After Ann Romney admits that she often raised six boys, not just her five sons, Hugo Schwyzer wonders if Mitt Romney’s latest attempt to gain likeability among voters simply perpetuates the myth that men are nothing more than overgrown boys.
Are we ready for a Peter Pan Presidency? Judging from one campaign ad, perhaps we should be.
Before looking at the ad, it’s important to note that contemporary beliefs about men are heavily influenced by a myth about their maturity. This myth of male weakness suggests that men, by virtue of being male, lack the capacity for self-control and self-reflection that women “naturally” possess. The myth takes many forms. Sometimes, it’s used to explain why guys can’t remain faithful; other times, it serves to justify sexual harassment. The common thread through all the manifestations of the myth: the reminder that we shouldn’t expect too much from men. After all, they’re really just overgrown boys.
One of the milder but no less pernicious aspects of the myth showed up again in a recent campaign spot for Mitt Romney, now the presumptive Republican nominee for president. In the video, the candidate’s wife Ann remarks: “I hate to say it, but often I had more than five sons, I had six sons. And he would be as mischievous and as naughty as the other boys.” This wasn’t an off-the-cuff comment. The Romney campaign, eager to humanize a candidate whom many regard as out-of-touch, chose to build an ad around the former Massachusetts governor’s capacity for immaturity. In doing so, the campaign was deliberately tapping into a new but increasingly familiar narrative about men and marriage.
As a child, I heard my mother, my aunts, my grandmothers, and my older female cousins say much the same thing about their current or former husbands that Ann Romney said about Mitt. “Husbands,” I remember one elderly female relative remarking, “are good for strong backs and entertainment.” People laughed when she said it (and when it was repeated, which was often), but the laughter from men and women alike was always tinged with pain. Men felt belittled even though some surely recognized a truth in what their wives and sisters were saying; for the women, it seemed there was an undercurrent of profound disappointment in their voices.
The idea that marriage often mimics a parent-child relationship isn’t new. Up until relatively recently, however, it was the wife who was depicted as the child. In Dickens’ David Copperfield, the title character’s first bride is the doomed “child-wife” Dora Spenlow, a young woman who prefers romps with her dog than time with her husband. Henrik Ibsen’s celebrated A Doll’s House features Nora, who—until her dramatic metamorphosis in the play’s final scenes—plays the part of a naughty girl to a censorious and patronizing husband. More recently, the iconic I Love Lucy left no doubt that in the Ricardo marriage, it was the ever-exasperated Ricky who was more consistently the grown-up.
Today’s television sitcoms—like today’s political ads—consistently portray the reverse: the husband as misbehaving boy. The exact origins of this shift are difficult to pinpoint (I like Barbara Ehrenreich’s theory that the publication of Playboy magazine, with the title’s nod to eternal puerility, had a lot to do with it), but it’s become a nearly universal phenomenon. Men’s Rights Activists and social conservatives tend to blame feminism for the widespread refusal of so many men to grow up. They theorize that women’s empowerment has left men without a specific role to play; in the absence of a safe and familiar niche, husbands simply leave the business of being a grown-up to their wives.
The theory that feminism has turned men into perpetual adolescents doesn’t help explain Ann Romney’s remark. The Romney marriage has hardly followed a modern egalitarian pattern. The couple married young, produced five children, and recently celebrated their 43rd wedding anniversary. As we all learned last week, Ann Romney has never worked outside the home, while Mitt has been (if nothing else) an apparently exemplary father and “provider.” The only place where there seems to be any confusion about the Romney family dynamics is over the question of whether Ann raised five boys—or six.
That the campaign sees boyish naughtiness and mischievousness as selling points for the GOP nominee says as much about our contemporary culture as it does about the Romneys. What it says is that we live in a culture that celebrates everlasting boyhood as never before. In an earlier era, there was a clear demarcation line between male child and male adult. While women remained perpetual “legal children,” under control of their fathers and husbands, boys eventually crossed a threshold into adulthood from which there was no turning back. (Some put that threshold later than others; the Athenians famously believed that only men over 30 could be counted as true grown-ups.) St. Paul famously wrote, “When I became a man, I put away childish things.” The Romneys apparently don’t agree with that definition.
The Romneys (or their media advisers) know that the new American man is defined by the defiant way he clings to childish things well into chronological adulthood. Thanks to the economy, more adult men than ever before are living at home, at least partly still dependent on their parents. But the failure to “put away childish things” goes beyond financial necessity. As Michael Kimmel points out in his brilliant Guyland, a wide variety of factors lead today’s young men to perpetuate their adolescence. Fewer and fewer are getting married, while those who do marry are marrying later—and, as we read and hear, more inclined than ever to act like sons to their wives.
I have no idea if Mitt Romney actually behaved like a sixth son to Ann. Whether he did or not, the attempt to portray him as an overgrown teenager seems to be a calculated attempt to appeal not to women—who may find juvenile behavior from their spouses exasperating—but to the male voters who are at the core of the Republican base. (Surveys show that Romney does much better among men than women.) If so, the ad reflects a remarkable cultural transformation. While there have always been men who wanted to stay boys forever, we’ve never seen perpetual puerility as a qualification for marriage, much less the presidency.
The old saying was that any boy could grow up to be president. The new version, thanks to Ann Romney: he should feel free to skip the growing up.
Hugo Schwyzer has taught history and gender studies at Pasadena City College since 1993, where he developed the college’s first courses on Men and Masculinity and Beauty and Body Image. A writer and speaker as well as a professor, Hugo lives with his wife, daughter, and six chinchillas in Los Angeles. Hugo blogs at his eponymous website and co-authored the recent autobiography of supermodel Carré Otis, Beauty, Disrupted.
Photo credit BU Interactive News/Flickr
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