These two had been together for a decade... had a nice new house and a couple of lovely kids... but my friend's father-in-law just couldn't wrap his head around a man who sat and typed all day for a living.
The fact that my buddy likely grossed at least four times the farmers annual income did not seem to come into play.
This identification of masculinity with hard physical work (no empathy required) is deeply embedded in the history of the human race. For eons, it has been the most common way to be a man.It seems, in today's rapidly evolving world, there's a sort of intellectual snobbery burbling not too far beneath the surface. We somehow imagine that white collar jobs are always much more valuable and difficult than manual labour. (Try assembling your own car, or growing all your own vegetables for just one year.)
Margaret Wente has a pretty interesting take on this whole deal.
People are pretty adaptable, and education can work wonders. But no matter how much education and retraining we offer, we are not going to transform factory workers and high-school dropouts into customer-care representatives or nurses' aides any time soon.And don't get me wrong, this isn't about slagging farmers, or steamfitters, or autoworkers... or about a disparity in intelligence.
To even survive as a farmer, you have to be a part-time biologist, meteorologist, accountant, ditchdigger and mechanic.
Your average denizen of Cubeville wouldn't last a day.
And that's a fact.
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