>My tentative conclusion is, if you go looking for bone-head, clueless
>men, you will find them.
except that you ignore the studies upon studies--mostly ethnographies of various stripes, but also good old fashioned positivist qualitative interviews--that have been done for the last 15 years wrestling with these same issues, particularly in the field of men's studies. [i'm not talking here about this mis/representation of your generation; yours is only one perspective and certainly isn't authorized because you were there and you're a man and faludi's wasn't/isn't. and the above also doesn't take responsibility for the significantly different kinds of experiences you are bound to have given where you were located. that matters. growing up near a slag pit in johnstown p.a. is different from growing up in berkeley]
when i studied men at ncr, as well as men who'd been downsized out of their managerial positions, not one of the 50 of them mentioned anything like what you've described. indeed, not one of them referred to "the 60s" as having much of an impact on their lives whether they were in college or not. [they had every opp to do so since i spent hours with them having them do "life histories" they reconstructed their past for me, reconstructed their identity, what made them who they were/are, how they made sense of why the ended up where they did in life. i then tried to read those narratives, exploring the gaps, fissures, the places where they couldn't articulate what they wanted to say --where they had no words, where they stumbled, slipped, stuttered --where the narrative did not flow smoothly, in other words. [a method that draws on dorothy smith's work actually and had little to do with derrida et al initially]
they were also read against both social science lit on what that "era" was about and popular representations of that era. in other words, their biographies were located in history but that history wasn't taken at face value as some sort of truth against their own distorted understandings. tried to play them off each other.
at any rate, what strikes me here is that the 50s' and 60's doesn't quite figure for them the way a lot of our telling of that tale would have it. and i suppose that has a lot to do with where people were "at" at the time and who's telling the stories about what the 50s and 60s meant to people. those stories are located in the same way that these men's stories a located.
her method is not unlike ehrenreich's in _hearts of men_. both of them examine cultural artefacts in order to explore representations of masculinity. faludi is also a journalist and so also uses interviews. the problem is likely that she;s not exploring what they say *as* representations of masculinity. perhaps she's taking them at face-value. not sure.
what ehrenreich did, though, was focus in on specifically representations of masculinity created by the professional managerial class and as disseminated in popular venues: book of the month fiction, playboy, commentary on the beats, medical advice in good housekeeping, films, best selling non-fiction.
ehrenreich's thesis is that professional-managerial men attacked and undermined the breadwinner/homemaker family long before feminists did because they carved out alternative possibilities for masculinie identity that didn't require a home, a dog, bbq grill, power tools, and wood paneled station wagon:
the gray flannel rebels wondering what the hell was so liberating about office work as opposed to manly physical labor who rebelled by taking off--really or symbolically--and relieving themselves of responsibility for wife/kids;
the beats who celebrated art and poetry and rejection of the gray flannel world [somehow forgetting that they depended on the women in their lives to support them financially];
playboy and the "fun morality" that fit nicely with the consumption ethic of keynesian capitalism [express your masculinity in products that symbolize liberation from basement workshop back into the den with stereo, picasso prints and fine jazz. oh yeah, and always make sure that there are beautiful girls [but not wives!] around lest anyone suggest you're gay.
medical advice about the crisis of heart disease which was [then] said to afflict men more than women, ostensibly becuase the stress of the corporate world was too much for them too bear. ladies make that man happy and shut about your probelm [with no name] it only aggravates his condition
maslow's psychobabble and so forth and so on.
ehrenreich shows how all of these are responses to changes in the configuration of capitalism in postWWII US and suggests how these representations work quite niceley,. [follows from her somewhat functionalist definition of class that she wrote with john ehrenreich]
faludi's mistake, it seems to me, is that she's all over the place.
she says in a mother jones interview that she chose _stiffed_ as opposed to another suggestion, 'shafted,' because it captured the notion that she wanted to deal with working class men. i'm just really curious whether she managed to do that or not.
and, i'm also curious whether her analysis isn't guilty of smilar analyses of the plight of black men in the US. i somehow can't imagine that she comes off sounding like eli anderson who writes [but was never taken to task for]:
"the lack of gainful employment not only keeps the entire community in a pit of poverty, but also deprives young men of the traditional American way of proving their manhood--supporting a family" [p 136, _Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community_]
kelley