grtz
since your reply was both candid and thoughtful, i'll try to say something a bit more fruitful, or at least less grumpy.
first off, i haven't read the book. but a review is, at least potentially, as much of a contribution to general discourse as a book is; as such, it can be 'reviewed' as well. the ar- gument that one shoulnd't do so without having read the book in question is as faulty as it would be to say (e.g.) that one couldn't review faludi's book without having talked with the men she talked with. that to those who would ask for a show of hands as to who's 'actually read the book.' toss in the feverish overproduction of books and it becomes clear, if it wasn't already, that 'reviews' function as summaries. that's extrinsic to a reviewer's responsibility to provide some kind of responsible accounting for what a book actually is; or, rather, it intensifies that need. but that's very precisely not what review editors are looking for. same old story: bottom (wo)man on the totem pole gets the contrdic- tions dumped in his/her lap.
anyway.
> I think that it *is* actually difficult to write a coherent book about
> masculine identity without writing about women (as opposed to Papua New
> Guineans, say). So a book which treats manhood as something men do by
> themselves is going to be working at a real theoretical disadvantage. In
> the early 1900s people like TR and Veblen were anxious about what the rise
> in consumption and service employment meant for masculinity -- but they
> also lived in a world which had only recently been dominated by craft
> labor. If there's a new "crisis of masculinity" -- as Faludi thinks; I'm
> curious whether you do -- it seems like it must be rooted in something else.
we'd do a lot better if we dispensed with this word 'crisis.' i can't remember where--maybe in _acts of resistance_ by bourdieu? i saw a decent account of the way its use tacitly distorts 'rhet- oric' by positing various entities and relations: an organic body in an acutely destructive phase, an observer diagnosing the con- dition from a neutral or normal standpoint, etc.
having said that, is there a problem? sure. has there been a problem for some time? sure. is that problem 'continuous'? nah. at least not any more than the holocaust was 'continuous' with henry ford's work, say. and that's not merely a lax comparison: the irruption of things like WW2 introduced huge disjunctures with erratic consequences. if, through the agency of SCAP, the US changed the course of japanese culture after the war, that act of changing another culture imposed huge reciprocal changes on the US--through tremendous shifts in the notion and practice of governmentality, through an altered sense of the country's place in the world, through the reflux of political programs imposed elsewhere, through tax and finance, etc., etc. none of which is 'directly' related to masculinity; but if it isn't, then what *is* directly related to masculinity? and i'm not interested in binary oppositions, so no 'femininity' answers please: as you your- self pointed out, you'd think that faludi might have spent a bit more time on what gays might have to say about masculinity in the postwar period. point is, gender isn't a zero-sum game. in fact, it's such an open field that writing an adequate book about it is impossible. in that regard, faulting faludi for writing a flawed book seemed a bit much: *of course* it's flawed and inadeqaute. but she does seem to have announced what she was writing about. and my five bucks says--i'll see, but i'll bet before reading--that she didn't set out to write a 'theoretical' book. commentarial, sure; but 'theoretical,' like 'critical,' promises a blue sky that nothing can ever fulfill.
> I also wonder if Faludi's book would have been better if she'd looked in a
> more nuanced way at what masculinity means for men in different classes --
> the 24 year old stock option millionaires probably aren't having much
> trouble feeling in control, powerful, etc. these days.
i'm sure it would have. the last ehrenreich book i read was _fear of falling_, which offers an analysis that could probably have _stiffed_ for lunch: as yet another middle-class exposition about a 'universal' problem whose parochial focus is made all too clear by what it omits.
> More generally, though, I plead guilty to your criticisms: I do wish there
> were more good, hard-hitting popular political books out there about
> feminism and about women. When someone who could have written a
> good one instead decides to write about the topic of how men today have
> it rough because they are *men* -- rather than because they're workers --
> it does kind of make me wonder what's up with feminism today.
you know something? we've all got a long way to go on these fronts, but the amount of progress that's been made in *my* conscious life- time--and i'm only 34--is really mind-boggling. i want it all as fast as you do, but it just ain't gonna happen. faulting specific people (*especially* writers who are making positive contributions) is just wack. sorry, but the world viewed through the prism of isms isn't sustainable. it took *millions* of years to build up these imbalances, and they ain't gonna get fixed in a few decades.
and that's not an argument for sitting around with our collective thumb up our collective bum. but it *is* an atrgument for lighten- ing up on people who are at least exploring what's afoot.
cheers, t