Jim writes (with deletions by me): >The fact that many (most?) two-adult heterosexual families are >nowadays dependent on both adults' incomes gives more women >economic some econonomic leverage they didn't have in the past. >(Men and women may not be competing directly in the marketplace, >but insecure male egos suffer if the "little woman" is pulling in >bigger bucks -- or even comparable bucks or even a rising chunk >of the family change.) On top of that, there's the usual >nostalgia seen during hard times: "things were better in the >1950s, when men were men and women were women" and all that crap. > >Anyway, my point is that the male backlash is not simply based in >economics but also sociology and psychology. > yes but there is more to the maladjustment than a "sick" desire to maintain hegemony. men are victims as much as women of the manipulations of capitalists and the recent command the cappos have had of formerly social democratic governments. in OZ structural economic changes (downsizing, flatter m'ment and all those nasty words) have seen men in their 40s become unemployed in their droves. The growth areas of the economy have been in the service sector, typically a female segregated sector. the problem is that the displaced blue-collar men (muscly, brawny guys used to being up to their knees in industrial squalor are just not getting the jobs in the service sector (which themselves are being casualised beyond belief). so the women in the families becomes the breadwinner, and the family plunges into near poverty (being relatively okay before all this happened) and the man has a major crisis of not being wanted anymore. this crisis may have the jim-syndrome associated with it, but it also is a separate problem of how capitalism uses gender for its aims and also only ever wants a bit of us, for some time that is at the beckoning of the bosses. kind regards bill -- #### ## William F. Mitchell ####### #### Head of Economics Department ################# University of Newcastle #################### New South Wales, Australia ###################* E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ################### Phone: +61 49 215065 ##### ## ### +61 49 215027 Fax: +61 49 216919 ## WWW Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/~bill/billyhp.html