Susan
Faludi
7:30 pm Thursday, Oct. 21
Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside St. 228-4651
Stiffed:
One Man's View
Imagine a time when men are so frustrated by their lot in
life that the only way they can get the testosterone pumping
is by beating the shit out of each other and playing lame
at illness-support groups. Sound familiar? It's the plot of
Portlander Chuck Palahniuk's novel turned big-buzz, Brad Pitt-starring
movie, Fight Club. It also
echoes a prevailing motif of Susan Faludi's new book, Stiffed:
The Betrayal of the American Man (William Morrow, 416
pages, $27.50).
Faludi, author of the landmark feminist book Backlash,
spent seven years researching men, culminating in a divergent
theory on gender in America. In Stiffed, she contends
that consumer culture "has men by the throat" just as much
as it does women, so that what a man buys and how he looks
matters more than who he is and what he does.
In an phone interview with Willamette Week, Faludi
explained the origins of her belief that American masculinity
has become a product, not an intrinsic quality. Faludi,
a contributing editor for Newsweek and a former Wall
Street Journal reporter, began her research for Stiffed
by setting down her political battle-axes and adopting the
tack of actually listening to men. What she heard was that
under feminist-phobia lay a real sense of pain and confusion
about what it means to be a man anymore. While Faludi by
no means defends old-world ideals about male primacy, she
found that masculinity meant something very different 75
years ago than it does today. "American masculinity has
always been about being the dominant figure in all environments,
particularly in the home and in women's lives," Faludi explained.
"But there used to be a mitigating idea of grounding your
manhood in usefulness, community and society-building. That
ideal has been eroded."
It's the ideal of public usefulness that Faludi would like
to resurrect. Though she'd refute the antiquated expectation
that men wear the pants in the family, Faludi would appreciate
pre-World War II men for donning tough, unstylish Carhartts.
Nowadays, to be a real man you better have your Calvins,
or at the very least your Dockers, carefully tailored to
reveal your bulging thighs. Faludi found that our ever-growing
culture of display and ornamentation--a realm that women
have been negotiating for centuries--is stripping men of
their humanity the same way it has women. Instead of rising
up in protest against their commodification and feminization
the way women in the '60s and '70s did, men are stuck, because
they're the ones who supposedly have the cultural reins
in their hands. Who do men have to fight back against besides
a handful of feminist whipping-girls? Men's rage at feeling
commodified and disempowered gets channeled into Waco-like
standoffs,Promise
Keeper fervor, Citadel cadets gone ballistic, and endless
Rocky-esque
posturing before cameras. "When there isn't a society to
grow up into in which there are useful adult male roles,
then men are left with the swill of consumer fantasies offered
up," Faludi said, "in which the way to be a man is to make
things explode."
Making things explode is the specialty of Fight Club's
main character, Tyler Durden. The Fight Club, a late-night,
secret society of men who pummel one another into a pulp
and walk away feeling freer and more real than they did
before, is Durden's brain child. Palahniuk is undisturbed
that actual fight clubs are popping up across the country,
even right here in Oregon City, where groups of teens gather
in a park to take shots at each other. "It's a way of having
an extraordinarily chaotic, violent incident which is scheduled
and controlled," he told WW. This, in Palahniuk's
eyes, is a way of solving problems and venting rage.
But can regulated bar-room brawls really address the larger
cultural shifts men have experienced in the past half-century?
Faludi suggests an antidote sure to be far more threatening,
yet more effective than a fist fight or a stint in the army.
Faludi says men need to link up with feminists. "It seems
to me that feminists are often the only ones on men's side,"
Faludi explained. "Feminists are really pushing for a fuller
life for men, in which they can embrace the kind of nurturance
they want to embrace." She cited the way the women's movement
has opened up doors for men to become more involved, caring
fathers and husbands. "I know in my gut that the ways that
women are cosseted, held back and diminished have everything
to do with the way that men are restricted, diminished and
forced into unnatural ways of being," Faludi offered.
Whether or not men have this same gut feeling remains to
be seen. Judging from the initial critical response to Stiffed,
some men feel more than a little threatened by Faludi's
assertion that they've been feminized. Sven Birkerts whined
in Esquire that Faludi encourages a "self-consciousness
[that] is to real masculinity as the query 'Is everything
okay?' is to a budding erection--the kiss of death." According
to Faludi, many men, like Birkerts, see women as the eyes
of the world, deciding how worthy they are. "Women represent
a media culture that is looking at men," Faludi responds.
Women have long been associated with glamour and display.
Now that the cameras are being thrust imposingly upon men,
demanding that they be as polished and enticing as a poster
girl, men associate this media invasion as a threat of the
female gaze. The irony is that the cameras are men's own
creation. Like Project Mayhem, the chaotic force that grows
out of Fight Club, media culture threatens to engulf
its makers. Susan Faludi would have men join women in laying
down the looking glass and forging renewed social responsibility.
She writes that men's task is not "to figure out how to
be masculine, rather, their masculinity lies in figuring
out how to be human."
Still, I cleave to the hope that Faludi's book will be
what one critic called "The Feminine Mystique for
men." I far prefer Faludi's rallying cry that men should
"learn to wage a battle against no enemy" and "act in service
of a brotherhood that includes us all" to Fight Club's
channel for male disillusionment. Palahniuk, however, is
an advocate of the organized-violence route. "I'd rather
have young men express their rage in controlled settings
than in other ways," he says. Palahniuk waxes nostalgic
about the pre-World War II era: "The WPA and the Army used
to provide men a means of transcending an old self and building
a new, more mature self with expanded capabilities and strength,"
he says. "I believe strongly that we've lost that second
stage of maturity." Faludi would agree that World War II
and the subsequent Works Progress Administration era encouraged
an important male maturation process, one based on teamwork
and society-building. But you won't hear her rallying for
more football games, boxing matches or military training.
Faludi takes her analysis of men's plight far deeper than
advocacy for physical release or fighting a common enemy.
Faludi may over-generalize the plight of men at times, but
she names a "problem that has no name," to borrow from The
Feminine Mystique. Faludi wants us to care again about
our world, our kids and each other, and to eschew celebrity
and glamour. As she said to me, "Caring and passing something
on is so essential to one's sense of humanity." Hear, hear!
Stiffed:
One Man's View
Men have a certain worry when feminists unzip our manhood:
Will this be another call for the guillotine? Susan Faludi
isn't one of those simple-minded feminists, but her attempt
to put the ruler to guys in Stiffed: The Betrayal of
the American Man simply comes off as big-think journalism
trying to pass itself off as learned sociology. And with
more than a little bit of hypocrisy, Faludi falls victim
to the very same forces of popular culture and history that
she claims have rendered men existential eunuchs over the
past half-century.
Faludi's premise is simple: Before the United States' superpower
days, American men were integrated into both history and
community; they weren't the bloodlusty competitors of today,
but rather GI grunts and WPA murals incarnate. As these
men built with their hands, nurtured one another and created
with their souls, their lives were satisfying, and all was
well and good in society. Charming as this picture seems,
it is a Panglossian revision of American history. Even the
most casual reading of that American era supports the notion
that for each Whitmanesque Everyman, America was equal parts
Rough Rider and Indian-killer.
Still--and, here, I am tempted to mutter, "Duh!"--Faludi
is correct in that something in the character of men came
apart as America became a superpower to rival Rome in its
glory days. For the first 100 pages of Stiffed, it
is interesting to observe a third-wave feminist rooting
about for man's heart ailment. But after that, it's as though
she were cutting with a butter knife. To be fair, delineating
the woes of man is as daunting as writing one's name on
a grain of sand, and any man with integrity could tell you
that the "men's movement" has it all wrong with its call
for drumming circles in the forests of the night.
For some reason, Faludi concludes that Los Angeles is ground
zero in her anecdotal world. Under Didion's bleached-out
sky, she finds laid-off aerospace middle managers, porn
stars, Sylvester Stallone, the infamous Spur Posse, the
feeble Promise Keepers and--the exception that proves Faludi's
rule--laid-off shipyard workers. They're uncentered, unintegral,
befuddled victims of a corporate and media culture that
has duped them into believing the way to happily-ever-after
and babes-on-tap is to replace substance and craftwork with
style and consumption. For this patent conclusion, we are
asked to soldier through yet more unblinking (and unedited)
"reportage" of rabid Cleveland Browns fans, Citadel cadets
and participants in the Million Man March.
To a man, these sad characters are media creations, each
of them caught in Faludi's reportorial stare during, or
soon after, his nanosecond of exposure. Despite her Marxist
gloss of American history, this is where Faludi's baby is
a breech birth: She expects us to take these men, most of
whom barely rise above Cro-Magnon, as proxies for the common
man. (Please.) And it is through this lazy sampling of American
manhood that she reaches the strained conclusion that men
and women are really fighting the same war, that men are
essentially 1950s housewives, disengaged from a meaningful
existence and nudged into a consumerist maze. Man's only
cure is to appropriate the tactics of the post-Friedan generation--"Burn
the jockstrap!"--and thereby toss off the shackles of his
oppressors.
Faludi is vaguely onto something here, but her reportorial
and analytical lapses give the lie to this book's buzz--"Feminist
Uncovers Truth about Men!"--and make her thesis ring across
the land like a muffled bell.
If she has done a service, it is that she's proven women
can't fully know men (the converse is also true). Our selves
and our worlds are just as mysterious as women's, and it
will take a man--one who is heir to all the tantrums of
our flesh--to drill into the marrow of men. It would also
be useful if he ignored the media's games, truly heard America
calling and weren't afraid to pursue its sounds down to
the commonest whimper.
--Philip Dawdy
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Willamette Week | originally
published October 20,
1999
|
