If you’ve ever had the pleasure of listening in to a Clubhouse room, you’ll soon realise it's nigh impossible to feature a blog article on every provocative discussion. But there’s one narrative that has emerged lately, a topic that is arguably long-overdue for a lot of millennials; the expectation that the husband should be the sole provider. A topic that begs the question of identity, and lays it at the feet of competing social norms.
The Simpsons connection
As fate would have it, around the same time, the Atlantic published an article examining how the cartoon series The Simpsons inadvertently underlines the increasing gulf in quality of life amongst groups in the social hierarchy. It’s the late 1980s, and Homer — a high-school dropout, works as a nuclear inspector; a role that is ostensibly framed as working-class in the show. He is the sole provider for his family of four, who own a comfortable home and two cars. The kicker? He is able to do this on a $42,000 annual salary. Homer’s scenario wasn’t atypical; it was largely reflective of a reality that did once exist; an American-dream that would in time come to dwindle.
The reality
Home ownership is becoming increasingly difficult. Banks will offer you mortgages x3 or x4 the size of your annual salary, but with house prices on average £500,000 in London alone, you’ll be needing to earn x4 the amount Homer did. The alternative? If you don’t fancy defrauding the social housing system by nudging your wife into the queue as a ‘single, homeless mother’, you’re left to rent out a 2-bedroom home for on average, £1,500 without utilities. That is about 60% of your salary if you’re on £45,000pa, a figure that is close to what Homer was able to support his family with. If you happen to be interested in groceries, petrol etc…the % goes up. And further up once you begin a family, or decide that you need a bigger car, or want to move to a not-so-bad area of town.
This is the reality, and it is a reality that has forced working professionals to flat-share into their early 30s, return home to live with their parents, or even delay having children altogether as they try desperately to pursue the means to a higher quality of life; a stark contrast to the nomadic heritage of our ancestors, and 7th century Arab norms.
The Clubhouse expectation
Seeped in hypothetical narratives, Clubhouse is home to topics that are designed to provoke superficial debates. But under the surface it all, they are discussions of how we balance tradition with a competing, and often, contrarian culture. When it comes to the question of men providing on their own income, it harks back to a norm that has existed for countless centuries all over the world, including Somalia. The men worked, and the women were expected to stay at home with the children. In fact, when that norm began to change, one of the criticisms volleyed towards those women were of men questioning their worth as wives, as mothers — and by extension — as women, by abandoning that traditional role; the original ‘Men don’t want to be men anymore’.
And so the topic of providing for the family, whilst the wife earns an income that remains exclusive to her, is another way to beg that question; to what extent can our traditions remain? The actual conversation, however, is marred with lazy religious arguments, the cynical invocation of male pride, the reasoning ‘our fathers back home used to do this so why can’t you’ laid out unironically, and innuendos about your masculinity if you question how the numbers add up.
Quality of life
The truth is, you could support a family with a single income, but it likely won’t be the type of life you envisaged for yourselves. In a city like London, £45,000 won’t get you much even if you were unmarried, living alone. So left with two options: (a) what’s his is ours, and what’s mine is mine, or (b) contribute so we can move to a nicer area with better schools, most will choose the latter. The question therefore isn’t whether men should provide on their own, but rather whether you would want them to.
Homer Simpson represented a generation with a different set of economic realities. You could live a comfortable life, have a mortgage and raise a family without a degree and that be the norm. In many places, that has changed, and it has forced the traditional family unit to change along with it. First generation Somali households will not be any different.
