> >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.
n.b., i explicitly rejected the word 'crisis.'
frankly, i think any such problems inhere less in quantifiable phenomena than in the proliferation of perspectives whose reci- procal irresolvability transforms 'normal stuff' into apparent 'crises.' so i'm *way* more reflexive than you, nyeah.
but the argument i made was a 'continuist' argument: the problem isn't an event, rather, it's a constantly shifting terrain; and the very fact of that shifting, which manifests itself in 'con- tradictory' ways (not that there's any counterexample of pure consistency, mind you)--politically, economically, technically, socially, etc., all out of sync with each other. put plainly, an example: men who were raised with the belief that they must provide for their families but, due to forces far beyond their control, cannot do so. that's just an example, and a specific- ally gendered one; in offering it i don't imply that women are somehow exempt to these cultural transformations.
and in a sense not a 'continuist' argument, since such things are far too often read as literal genealogies immune to contin- gency. thus:
> >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
yeah: it's one paragraph. if i'd written too, it'd have been thicker, n'est pas?
> 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
tsk tsk, 'all of history' indeed. and you would tell me that a peasant in aquitaine in the eighth century was subject to forces as irruptive and extrinsic as someone who was born in vilnius in 1925 and ended up in haifa by way of bergen-belsen and palm beach? i don't think so. those are, of course, extreme examples; but the US lies somewhere between them, and it sure isn't the country it was even thirty years ago. take a trip to the south side of chicago and check out the building where the democratic convention was held.
> 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.
bingo. note, though, that it's hard to cite such an anthem from the 1890s or the 1950s. in point of fact--and this is what a few people in this thread have touched on--there's no monolithic 'masculinity': expressions of it vary generationally, regionally, in terms of class, race, ethnicity, orientation, education, etc. within these variations are 'themes,' one could say. of course these themes--which are 'constitutive'--tend to repeat and modu- late over time: that's how culture works.
> 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."
i somehow doubt faludi would argue that it began in 1945, and i even bet she says explicitly that it didn't.
cheers, t