When Do Women Get Cared For (by Men)? Introducing Hetero-Insistence

As women, we are the caregivers and the holders. But we are radically uncared for and unheld ourselves. It’s not fair: and, to a large extent, men can fix it.

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I am writing tired. Two weeks ago, my husband underwent a long-anticipated, much-needed, but fairly brutal, surgery. Everything, I’m pleased to say, went well, and he was out of hospital in the anticipated timeframe and has been recovering well at home with less pain than we were expecting. Thanks to invaluable help and support—some paid, some unpaid—I was able to be there for him in the recovery room and visit him every day, as well as pick him up from hospital. Since the surgery took place in the middle of the school holidays (we have a five-year-old), and I don’t drive (the hospital was an hour away), none of this was a given. I’m giving thanks for the material support of friends and neighbors, as well as the moral support of our far-flung family members (in Australia and Alaska). We received gifts of food and groceries I was able to turn into meal after meal after meal. I made four big batches of soup and three meals a day, every day. I was never not doing dishes.

But. As I witnessed how seamlessly and automatically I and others kicked into caregiving power mode, centering around my lovely husband, I couldn’t help but wonder: how often do women get this kind of support and care from men? Regardless of my own expectation that I would indeed receive comparable care from my (again, lovely—and, I should add, attentive and responsible) husband, were I in a comparable position, I’m aware I am in the minority: hetero-exceptionalism is no antidote to structural injustice. And the hetero-pessimism I find persuasive deserves a “yes, and” coda: men who fail to care, and want to remain in relationships with women, should be held responsible for their deficits and called upon to do better. Call it hetero-insistence. It’s an idea I myself once struggled with.

I’ve been married for fifteen years but, once upon a time, I was in another long-term relationship with a man. We lived together briefly. Both of us were ambitious students with similar goals and plans—we bonded over our logic textbook; he got me into computer science. He was a gentle, smart, and in many ways lovely, person. I would love to say that his absolute inability to offer me any concrete form of care became a sticking point in our relationship, but his failures on this score somehow barely even registered. I cooked for him; S didn’t cook for me. He never even so much as made me a piece of toast or a bowl of cereal. I cared for him when he got sick; this care was not reciprocated. One time, when I was felled with the ‘flu in bed, I asked him to bring me a buttered bagel. He burnt the bagel and put it on a plate with a pat of butter on the side, a bit of grease paper still attached to it. He said he didn’t know how I liked it.

Fellas, if in doubt, go heavy. Butter—and don’t burn—the goddamned bagel.

Image credit: Getty Images

At the time, I found this merely amusing and slightly annoying, but didn’t think too much about it. The crucial point, in our relationship, was that he took my ambitions seriously. He valued my mind and intelligence. He wanted me to succeed in philosophy, and in general.

I am here now, knowing what I know, to tell you that wanting women to succeed doesn’t mean shit unless you are prepared to materially support her—especially as a man who has children with a woman (something we were admittedly highly averse to at that point in our early twenties).

I now know, and have written extensively about, men’s failures to provide care for the home and their children within heterosexual households. For a man and a woman who have children together, he will do less than half of the childrearing and domestic labor that she does—a figure which hasn’t budged in twenty-five years—even when they both work full-time. There is one situation where their household labor will begin to approach parity: when she works full-time and he is unemployed. Even then the operative word is “approach.” She will still do more, on average. And some studies have even suggested that, when women become higher earners, they are expected to compensate for their increased socio-economic status by doing more care labor by their male partners. (And poor him, he gets anxious.)

These statistics and the broader structural injustice they represent are well known and highly interrogated, including by yours truly. Still, what remains unsaid and perhaps unsayable is that, when it comes to caring for your partner, women are likely to receive far less than would be reciprocal.

This happens both in big situations and on the regular. On the former score, men are more likely to leave their female partners when she develops a heart condition, as compared with the reverse scenario. (Although the original finding—that when women get sick, men scarper in droves—turned out to be more nuanced due to a coding error.) Similarly, statistics show that, at the point in life when most people begin to need routine care—old age—many more women are alone, whereas men tend to be cohabitating (with female partners, in the majority of cases, as well as other family members). Of course, women’s greater longevity has something to do with this. But the trend begins at an age that suggests the longevity gap does not solely explain it: men are getting more care than they give in general over their lifetimes.

I suspect this is true on a smaller scale too—though I struggled to find studies about this, since it seems to be a question researchers have not been asking. When it comes to who gets brought a plate of food when they are working hard or late at home, or just feel a bit poorly, I suspect women are doing the providing, and men are on the receiving end, in the majority of cases. And although I’m fortunate, when I travel, to come home to a reasonably tidy home and neatly folded laundry, how many other women can say the same? This isn’t a question of a quid pro quo: it’s a question of basic fairness—and historical reparations.

Many researchers and writers, including the excellent Eve Rodsky and Gemma Hartley, have broken ground on exposing and developing practical solutions to men’s caregiving deficits when it comes to care for their home and children. But have we required men (I nearly wrote “asked”) to give as good as they get when it comes to caring for their female partners?

I cannot help but wonder if the huge proliferation of the self-care industry for women owes something to the feeling of being fundamentally unheld and uncared for by the men with whom, again, statistically, many of us co-habitate. There have been brilliant explorations and defenses of self-care—which can be traced to Audre Lorde’s dictum that caring for oneself is a political act—and also brilliant critiques—such as Pooja Lakshmin’s call to cast aside the bubble bath and crystals in search of more meaningful alternatives. I have a lot of time for all of these perspectives. And still, I can’t help but feel that, often, in order to feel truly cared for, other people need to see us and hold us and support our basic needs materially: making us soup, bringing us a bowl of soup, buttering our goddamn bagel.

Community care, and the care of women by women (as well as non-binary folks), is surely part of the solution here. Women who are in intimate relationships with one another, as well as deep and sustaining friendships, make up for a lot of this lack in ways that are deeply healing. And yet, and yet, and yet. I don’t want to let men off the hook here either. I want men to be held to the same, high standards of caregiving as the rest of us. I want them to be making soup for their family members and friends in need, and even just on a daily basis.

It can feel like a lot to ask, I know. I have struggled with this myself. It is easy to feel, in the misogynistic hellscape that is the world as we know it, that a straight man should get credit not only for not being an asshole but for being gentle and kind and generally decent in his demeanor and behavior. Hell, it’s easy to feel relief that he’s not an abuser or a rapist—plenty of his counterparts are, sadly. But I think this is where hetero-insistence should come to the fore: we can, must insist on better. We can, must insist on true and full equality. We are often a long way from there now. We will only get there by not stopping short of demanding what we deserve. And realizing, hard as it can be, that we do deserve reciprocity.

To my readers who are women: can you think of examples where you are getting less than you give to men, specifically? Are you up for insisting? I am also curious to hear from men and other folks who can see room for improvement in their own lives, their own practice. There should be no shame in recognizing one’s own failures here, given the way social scripts set us on the wrong path, oftentimes. Let’s just try to get and do better, looking forward, as needed.