ABSTRACT
As has been explored in Chapter 5, a man’s right to an emotional relationship with his child may often remain conditional on his continuing relationship with the child’s mother. In a country where most marriages have a limited life, men’s on going involvement with their children is not automatic. As the well-known demographer, Viktor Perevedentsev, was pointing out by the late 1990s, when divorce rates have increased so sharply young women increasingly have the expectation that a marriage is unlikely to last a lifetime (Perevedentsev 1998). In these circumstances, and given current practice relating to access and custody after divorce, it is almost inevitable that they will regard men as intrinsically peripheral to what they see as the central family bond of mother and child.1 When problems over the payment of maintenance have become such a constant and thorny issue in the media, it is perhaps inevitable that negative images of men as fathers abound. Absence and disinterest, rather than engagement and care, have become the hallmarks of the most prevalent popular imagery of fatherhood. Where this is so, it is scarcely surprising that women themselves, in conversation, are frequently disinclined to spare their criticism of men’s abilities as fathers and partners. This chapter seeks to explore the ways in which perspectives such as these are both shaped by and reflected in media and popular discourses. Men at home: A waste of time? Women interviewed in the mid-1990s were often scathing in their assessment of men’s attitudes towards their families, castigating them for ‘just’ earning money, for not being active parents, for scarcely seeing their children: ‘When I
was asked how many children I had I always said two – my husband and my baby daughter. … [O]ur men are infantile.’ Attitudes such as these, however, had not suddenly sprung up in the face of post-Soviet economic difficulties. In far more stable times before the demise of the USSR, women’s letters to the press were regularly expressing similar sentiments, about men as fathers and as partners: ‘Husbands in this country need the sort of care you’d give to an invalid or someone who was gravely ill’ (Voronina 1989: 11). In much of this comment, men came across, at best, as a waste of time, at worst, as creatures which, in the family at least, were likely to do more harm than good. In the post-Soviet period, views such as this became so commonplace that they were regularly seen as simply stating the obvious, a chorus of disapproval which men could scarcely miss, even if their response was fairly muted. As Oleg Riabov, in his work on gender and national identity in Russia, summed this up: ‘In recent years Russian men have started to be accused of all the sins’ (Riabov 2001: 127). Or, as one of the men in this study put it more simply: ‘Men have become unpopular.’
