Wall Street Journal - September 24, 1999
THE BETRAYED GENERATION
By Francis Fukuyama
Journalist Susan Faludi rose to prominence in 1991 for her book "Backlash," which sought to exonerate feminism of any blame for society's contemporary discontents, pointing the finger instead at feminism's enemies who, however improbably, were said to dominate the media and popular culture. Following her bestsellerdom, she spent time trying, as she explains at the beginning of her new book, "Stiffed," (Morrow, 650 pages, $27.50) to understand male resistance to female change. She did so initially by attending weekly meetings of a domestic-violence group and discovered that the men were not the monsters portrayed by some feminists but rather victims themselves. After countless interviews with men, she was led, as the book's publicity materials inform us, to a "surprisingly empathetic" view of modern males and the realization that the baby-boom generation of men has suffered a huge betrayal.
This, like the picture of the chisel-faced worker on the book's cover, turns out to be a lot of false advertising. Had Ms. Faludi's intention been to demonstrate how awful contemporary men were, she could not have picked a choicer lot. Apart from the workers at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard with whom the book begins, the rest of the male "victims" described in this book's mind-numbing 650 pages range from repulsive to merely pathetic: members of the Spur Posse (the high-school club in Lakewood, Calif., that racked up points for having sex with as many girls as possible); cadets at the Citadel, with their violent hazing rituals; the "Dawg Pound," a group of working-class fans of the Cleveland Browns who dress up in basset-hound ears to yelp at their team; Lt. William Calley of My Lai fame; gun-toting militia members; an L.A. gangster who shot out the intestines of a 14-year-old; drag queens; and (I kid you not) a male porn star who was driven to suicide by his failure to deliver erections on cue. Even Sylvester Stallone figures as a victim; he whines to the author over appetizers at Spago that the only roles he can get are as "feminized" muscle men.
Bait and Switch
Having anointed this unappealing group of losers as representative of American postwar manhood, Ms. Faludi proceeds to explain how they were "stiffed." According to her, the generation of men born at the end of World War II was promised by their fathers that they would be in control, that they would have meaningful work, that life-long loyalty would be rewarded, whether by their companies or their government. These baby boomers were then betrayed by a cliched list of villains. Their fathers, in the first place, were wedded to an incorrect version of masculinity that involved domination, protection of the weak and the desire to be number one. (Ms. Faludi explains at several points that being a man really means being a political activist or community organizer; it thus turns out that gays are the most manly of contemporary men.) These qualities led the fathers' generation to create what Ms. Faludi calls the "national security state" and to compete in a Cold War -- interpreted primarily in psychosexual terms -- whose outcome was ultimately Vietnam. This "foreign-policy betrayal" of American ideals was complemented at home by a betrayal of the lifetime employment contract by profit-hungry corporations.
But the chief villain in this postwar drama is the growth of what Ms. Faludi calls an "ornamental" celebrity culture that promotes individual display over community service. Feminists have long argued that women, rather than being rewarded for the work they do, are valued for their looks. Ms. Faludi claims that men -- deprived of meaningful work -- have come to suffer the same fate, measuring themselves increasingly by the kind of media spotlight they can attract to themselves. Men cannot deal with this "feminization" of their roles, and they react by turning violent and self-destructive.
Ornamental Men
There is of course a great deal that is distasteful about America's contemporary celebrity culture and the kinds of values that it promotes. There are certain subgroups like African-American inner-city teens who may be misled into seeing sports stardom as the best route to upward social mobility. But turning oneself into an "ornament" was hardly an option for the thousands of laid-off industrial workers, or downsized corporate middle managers, who have found the economy tough going in the past generation. The celebrity culture, moreover, is not a conspiracy stage-managed by some large media conglomerates but reflects in large measure the preferences of the general public. And it is notable that well into the age of feminism, those market forces dictate that ornamental display remains largely the province of women. Look at any airport magazine rack, where the men's magazines have pictures of beautiful women on their covers, while the women's magazines have ... pictures of beautiful women on their covers.
There is no question that men have had special problems in the past few decades. Women have not simply done better in the job market; men have positively lost ground. After peaking in the early 1970s, real male median incomes have slipped perhaps 12%, while male labor-force participation -- particularly for young workers without skills -- has declined. Conservatives often fail to recognize that family decline is not just a matter of moral decay but also of men's loss of their ability to play the role of resource provider. (It is fascinating to note among Ms. Faludi's interviewees how often it is that women respond to a spouse's loss of livelihood by taking up with another man who can better provide for them.) As Lionel Tiger points out in "The Decline of Males," the desire of men to play this traditional role, or to participate in male-bonded competition, is rooted in nature and therefore cannot be so easily wished away when society finds it politically incorrect.
Back in the Good Old Days
On the other hand, Ms. Faludi shows a complete lack of historical perspective by suggesting that somehow back in the good old days men always had meaningful work that embedded them in their communities. She seems to forget that the way to the West (or indeed, to the U.S. itself) was paved by the absence of opportunity at home, and seems to think that there was once a time when competitive individualism was not part of the American character (perhaps back in the days of Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller).
Consistent with her earlier book, Ms. Faludi is particularly intent on showing that feminism is not to blame for the current predicament of men, despite the insistence of her interlocutors that this is so. It seems not to have occurred to her that the loud assertion by many feminists in the 1970s that men were violent, loutish creatures who had no useful role to play in the lives of women (recall Gloria Steinem's remark that a "woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle") might have represented its own sort of betrayal. Ms. Faludi makes fun of the gun enthusiast's nostalgia for the role of protector and provider without acknowledging that that role, no less than a steady job, was part of the "promise" that was made to the postwar generation of men. And she is oblivious to the fact that feminism's attack on "family values" is often tantamount to a denigration of the importance of fatherhood, despite the fact that she finds a failure of fatherhood at the core of the personal pathologies she describes.
The account I have just given of "Stiffed" makes the book seem more analytical and coherent than it really is; Ms. Faludi is clearly a better journalist than she is a social thinker. There are a number of compelling personal stories in this book, but to get to them one has to wade through a sea of pointless detail about the travails of a gay magazine or the maneuvering over Mr. Stallone's latest script. In the end, what is betrayed is not American men but the author's promise of a truly empathetic portrayal of them.
Mr. Fukuyama's latest book is "The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order" (Free Press, 1999).