The "traditional family" financial structure is back, thanks to Gen Z

[marmar]

The “traditional family” financial structure is back, thanks to Gen Z
Younger men want to return to older times — but we shouldn't forget why we left those behind

By Katie Gatti Tassin
Podcaster and author
Published June 10, 2025 5:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) Two seemingly disparate topics dominated media during the 2024 presidential election: gender roles (the male loneliness epidemic; tradwives) and the economy (the cost of living or, its shorthand, eggs). But these threads might have been weaving a single narrative all along: The renewed fixation on traditional gender roles was a canary in the late capitalist coal mine, warning that the neoliberal era’s social contract was leaking noxious gas.

As of 2024, almost half of Republican men and one-third of Republican women believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” a cultural prescription that’s doubled in popularity since just 2022, in part due to the grim outlooks of disillusioned young people. This vision was particularly seductive for young men, who voted for Trump in record numbers: Gen Z men report regressive gender views (like “a man who stays home with his children is less of a man”) at more than twice the rate of their baby boomer counterparts. This context makes otherwise unobjectionable family-friendly proposals — like that of a $5,000 baby bonus — seem more sinister, meager attempts at restoring the single-earner, single-caregiver family structure associated with a bygone era of American prosperity and dominance.

....(snip)....

The last time gender’s cold war erupted into a battle fought on such explicit terms was around 50 years ago. Two years after Silvia Federici published her seminal work "Wages Against Housework," a woman named Terry Martin Hekker took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to bemoan the state of homemaking — not because she wasn’t being compensated for her time and labor, as second-wave feminists like Federici suggested she ought to be, but because she felt too few women were choosing to do it anyway. Examining household income trends, she muses, “I calculate I am less than eight years away from being the last housewife in the country.” Betty Friedan, avert your eyes.

....(snip)....

This conflation of gender orthodoxy with American prosperity is popular for a frustratingly simple reason: A politics which refuses to engage with a rigorous economic analysis in the face of parabolic wealth and income inequality has no choice but to attribute the creeping void of American precarity to cultural explanations instead. In other words: Do the gender roles again, a growing contingent of Americans seems to believe, and the prosperity will return! In this accounting, feminism made women selfish and undesirable, men no longer exhibit sufficient “masculine energy,” and the result is .. wage stagnation? ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/10/the-traditional-family-financial-structure-is-back-thanks-to-gen-z/

[Walleye]

1. Honestly, I don't care what younger men think or feel. Sorry.

They have been catered to disproportionately in my opinion. Traditional marriage is designed for the benefit of the man, we know that of course they want to go back to it. Also, they hate housework. Who doesn’t. They think they can just manhandle their wives into doing their domestic work for them. There are so many good men who try to do the right thing. Why are we letting these hotheads run everything. As far as voting, they will vote against us every chance they get

[Lithos]

2. Fragile male egos are back, baby!

They forget, fragile male egos were also in play during the height of the great depression and the various failed economic systems before that. The great economy was a product of the rise of equality and diversity.

Stupid gits.

[Lovie777]

3. What kind of bullshit is this?...................

[CrispyQ]

4. Apparently these young men are too stupid or gullible to realize that going back won't include

the wages they'll need to support a family, much less to buy a half a million dollar starter home & save for college for your kids.

Maybe the DNC should be more worried about voters like me instead of all the handwringing on how to appeal to these young men. I'm sick of this attitude that women can always take the back seat cuz who else are you going to vote for & they have a point, but I can opt out of donations & GOTV. The criticism of the Harris campaign after the election from all quarters of the Party pissed me the fuck off. I'm still mad. I thought she pulled off an almost flawless campaign & did it in three months.

[slightlv]

7. And I'm sick and tired of the old "too emotional" trope.

Maybe if we started to get really violent during "that time of the month" people might sit up and take notice. As it is, male emotionalism is the default mode and called "unemotional". I say bullcrap on that. Male emotionalism is made up of testosterone... which produces waves of adrenalin rushes and moves towards violence. I'm much rather have an emotional outbreak that holds up cooperation and understanding as it's rallying points, instead of the male outbreak of whining and fisticuffs. One is productive; the other isn't. And I think we've seen more than enough of it.

But those voters whom the reporters and pundits interviewed after the election stated openly and unashamedly that they'd never vote for a woman president, no matter how good she was. We may eventually come to a reckoning with racism. But I don't think we'll ever come to a reckoning over misogyny. The hatred towards women is too inbred world-over. Lysistrata is what we should have been doing all along, since trump's first admin... and we should be deepening it and holding strong during this 2nd and more dangerous admin. The men think we have to much power? I'd love for the women of the world to show them they've not seen anything yet.

And I agree with you, CrispyQ, in your desire to see the party pay more attention to us... as women, and as progressives. We always get shoved to the back of the line, our heads petted, and told there are higher priorities at this moment... no matter how loudly we scream. They did it until we did see RvW ripped from us. They're doing it now as we see states turning against same-sex marriage. And they did it to us... and everyone else... who was screaming to reform the SCOTUS. Enough is enough!

[chouchou]

5. Yes Sir! We woman can hardly wait to be in the house all day and night and day and night and day but, ...

...especially be fucked in many, many, many ways. ( Not this chick)

[valleyrogue]

6. It isn't "back," and it isn't "traditional."

The 1950s "nuclear family" was an aberration.

The fact is more and more women are rejecting marriage and kids because they simply don't want them. The economy has nothing to do with it. More than a few young men are pissed off because they aren't getting the sex and the free chores around the house like their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did.

Just because many men "want" it back doesn't mean they will EVER get it. They won't--ever.

The ship sailed fifty, sixty years ago. The economy won't allow it anyway.

[slightlv]

8. That nuclear family was not only aberration... it was fantasy myth even then. nt