Where are all the daddy blogs?

Why dads should write more about parenting

There are a lot of dads who are writers, but there’s just not that much writing about being a dad — certainly not the kind of regular, routine parenting content that is served up in all kinds of venues by (and largely for) women.

In the comments on our post about Slow Boring’s editorial strategy, Jessica said “I feel there’s a gap in the market for parenting content from men … male perspectives are really lacking in the substack/twittersphere, despite fathers taking so much more of an active role in parenting these days.”

I agree with Jessica and the many others who chimed in that there is such a gap, in the sense that I, personally, believe that I would enjoy reading parenting content written from a male perspective. I’ve even considered the possibility that I should try to write such content. But I’m deeply reluctant to actually do it.

That’s in part because, with some notable exceptions like Emily Oster’s work, good parenting content tends to have a narrative element that doesn’t play to my strengths as a writer. And beyond that, I think there are real structural forces at work in non-conservative media that make it challenging for men to take these topics on. If you’re conservative, and especially if you’re a religious conservative, you have access to a localized safe space to reflect on the nature and purpose of patriarchal Christian family leadership. Most readers will ignore you, and it will be constitutive of your worldview that you’re pretty detached from most of the day-to-day work of parenting. But within the community of religious traditionalists, I think this would be regarded as useful content.

The secular liberal media isn’t like that, though. In our community, even as norms have shifted such that men are now expected to be more engaged as parents, it’s not really expected that men share their perspectives about parenting and family life.

Some of this skew of this is just basic biology.

Women are, by and large, the ones who get pregnant, give birth, and lactate. Women parent newborns while coping with the physical effects of childbirth. Women are more likely to have parental leave, and their leave is likely to be longer. Young women who do not have children are more likely to have experience in parenting-adjacent activities like babysitting and are often more curious about parenting experiences. So it’s understandable that this is a woman-dominated zone of content. But the actual skew is enormous¹ and I think not explicable by those fundamentals alone.

I do politics takes, not parenting takes. But I think this issue is tied up in politics. Egalitarian aspirations for family life imply that there should be parenting content by-and-for men, but in practice, the long inegalitarian history of the domestic division of labor makes this difficult.

The case of the messy husband

Twelve years ago, Jonathan Chait published an essay suggesting that the solution for women who are mad at their husbands for doing less than half the housework is to just clean less and accept a messier home. I don’t think that I have ever seen such a sharply negative response to an essay, such that I still vividly remember it twelve years later. And yet, this text still circulates in samizdat form in the Messy Husband Community.

Then last week, Cartoons Hate Her published an essay titled “I Am The Female Bad Husband” about her experience as a woman married to a man with a more stringent preference for cleanliness.

She admits to her flaws and failings and is funny about it. But she doesn’t apologize for being messy. And critically, she doesn’t really express gratitude toward her husband for the extra work he does cleaning around the house. On the contrary, she expresses some resentment toward him for cleaning in a way that makes her feel bad about not cleaning, when her sincere preference would be for him to leave the house messier and play video games:

Before we had our second child, I used to play Sims when our son was napping on the weekends. While Nick insists to this day that he never took issue with it, I distinctly recall trying to zone out and enjoy building my Victorian mansion by the Brindleton shore where I would stage the perfect love rhombus melodrama, and watching Nick huff and puff around the room, cleaning things nobody asked to be cleaned, an exasperated look on his face as he vigorously wiped a silicone coaster for the fourth time in a row. His argument would have been that I picked up on hostility that wasn’t there, and he simply just needed to clean (subtext: because someone has to do it,) but there’s nothing more demoralizing than playing video games while watching someone else clean in a particularly irritated fashion. I would have vastly preferred it if he plopped down next to me and played Fortnite.

This was much better received than Chait’s piece. It would be simplistic to say that’s because the author is a woman. But there is a long and deeply entrenched history of women being confined to domestic roles and a particular set of gendered assumptions around housekeeping, such that being a slob wife with a tidy husband is a kind of bold feminist act while being a man who tells tidy women to chill out and relax is being an asshole.

And imagine the shitstorm that would rain down on an essay by a tidy man married to a slob wife condemning her for being lazy and inept at cleaning!

It’s very difficult to write about this from a dad’s perspective, in part, because it’s not clear who the audience is. The comments we received in support of more parenting content were disproportionately from women, but it’s just not clear to me that there is a male perspective on issues like this that most women want to read. And it’s not clear to me that dads are clamoring to read these takes, either.

More dad takes sounds good in theory, but who in practice wants to read them?