[lbo-talk] the decline of men

[shag carpet bomb]

it's interesting that this type of conversation has been a topic of concern 
for a long time among blacks in the u.s. - the relative surplus of 
'undesirable' hetmen. Yet, that conversation tended to see it as a 
structural issue -- with major exceptions, of course, such as the black 
nationalist masculinist ideologies alluded to in the article.

anyway, on a related note, on facebook, michael pollak and i had a brief 
conversation about Ehrenreich's Hearts of Men. The reason why I always used 
that book to teach sociology of marriage and families is that her thesis is 
counterintuitive - at least according to a more mainstream feminist POV: 
Ehrenreich's argument is that breadwinner male, homemaker female hetfamily 
unraveled because capitalism, uh, *wanted* it to. that's a simplification, 
of course, since normally one might say "patriarchy" (*spit*) wanted it to 
or men wanted it to. But her deeper point is more that you can't analyze 
anything about gender relations, gender ideology, heterosexuality, etc. 
without examining capitalism. blah blah. (She makes this point even more 
clearly in an interested essay in a anthology of socialist feminist essays 
and articles, big fat book, I read a few years ago, which seems to have 
completely been missed as part of the feminist canon - mostly because, as 
Janet Halley says, socialist feminism is pretty much comatose. (paraphrase)