America: A Raw Deal for Men?

by Emmett Hogan

Susan Faludi, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is unabashedly a woman whose primary occupation is other women.

There are, however, two types of feminists. There are the Catharine Mackinnon-Andrea Dworkin feminists, the crusaders, who see a male bogeyman around every corner and under every stone. These are the confrontational feminists, who spell “women” with a “y” instead of “e” and burn their bras to defy convention. Less candorous observers would call them “feminazis.” If one has a good taste for irony, one could say that these are the masculine feminists.

Faludi, fortunately, does not belong to this more belligerent breed. She is a feminist in the stricter sense of the term, meaning simply that she studies women. And not exclusively, at that. Her latest book is Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man—assigned reading in Dartmouth's College Course 22: The Masculine Mystique—in which she concerns herself with what's been going on with the other team for the past few generations. The book benefits from Faludi's comparatively open-mind.

Whereas a garden-variety feminist, inclined to study the American male, would indict him for his shocking propensity to war, misogyny, or spousal abuse, Faludi pointedly states that “even the most powerful man has had at least as much happen to him as he has made happen.” In Stiffed, the author takes the position that men, contrary to the belief of many, are not the authors of the world, and that they have in fact spent the past few generations grappling with an unrecognized betrayal they have been unable to control and that has been stripping them of their own masculinity.

Faludi argues that the American male has been betrayed in two ways by two different actors. The first betrayal was perpetrated by the “fathers” of the post-World War II era, the generation of men that raised the baby boomers. In some cases, the source of a man's inability to define himself as a man is indeed the lack of an actual father figure in their childhood years. But Faludi speaks more generally of a society that taught its “sons” the rules of manhood and then cruelly broke those rules. The “sons” were to be the heirs of a great patrimony, bestowed by the triumphant elders who had made America the strongest and most prosperous nation in the world. The world was to be theirs; for their generation, the characteristics of manhood were to shine more brightly than ever before.

What are these “characteristics of manhood?” They are, of course, what make men men, what set men apart from women. Faludi's answer is not superficial. Manhood, for Faludi, is not simply characterized by physical strength, or predatory instinct, or boorishness, or a desire to dominate women. Rather, manhood is characterized by a deeper concept that can best be described as paternalism (although Faludi periodically labels it “maternalism”—no doubt a minor recursion to her feminist leanings for which she can be forgiven).

This paternalism made certain demands on a man; he must be loyal, he must seek to provide, and above all, he must toil for the general good of his community. The sons were promised that, if they abided by these rules, they would not just become men, but would be richly rewarded. This—the promise of manhood—was the patrimony of which the sons were robbed. The better half of Faludi's book seeks to illustrate this point, through a series of vignettes that showcase the breakdown of a general father-son dynamic in various guises. She speaks at length about workers in the aerospace industry of southern California, promised a good living in return for lifelong loyalty, who faced despair and ruin in the rash of downsizing in the 1980s and 1990s. She speaks of Cleveland Browns fans and their sense of betrayal when the team moved to Maryland. She speaks of men trying, in vain, to re-establish a link with a paternal God through the Promise Keepers Movement of mid-decade. Ultimately, Faludi argues, their inheritance was not the world on a plate, but disillusionment, betrayal, and a lack of certainty in one's own manhood.

The second betrayal, Faludi thinks, is the product of a consumer culture, or, more accurately put, a glamour culture. Faludi focuses the second half of her book on this, a phenomenon she calls “man in a can.” Masculinity, when defined by Budweiser commercials, Nike shoes, and GQ magazine, is ultimately a superficial alternative to the more traditional sources of male identity (i.e., family, work, productiveness). Faludi goes to great lengths to deride the impact of commercialism, claiming that it has ensnared men in a prison where the only way out is the pursuit of one's fifteen minutes of fame. The Spur Posse of southern California, a group of adolescent urban males who sought talk-show celebrity by turning sex into a quantified competition based on a point system, is but one example. Faludi argues that this sort of fame—or, as with the Spur Posse, infamy—is almost invariably short-lived, and that the end of those fifteen minutes herald, in reality, the end of the road for those who chose this path to male identity. The impulses to be seen, to be important, to be glamorous, argues the author, are ultimately self-destructive for those who seek to define their manhood through them.

More generally, Faludi thinks, the enslavement of the American male by consumerism presents an acute challenge to the male identity. Femininity, not masculinity, has traditionally been the purview of consumerism. The vanity and self-obsession that it causes—as evidenced by Nautilus machines, designer clothes, and a “pretty boy” conception of masculine beauty—are sentiments that are completely anathema to traditional masculinity. Simply put, consumerism is threatening to the male identity because it grafts onto the male persona characteristics that have been associated with the female identity since time immemorial.

With all these problems plaguing the American male, the male reader may be led to believe that he is an endangered species. Faludi's book is brimming with case studies, ranging from the former aerospace industry workers, to the Spur Posse, to the grieving Browns fan—even at one point to Sylvester Stallone—that illustrate how the American man has been betrayed. Her work is nothing if not depressing.

Yet Faludi's dire prognosis is overdone. The average American male is doing quite fine, thank you very much, economically as well as emotionally. The author's broad statements about the lack of a male identity may only be relevant to a few isolated individuals—many of whom Faludi seems to have drudged up, and most of whom, perhaps not coincidentally, seem to live in California.

For most, the desire to look good or to own a nice car is neither fundamental nor connected to any sense of masculine identity. How exactly does buying a wide-screen TV or wearing Nike sneakers make one less of a man? Ms. Faludi's analysis is basically conjecture, and not simply because it is based on just a few sad instances. She seems given to broad extrapolation. At many parts in the book, she uses simple statements to illustrate the presence of a grand theme that epitomizes the decline of the American male. When, for example, one Browns fan claims that “he wants to win so bad,” Faludi's implication is that the son (the fan) wants to cooperate and to succeed in a venture with the father (the team). This is, of course, a stretch; and Stiffed is replete with such examples.

Faludi is trying to divine great meaning from idiosyncratic circumstances. Her attempt to psychoanalyze the men she encounters smacks of cheap Freud, as she seeks to pin grievances on a estranged relationship with a father or, more generally, on the lack of a paternalistic inheritance for modern American men. As Freud himself once said, however, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” In this case, sometimes desire to reconnect with an absent father, or to achieve a glittering sort of fame, are merely elements of an individual's personality, and not characteristics of America's entire male population. When the author tries to argue that the presence of a nurturing father is essential to the development of a male identity in the sons, what she really proves is merely that the absence of such a father can, in some cases, preclude it.

Ultimately, Stiffed is an interesting, if pessimistic, book. The author has an engrossing writing style, and the stories of the men she encounters are poignant. Despite a tendency to adopt a condescendingly paternalistic (maternalistic?) attitude towards the men in her book, she does manage to display a remarkable sensitivity to their particular woes. More to her credit, she considers them important enough to write about, because she probably recognizes that femininity has no meaning without masculinity, and vice versa. Yet the book does not amount to anything more than the sum of its parts; it is an anthology of tales, and no more.

Whether or not a crisis of identity actually exists among American males, Faludi's attempt to diagnose it fall prey to overextrapolation. One thinks of hardcore feminists, those who see anything longer than it is wide as a phallus and a symbol of patriarchal oppression. One thinks of this kind of overextrapolation, and one wonders whether or not Faludi, for all her writing talent, has really left her feminist baggage at the door.