Feminist theorists, myself included, have for some time now called attention to the fact that the behavior of men who make money yet refuse to pay alimony or child support, or their peers who head households yet squander their paycheck on individual pleasures, challenges the patriarchal insistence that men are eager to be caretakers and providers. Barbara Ehrenreich’s The Hearts of Men was one of the first books highlighting the reality that many men are not eager to be providers, that the very idea of the “playboy” was rooted in the longing to escape this role and to have another means of
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