How the ‘middle-class’ husband lost his place

Emile Durkheim, credited in the European tradition with founding sociology as a discipline, demonstrated in Suicide (1897) that even the most private act available to a person, the decision to end one's own life, follows patterns that are social rather than purely biographical.

The claim is not the modest one that circumstances influence us. Durkheim suggests that suicide rates can be explained by degrees of social integration and regulation, without looking at the individual cases.

The same logic governs materials far less grave. Why you type accha, while your cousin in a village in Kishoreganj types assa or acca, says more about the difference in the surroundings of you and your cousin than about the difference in your personalities, which are shaped by those surroundings. 

The stories that 90s kids tell one another about their childhoods or the descriptions of middle-class family life in the 1960s have a great degree of similarity. This is not coincidental, because those experiences, however personal, contribute to social trends that, at the same time, shape them.

It is precisely because of this that almost every middle-class Bangladeshi millennial recognises the figure of a mother who may or may not have completed higher education, and who then chose, or was obliged, to become a housewife. Her sacrifices, her loneliness and her economic and social vulnerabilities are described in strikingly similar terms across households that have never met one another.

However, that story has been changing quietly for some time, and neither our collective psyche nor the scholarly literature has caught up with it. What has changed most is not the mother, but her son.

The symptoms accumulated slowly and silently: the maternal uncle, the mama who had been a fixture of childhood, reduced his contact after marrying and moving away, and it became apparent, over a few years of Eids, that he bought better gifts for his wife's nieces and nephews than he did for us. 

The paternal uncle, the chacha who had settled in Toronto, returned to Dhaka after six years, stayed the entire time at his in-laws' house, and visited his own parents only thrice. We grew close to our maternal cousins, and we were not thrilled, to put it modestly, at the prospect of hanging out with paternal cousins.

Taken together, these anecdotes, across an entire class and across roughly three decades, describe a shift, even if incomplete, in the axis of Bangladeshi middle-class kinship. It now tilts more towards the matrilateral than the patrilateral.

Making a sense of this shift

The cause, perhaps, is material. Before the advent of the salaried middle class, families were held together by a claim to the same land transmitted along the male line. This meant that paternal cousins often shared the same household and were co-claimants on the same property.

Salaried employment altered the dynamic. A man whose income is a salary, whose apartment carries a bank loan in his own name, and whose old age rests on a provident fund rather than on a share of ancestral property, owes his brothers nothing, and they owe him nothing either. This means, for his children, less contact with paternal cousins as well.

But the thinning of ties with paternal cousins does not explain the thickening of ties with maternal cousins. This is where monogamy, middle-class respectability and the emergence of empowered women come into play.

A middle-class man draws sex, companionship, social standing and emotional maintenance from a single woman, whereas his grandfather drew those things from a lineage, a village and a male peer group that were institutionally separate from one another and, crucially, could not all withdraw at once. 

Marriage was often not central to his social identity or survival, not least because he could marry multiple wives at the same time.

It is against this background that the mysterious demise of Irfan Al-Hussaini, an NVIDIA engineer of Bangladeshi origin, and, more particularly, the public response to it should be considered. Within days of Irfan's death, Bangladeshi Facebook exploded with posts accusing his wife, also a PhD in a similar field, of forcing him to cut ties with his family, among other things. Irfan's parents seem to be on the accusing side as well.

I do not propose to adjudicate the accusations, partly because I do not have the resources needed to investigate the claims and largely because the accusations are beside the point. The point is that accusations of this kind, in this class and in this market, have become all too relatable. 

Whether or not Irfan suffered the abuses he is claimed to have suffered, what interests me is the social trend of this particular type of abuse and the structure that produces and sustains it.

Consider the structure of the marriage market that middle-class Bangladeshis actually inhabit. A moderately attractive woman in her twenties or thirties has significantly more options than does a man of her age and social position. In the dating scene, in particular, men are more willing to overlook red-flags than women.

It is an open secret in Bangladeshi universities that male classmates and boyfriends complete coursework for female students, and that, in some proportion of these arrangements, an expectation of intimacy, whether stated or merely understood, forms part of the exchange. 

Men know they are being exploited, and they do it regardless, because they feel that their romantic prospects would be significantly hurt if they did not simply accept the reality that others, equal to them in every other respect, are willing to offer these services.

Viewed in this light, the phenomenon is not a story about women at all. It is a story about men who are unable to coordinate, which is to say a collective action problem of a perfectly ordinary kind, and one that any game theorist would recognise on sight.

Class compounds the crisis. Middle-class men marry and date middle-class women, because marrying downward carries a prestige cost that most families will not absorb, and because marrying upward is rarely on offer. 

Middle-class men's taste in women also prevents them from marrying women with whom the dynamic would be advantageous to them. When social class is held constant on both sides, the residual advantage sits with the woman.

The sanctions attached to exit and to infidelity confirm the asymmetry. A man who leaves his marriage is judged inconsiderate, whereas a woman who leaves hers is understood to have liberated herself. A wife's infidelity, moreover, shames her husband, who is held to have been inadequate, unavailable, and/or abusive.

Perception and forced perception

We continue to interpret middle-class marriages through a frame in which the woman is, by default, the injured party. To be sure, that frame was earned, and I am in hard agreement with those who insist upon it for most of Bangladeshi society.

For the garment worker, for the girl married at thirteen, for the wife whose in-laws determined that her family's dowry had been insufficient, patriarchy is the perfect vocabulary through which gender relations governing large swathes of Bangladeshi women can be described.

However, a description that is accurate for many does not match the lived reality of the middle-class population. The woman with a doctorate, an income equal to or larger than her husband's, substantially more romantic prospects, and a vast professional network is not the woman for whom the frame was constructed, and she is nevertheless read through it. 

Her power is thereby rendered invisible by construction, since the frame presumes that she has none and interprets whatever she does as a response to not having any.

This is not a Bangladeshi failure of nuance. The world operates under the assumption that women are the vulnerable party, and its protection mechanisms are designed on that assumption. It does not take into account that the categorisation of women as vulnerable itself carries tremendous power. 

The formal and informal protection mechanisms emerging from that understanding have an empowering effect on women. The assumption also fails to recognise that empowered women exist, and that they are not vulnerable in the traditional sense.

The consequence for the middle-class husband is that he has no vocabulary through which he can describe what is happening to him, if something is happening to him, because every word available to him assigns him the other part in the story, and a man who reaches for those words anyway is construed as mansplaining, victim-blaming, or gaslighting.

Furthermore, monogamy, a core middle-class feature, ensures that the wife encounters no competition within the marriage, and the internet ensures that male attention, for a woman who wants it, is effectively free and unlimited, making the husband constantly insecure.

The husband, accordingly, relinquishes what he must relinquish in order to secure access to sex and peace. His friends go first, then his family, and finally the property that was once supposed to constitute his leverage.

None of this holds permanently, however. While middle-class men's romantic options do not improve noticeably with age, women's options contract sharply, which alters the dynamic over the course of a life rather than at any single moment in it.

More importantly, the wife eventually becomes a mother whose son goes on to have a wife of his own, and that wife, having been formed by the same conditions, behaves very much as her mother-in-law once behaved. The complaint, when it arrives, is almost always lodged by a mother-in-law describing her own younger self.

In short, this is a game rather than a morality play, and the two most popular conclusions, that women are witches and that men are dogs, are both refusals to look at the board. Games with repeated rounds, in which a wife recognises that distancing her husband from his family also risks her own distancing from her son in the future, tend towards cooperation between players. 

It can be reasonably expected that once two or three generations of empowered women have reached their fifties and sixties, society will become ready to recognise and settle this matter.

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Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim is academically trained across Thailand, England, and Qatar, bringing together political, philosophical, and theological perspectives. He writes on the intersection of politics, society, gender, religion, and culture in Bangladesh and beyond