BACKTRACK By Kim Phillips-Fein
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man By Susan Faludi William Marrow 662 pages, $27.50
Last summer a short news item appeared in the weekly New York Press that nearly made me gag. A truculent reporter described the results of some study using longitudinal data that looked at the childbearing histories of women who scored above average on math tests. Apparently, what the academics found was that these women are significantly more likely than the general population to have trouble having kids. So, concluded the journalist, math is evolutionarily disadvantageous for women.
I can't wait till Susan Faludi takes this one apart, I thought.
Faludi, the author of the incisive funny Backlash (1991), a full frontal assault on the culture and politics of anti-feminism, once would have had a field day with a study as bogus as this After all, she'd done a great job debunking lousy social science in the past; remember her witty dissection of the nonexistent "marriage crunch" of the '80s? For that matter, wouldn't it be great if she wrote a Backlash for the '90s. There has been plenty of anti-feminist ink spilled in the past decade, and who better than Faludi to mop it up?
Now Faludi's new book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, finally has come out, and women who've waited eight years for a follow-up to Backlash may feel a little betrayed themselves. Nearly positioned to tap into post-Littleton anxieties, Stiffed says almost nothing about women, let alone anti-feminism. Instead, it is devoted to chronicling the rage of America's men, who chafe against the it untenable and insulting" demands placed on them by our culture.
Faludi opens Stiffed with a heartfelt admission that to write the book, she had to admit that men did not, as she'd thought, hold "the reins of power"; instead, even the wife-beaters among them often felt weak, themselves battered by economic forces and internal demons. She writes: "What if we put aside for a time the assumption of male dominance, put away our feminist rap sheet of men's crimes and misdemeanors, or our antifeminist indictment of women's heist of male authority, and just looked at what men have experienced in the past generation?"
Faludi wanders through closing shipyards and downsizing aerospace firms, sits in on Promise Keepers meetings and interviews the Spur Posse (a group of Southern California adolescents who compete to see who can sleep with the most women). She meets Sylvester Stallone several times for drinks, sympathizes with the plight of the male porn star, hangs out with Citadel cadets and chats up the drag queens the cadets go out with. Its canny aim at the zeitgeist aside, the book's not I awful. There are some rich bits of reportage, and many inadvertently funny moments, like the wannabe porn star trying desperately to get an erection while surrounded by an increasingly angry technical staff. For sheer weirdness, it's hard to top her description of the cadet who comments that he's against Shannon Faulkner coming to The Citadel because: "When we're in the showers, it's very intimate. We're one mass, naked together, and it makes us closer. ... You're shaved, you're naked, you're afraid together. You can cry."
But when Faludi stops reporting things and starts analyzing them, her ideas get fuzzy and her interpretations bizarre. Seemingly cribbing from the publicity material for Saving Private Ryan, she argues that World War 11 was the golden age of American manhood. The Army took a generation of fatherless boys and made men out of them: "Boys whose Depression-era fathers could neither provide for them nor guide them into manhood were placed under the benevolent wing of a vast male-run orphanage called the Army and sent into battle. There, firm but kindly senior officers acting as surrogate fathers watched over them as they were tempered into men in the heat of a heroic struggle against malevolent enemies."
When they got back to the States, Henry Wallace envisioned a quiet, productive masculinity, embodied in his idea of the "century of the common man." (Faludi says little about the politics behind this vision, though she does note that Wallace was "deemed a Communist dupe.") But Henry Luce's glitzy American Century defeated Wallace's homelier vision: "If Wallace's manly ideal was all about parental care and nurturance, Luce's was all about taking control-and, even more important, displaying it." In the early '60s, American boys were still being promised the world. ("What Kennedy was selling was a government-backed program of manmaking, of federal masculinity insurance.")
But one by one, the promises made to postwar boys were broken. Outer space, the promised frontier, turned out to be a sad disappointment, "a sterile environment, not a place where women and children could or would want to settle." When "their war" finally came, it was Vietnam, which did not provide the secure sense of mission offered by World War 11. "Even if an emergency airlift of fatherly officers had provided better battlefield guidance, it could not have rescued a battle misguided from the start. Good national leaders, good fathers, wouldn't have deployed their sons to such a war in the first place." Things just got worse for men. They lost their jobs in the '70s and early '80s; then their wives went out and got work - and sometimes even lives -- of their own.
This reinterpretation of 20th century American history in terms of "manhood" weaves in and out of 600 pages of interviews and reporting. Though Faludi's prototype of the betrayed man is clearly a white, blue-collar worker, she talks to middle managers and football fans, a movie star and a playwright, gang members and the editors of Details magazine. (She touches only briefly on gay men, who you'd think might have had some influence on ideas about masculinity.) Today, Faludi concludes, men find themselves with nothing to do, no frontier to seek, no women to protect. "At the close of the century, men find themselves in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured only by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture and awarded by lady luck. There is no passage to manhood in such a world."
Unlike the men of the postwar era, men now live in a "culture of ornament," in which manhood is defined by "appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger and 'props,' by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, and by the glamour of the cover boy."
In lachrymose tones, Faludi reports that men are in crisis because in such a shallow, glittery world, they can no longer support each other. They mourn the closing of a shipyard that employed thousands not because it means losing work: "The more profound loss is of a world where men cared for each other."
Men join the Promise Keepers not because they wish to regain control over the home, but because they want to "search for new ways of being men." The Citadel, she now sees, is a bastion not of male privilege, but of a gentle, caring masculine culture: "Women were just proxies for the real war-against a new economy and a new culture that could not be battled with obscenities and violence." No doubt that would relieve the female cadet who was set on fire by her male peers.
With its fusty Victorian nostalgia for a lost "manhood," and its elegiac descriptions of absent fathers and aching sons, Stiffed reads like a collaboration between Midge Decter and Robert Bly (who Faludi so memorably savaged in Backlash). But despite the book's strange tone and many stylistic flaws, readers may find some of its arguments attractive. It's true-though not across the board-that men are losing pay and job security, and are working at service-oriented jobs kind of like the ones to which women historically have been relegated. As the real social benefits of male privilege decline, cartoon-like images of pumped-up, hyper-masculine bodies haunt men who feet they've somehow been denied their just rewards.
I doubt, though, that Faludi's mission to write a Feminine Mystique for men will win her many readers; the problems of the men she describes seem to have more to do with ordinary economic distress than being confined by gender, anyway. The real appeal of the book isn't what it says about men, but its admonishment to women to try harder to understand the male plight. Ultimately, Stiffed says more about the timidity and confusion of feminism than it does about men.
How hard do men have it, really? They still earn more than women; they still do less housework and child care; they aren't publicly scolded for wanting to make their own choices about sexuality and marriage and children. It's true that working-class men have been screwed by the economic policies of the '80s and '90s, but it's not like everything is rosy for women, who still occupy the worst-paying jobs in disproportionate numbers. Faludi might say this is beside the point; as she puts it, "while being laid off was agony for a female employee, the one part of her life it didn't ruin was her feminine identity." Fair enough. But surely if it's gotten harder to "be a man," in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, it's not really because of deindustrialization - though it may be true that widening economic inequality spawns all kinds of theories of natural hierarchy, including gender roles. Nor is it because craft labor is in decline, as it has been for the past century. It's because relations between men and women have been so deeply transformed over the past 25 years. Strangely, Faludi effectively has written a book about men as if women hardly existed at all.
It's hard, after all, to take seriously Faludi's contention that "manhood" is all about apprenticeship, wartime bonding and man-to-man talks. Superiority to women historically has been central to ideas of what it means to be a man; communitarian shibboleths about a "culture of utility" seem rather beside the point. If a man leaves his job and hobos around the country doing nothing productive whatsoever, he's no less a man. But if a man lets a woman tell him what to do, then he's "emasculated." Supporting women is part of what it has meant to be a man, but sleeping with lots of women and never getting tied down to any of them also has been a perfectly valid way to show off one's "manhood," in the Danielle Steele sense of the word. Feminism, more specifically than the whole nexus of cultural changes wrought by modernity, challenges the bedrock notion of women's inferiority; as women change their actions and lives, men must do the same.
Since Faludi doesn't say much about transforming men's attitudes toward women, it's hard to know exactly what she means when she writes about imagining "a life without predetermined masculine expectations." Does she want men to become more stereotypically "feminine" in their personalities and expectations, as their jobs have become more service-oriented, more unstable, more like women's work? It may well be that servility and docility-the personality traits that made girls suited to factory labor, in the eyes of 19th-century mill owners-would serve working-class men better as the erosion of blue-collar skills and the annihilation of unions leave them increasingly helpless before the forces of the market.
But can anyone really encourage men to embrace these "feminine" traits? When Simone de Beauvoir wrote that there were "two kinds of people, women and human beings," what she meant was that women were socialized to deny their full humanity, trained to be passive, undemanding, their lives directed by others. Rather than claiming for women the courage, economic security and freedom long the province of men, Faludi implies that men should throw out their old expectations of what they deserve in life, becoming more like women, who know they don't deserve anything anyway.
Why did the author of a polemic as fiery and smart as Backlash write such a saccharine second book?
Redefining feminism as a movement to liberate men as well as women could be seen as a smart tactical maneuver. Men, Faludi suggests, should join with women to revolt against the stereotypes that bind them, and that often lead men to mistreat women. To encourage this, women should lighten up. But Faludi seems to have forgotten that feminism has succeeded when women band together to demand change from men. In contrast, in Stiffed she plays the ultimate feminine role: She listens, attentively, sympathetically, non-judgmentally, to men talk about their pain, and she lets them know she's on their side.
Intentionally or not, Stiffed reads like a roundabout apology for Backlash. Faludi wants men to know that they're forgiven; she has learned her lesson. Feminists should stop criticizing men, for they need our succor, our affection, our understanding and respect. Looked at this way, it's clear that the notion that men are sexism's real victims has an obvious appeal for a feminist in retreat, for a woman who's just anxious to make it clear she has had the boys' best interests at heart all along.
Kim Phillips-Fein is a contributing editor for The Baffler and a writer in New York.