolated, confused and conflicted about their natures. Many feel that the very qualities that used to define them — their strength, aggression and competitiveness — are no longer wanted or needed; many others never felt strong or aggressive or competitive to begin with. We don’t know how to be, and we’re terrified.
I find it laughable that Black claims that girls today are “…the beneficiary of decades of conversation about the complexities of womanhood, its many forms and expressions.” Where exactly are these conversations taking place, and who is having them? Please show me the decades of literature written by men (or even women for that matter) about the complexities of womanhood, from which you make this claim. He also claims men are “trapped,” but who trapped them? Is it possible that men are simply “trapped” in a trap of their own making? They say that schools are failing boys, so where are all the male teachers to help them navigate a better path to manhood? Is it possible that “schools” began failing boys when men decided teaching was beneath them because it was a job increasingly held by women?
In all of the many books and articles written on the topic of the current plight of men and boys, there seems to be an underlying belief that women have simply been handed their current situation on a silver platter, largely by men who have spent centuries now being overwhelmingly concerned with the plight of women. Now, at long last, they seem to feel, it is time for the beneficiaries of all that support to turn their attention back to the poor men that have sacrificed so much to give them all that they have.
Yang points to a study that claims that young men are more likely than ever before to live at home with their parents rather than with a spouse or partner. He offers this as evidence that young men are “struggling,” but fails to mention that another study he references found that only 46 percent of Americans even believe that people are better off if they make marriage and children a priority.
The consistent underlying thread in all of these articles is that marriage is best and men can’t get married if they can’t get a “good” job, which they can’t get if they don’t get a “good” education and schools are failing boys, which is why men are struggling. What they are failing to ask is if young men even want to be married? Perhaps the priorities of Gen X men are not the same as those of Millennials or Xennials and perhaps they seem to be “struggling” only because men of Yang’s age keep trying to put their values and priorities on younger men. Perhaps they are trying to force upon them a reality that perhaps these young just don’t want.
What Yang is also not saying (or perhaps even seeing) is that more young men and women are choosing to live alone or in some other arrangement than with their parents or a partner than any other time in history. For men, this is not actually a big change. The biggest change is to women.
What this chart shows is that between 1880 and 1920, roughly 35 percent of men lived at home with their parents and 35 percent lived with a spouse or partner. What it is not showing is that this means that roughly 30 percent of men were living alone or in some type of arrangement other than with a spouse, partner or parents. What it also shows is that between the same period of time, nearly half of all women lived with a spouse or partner, while around 30 percent lived with their parents, which means that about only about 20 percent of women were living alone or in some other type of arrangement.
When you account for the discrepancy between the high number of women who are married or cohabitating and the far lower number of men living independently with a partner or spouse, it also means around 20 percent of married or cohabitating women were probably living with their husband or partner’s parents.
In fact, in 1940, men were slightly more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse and the number of men choosing to live alone or in some other type of arrangement dropped from 30 percent to 20 percent. As you can see, however, things changed drastically in 1940, with the numbers of both men and women choosing to get married and/ or cohabitate skyrocketing until 1960, when more than half of all men and nearly 70 percent of women were either married or cohabitating. So what happened in 1940?
Although the idea of the “nuclear” or “traditional” family (man, wife, children) has existed in some form or fashion since the 13th century, it was heavily promoted as being the ideal unit by the Nazi party in the 1930’s and 40’s. In fact, if you look at the values of modern day conservative Christians in America, they are in direct alignment with those of the Nazis, who also considered themselves to be “good Christians.”
Just like today’s conservative Christians, the Nazis also believed that men were to be the “head of the home” and this was the “natural order of things.” The idea that women are “equal but different to men,” is simply what today’s conservative Christians refer to as “complementarianism.” The role of women was often summed up as the “3 K’s”: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church).
Hitler also believed that women needed to focus on bearing more children to create a “master race,” which is a direct parallel to the modern day conservative Christian belief that women should have as many children as possible in order to have more “arrows for war,” which is also a common belief in many cults, such as the FLDS and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians.
Much like today’s conservative Christians, the Nazis were also deeply concerned with how women should dress. They encouraged plain clothes, traditional hairstyles and flat shoes and discouraged makeup, pants, short skirts and dying or perming their hair. Unlike modern Evangelicals, however, they were discouraged from staying slim or dieting, because it was thought that being thin made it more difficult to give birth. Although Evangelicals lean more towards women looking “modest but still sexy” (modest is hottest) and “keeping in shape”, the bottom line is they invest an enormous amount of time, energy and tweets debating how women should and should not be “allowed” to dress.
It is important to understand that as late as 1970, more than 90% of Americans considered themselves to be Christians and religious participation was much higher than it is today. Therefore, it really should come as no surprise that Nazi values reframed as religious beliefs took hold in America and the “nuclear family” became the standard for everyone. In the 1960’s more young people than ever before were choosing to be married or cohabitate, with only 10 percent of men and 15 percent of women choosing to live alone or with someone other than a parent, partner or spouse. Yet, it didn’t last. Why? What the dwindling numbers show, is that the nuclear family is a failed experiment that did not work. If the nuclear family had led to happiness or contentment, it would have continued to be the norm, yet it did not.
What Yang and others are failing to see and understand is that the number of young men living with their parents has merely reverted to a pre-1940’s norm. What has changed drastically, however, is the number of young men and women who are simply choosing to not be married, cohabitate or live with parents. In 2014, nearly 37 percent of men and 35 percent of women were neither living at home with their parents or cohabitating with a partner or spouse. Perhaps the real problem is that Yang and others are trying to inflict a standard on young people that the majority simply don’t want. Yang and Co. seem to believe that marriage is the key to happiness, yet don’t seem to want to invest in doing the work of making and creating happy marriages. They just want women to make them happy.
In 2022, suicide rates rose overall, but actually declined among teens and young adults, while the biggest jump was in 55-64 year-old men. In fact, the highest suicide rates were among men 75 and older, which has been the case for several decades now. Going back to the above graph, men who are in their 70s now would have been born right around 1960, when more men and women were married or cohabitating than in the previous century. This means they most likely would have spent their childhoods watching the decline of those marriages, having no idea that the very fact that so many of their friend’s parents were married or at least living together was actually a very new occurrence. The norm that they grew up with was not the norm for their parents and grandparents as children.
So, who is really struggling - young men or old men, and why are they struggling? Is it perhaps because they are still chasing an ideal that was never actually ideal for anyone but them?
When a person born into wealth loses all their money, their very existence becomes a much greater struggle. They may have to cook their own meals, do their own laundry or drive themselves places instead of having someone drive them. They may even have to actually learn how to do things like driving and cooking and laundry. There is no question that their lives have suddenly become a much greater struggle, the question is whether it is unfair that they suddenly have to struggle to do things that the majority of people have always had to do. Things they have spent most of their lives having done for them. What right did they ever have to such an easy existence in the first place?
Until they lost all their money, they probably never contemplated just how many other people were spending their entire lives in service to them. How much they benefited from never having to do the most taxing and time-consuming of chores, which freed them up to do little else but play, think, plan and strategize how to make even more money. They likely had a cook and a chauffeur and perhaps an entire staff of maids; people who did jobs daily that the rich child may have been unaware even needed doing. Much like, one might argue, men that have been accustomed to having wives.
I would argue that there are plenty of white men who are doing just fine. Which is not to say they aren’t struggling, but rather, they don’t expect to not be struggling. They recognize and understand that life is a struggle and rather than whining about it, they live every day learning to better overcome the challenges that life throws at them. I would argue that two of these men are Jason and Travis Kelce.
Jason and Travis Kelce are highly successful athletes in what might arguably be the most “manly” sport in America. There is nothing about these men that screams “sissy” or “weenie”, yet they cry, they exhibit tenderness and even appear in commercials for laundry products. In the next few articles, I will be taking a look at many of the traits and qualities exhibited by Jason and Travis Kelce, and how their parents helped instill in them the values that formed and shaped them into the men they are today. Men who have spent their lives facing challenges and struggles of all kinds, but rather than screaming about how unfair life is or how women just need to understand them better, they have conquered every mountain placed before them and come out stronger and better men for it.