You mean John Cassavetes.
On this thread and related ones (Faludi, etc.), I'm mainly with you. The 'feminization of culture & society' thesis is an old hat. In the process of the development of capitalism, women's role has come to be often posited as a 'civilizing' influence, from which rebellious boys & men are supposed to flee; they got to "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before." This tendency to portray the 'stifling civilization' as 'feminine' & 'feminizing' is especially strong in American culture; with regard to literature, Leslie Fiedler (even though he wasn't what we'd call feminist) took note of it in _Love and Death in the American Novel_ (1960):
***** The novel, however, was precisely the product of the sentimentalizing taste of the eighteenth century; and a continuing tradition of prose fiction did not begin until the love affair of Lovelace [Yoshie: A homonym for "loveless"] and Clarissa...had to be imagined. The subject par excellence of the novel is love or, more precisely -- in its beginning at least -- seduction and marriage; and in France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, even in England, spiritually so close to America, love in one form or another has remained the novel's central theme, as necessary and as expected as battle in Homer or revenge in Renaissance drama. But our great Romantic _Unroman_, our typical anti-novel, is the womanless _Moby Dick_.
Where is our _Madame Bovary_, our _Anna Karenina_, our _Pride and Prejudice_ or _Vanity Fair_? Among our classic novels, at least those before Henry James, who stands so oddly between our own traditions and the European ones we rejected or recast, the best attempt at dealing with love is _The Scarlet Letter_, in which the physical consummation of adultery has occurred and all passion burned away before the novel proper begins. For the rest, there are _Moby Dick_ and _Huckleberry Finn_, _The Last of the Mohicans_, _The Red Badge of Courage_, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe -- books that turn from society to nature or nightmare out of desperate need to avoid the facts of wooing, marriage, and child-bearing....
...Ever since [the figure of Rip Van Winkle], the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat -- anywhere to avoid "civilization," which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility....
...In our national imagination, two freckle-faced boys, arm in arm, fishing poles over their shoulders, walk toward the river; or one alone floats peacefully on its waters, a runaway Negro by his side. They are on the lam, we know, from Aunt Polly and Aunt Sally and the widow Douglas and Miss Watson, from goldern-haired Becky Thatcher, too -- from all the reduplicated female symbols of "sivilization."...
...Twain's treatment of Jim in _Huckleberry Finn_ is, however, complex enough to preserve him from becoming a merely stereotypical darkie; and that very complexity makes it impossible to describe him as just a substitute father. Sometimes he seems more servant than father, sometimes more lover than servant, sometimes more mother than either! His relationship with Huck must be seen not against the later sentimental tradition of "little children and big Africans," but against an earlier tradition of more nearly coeval loving pairs like Natty and Chingachgook, Gordon Pym and Dirk Peters, Ishmael and Queequeg. In Jim, Huck finds the pure affection offered by Mary Jane without the threat of marriage; the escape from social obligations offered by Pap without the threat of beatings; the protection and petting offered by his volunteer foster-mothers without the threat of pious conformity; the male companionship offered by the Grangerfords without the threat of the combat of honor; the friendship offered by Tom without the everlasting rhetoric and make-believe. Jim is all things to him: father and mother and playmate and beloved, appearing naked and begowned and bewhiskered and pained blue, calling Huck by the names appropriate to their multiform relationship: "Huck" or "honey" or "chile" or "boss," and just once "white gentleman."
It is an impossible society which they constitute, the outcast boy and the Negro, who, even for Huck, does not really exist as a person: a society in which, momentarily, the irreparable breach between black and white seems healed by love. Huck, who offends no one else, begins by playing in Tom's company a stupid joke on the sleeping Jim; then almost kills him as the result of another heartless stunt; teases him to the point of tears about the reality of their perils on the river; and finally joins with Tom once more to inflict on Jim a hundred pointless torments, even putting his life in unnecessary danger. And through it all, Jim plays the role of Uncle Tom, enduring everything, suffering everything, forgiving everything -- finally risking a lynching to save "Marse Tom's" life. It is the Southerner's dream, the American dream of guilt remitted by the abused Negro, who, like the abused mother, opens his arms crying, "Lawsy, I's mighty glad to git you back agin, honey."... (25-6; 271; 352-3) *****
Since Leslie Fiedler is a Freudian of sorts, he thinks that the lack of full-frontal (pun intended) engagement with heterosexuality in classic American novels make them look "immature" when compared with the best of the European novels. Nonetheless, Fiedler paid close attention to exactly those intersections of race, gender, & sexuality in representation that would later become the stuff of cultural studies (that is sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly maligned).
Yoshie