When she earns more, men aim to please

Brian Alexander • E-mail

Derrick Hayes’s wife, an oncology nurse, makes twice the money he does in his job as a juvenile corrections officer in Columbus, Ga.

And he since she brings home much of the bacon, he wants to make sure he’s offering her some perks too. He leaves affectionate notes around the house for her and tries to keep the house tidy. And he wants to make sure he shines in one special area.

Since she is “handling certain areas of the relationship” like making most of the money, he said, “you’ve got to handle your business.” By “business,” Hayes means sex. “You’ve got to be creative. You’ve got to be good!"

As more and more women in the U.S. out earn the men in their lives, or become the sole breadwinners, men are trying to figure out how they fit into the relationship, including in the bedroom.

The old cliché that men would or should feel emasculated by earning less, or none at all, does not seem to hold, but it does affect sexual lives and some men, especially men who straddle generations, do feel a sense of vague discomfort, not about sex, but about what, exactly, their role is supposed to be.

Hayes, 39, says how much his wife makes doesn't make her any more or less desirable to him, but he feels an internal pressure on himself, an attitude reflected in the newly-released “Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation.”

"If you are weak in one area, you have to be strong in others,” he says.

New York comedian Dave Rosner is dating a physician who makes far more money than he makes. Rosner also happens to be an officer in the Marine Corps Reserve with wartime deployments under his belt, so he’s certainly attuned to macho culture.

He makes a conscious decision to compartmentalize and not mix economics and sex, he explained. “I don’t sit around saying, ‘Oh, I don’t make as money as you do, so I can’t take you to a nice restaurant.’”

Giving back
Fellow New Yorker Steven Lowell used to work at AIG making a good living before the economic implosion. Now he works for a small, Web-based start-up that’s financed “on a shoe-string.” His wife, meanwhile, works for a major New York City museum and provides the lion’s share of the couple’s income. He’d like to make more, naturally, but he’s happy with the situation as it is.

“It has affected our sex life,” he said of the recent turnabout. “It’s made it better.” It’s better he said, because he has adopted Hayes’ strategy. “I’ve never said this to her, but I try to provide that sexual feeling for her to give back for what she does for me with her work.”

If this sort of thing sounds like something June Cleaver would have said if June Cleaver could have ever said such a thing about Ward, it’s no accident. Research on sex and income disparity is very thin, but two social scientists who were then at Cornell University stated in a 2006 study called “Power and Dependence in Intimate Exchange” that “individuals offer greater sexual gratification to partners” with several qualities. Among those qualities were “earn higher incomes.”

Men, especially men of a certain age, are attuned to political correctness and well-versed in how they are supposed to feel about egalitarianism between the sexes and female economic might: Hooray!

Yet they also have ideas about what it means to be manly in a relationship.

'I never wanted to be a first lady'
There may be no more dramatic testimony to the evolving roles of American men and the women they love than the signature line on Daniel Mulhern’s e-mail messages: “First Gentleman, State of Michigan.”

Video   More women becoming breadwinners Oct. 19: Maria Shriver looks at the changing roles of women and men at home and in the workplace. Her report focuses on Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and her family. Today show

Mulhern is the husband of Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. He’s a 51-year-old product of the Midwest who was raised on the cusp of the greatest shift in gender roles in the nation’s history. When his wife became governor, he gave up his career to become a house husband, the primary child nurturer, the public second-banana. Not surprisingly, he struggles to figure out where to place his feet now, especially when it comes to private moments with his wife.

“I am far from finished thinking about this stuff,” he told me. “It is no exaggeration to say I think about it every day.”

Mulhern described an inchoate feeling of disquiet during a   roundtable discussion with Maria Shriver.

“I can’t think of anybody saying anything critically in six and a half years about me and my role. In fact, tons of people have said wonderfully supportive, marvelous things about trying to support Jennifer … But it’s the internal sense that something’s wrong. It shouldn’t be like this. I never wanted to be a first lady.”

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