GIVE ME A BREAK:'MALE ORNAMENT variation in a sexually dimorphic seabird with variable male mating success".
I came across this scientific paper while pondering the significance of the male bird’s strutting of the Milan catwalks last week. This bird hasn’t been fed in a while. His clothing wouldn’t protect him from the weather. He is definitely dimorphic in the sex department, changing his shirt to please you at a moment’s notice. He is undoubtedly too sexy for his shirt, which cost nearly as much as his chest implants and liposuction.
The ornamental male is just like the Sex and the Citygirls, without the personality and the sex. He may be a spoiled footballer, or he may be a model working his way through university. Whichever way, he's an object who feigns disinterest until a rich master or mistress comes along to kiss him awake.
It’s only fashion. Except that, it’s never only fashion. Fashion reflects life, so there’s some sort of cultural shift going on.
I mention to my editor that I’m thinking about doing my column on the ornamental male. “Do you know any?” he asks.
I start looking for them — the dandies, the peacocks. It’s only when you pay attention that you see these magnificent specimens, just like bird-watchers need binoculars. The man with highlighted blonde shoulder length curls wearing knee-length khakis with a classy shirt open to the third button and a close fitting suit jacket as he parks his bike. The brown curly-haired father jumping out of his vintage Land Rover in denim cut-offs and a washed-out T-shirt that fits just right. I know these men as fathers raising kids while earning a living, yet they’ve liberated themselves from the suit-and-tie office world. They’re on the school run. They know what quality time is. Good God, these men run companies from their laptops. They go for a run or a swim in the morning, excel in the home office, do a marathon at the weekend and still manage to bake cakes. They’ve got it made.
The yummy Daddy has arrived. He’s what we all wanted, isn’t he? The Dad who does it all, so that Yummy Mummy can have a life too? If we were seabirds, we could argue that Yummy Mummy chose Yummy Daddy due to his dress sense. At first, it worked. Those extra bright feathers did the genetic trick, producing children just that little bit prettier and smarter and coming with a father so anxious to procreate that he wanted to attend the birth and take paternity leave.
Future yum-mums chose feminine men not just due to their lovely feathers, but also because they could dominate them. Some species of female birds, I’m given to understand, change their view of what is attractive depending on the prevailing environmental circumstances at the time. The boom required women leaving the home to work, and now that it’s over, the women are keeping their jobs and the men are on the school run. It’s not quite what we expected.
Humans really do act like birds, reacting to the environment. In the boom environment, women sought out supportive men who would help them excel on the Mummy track, but now that more men are becoming unemployed, with more women supporting their families, women are thinking: “What just happened? Did I really want a househusband?”
So maybe the Milan catwalk reflects a social change, as the exaggerated language of fashion tends to do. Men are becoming more feminine, in the context of gender being about roles rather than sex organs. I’ve heard women call their stay-at-home ornamental husbands “Mr Mom”, which is as objectionable as husbands calling their wives “Mrs Mommy”.
I think women do this because they feel uncomfortable having male partners who aren’t working outside the home, so they have to put them in the traditional non-earning woman’s role as if this makes everything all right. We don’t call our Mr Moms unemployed. We call them trophy husbands, or say “he’s on early retirement” or he’s “taking a sabbatical” or “he has a portfolio career”. We don’t acknowledge the fact that Ireland screwed up the economy, putting so many fathers out of work.
Perhaps there are a few women out there who come home from work to find Mr Mom waiting at the door with the gender-equality equivalent of pipe and slippers: a glass of Sancerre and a foot rub. Maybe these women are greeted by dinner on the table, the children bathed and in their pyjamas, the table set with flowers. Maybe the gorgeous spouse has showered and scented himself and can’t wait to go to bed for steamy sex.
I don’t know anybody whose life is like that, and if it was, they wouldn’t tell. Some women are regretting this role reversal where the traditional “husband” has become the traditional “wife”. And just as things never felt right when women were anchored in the home and itching to escape, it doesn’t feel right to have Mr Mom feeling oppressed.
We women, who protested over being ornamental, never reckoned on the shoe being on the other foot. That’s something to think about over the summer.
Kate Holmquist’s column returns in September