Absent Men, Present Women. Why the Debate on Equality Doesn’t Get to the Heart of the Matter.

Why the debate on equality focuses on who is allowed to be absent—and why it cannot articulate what makes absence so worthwhile

„ἀλλὰ καὶ ὧς ἐθέλω καὶ ἐέλδομαι ἤματα πάντα οἴκαδέ τ' ἐλθέμεναι καὶ νόστιμον ἦμαρ ἰδέσθαι."

“Yet even so, I long every day to return home and to see the day of my return.” —

Odysseus to Calypso, in her bed. Homer, Odyssey V, 219–220

23. July 2026

The system rewards absence twice over. First, in monetary terms: income, status, and advancement are rewarded precisely when you’re not at home. And second, in terms of longing: those who leave are missed. Those who stay are left clinging to the hope of being together. For fifty years, the debate on equality has focused on the first form of compensation—positions, quotas, access. The second form does not feature in it. It cannot feature: a debate on justice has no vocabulary for longing. That is why it can be won entirely without the architecture changing. The architecture is older than any of its demands. It is even older than money.

The Setup

The men gather at the gate. Weapons, provisions, departure—the campaign begins in the spring, just like every spring. The women stay behind: fields, children, the elderly, supplies, walls. Months, sometimes years. Those who return come back with spoils, scars, and stories. Those who stayed home have preserved what the returnees call home.

Three thousand years later, Tuesday, 7:12 a.m.: The child has a fever. Two adults, two calendars. One cancels her plans for the day. The other is on the train at 7:31 a.m. The Federal Statistical Office has measured this morning: Gender Care Gap, 44.3 percent more unpaid work per week.

The train is no plundering expedition. But it runs on the same tracks.​

The Old Architecture

The raid is the archetype of rewarded absence. The man who left brought back what mere presence could never yield: spoils, recognition, stories. The woman who stayed home safeguarded what would have fallen apart without her—and what stood there, taken for granted, upon his return, simply because it was there. Only what was missing became visible when she failed. Her greatest success was invisibility.

This is not a story about oppression. Both roles were rational, both essential for survival, both without alternative—for lack of an alternative. But the evaluation was asymmetrical from the very beginning: the one who left was celebrated. The one who stayed was taken for granted.

The modern economy did not build this architecture. It adopted it and translated it into pay. The office is the domesticated campaign: one goes out to bring home the spoils. A career measures how reliably someone can be elsewhere.

The structure is not fifty years old, like the debate. It is three thousand years old, at least. The debate is merely renovating the room on the top floor.

The Second Currency

And then there’s something that nobody talks about.

His departure didn’t just yield spoils. It created longing—on both sides. Odysseus spends ten years in foreign beds, yearning for Penelope. Penelope sits among a hundred men who are present and available, yet weaves for the one she misses. The suitors have everything that presence offers: closeness, availability, persistence. It does them no good. It is the absent one who is desired—the one who is currently sleeping with someone else.

This is the second currency of the structure: absence creates scarcity, and scarcity makes one desirable. Presence creates availability, and availability becomes a habit. The faithful, reliable, present partner does everything—and precisely because of this, loses the status of the prize. The hunting pattern knows no morality and no direction: whoever possesses security seeks the scarce commodity. The disparity applies to both sides. Research objectively measures this as a decline in desire as the duration of the relationship increases—accustoming oneself is the price of presence. Anyone who has experienced both—the security that grows cold and the absence that burns—recognizes the pattern from within. If they choose to recognize it. They don’t have to recognize it. It works anyway, or perhaps precisely because of that.

And the structure dictates its own law. Odysseus cheats for ten years—the epic does not count it as cheating, but as an odyssey. Penelope is tested for unconditional fidelity—her infidelity would have been betrayal, not a test. And when the absent one returns, he kills the rival suitors who are present, all of them, and the epic calls it justice. The absent one not only accepts both currencies; he sets the exchange rate. For three thousand years, no reader has batted an eye.

No one decides this. Desire decides it, the norm seals it—and both decide structurally.

The Double Payoff

Now it becomes clear why the flight into absence is so persistent.

The man optimizes for absence—doubly rational: that’s where the income lies, and that’s where the aura lies. The woman occupies presence—rational: the position cannot remain vacant; the child has a fever right now. The debate demands access to the paid side—rational: where the reward lies, access must follow. But it demands access to the primary currency. The secondary one cannot be claimed. There is no quota for being desired, no redistribution of longing, no committee that distributes scarcity fairly.

And in some respects, the debate has won—you can see the result for yourself. Women in leadership positions are absent just like their male colleagues; the position demands it. Presence does not disappear—it is fundamental. It is delegated: downward, to lower-paid women, and across borders, to recruited caregivers from the Philippines, Mexico, and Tunisia. Imported presence, so that local absence is possible on both sides of the desk. At the end of the debate that has been won, there is no man present. Only a woman present with a different passport.

The Paradoxical Interaction

The Absence-PI: A structure rewards absence twice—in money and in desire—and requires presence, which is not compensated in either currency. The debate over equality negotiates the first currency and thereby reinforces the valuation it seeks to combat. It cannot negotiate the second currency, because longing cannot simply be redistributed.

Everyone acts rationally:

• The Departing One — optimized for absence (there, the structure provides compensation: income and aura)
• The Remaining One — occupies presence (it must not remain unoccupied, and the responsibility has been defined for millennia)
• Desire—follows scarcity (habituation devalues, deprivation revalues—on both sides, as a one-way street)
• The norm—codifies the perspective of the absent one (his infidelity is called an odyssey; hers would be called infidelity; his repayment is called justice)
• The Debate — demands access to the paid section (the only direction in which the structure accepts demands)
• The Structure — delegates presence that becomes available downward and across borders (structurally, not intentionally)
• Result — equality as a rotation of occupancy. The architecture remains in place. So do the tracks. No switches.

Everyone is guilty. None is at fault.

​Navigation Instead of a Solution

What to do? Nothing that looks like a solution.

See who’s there when it’s not worth it. Not in rhetoric—in the calendar. Tuesdays, 7:12 a.m.

Ask in which currency a demand is calculated. Almost all demands of the last fifty years are calculated in the first. This is not a failure on the part of those making the demands—the second currency simply does not accept demands.

Stop expecting justice to reshape a one-sided structure that’s older than any concept of justice. The structure negotiates possible (re)castings. It doesn’t negotiate its own stability.

Insight isn’t a way out. Odysseus knew where he belonged—he said so, of all places, in Calypso’s bed.

The real point

The debate centers on who is allowed to be absent—not on the value of presence, nor on why absence is desirable.

It fights in terms of a currency that can be quantified. The structure, however, operates on a different scale.

Related Posts

On piinteract.org:

• [“See the Pattern, Not the Symptom”] — The quota addresses the symptom in the first currency. The pattern calculates in the second — and remains unaddressed.
• [“More of the Same”] — Fifty years of the same demand in ever-increasing doses: more access to the paywall. The equation continues to calculate, unmoved.
• [" Accept Asymmetries“] — Presence and absence cannot be made symmetrical as long as only one side is compensated in both currencies. To see the asymmetry is to stop negotiating it away.
• [”The Solidarity Trap"] — Those who prop up the load-bearing wall cannot simultaneously take to the streets to demand its revaluation. Their presence prevents those present from protesting.

See also (external links):

Gender Care Gap 2022: Women Perform 44.3% More Unpaid Work Than Men (Federal Statistical Office) — The official primary source for Tuesday morning: 2022 Time Use Survey, the gap in hours, not in rhetoric.

Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (ILO) — The global institutional finding: 76.2 percent of unpaid care work is performed by women — the global version of the same equation.

Sexual Motivation and the Duration of Partnership (Klusmann, Archives of Sexual Behavior) — Peer-reviewed evidence for the second currency: desire declines with the duration of security. Habituation is measurable.

“I'd like five of them”: Internationally Recruited Nurses in the German Healthcare Sector (peer-reviewed) — Peer-reviewed evidence for the chain of delegation: imported presence as a condition for local absence

Paradoxical Interactions (PI): When rational actors consistently produce collectively irrational outcomes — not through failure, but through structure.

All are guilty. None are at fault.

Peter Senner Thinking beyond the Tellerrand

contact@piinteract.org
https://piinteract.org

Co-created with Claude (Anthropic) — two incomplete systems making each other's gaps visible.