The Week the Women Went

Well it's been a few weeks since fellow blogger AS decided to pull the plug and drift away into the blogmos, and Steely has been away on holidays and Matty is busy pirating videos off of YouTube - all of which has left a serious dent in the traffic and discussion on my blog. So I have decided to reach into the spice cabinet and try and spark a little discussion.

I don't know if anyone managed to catch the documentary that CBC ran a few months ago called "The Week the Women Went", but that will be the focus of my rant this week. For anyone who did not see it, it was actually a very interesting look at what happens when you pull 85% of the women out of small town in rural Alberta for a week. You can read all about the show here.

Here is a paragraph from the website describing the premise of the show.

What happens when the women of a small town pack up and leave – will chaos erupt? Will the kids survive? Will the men pick up the slack or head to the pub? The town of Hardisty, Alberta is about to discover what life without women is really like.

The women, meanwhile, are similarly keyed up AND nervous about leaving their kids and men behind. The ladies pack their bags, stock meals in the freezers and list multiple chores for their guys to complete in their absence. Some go as far as leaving a detailed plan for watering the garden or pin rosters to the fridge. What does this say about women’s control in the home and their confidence in their men? We’ll soon see.

As I said before I think this show was a very brilliant attempt at some social engineering, but the whole premise of the show really irritated me and many times left me yelling at the TV. You really needed to catch the whole series of episodes, but I thought the show was put together from a very lopsided perspective that really cast working men of all kinds in a very bad light. Not to fault the editors though, I think the show was deliberately put together this way because society, particularly North American society, seriously undervalues the contributions that the working (by that I mean the one earning a paycheque) parent in a two parent household makes to the family unit, especially if the breadwinner happens to be a man.

When was the last time you saw any stories in the media of how hard men work while they are actually at work? Or how about how much work men actually do around the house (as opposed to how much they don't do)? Or a comparison of how much total work men do compared to women? Not so much from what I can gather. Seems the trend du jour always seems to be some lament of one form or another about how men don't do their share of housework, or how hard it is to be a stay-at-home mom, or how many working mothers there are out there. It has even gone as far as to have spawned the term Choreplay. Wanna get your wife to have sex? Pick up a vacuum - because clearly everything else you do in a day is meaningless. Does this all seem a bit one sided to anyone other than me?

Now don't get me wrong. By no means am I trying to suggest that women work less, or that the traditional duties of a stay-at-home mom are not tough to juggle because they clearly are. I have no problems acknowledging that women pull their fair share. All I am irritated at is that I do not beleive that men today receive the same acknowledgement in return. Men are constantly portrayed in recent media as lazy bums who contribute nothing to the running of a household.

Granted, I completely understand where the impetus for such a mentality has come from. It wasn't so long ago that the shoe was completely on the other foot. Even in my lifetime the work that women did around running of a house was persistently overlooked and discounted as being not as important - even in an era of families having 10 or 12 children (yikes!). Perhaps this is payback - I don't know. What I do know is that the pendulum has swung the other way and we will be no better off than we were in the 50's or even the 70's as long as these biases persist.

So back to the show - why did it stick in my craw so much? The long and short of it was that it completely overlooked everything that the men of Hardisty (and by extension, men everywhere) do day in and day out to support their families. Many of the guys profiled on the show work 60 or 70 hour weeks just to support their families, many of them intentionally so that their wives can stay home to rasie the children because the men would rather sacrifice their time with their children than have the kids raised by strangers. Was there any mention of this in the show? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Instead the show chose the stereotypical route of showcasing the void that was bound to be there when you turn a town of working fathers into single parents who were expected to work their day jobs and manage the family. There was no time given to developing the background stories of the men other than to show them playing golf or waterskiing - because afterall, that is all us men must do. The show would have been so much better if it had included a look at what each of the husbands did to support their families. But that apparently doesn't play well in the media today.

If anything, for me, the show did more to highlight how rediculously difficult it is be to be a single parent (tip of the cap to my ma). What the show painfully avoided discussing was how equally screwed the women would be if the men (and their paychecks) up and left for a week. Now THAT would be a show I would love to watch.

So while us men are constantly bombarded with media messages that say we don't do enough around the house, or spend enough time with our kids, or give enough attention to our wives the bills will continue to pile up and somebody will need to do something to pay them. And, yes, it will usually be us men that step up to get that done -often sacrificing, dearly, to provide for our families. What husbands and wives are equally guilty of is not doing enough to say thank you for the sacrifices that your spouse makes day in and out. I'd say that women are getting alot of help in the media to get some recognition for the work they do and the sacrifices they make. Perhaps it is time us men need to start doing the same?