Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 15:57:10 -0400 From: "Eric Beck" <rayrena at mail.accesshub.net>
T Byfield wrote:
>having said that, is there a problem? sure. has there been a problem
>for some time? sure.
What makes you say this? I don't think the matter--whether the problem is real or imagined--can be shooed away with a wave of the hand. Not that you must report back to me with a stack of citations, but it deserves more than just terse consideration; how is the "crisis" manifesting itself, what trends make us believe that there is one, what are its features etc. I'm not saying that there's *not* a problem, but I'm sensitive to reflexively buying into the hype.
>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?
This sounds a little thin. The same sort of dynamic followed the war with Spain and the US's imperialist adventures throughout Latin America and the Far East. What you are describing here sounds like all of history, and I'm not convinced the situation is anymore dire or pronounced since WWII than since, say, the Civil War. As KPF points out, TR and TV were worried about withering masculinity a century ago (Stuart Ewen, more implicitly than explicitly, has described the "feminization"--my quotes, not his--inherent in the creation of the consumer culture). The Lynds' Middletown in Transition described the changes occuring to the family and to society as women were (re)entering the factories in the thirties (capitalists loved their work ethic and low expectations re wages). One of the much-quoted protests by depression-hit workers in the 30s and even in the 1870-80s is "how's a man supposed to feed his family," with its implied failure of attaining traditional masculinity.
Not trying to be pedantic in my raising of these few examples (though I'm probably accomplishing that), only say that perhaps this "crisis" has longer history than just 1945. Maybe it's a permanent capitalist condition that started with the massive change from a rural/ag/craft-based society to an urban/industrial-based one? I don't know; it's a "theory."
Of course none of this, in itself, makes Faludi's book irrelevant. But I gotta wonder about her grasp of the subject if she sees this as a wholly new thing (oddly, it began about the same time she started research for her book!). It may have different slightly different impetuses and manifestations, but as far as I can tell it's been around awhile.
Eric