I just stumbled across this essay and it is the only one I’ve read that actually addresses the biggest issue with Butker’s comments on women and vocations: the good men just aren’t there. And I think it’s even more difficult for Gen Z than it was for me, as an elder millennial. I desperately wanted to meet my husband in college ( I went to Notre Dame in the early 2000s where it was quite common for students to get married the summer or year after graduation) and get married and have 6 kids before I turned 30, but as it happened I worked as a high school theology teacher for 9 years before I met my husband at the ripe old age of 32. We married less than a year later and now have 3 beautiful sons…but I had to wait. A long time. And many of my friends are now in their 40s and still waiting, and may very well never marry, much less have children. When I heard Butker’s speech, my heart went out to the girls sitting in the audience who, like me, were wondering why they didn’t get a “ring by spring,” and who may have to wait a long time before they meet a man who 1) would make a good father and husband and 2) actually wants to marry them. I think often of the generation of men that was lost during world war I and how many women were unable to marry—by no fault of their own—and had to come up with plan B because of it. I think our culture has produced a generation of men who are spiritually and emotionally like the walking dead.
I wonder what his mother, the medical school professor, thought when he announced that she wasted her life on the day before Mother’s Day? Mom’s salary made it possible for this kid to get an excellent education so that he can be vastly overpaid for playing a game for a living. Apparently his version of the Ten Commandments doesn’t include ‘honor thy mother.’
I wonder what the reaction would have been if he had said that his “life really began when he started living his vocation as a husband and a father?”
Thanks Lane! Really well put, I’d been meaning to ask what we should make of this!
I just stumbled across this essay and it is the only one I’ve read that actually addresses the biggest issue with Butker’s comments on women and vocations: the good men just aren’t there. And I think it’s even more difficult for Gen Z than it was for me, as an elder millennial. I desperately wanted to meet my husband in college ( I went to Notre Dame in the early 2000s where it was quite common for students to get married the summer or year after graduation) and get married and have 6 kids before I turned 30, but as it happened I worked as a high school theology teacher for 9 years before I met my husband at the ripe old age of 32. We married less than a year later and now have 3 beautiful sons…but I had to wait. A long time. And many of my friends are now in their 40s and still waiting, and may very well never marry, much less have children. When I heard Butker’s speech, my heart went out to the girls sitting in the audience who, like me, were wondering why they didn’t get a “ring by spring,” and who may have to wait a long time before they meet a man who 1) would make a good father and husband and 2) actually wants to marry them. I think often of the generation of men that was lost during world war I and how many women were unable to marry—by no fault of their own—and had to come up with plan B because of it. I think our culture has produced a generation of men who are spiritually and emotionally like the walking dead.
I wonder what his mother, the medical school professor, thought when he announced that she wasted her life on the day before Mother’s Day? Mom’s salary made it possible for this kid to get an excellent education so that he can be vastly overpaid for playing a game for a living. Apparently his version of the Ten Commandments doesn’t include ‘honor thy mother.’