The Cut says that Gen-Z women are increasingly “mothering” their male partners, but was there ever a time when this wasn’t the conventional script in heterosexual relationships?
On July 21, The Cut’s Angelina Chapin published an article exploring the changing dynamics in the heterosexual relationships of Gen-Zers. In the article, titled “Call Her Mommy: Gen-Z women are paying for, and parenting, their boyfriends,” Chapin argues that the young women of today are not only emotionally supporting their boyfriends, but also financially supporting them.
Collecting stories from several young women about their dating experiences with men who “[lack] ambition,” Chapin deduces that women are becoming the new providers, and that some Gen-Z men are “for the most part, […] comfortable with being pampered and paid for.”
Though she acknowledges that the gendered wage gap is still very much a reality, Chapin cites Pew Research Center’s findings that women are more likely to receive college degrees, and notes that female dominated fields like healthcare and mental health support are growing in demand. Thus, Chapin argues that changing labour market trends give some women a leg up economically over their male counterparts — at the cost of their romantic lives.
When I first read Chapin’s piece, I was quite cautious to have faith in her argument. Given that most mainstream commentary on heterosexual relationships relies on misogyny or gender essentialism (or a hint of both), I was worried that The Cut was simply capitalizing on the polarizing gendered discourses that tend to gain traction online.
Clearly, Chapin’s piece isn’t entirely free of patriarchal gender expectations. Much of the language surrounding the unambitious men her sources found themselves with seems informed by conventional understandings of how men and women should behave in heterosexual relationships.
For example, after finding out about the seeming role changes in Gen-Z relationships, Chapin writes that she assumed young men “must be humiliated by this state of affairs, their masculinity in tatters.” Here, the implication is that they should not be humiliated for being apathetic, incompetent partners, but they are expected to be humiliated for not playing the masculine role properly — a role that we know has equally severe consequences for their female counterparts.
There’s also a clear class aspect at play here. Though most gender essentialist discourses look back on the ‘50s with reverent nostalgia as a time where women ruled the domestic sphere and male partners “provided” for them materially, this ideal only existed (or, seemed to) for middle-to-upper-class families who could afford to live on a single income. To be clear, this time was not truly “ideal” in any sense of the word.
Women were incredibly restricted and had very little personal autonomy, and men were forced to fit into incredibly damaging expectations based on their gender.
Though this “ideal” relies on keeping women out of the public sphere, poorer women were forced into the public labour market to stay alive. So, for many demographics of women, forcibly giving all their time to public sphere labour is not new.
Since Chapin is less concerned with labour politics in her piece, these points are less relevant, but worth noting.
Despite some of the essentializing language in the piece, Chapin is actually picking up on a very real issue born from the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy. However, Chapin’s findings don’t indicate a brand-new, generational “incompetency epidemic.” Her piece is picking up on a symptom of patriarchy that has always existed, but now it has been translated through the neoliberal era: the devaluing of women’s labour and the expectation that women take on disproportionate levels of reproductive labour.
As Chapin states in her title, it seems that Gen-Z women are increasingly “parenting” their male partners, but women have always been forced into the “mother” role under patriarchal standards.
We’ve seen a similar occurrence with the double shift phenomenon. According to feminist theory, the advent of neoliberal capitalism and the mass entry of women into the public sphere workforce in the West led to many women working a daily “double shift,” wherein they attend their paid job all day, then come home and complete mounds of unpaid domestic labour.
The double shift indicates that, though women have been able to gain material capital through public sphere labour, private sphere labour remains disproportionately delegated to them. Fueled by essentializing discourses that women are naturally apt for child-rearing and homemaking, domestic labour continues to be devalued and unpaid, giving many women twice as much work on the daily.
Though the double shift phenomenon typically applies to child rearing, Chapin’s article highlights that “mothering” duties are not limited just to one’s children, but also to their male partners.
So, what we’re seeing among Gen-Z is not an epidemic of carelessness among men, and women having to pick up the slack as a result. We’re seeing that the patriarchy has always expected female partners to take the “mother” role in their relationships with men, to complete unpaid reproductive and care labour in their daily lives. Once we situate the origins of this issue within the patriarchy rather than an individual demographic or essentializing it to one’s gender, we will see genuine change.