New Dads Aren’t a ‘Waste of Time and Space’ |
This Masculinity Influencer Is Loud and Wrong About Paternity Leave
For a brief shining moment in 2021, it seemed like there was a tiny chance that, thanks to the Build Back Better Bill, the United States would give its citizens at least some paid parental leave. It would have been only four weeks, but even that never happened. At the time, I wrote a column explaining how overwhelmingly popular paid leave was (and continues to be). I wondered if part of the problem was that only women and liberals were talking about how badly they needed paid leave after giving birth, and how, if we had more men and conservatives talking about their experiences postpartum, it might be more politically effective.
Christine Matthews, a public opinion pollster who had conducted focus groups with rural men and Republicans, told me five years ago about how much members of both groups wanted paid leave. “They’re talking about having jobs that are very inflexible, where they don’t get time off to support their wife who has had a baby or a serious illness or problem,” she said. You don’t necessarily have to be woke — or even believe that mothers of young children should work outside the home — to feel that a man needs the option of paternity leave to support his family.
This brings me to Scott Galloway, the prolific podcaster and author of the book “Notes on Being a Man.” He is very concerned about “the alarming state of American boys and men,” the country’s falling birthrate and the dating drought among young people. He theorized that the marriage rate is falling in the U.K., where he now lives, because economic anxiety “creates strain in relationships.” He positions himself as a masculinity whisperer who is much less toxic and more progressive than manosphere figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
You would think, given these priors, that he would be all for paternity leave. But on a recent episode of his Prof G Pod, in an interview with the writer and author Derek Thompson (who just got back from two months of paternity leave after the birth of his second child), Galloway said, “I think dads are mostly a waste of time or space” for the first few months of a child’s life. He continued:
I think there should be mandatory maternity leave, because I think the species needs to propagate. I’m not sure there should be mandatory paternity leave. I think it sometimes creates resentment. I think sometimes it’s abused. And so I’m a bit of a capitalist here. I think it’s between the company, but I don’t know if I immediately default to oh, the father needs to be there.
I think there should be mandatory maternity leave, because I think the species needs to propagate. I’m not sure there should be mandatory paternity leave. I think it sometimes creates resentment. I think sometimes it’s abused. And so I’m a bit of a capitalist here. I think it’s between the company, but I don’t know if I immediately default to oh, the father needs to be there.
(There is not evidence that paternity leave is regularly abused in the U.S. Many men don’t even take paternity leave when it’s available because they are afraid they will be punished).
Galloway also commented that he doesn’t think men should be in the delivery room. “I thought that was so disgusting and unnatural,” he says. When I asked Galloway if he had a response to the backlash he has been getting over these comments, he said over email, “My comments were intentionally provocative in the context of a friendly/snarky conversation with Derek.”
Poor Derek Thompson tried to push back, and launch a defense of parental leave. “Most of the gap between prime age adult male and female earnings is a motherhood penalty. And so one benefit of paternity leave is that it puts men and women on relatively more equal standing,” to which Galloway replies, “By lowering the economic standards of the man?”
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Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.