That’s a sentence from this review of this book. Here’s another excerpt:
“Home Game,” Mr. Lewis’s account of becoming a father to his three children, begins promisingly. “At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and — let us be frank — got fleeced,” he writes.
The poor sucker agreed to take on responsibility for all sorts of menial tasks — tasks that his own father was barely aware of — and received nothing in return. If he was hoping for some gratitude, he was mistaken.
The Lewis book is supposedly to be funny, apparently. Lewis is also the author of “Moneyball.”
–Ann Bartow
ETA: According to this NY Observer article:
In June 1997, the late Marjorie Williams wrote a brutal profile of journalism’s then-36-year-old golden boy Mr. Lewis for Vanity Fair which included an uncomfortably close examination of his love life, his journalistic practice, and his personality.
But when I search the Vanity Fair archives, it seems to be mysteriously missing. Could be it’s there somewhere, but I can’t find it.
Taking the prior allocation of these “menial tasks” as a given absolves him of the need to consider how women came to be responsible for those tasks in the first place (hint: it wasn’t at the negotiating table) and to assess what, if anything, they received in return.
There’s so much wrong here. Not the least of which is that if he thinks he gets nothing in return for being more involved with raising his kids, helping his wife, and being more a part of the family, then maybe his wife really should let him go back to the 50s model and keep him very far from his kids’ lives.