Harrison Butker is flat-out wrong about the history of gender roles
Women aren't "naturally" better at raising children, and men aren't "naturally" better at working outside the home.
I’m a little late to last week’s party, but I couldn’t not write about football player Harrison Butker’s speech. He talked about gender roles—one of the things I obsess about in this newsletter. And he’s a football player. My big guilty pleasure is football, even if it’s owned by billionaires.
If you don’t feel like watching what he said, basically he gave a graduation speech at a Catholic university arguing that women have been told “diabolical lies” and their main job in life is to be a wife and mother. He said that a man’s job is to be a provider and father, while being “unapologetic in [our] masculinity, fighting against ... cultural emasculation.”
There have been many good takes already. I really like
’s post “Harrison Butker and what men fear” (more on that in a minute).What I would like to add is that Butker is completely wrong about history and what “traditional” gender roles are. What he said about men and women is not based in fact. It’s disinformation meant to convince people to buy into an outdated version of capitalist society, one that caused immense pain and suffering for those without political and economic power—just as capitalism continues to do today.
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Ideas about so-called “traditional” gender roles are only a couple hundred years old.
They were invented in the early days of capitalism in Western Europe to help large landowners and factory owners exploit workers. Before then, human societies were arranged in diverse ways, with varied gender roles and ideas about gender.
Writer and educator
writes:recently wrote in a comment on one of my posts:“For example, the culture of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) ... enshrined extensive rights and leadership roles for women in their Constitution (one that influenced the creation of our own, as well as women’s suffrage movements in the 1800s). The culture of the Diné (Navajo) ... was one in which four, not two, gender roles were respected, and all were seen as integral to the whole.”
“Before colonization—and we're only talking 200 years ago—my own Indigenous ancestors distinguished gender roles, but not in a way that put all the emotional and caring labor onto women, or deprived men of culturally accepted ways to express fear, joy, grief, or vulnerability.”
Even in indigenous Europe, gender roles weren’t so “traditional.” Feminist scholar Silvia Federici writes:
“In the [European] feudal village ... all work contributed to the family’s sustenance. Women worked in the fields, in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden. Their domestic activities were not devalued and did not involve different social relations from those of men, as they would later, in [capitalism] when housework would cease to be viewed as real work."
These are just some of the countless examples of gender roles even more “traditional” than those Butker argued for. Again, what Butker is trying to do isn’t based in fact. It’s propaganda. Just like the tongue-in-cheek misogyny of influencer Andrew Tate and U.S. Senator Josh Hawley’s crusade to restore “manhood.”
The rich and powerful have a financial interest in pushing these outdated, made-up ideas about gender.
They want to continue hoarding economic and political power—and they need the rest of us divided against each other to do so. That’s why the same guys promoting “traditional” gender roles often also spew racist and homophobic hate. They want us punching down at those below us in the economic pecking order rather than rightfully blaming them or the system of capitalism itself. As law professor Ian Haney López says, “The way concentrated wealth rules a democracy is by promoting social division … Money power dominates people power by making sure that people can’t come together.”
(By the way, Butker isn’t just a rich football player. He also owns a “holding company” that owns other businesses producing energy drinks, menswear, and more.)
writes:“Butker and countless other far-wing provocateurs try every day to harness patriarchy and our fears about our own masculinity to bring men into the fascist fold. Whether it’s talk about emasculation, or overtly telling men to not be gay, the insecurities programmed into us by patriarchy and traditional masculinity are buttons the far-right tries to press to push us towards being willing foot-soldiers for all sorts of harmful, regressive, abusive ideas. They want us to be scared we’re not manly enough, and they also want us to believe that the way to be a man is to dominate and oppress others.”
The rich and powerful also don’t want to pay more taxes to fund health care, education, welfare, and other public programs that care for people. Since the Industrial Revolution in England—when the so-called “traditional” gender roles Butker talked about were invented out of thin air—capitalism has relied on women to do unpaid, unappreciated care work at home.
More and more women entering the workforce over the past few decades has created what feminist scholar Nancy Fraser calls a “crisis of care.” There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to work a full-time job (or more than one), raise children, and care for the home. Working people—men, women, everyone—are increasingly stressed, burned out, and strapped for time.
That’s why movements like the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Green New Deal and mutual efforts around the world are so important. They are fighting to tax the rich and increase public investment, in an effort to create—in the words of PowerSwitch Action executive director Lauren Jacobs—a “sustainable economy where all work is valued.”
And that’s why rich and powerful people like Butker are getting louder and prouder with their backwards ideas. They don’t’ want people who work for a living—the majority of people—getting the idea that we’re on the same team. And they’re more than willing to tell “diabolical lies” to do so.
Now, a question for the comments below: How did you feel about Butker’s speech? What did you notice inside your body when you listened to/read it?
(P.S. If you become a paid subscriber for $5/month, you’ll get my weekly Friday Q&A posts about improving your relationship and friendships, plus the warm feeling of supporting my writing.)
I can personally attest. Not just from my spouse who is the most nurturing man alive—but from my parents AND my grandparents.
BOTH sets of grandparents! But especially my one grandpa, who was a Christian conservative and used to LITERALLY BRAG about how ‘your grandma never changed a diaper’ and ‘everyone thought I was a widower in this neighborhood at first because they only saw me outside hanging the sheets, never your grandma.’
Sure —there were more defined gender roles. But it wasn’t like they imagine for a lot of people because some men are simply very good at nurturing, and they enjoy it, and they always did it. They just make shit up again and again and again.
Amen.