I Want What I Want

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Institute’s main scholarly body, our 20-member Council on Families, has been sincerely flattered.  In the last couple of years, several books (such as Judith Stacey’s In the Name of the Family and Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Really Are) and quite a few articles (such as Arlene Skolnick’s “Family Values: The Sequel,” in The American Prospect) have gone to some lengths to argue that our Council is almost single-handedly responsible for fooling the media and harmfully distorting the national debate on family well-being. 

To Judith Stacey, the Institute and Council “have had great success shaping the national debate over the family.”  Part of this success includes fostering “the national consensus on family values that rapidly shaped the family ideology and politics of the Clinton Administration and his New Democratic party.”  All very bad, in her view.  Arlene Skolnick similarly describes the Institute as “the think tank responsible for the sudden shift in the national debate on the family,” while concurring with Stacey that “its writers have the facts wrong - the policies they encourage could actually make children’s lives worse.”

No longer content merely to curse the darkness, Stacey, Coontz, Skolnick, and a number of other like-minded scholars and therapists have recently launched a Council on Contemporary Families - sound familiar? - devoted explicitly to attacking the ideas of our Council on Families.

To begin to grasp the new group’s philosophy, consider some of the titles of recent material either written by them or in support of their ideas. Constance Ahrons, the co-chair of the group, is the author of a book called The Good Divorce.  Stephanie Coontz and Donna Franklin: “When the Marriage Penalty is Marriage.”  Katha Pollitt, a regular Institute critic:  “What’s Right About Divorce.”  The main point of contrast seems pretty clear.  Our purpose is to criticize the divorce revolution; their purpose is to defend it.

One way to defend the divorce revolution is to say that you are not necessarily in favor of divorce, but are against the people who are against divorce. (Their research is bad, they exaggerate, they are politically motivated, etc.) Everybody occasionally says something that is open to criticism, so it’s easier for our critics to attack us rather than propose their own ideas. This was certainly the approach taken in a recent New Republic cover story reviewing The Divorce Culture, by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a former member of our staff and current member of our Council, and The Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher, an Institute staff member.  The review essay was described as “The Case Against the Case Against Divorce.”

Another strategy is the “per se” argument.  Whatever you want to denigrate or downplay - marriage, fatherhood, the two-parent home - simply describe it as not very important “per se.”  Here is contemporary-council member Carolyn P. Cowan describing the new council’s conceptual framework: “It’s not the family structure per se, it’s the quality of the relationships between adults and children.”  This formulation works for almost any topic.  It’s not marriage per se, it’s commitment in relationships.  It’s not fatherhood per se, it’s another caring adult to help raise the child.  Or this slight variation: The problem for children is not divorce per se, it’s parental conflict.

The purpose of the “per se” argument is always disassembly: to break something down into its constituent parts, so that the effects of one part can be said to override the effects of another. Consider this example: Regarding who gets lung cancer, what matters is not “smoking per se,” but lifestyle habits. The statement is obviously absurd.  One cannot logically separate smoking from lifestyle, much less suggest that the health consequences of lifestyle somehow invalidate the health consequences of  smoking.  Similarly, it is absurd for Carolyn Cowan to suggest that good relationships matter, but that who lives in the home (“family structure per se”) does not, as if we must choose between the two, oblivious to the fact that they are inextricably connected.  If a father is separated from the mother and living far away, doesn’t that typically impinge on the “quality” of the father-child relationship?

One more example: the common claim that the main problem for children is not “father-absence per se,” but rather the effects of living in poverty.  See how it works?  Like a magic wand, this formulation turns any evidence that poverty harms children into evidence that father-absence does not harm children, or at least does not harm children as much as poverty does. What gets lost in the sophistry is that fatherlessness and child poverty are not opposed to one another; they are causally linked.  Which helps to explain why children in mother-only homes are five times more likely to be poor than the children in married-couple homes, and why approximately 60 percent of all poor children in the U.S. today live in homes characterized by “father-absence per se.”  

Yet in a larger sense, none of these particular disputes - most of which center on what the data show regarding the significance of the two-parent home - directly illuminate the essential dispute. After all, looking at it from the viewpoint of our critics, why would anyone want to spend all her time arguing that unwed childbearing doesn’t hurt children, or writing articles with titles like “What’s Right About Divorce”?  Surely the spread of divorce and illegitimacy are not final aims; they do not constitute an animating vision.  So what is the vision?

Karen Stuening frames the point nicely: “The family values debate is not, then, just about the family.  It is also about personal freedom and whether we can afford a plural moral culture that supports lifestyle experimentation.”  She elaborates: “This freedom consists not just in redefining the structure and composition of our intimate associations, but in redefining the roles of mother, father, husband, wife, lover and friend and the meaning of family, friendship and other forms of intimate relationship and association.”  For Katha Pollitt, the goal is similar: “a life not just with more justice but also with more freedom, more self-respect, more choices, and more pleasure.”

But for succinctness and clarity, listen to Barbara Ehrenreich.  The “first principle” for progressives must be “full freedom and economic security for all,” meaning the creation of a society that is “economically socialist and socially libertarian.”  As I review the family-debate writings of Stacey, Coontz, Skolnick, and others in and around their school of thought and their new initiative, I can find nothing that is inconsistent with this goal of socialism plus libertarianism.  Indeed, everything they say fits quite comfortably under this guiding premise.

Here, then, is the vision:  a society that collectively provides for everyone’s material needs (“economic security for all”) while simultaneously encouraging everyone to do anything they want to do (“full freedom” and “lifestyle experimentation”). What kind of people would such a society tend to produce? 

One person who comes to mind is Dennis Rodman, the professional basketball player and pop-culture celebrity who dyes his hair different colors, hosts a show on MTV, and recently wrote a best-selling book called Bad As I Wanna Be.   Rodman might be too rich to favor socialism, but he is certainly the equal of Stacey and Ehrenreich in his support of “full freedom” and “lifestyle experimentation.”  Some years ago, in the midst of a suicidal depression, Rodman made a life-changing personal choice: “to let the person inside me be free to do what he wanted to do, no matter what anybody else said or thought.”  He elaborates: his basic dream today is “to live my life like a tiger in the jungle - eating whatever I want, having sex whenever I want, and running around butt naked, wild and free.”

As Woody Allen similarly put it, discussing the merits of his sexual affair with the adopted daughter of his then-wife Mia Farrow: “The heart wants what the heart wants.”  Or as Clubber Lang, a bad guy in one of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky movies, screams at everyone: “I want what I want!”

To put it mildly, this way of thinking can often lead to problems for men - a fact that many national political commentators are discussing today, and that has been pointed out in Rodman’s case by Anicka Rodman, whose reflections about the father of her child are contained in her book, Worse Than He Says He Is.  Others who have pointed out this fact include virtually every anthropologist, historian, or psychologist who has ever studied or written anything about male behavior or male socialization.

This way of thinking can also lead to problems for women - another fact that, for most people, surely goes into the “not surprising” file.  Accordingly, across cultures and history, women, especially mothers, have always tended to be firm opponents of libertinism, especially sexual libertinism.  At the same time, it is true that the cause of libertinism in the U.S. today is frequently championed by women: especially by that small group of elite women who are intent on elevating “lifestyle experimentation” to the top of an otherwise venerable, and primarily economically oriented, progressive agenda.

To me, such a goal reflects a failure of the progressive imagination.  The goal of blending guaranteed economic plenitude with personal libertarianism is not a serious philosophy.  It is not even a serious politics.  It is instead what psychologists call an infantile desire.  It is the cry of the little girl who wants Mommy and Daddy to give her everything and let her do anything.

Sources: Judith Stacey, In the Name of The Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996),  54. Karen Struening, “Feminist challenges to the new familism: Lifestyle experimentation and the freedom of intimate association” Hypatia 11, no. 1 (Indiana University Press, Winter 1996). Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families  (New York: Basic Books, 1997).  Arlene Skolnick, “Family Values: The Sequel,”  The American Prospect, May-June 1997. Constance Ahrons, The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Coontz and Franklin, op.cit. Katha Pollitt, “What’s Right About Divorce,” New York Times, June 27, 1997; and “Feminism’s Unfinished Business,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1997. Margaret Talbot, “Love, American Style,” The New Republic, April 14, 1997. Abigail Trafford, “Family Matters,” Washington Post, November 25, 1997.  Barbara Ehrenreich, “When Government Gets Mean,” The Nation, November 17, 1997. Dennis Rodman, Bad As I Wanna Be (New York: Dell Publishing, 1996), 11; and Walk on the Wild Side (New York: Delacorte Press, 1997), jacket. Anicka Rodman, Worse Than He Says He Is (Los Angeles: Dove Books, 1997).

First published Spring 1998.