Name: Gender Roles Are Flipping (w/ Richard Reeves)
Uploaded: 2025-02-17T13:00:35.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Gender Roles Are Flipping (w/ Richard Reeves)' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Gender Roles Are Flipping (w/ Richard Reeves)' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-17. Transcript available.

I think that sense that a lot of men have is that there isn't really a script
anymore
to follow, to manhood, to mature masculinity.
And I think that that's, in one way, that's for a good reason.
But the way I think about this is if you think about the script that my dad had
about being a breadwinner.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
Let's look at some previous scripts so we can examine those.
So my parents are a good example, born in the 40s, had the kids in the 1960s.
And then it was like my mom knew that she was mostly going to be the homemaker
and the mom.
She worked as well.
She was a nurse.
But my dad knew that he was going to be the breadwinner, the provider.
There was not a discussion about that.
There was no question about that.
So they had pretty clear roles.
Now, the problem with that, of course, was that the roles depended on the woman,
in this case my mom, being economically dependent on my dad.
Right, right.
That's the problem.
And that's the problem that the women's movement successfully, to a large
extent, set out to solve.
But my dad was also quite emotionally dependent on my mom, right, and vice
versa.
But I do think it was like it's a two-way street that was missing from the
analysis.
Anyway, we tore up these old scripts, right, and we said to women,
you don't have to be a housewife and mother anymore, or at least that's not
your only option.
You can be whatever you want to be.
You go, girl, right?
Be president.
Be an astronaut.
Be whatever.
Which is amazing.
Totally amazing.
That message of empowerment we sent to women.
So we tore up the old female script, provided a new one about empowerment and
independence and you go, girl.
We tore up the old male script, which is you're going to be the provider and
the protector.
We don't really have a new one.
We didn't replace it.
And so we're all improvising now.
So basically we've gone from having some kind of script to improvisation.
And that's incredibly difficult to do.
And so it's hard because the good news here is what's happened to women, right?
Nobody wants to roll back the economic gains of women.
But I think it's incredibly irresponsible and naive of us to think that that
doesn't have consequences for how we think about the role of men.
We've got to be able to think both of those thoughts at once.
It's good that women are gaining ground.
It is bad that men feel lost and purposeless.
And we have got to solve that problem as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think that's really cool information.
It's good to look at.
It's good to like.
And it's really, it makes perfect sense, right?
And it's like you want to have a reason, right?
And sometimes I think women, yes, they didn't have the access to money.
And in a capitalistic society, money is power, right?
But also I think there was a missing respect there, right?
There wasn't all, I think if women had been, if it had been totally respected,
the sacrifices that they made and the just intrinsic value of who they are as
mothers and as caretakers.
And as bridges of empathy and affection and as homemakers, no matter where they
are, whether they're in a home or whether they're in a conversation, you know,
just being able to have that ability to create peace.
I think if women had, if that had been more respected, then maybe they never
would have felt as much of a movement or as much of a desire to have so much of
a movement.
Because they had the power.
Right.
Yeah.
And the power.
And the money is the power.
Is the power.
And that's what that, that the women's movement had a huge fight about that
because there were some people in the women's movement saying, no, no, no.
We, there's, it's called the wages for housework movement, which was basically
what we need to do is pay women to do the traditional women's role.
Oh, that's a cool idea.
And that lost out.
That was a real idea?
Yeah.
Bring that up.
The wages for housework movement?
Yeah.
This is, there's a big split in the women's movement between the ones who are
saying we need to value care and value care work.
Yeah.
Like wages for housework.
And then there's another movement, which is like, actually you've got to be,
yeah, in the 1970s.
I never knew about this.
The wages for housework campaign was a 1970s international movement.
That demanded governments recognize the value of unpaid domestic labor
primarily performed by women.
Wow.
The founders were Sylvia Federici, Selma James, Marielsa Diacosta, and Bridget
Gautier.
Their goals were to change the dependency of domestic workers, reverse power
relations, and redistribute wealth.
Yeah.
Dude, that's fascinating.
That's another way, that's another way we could have gone, in theory at least,
right?
Right, right.
And I'm not saying that women didn't deserve to have all the jobs.
And whatever they wanted to do.
I'm just saying if there had been a different level of respect and some, yeah,
and this makes
perfect sense, and some financial equality, maybe they wouldn't have wanted
that.
I have no idea.
I'm just thinking.
No.
Well, this is a really interesting question because I now think we're at a
point where a
lot of men and women are feeling like, this isn't quite working.
We're trying to raise kids.
We're trying to form families.
We want to raise our own kids.
Right.
Both parents are so stressed out that they can't even have a relationship
anymore.
Right.
We want to stay together and be married.
We want to raise our own kids, by and large.
Right.
And we don't want to die of stress.
Right.
So one of the ways I think about this is like, you had this old family system,
right, which
was breadwinner father, homemaker mother.
And it was unfair in many ways, but it was also pretty stable and very clear
what everyone's
role is.
And it was pretty good for kids, right, because of that stability, when it
worked.
Right.
We've replaced that with a different model now where we don't want that
economic inequality.
So we're going to, both men and women are going to work.
That can create all kinds of stress.
And maybe that relationship is hard to sustain, which means it might end up
separating, which
is not good for kids.
Right.
And the rules aren't super clear.
You don't know who's going to be doing what.
You don't know who's getting certain things done.
You don't know.
The division of labor is not clear anyway.
And a division of labor, in other words, like being clear, like you do this, I
do this.
It's like an organized business, really.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like everybody knows that it makes more sense.
Like you're in charge of X, I'm in charge of Y.
So you get, you know, really good at X and I get good at Y, right?
And the interesting path we took instead was like, okay, women need to get into
the labor
market and have labor market power.
I think that was almost certainly the, I mean, that's the right.
I don't imagine a world where the wages for housework movement, like huge
government subsidies
to people who are staying at home was ever likely.
And there's all kinds of problems with that idea.
But it's an interesting idea, but thought behind it, which is, are we doing
enough to support
the people who want to raise their own kids?
The whole point of the women's movement wasn't to turn women into their fathers.
It was to give everybody more choice, right?
And we haven't achieved that yet because we haven't done the rest of it, which
is to change
the way the workplace works, to give more support to families.
I know you had JD Vance on, right?
And JD Vance has supported like a child tax credit to, which is seen as a left-wing
idea
to give more money to people who've got kids in the house.
Right.
And so that's, that's not wages for housework, but it's in the direction of, of
actually valuing
care through government subsidy.
But that has not been an idea that's been popular for a pretty long time.
Really?
Well, since the 70s, I would have been.
Yeah.
You're saying that.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Right.
So it's a similar idea.
It's not the same.
Yeah.
And it wouldn't be framed as wages for housework anymore.
And it certainly wouldn't be aimed just at women anymore.
Right.
It would be for families, et cetera.
But the idea that another way to go is to actually provide financial support,
like most European
countries do to parents who are at home and not just to parents who are in the
workplace.
That's an interesting discussion right now.
And I think as long as it doesn't become a call to go back, right, we're going
to help
women stay in the home.
Right.
Instead, it should be to help parents figure out for themselves.
And I'm a huge believer that actually fathers, fathers are doing so much more
than they were
in the past.
Right.
Fathers are doing so much more in the home, so much more childcare.
And dads are saying they want to do more.
Interestingly, now, men are more likely to say that having children is
important to them
than women are.
Yeah.
Men are more likely to say that getting married is important to them than women
are.
Wow.
Right.
And so that's a really interesting moment in history where if you've got this
stereotype
that it's like women who are obsessed with like getting married and having kids,
like,
not anymore.
It's now men who are saying that's a higher priority for them.
It's almost like men are coming to the, to bridge the gap there of like making
sh...
Because there always needs to be some...
One of the parties has to be, until we can get both of the parties to be
aligned, has to
be the one that wants to bring it back to let's have a family and move.
Yeah.
We have to do it.
It's like, it's how we're built.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
So we've had this massive economic change and then along it, alongside it, we've
had
this huge social change, which has been the economic rise of women, right?
And so it's no longer the case that women are now like looking for a man.
Gloria Steinem is a very famous feminist, still alive, from the 1970s.
I actually had a really cool meeting with her.
Really cool lady or not?
Yes.
Totally cool.
I've got to meet that lady.
She's amazing.
And she said, famously, she said, "The point of the women's movement is to make
marriage
a choice for women, not a necessity."
Ah.
Right?
Because women needed to get married before to, you know...
Right.
It was the only way who was going to pay for dinner.
Right.
To eat.
Not at a fancy restaurant.
Right.
Right.
And so the whole point is to make it a choice so that women have enough
economic power to
choose marriage rather than being forced into it.
She actually, this is a weird coda, but she actually just got married herself.
I think she's in her 90s now.
Wow.
She's so cool.
But she got married, partly because same-sex marriage is legal now, and because
she said
we've made enough progress that marriage...
She used to describe marriage as this patriarchal citadel, et cetera.
Here's the weird thing.
She got married to Christian Bale's father.
Wow.
Which I just find a bit random.
And he's British, isn't he?
Interesting.
No.
Is he?
I don't know.
I don't know either.
In 2066, the long single Steinem married for the first time in a Cherokee
ceremony in
Oklahoma.
So that was a while ago.
It was in 2000, right?
Her husband, entrepreneur and activist David Bale sadly died of lymphoma four
years later.
Wow.
So even in the end, even Gloria Steinem felt like it was okay to get married,
right?
We'd made enough progress.
Right.
Actually, marriage was no longer this kind of trap for women economically.
But it was a choice.
It was a choice.
And so, but of course, what that means is when it's a choice, there's a lot of
women that
might be like, "I choose not to marry you.
I might or might not have your kids, but we're now in this world where there's
a lot more freedom
of choice."
And of course, that is a great and wonderful thing.
But it's also created a huge amount of uncertainty, especially among men.
Like they just, I think a lot of men feel now that they've been told a bunch of
things
that they know they shouldn't be, uh, shouldn't be predator.
Shouldn't, you know, there's all, but right, don't do this.
Don't do this.
You can't peep in time.
You can't.
And quite right too.
Right.
But there's no, like, I sometimes think that we had a long list of don'ts for
men.
Right.
Right.
But not very many do's.
Yeah.
Where's the list of to do's for men now?
For sure.
And it used to be that, yeah, almost every man was get, you weren't guaranteed
a wife,
but everybody's going to need to pair up because the way that the, the, the
script was put together,
you needed each other because, um, you needed someone to be in the home.
You need someone to be the breadwinner.
Right.
The script was there.
Yeah.
You had to partner up.
So figure it out and let's move on.
Let's move forward in the world.
Exactly.
And what I'm afraid of now is that there are some more reactionary forces,
voices saying
the way to, to actually for men to find purpose is to go back.
Because it's very recently that there was a world where men felt purpose, which
was the
world we just escaped from where women were economically dependent on men.
And so I could totally understand why this is happening, where people are
saying, well,
we used to know what our role was when women were economically reliant on us.
Well, first of all, we ain't going back, there's no switch.
You could turn that even if you wanted to.
Yeah.
And we don't want to, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing more to help
men move
forward and actually having a bit of empathy for the fact that this is a
difficult moment,
a difficult transition for men.
And so rather than kind of pointing fingers at them, we should maybe offering
them the occasional
helping hand.
And I think that lack of empathy and understanding and awareness of the genuine
suffering of many of
our men has created a huge vacuum in our culture and in our society.
And we need to fill it fast.
Otherwise, we're going to lose more and more of our men.
And we'll be right back.
Wow.
Very true.

Gender Roles Are Flipping (w/ Richard Reeves)

I think that sense that a lot of men have is that there isn't really a script
anymore
to follow, to manhood, to mature masculinity.
And I think that that's, in one way, that's for a good reason.
But the way I think about this is if you think about the script that my dad had
about being a breadwinner.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
Let's look at some previous scripts so we can examine those.
So my parents are a good example, born in the 40s, had the kids in the 1960s.
And then it was like my mom knew that she was mostly going to be the homemaker
and the mom.
She worked as well.
She was a nurse.
But my dad knew that he was going to be the breadwinner, the provider.
There was not a discussion about that.
There was no question about that.
So they had pretty clear roles.
Now, the problem with that, of course, was that the roles depended on the woman,
in this case my mom, being economically dependent on my dad.
Right, right.
That's the problem.
And that's the problem that the women's movement successfully, to a large
extent, set out to solve.
But my dad was also quite emotionally dependent on my mom, right, and vice
versa.
But I do think it was like it's a two-way street that was missing from the
analysis.
Anyway, we tore up these old scripts, right, and we said to women,
you don't have to be a housewife and mother anymore, or at least that's not
your only option.
You can be whatever you want to be.
You go, girl, right?
Be president.
Be an astronaut.
Be whatever.
Which is amazing.
Totally amazing.
That message of empowerment we sent to women.
So we tore up the old female script, provided a new one about empowerment and
independence and you go, girl.
We tore up the old male script, which is you're going to be the provider and
the protector.
We don't really have a new one.
We didn't replace it.
And so we're all improvising now.
So basically we've gone from having some kind of script to improvisation.
And that's incredibly difficult to do.
And so it's hard because the good news here is what's happened to women, right?
Nobody wants to roll back the economic gains of women.
But I think it's incredibly irresponsible and naive of us to think that that
doesn't have consequences for how we think about the role of men.
We've got to be able to think both of those thoughts at once.
It's good that women are gaining ground.
It is bad that men feel lost and purposeless.
And we have got to solve that problem as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think that's really cool information.
It's good to look at.
It's good to like.
And it's really, it makes perfect sense, right?
And it's like you want to have a reason, right?
And sometimes I think women, yes, they didn't have the access to money.
And in a capitalistic society, money is power, right?
But also I think there was a missing respect there, right?
There wasn't all, I think if women had been, if it had been totally respected,
the sacrifices that they made and the just intrinsic value of who they are as
mothers and as caretakers.
And as bridges of empathy and affection and as homemakers, no matter where they
are, whether they're in a home or whether they're in a conversation, you know,
just being able to have that ability to create peace.
I think if women had, if that had been more respected, then maybe they never
would have felt as much of a movement or as much of a desire to have so much of
a movement.
Because they had the power.
Right.
Yeah.
And the power.
And the money is the power.
Is the power.
And that's what that, that the women's movement had a huge fight about that
because there were some people in the women's movement saying, no, no, no.
We, there's, it's called the wages for housework movement, which was basically
what we need to do is pay women to do the traditional women's role.
Oh, that's a cool idea.
And that lost out.
That was a real idea?
Yeah.
Bring that up.
The wages for housework movement?
Yeah.
This is, there's a big split in the women's movement between the ones who are
saying we need to value care and value care work.
Yeah.
Like wages for housework.
And then there's another movement, which is like, actually you've got to be,
yeah, in the 1970s.
I never knew about this.
The wages for housework campaign was a 1970s international movement.
That demanded governments recognize the value of unpaid domestic labor
primarily performed by women.
Wow.
The founders were Sylvia Federici, Selma James, Marielsa Diacosta, and Bridget
Gautier.
Their goals were to change the dependency of domestic workers, reverse power
relations, and redistribute wealth.
Yeah.
Dude, that's fascinating.
That's another way, that's another way we could have gone, in theory at least,
right?
Right, right.
And I'm not saying that women didn't deserve to have all the jobs.
And whatever they wanted to do.
I'm just saying if there had been a different level of respect and some, yeah,
and this makes
perfect sense, and some financial equality, maybe they wouldn't have wanted
that.
I have no idea.
I'm just thinking.
No.
Well, this is a really interesting question because I now think we're at a
point where a
lot of men and women are feeling like, this isn't quite working.
We're trying to raise kids.
We're trying to form families.
We want to raise our own kids.
Right.
Both parents are so stressed out that they can't even have a relationship
anymore.
Right.
We want to stay together and be married.
We want to raise our own kids, by and large.
Right.
And we don't want to die of stress.
Right.
So one of the ways I think about this is like, you had this old family system,
right, which
was breadwinner father, homemaker mother.
And it was unfair in many ways, but it was also pretty stable and very clear
what everyone's
role is.
And it was pretty good for kids, right, because of that stability, when it
worked.
Right.
We've replaced that with a different model now where we don't want that
economic inequality.
So we're going to, both men and women are going to work.
That can create all kinds of stress.
And maybe that relationship is hard to sustain, which means it might end up
separating, which
is not good for kids.
Right.
And the rules aren't super clear.
You don't know who's going to be doing what.
You don't know who's getting certain things done.
You don't know.
The division of labor is not clear anyway.
And a division of labor, in other words, like being clear, like you do this, I
do this.
It's like an organized business, really.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like everybody knows that it makes more sense.
Like you're in charge of X, I'm in charge of Y.
So you get, you know, really good at X and I get good at Y, right?
And the interesting path we took instead was like, okay, women need to get into
the labor
market and have labor market power.
I think that was almost certainly the, I mean, that's the right.
I don't imagine a world where the wages for housework movement, like huge
government subsidies
to people who are staying at home was ever likely.
And there's all kinds of problems with that idea.
But it's an interesting idea, but thought behind it, which is, are we doing
enough to support
the people who want to raise their own kids?
The whole point of the women's movement wasn't to turn women into their fathers.
It was to give everybody more choice, right?
And we haven't achieved that yet because we haven't done the rest of it, which
is to change
the way the workplace works, to give more support to families.
I know you had JD Vance on, right?
And JD Vance has supported like a child tax credit to, which is seen as a left-wing
idea
to give more money to people who've got kids in the house.
Right.
And so that's, that's not wages for housework, but it's in the direction of, of
actually valuing
care through government subsidy.
But that has not been an idea that's been popular for a pretty long time.
Really?
Well, since the 70s, I would have been.
Yeah.
You're saying that.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Right.
So it's a similar idea.
It's not the same.
Yeah.
And it wouldn't be framed as wages for housework anymore.
And it certainly wouldn't be aimed just at women anymore.
Right.
It would be for families, et cetera.
But the idea that another way to go is to actually provide financial support,
like most European
countries do to parents who are at home and not just to parents who are in the
workplace.
That's an interesting discussion right now.
And I think as long as it doesn't become a call to go back, right, we're going
to help
women stay in the home.
Right.
Instead, it should be to help parents figure out for themselves.
And I'm a huge believer that actually fathers, fathers are doing so much more
than they were
in the past.
Right.
Fathers are doing so much more in the home, so much more childcare.
And dads are saying they want to do more.
Interestingly, now, men are more likely to say that having children is
important to them
than women are.
Yeah.
Men are more likely to say that getting married is important to them than women
are.
Wow.
Right.
And so that's a really interesting moment in history where if you've got this
stereotype
that it's like women who are obsessed with like getting married and having kids,
like,
not anymore.
It's now men who are saying that's a higher priority for them.
It's almost like men are coming to the, to bridge the gap there of like making
sh...
Because there always needs to be some...
One of the parties has to be, until we can get both of the parties to be
aligned, has to
be the one that wants to bring it back to let's have a family and move.
Yeah.
We have to do it.
It's like, it's how we're built.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
So we've had this massive economic change and then along it, alongside it, we've
had
this huge social change, which has been the economic rise of women, right?
And so it's no longer the case that women are now like looking for a man.
Gloria Steinem is a very famous feminist, still alive, from the 1970s.
I actually had a really cool meeting with her.
Really cool lady or not?
Yes.
Totally cool.
I've got to meet that lady.
She's amazing.
And she said, famously, she said, "The point of the women's movement is to make
marriage
a choice for women, not a necessity."
Ah.
Right?
Because women needed to get married before to, you know...
Right.
It was the only way who was going to pay for dinner.
Right.
To eat.
Not at a fancy restaurant.
Right.
Right.
And so the whole point is to make it a choice so that women have enough
economic power to
choose marriage rather than being forced into it.
She actually, this is a weird coda, but she actually just got married herself.
I think she's in her 90s now.
Wow.
She's so cool.
But she got married, partly because same-sex marriage is legal now, and because
she said
we've made enough progress that marriage...
She used to describe marriage as this patriarchal citadel, et cetera.
Here's the weird thing.
She got married to Christian Bale's father.
Wow.
Which I just find a bit random.
And he's British, isn't he?
Interesting.
No.
Is he?
I don't know.
I don't know either.
In 2066, the long single Steinem married for the first time in a Cherokee
ceremony in
Oklahoma.
So that was a while ago.
It was in 2000, right?
Her husband, entrepreneur and activist David Bale sadly died of lymphoma four
years later.
Wow.
So even in the end, even Gloria Steinem felt like it was okay to get married,
right?
We'd made enough progress.
Right.
Actually, marriage was no longer this kind of trap for women economically.
But it was a choice.
It was a choice.
And so, but of course, what that means is when it's a choice, there's a lot of
women that
might be like, "I choose not to marry you.
I might or might not have your kids, but we're now in this world where there's
a lot more freedom
of choice."
And of course, that is a great and wonderful thing.
But it's also created a huge amount of uncertainty, especially among men.
Like they just, I think a lot of men feel now that they've been told a bunch of
things
that they know they shouldn't be, uh, shouldn't b