National Post (National Edition)
Stephen Marche’s The Unmade Bed explores the modern couple.
STEPHEN MARCHE’S THE UNMADE BED EXPLORES NEW REALITIES OF COUPLEHOOD
When I cracked Stephen Marche’s new memoir-cum-cultural critique, The Unmade Bed, I braced myself for a hate read.
Not because Marche’s prose isn’t clean and readable — if occasionally a titch pretentious — but because I sighed at the subtitle: “The Messy Truth about Men and Women in the 21st Century.”
Before I finished the first page, however, Marche had nearly won me over. He opened the book by pondering what possibly could a man have to add to the current feminist discourse. Turns out, it’s a lot. The book blends cultural critique (Marche covers the well-worn ground of the anti-intellectualism of the Internet outrage cycle) and personal memoir (he shares the intimate moments of the birth of his child/children, post-baby sex and his father’s death). The Unmade Bed is also poignant, thought-provoking and a necessary addition to a cultural moment where the Western world is grappling with the biggest shift in gender relations in human history. As March notes, progress for women is severely unequal across the globe and between the classes. His focus is instead on the wealthier, developed world, where “we are entering an intimate wave of feminism, a wave that will have to include men, both as subjects and as participants.”
The book’s public hook is his own relationship with the woman in his life: he is the 21st century man, who gave up a tenure-track job in New York City to move back to Canada so his wife, Sarah Fulford, could become the editor-in-chief of Toronto Life magazine.
Fulford herself appears in the book, not just in the personal narrative but also with the salient footnotes she adds throughout the text, checking some of Marche’s more questionable assertions. My favourite came when Marche lamented how stereotypical male writers like Philip Roth really want to be Alice Munro, because men write “books that sting” and women “write books that soothe.” To which Fulford addends, “Alice Munro stories sting too. They can be devastating, no?”
Though the premise alone could make eyes roll — why, in 2017, is it even a thing when a man puts his ambitions aside for a woman? — the truth is it is still a thing in 2017. As much as Marche insists it’s common in his upper-middle-class circle for men to stay at home or for women to have big jobs, the echo of what he argues has become a “hollow patriarchy” still means that men with babies get the “aren’t you a great dad” smile. The man who is willing to pack up his life for his female partner’s big dreams is still rare enough to raise eyebrows outside the latte-sipping set.
There will be those who will toss the book aside because it’s about a certain class of privileged urbanites, because it’s too heteronormative or exists almost entirely in a gender binary. Some will stop at the sometimes rose-tinted view Marche takes of the state of womanhood in 2017. (For example, in a lengthy defence of pornography, he argues “Modern pornography exists in worlds where women have power, exactly where they cannot be objectified in real life.” His point being that the freer the society, the darker the porn and its deleterious effects on sexuality being greatly exaggerated. A point with which I wholeheartedly agree, although we only need to look at the ridiculous treatment Kellyanne Conway has received to see no matter how high a woman rises, she can still be little more than an object in the public eye.)
But putting this book down because its premise feels too privileged would be a mistake, especially for anyone trying to navigate the moment’s very public gender politics in the private intimacy of her interpersonal relationships. It isn’t easy to build a life with someone, to set aside the individual and become a “we.” It’s hard before kids, and Marche shows just how much harder it can become after.
Marche adds a necessary nuance to the gendered baggage we all carry whether we want to or not: he’s right to argue that if we refactor the feminine, we can’t simply demonize the masculine. It’s not good for our boys — who are struggling in classrooms and with mental health — nor is it based in sound science or sociology. Gender identity is not the pure construct the second wave would have you believe.
Dismissing men’s rights groups and the reddit Red Pill swallowers of the world as whiners who need a grip, Marche also points out that change is not as simple as hashtag activism: “Men and women living together as equals is not easy; it reveals new asymmetries rather than destroys old ones.”
I can’t count the glasses of wine I’ve downed with women wondering why men are so incapable of finding the laundry basket with their dirty socks — something Fulford also notes. Or the number of times women tell me how “lucky” I am that my partner cooks as much as I do (though perhaps less frequently, does the dishes.)
Between biology and sociology, home life is where the gender wars (a term Marche eviscerates) are the fiercest for both sexes. It can be even more difficult for women who’ve rightly or wrongly internalized a variance of feminism that suggests a man is merely an anchor on her ambitions.
It was how I felt nine years ago when I met my now common-law partner. I told him I couldn’t possibly want a relationship: I had these big plans and no man fit into them outside of the occasional romp.
He — along with my mom and my friends — still loves to tease me about this. I suspect a column I wrote as an undergraduate proclaiming I would never marry will make an appearance at our wedding, should we ever decide to shell out the cash to make it official.
When we met, I had yet to internalize the Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote Fulford cites in one of her footnotes, “find a partner who values your career as much as his own.” But then I was 20, he was 19 (the same age Marche writes he and Fulford were when they met) and we had a lot to learn about being a “we.”
I think we have things down now, though I did recently send a mean text about leaving clothes and those bloody socks all over the living room when I knew he was having a hard day at work, and it spiralled into the too-common working couple fight about who really does more in relationships.
Fulford notes that she has vowed to never pick a fight over those wayward socks because it’s not worth it. She’s right that I need to let the socks stuffed between the couch cushions go — especially because I did find the man who values my career as much as his.
I tossed him a copy of The Unmade Bed when I started reading it, and as he thumbed through it he looked up and laughed. “I’d happily quit work and raise kids for your job if you made more than me, but you’re a reporter. So that ain’t gonna happen.”
I know he really would if he could because, ten years younger than Marche, he’s of the generation where it’s even more common for the woman to make more and work more. Marche deftly details how huge this shift, in just two generations, has been.
My grandmother, a 1950s housewife, used to tell me I would “never keep a house or a husband if I couldn’t learn to make a proper hospital corner.” Once, just once, I got the nerve to shoot back, “I’ll find a man to make the bed for me.” And I did. These days, even if I make the effort, he’ll come home and say, “thanks for trying,” take the bed apart, and remake it tighter, cozier and more neatly in a fraction of the time. I was genuinely intrigued to learn who makes the Unmade Bed in Marche and Fulford’s home — we don’t find out for sure, but we do learn Fulford worries about it and Marche wants us all to let go and love domestic chaos.
We also learn that it doesn’t really matter, because in the complexities of a 21st century partnership, women may still scrub more tubs and dishes, but the modern man is no less engaged in kids homework or after-school activities.
To dismiss Marche’s book as “mansplaining feminism” would be to say men don’t have a role in the hard work that remains. It may take another generation for men to start worrying about sending sympathy cards and kids’ birthday presents, And though the intervening moments will be dirty, men helped make this mess. It’s only right they help clean it up.