In response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic piece, Suzanne Turner asks: Does anyone else find the resounding silence from the guys in our lives deafening?

I’ve been looking and looking for the dad’s voice—even, for goodness sakes, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s husband’s voice—in the epic dust up over the Atlantic Monthly cover story.

It’s no surprise that bloggers and Tweet chats galore have been pouring over every detail of the article. Poking a pointy stick into all of our feminist eyes is successfully selling magazines, driving eyeballs and creating controversy. Who could resist when the packaging of the piece was, as Jessica Valenti so memorably said, “sad white babies with mean white mommies.” Atlantic Monthly advertisers please smile—this cover art has driven more clicks than any other story for the magazine.

So much of the commentary is vitally important—whether Tressie McMillan Cottom’s slaying the unicorn of“trickle down feminism” or Lauren Sandler and Rebecca Traister enumerating the ways that feminism is the false bogeyman of the piece, or younger feminists reminding us that “having it all” sounds quite exhausting, thank you, and isn’t the movement really about something else?

There’s no need to repeat all this good thinking. But I have to ask: Does anyone else find the resounding silence from the guys in our lives deafening?

No, no, this is not what you think. This is not the tired complaint that men actually can have it all while we can’t. This is a CELEBRATION of today’s men—and how they’ve been PROTECTED by feminist policies. These guys—in my experience—have jumped feet first into childrearing and partnering on the homefront. With the exception of a widower single dad, however, men have been completely missing from the conversation.

Slaughter’s husband kept the home fires burning during her D.C. tenure, and I know a lot of other men who either stay at home or cut back their careers drastically to support their wives. In fact, one friend—a man I’ll call Pete—really helped re-shape my reality when he made this comment:

“We were the first people in thousands and thousands of years when men and women lived as equals. I’m not ashamed that we got some of it wrong—I’m not ashamed at all.”

Pete’s version of his marital story went this way: He put his wife through medical school, then left a successful career as a mechanical engineer to stay home with their two children when her residency and subsequent practice became too demanding.

Pete’s little secret? He far preferred parenting and connecting with the school, neighborhood, and kid sports team communities to punching a time clock. But the end result was multiple infidelities by a wife who was ensconced in a different workaday world. Ultimately, Pete was left for a work colleague.

Doug’s story was similar. He and his wife had both been young journalists. When the second child arrived, Doug opted to stay home while his wife took a demanding job at a federal agency. One day his wife decided their marriage was over. Within weeks of the final divorce decree, she was engaged to a work colleague.

What surprised me most about these friend’s stories was that—with the exception of having careers to leave—their stories sound eerily like those of my and my childhood friends’ mothers. Once the kids were raised, our Dads uniformly ran off with their secretaries or their golfing buddies or just didn’t come home from a business trip.

And—here’s the punch line—feminism actually helped these men as they helped our own mothers. Laws put into place to protect stay-at-home mothers ensured these guys got their fair share of marital assets and shared custody of their children.

In my case, well-heeled men laugh at my alimony plight—I’ve joined the old boys club in a particularly painful way. And my poor fashion designer sister … well let’s not even get into the way she’s paying her ex.

This is a decidedly non-representative sample. But I argue that feminism has lifted all boats. Slaughter gets the top-shelf career and the choice to return to her family—or not. Men get to be an integral part of family life—and are protected legally if they’re not the main breadwinners.

This, of course, leaves out a giant part of the conversation: the nature of information age serfdom in today’s workforce, those families who are struggling to keep the electricity on while working multiple minimum wage jobs (or facing chronic unemployment).

But, as Pete said, we have been through an incredible social revolution. And if we made a few mistakes, then we’re just helping blaze the way for those people coming up behind us.

Suzanne Turner is a co-founder of Fem2.0, and a longtime advocate for women’s rights and gender equity.  She is the President and Founder of Turner Strategies, a public affairs and communications firm based in Washington, D.C. Before starting her own business, Suzanne spent seven years at Fenton Communications, where she served as Senior Vice President.  She is also a co-founder of the Internet Advocacy Center and a founding member of Progressive Communicators of D.C.  You can follow Suzanne on Twitter @SuzTurner.  This post is originally published on Role/Reboot and is cross-posted with permission.

Photo Credit Tobyotter via The Creative Commons License.

But the current conversation has the sole intent of misleading the populace into voting Republicans back into office in 2010. The far right message machine is brilliant — faced with a worldwide economic crisis, anyone elected in 2008 would have been required to bail out the global financial system. Pre-painting Obama as a "socialist" knowing he was going to do what McCain would have done set up the entire subsequent dialogue.

We wrote the robber barons who created this crisis a blank check. They had a gun to our heads. Pump money into the system, or we face an unprecedented depression. This was done.

The teabaggers are protesting the very things that could one day save them from penury. Yet any attempt to pump up the fortunes of the common working man — those very people the entire world economy relies upon to buy its goods and services and return our dilapidated system to some semblance of normalcy — is dubbed "socialism."

I do not withhold my ire from the liberal and media elites. By ignoring, mocking and further disenfranchising the far right, we bring our country quite literally to the brink of Civil War. People are scared. We face unprecedented challenges. The media has collapsed and is incapable of anything but political name calling.

Real issues — and an honest debate about how to address those issues — is impossible in our current political and media climate. Our fate and the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance.

Our partisan divides will suffocate us. We need a White House that is clear in its vision. We need brave and resolute Republicans. We need a real Maverick to stand up among the Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats — someone like the John McCain of old — not to further fan the flames for short-term political gain, but to say: "yes, we must fix this, and this is how we will work together."

Patriots among us — let us not continue to screech untruths, let us seek to fix the seemingly insurmountable issues that face us. If you do not have a constructive alternative, if your only recourse is to yell "liar" or "socialist" or "right-wing nut jobs" then, please, look around you. Work for real, constructive change.

EXCERPT FROM FRANK RICH COLUMN 9/13/09:

The reason is that health care reform, while an overdue imperative, still is overshadowed in existential urgency by the legacies of the two devastating cataclysms of the Bush years, 9/11 and 9/15, both of whose anniversaries we now mark. The crucial matters left unresolved in the wake of New York’s two demolished capitalist icons, the World Trade Center and Lehman Brothers, are most likely to determine both this president’s and our country’s fate in the next few years. Both have been left to smolder in the silly summer of ’09.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of the war that 9/11 bequeathed us in Afghanistan, the endgame is still unknown and more troops are on their way. Though the rate of American casualties reached an all-time high last month, the war ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking the issues important to the American public. Most of those who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). But the essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan — and make the heavy sacrifices that would be required — or look for a Plan B was punted by the White House this summer even as the situation drastically deteriorated.

Also posted to The Turner Report