How to Put Your Wife Out of Business

With women now paid as much as 90 cents on the dollar for the same work as men, it is increasingly difficult to shut down your wife's commercial activities and get her to focus on household chores. Many men don't even bother, but simply accept that their wives will keep their jobs. But those of us who don't -- those men who want to bring home the bacon in the spirit of our fathers, and their fathers before them -- have very little in the way of guidance or support. Women seeking counsel on how to get the most out of their husbands can dip into a river of self-help books, tawdry daytime TV shows and features that dramatize the female author's plight in women's magazines. Every week, it seems, women are offered ever more expert advice on how to manipulate their men. Men, however, are expected to figure it out all by themselves. And so they don't.

There are many good reasons for putting your wife out of business. One is you want someone to pay careful attention to your children, and you don't feel like doing it yourself. Another is the sheer amount of time it frees up for her to pay attention to you. But the best reason is the pleasure you will receive from proving to the outside world that you can do it.

There was a brief time, from about 1985 to 1991, when high-powered males demonstrated their status by marrying equally high-powered females with high-paying jobs. That time has passed. The surest way for a man to exhibit his social status -- the finest bourgeois bling -- is to find the most highly paid woman you can, working in the most high-profile job, and shut her down. Bonus points if her job is typically viewed as a "man's" job. Find, for instance, a female professor of science at Harvard and persuade her to swap her Bunsen burners for your Viking gas ones; you will earn the degree of respect typically reserved for CEOs and movie stars. Bonus points for making her unemployment stick. Warren Beatty briefly made a flagrant display of his stature when he married Annette Bening and took her out of movies -- but now, alas, she has returned to her acting. And where does that leave him? A bit lower than he was, I think.

What men need, really, are role models. Other men who have done it and lived to tell the tale. Consider, for example, me. I hope I don't need to remind the reader, but I will anyway: When we met, my wife -- Tabitha Soren -- was a hotshot. She walked from her offices at MTV into Times Square and people shrieked her name and bayed for her autograph. She made pots of money. She couldn't swing a dead cat in the television business without hitting a job offer. And now -- behold! Two children later, she has happily abandoned fame and fortune and is making a second "career" as a fine-art photographer.