As if men hadn't suffered enough indignities of late (loss of breadwinner status, declining sperm counts, advertisements targeting erectile dysfunction and hair loss), along comes Susan Faludi, offering soothing words and a lump of sugar. Like a horse whisperer, she feels men's pain and wants to coax them out of the barn, one hoof ahead of the other. She isn't being deliberately patronising-which makes her tender concern all the more shaming. Men are now officially pathetic.
Having stirred up the henhouse with her best-selling tract Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, a warning cry about the secret plot to reverse feminist gains by brainwashing women with stick-figure fashion images and false idols such as Camille Paglia, Faludi has concluded six years of research with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, which declares that men are not guilty of being the enemy. No, they are victims, too: dazed captives in a jar.
Like women, Faludi argues, men are judged today on their cosmetic appearance and their market value rather than their inner worth-forced to parade down the catwalk of consumerism and to compete in the swimsuit competition. As men lose to women in the looks department, they blame women for their second-class showing. They shouldn't. "Just because men have wound up in a beauty-contest world doesn't mean women have put them there. The gaze that plagues them does not actually spring from a feminine eye." It is, Faludi says, the Cyclops eye of "ornamental culture," a Hollywood/Madison Avenue/glossy-magazine creation that saps everyone's vital essences like a ray of Kryptonite. Only by smashing this prison searchlight can the sexes join forces and confront their overseers. Runway models of the world, unite!
Others have called for a truce between the sexes, but Faludi plays peacemaker on an epic scale. Despite its irate title and a cover picture of a hardworking American Joe, Stiffed is a gentler book than Backlash. In a story for Newsweek, Faludi was photographed sitting on the floor, holding her toes and looking disarmingly girly, as if to say, "Me, a scary feminist? How silly!"
Like Edmund Morris with his biographical "memoir" of Ronald Reagan, Faludi couches her book as a personal odyssey. (There are no impersonal ones any more.) "This is the story of a feminist's travels through a postwar male realm... It is also a reflection of my own mental journey as I struggled to understand the perilous voyage to manhood undertaken by the men I once knew as boys." A wayfarer with an agenda, she travelled the length and the breadth of the US sprinkling empathy wherever she went.
Her safari took her to places where men continue to lead lives of quiet desperation, and yet, like the "silenced" women in Backlash, are quite talkative. Faludi suspends judgement no matter what nonsense she hears. Whether she is interviewing troubled souls in the Promise Keepers, a football fanatic who daubs his face every Sunday, or a former go-go boy who felt so degraded, you can picture her nodding with understanding.
Faludi may be a good listener, but as a writer she has both mitts choking the steering wheel. With its hokey subheads ("Cause Without a Rebel," "A Woodsman in a Microwave World"), its oracular utterances, and its pat generalisations, Faludi's tome is an almost self-parodying product of crisis-mongering news magazine journalese, squeezing the life out of every topic to make a debatable point. The author surveys the Zeitgeist to stereophonic fanfare, conflating the US president with Obi-Wan Kenobi: "If Reagan was the fantasy elder come to lead the sons in triumphal battle against the Evil Empire, when the credits rolled and the sons awoke... most felt farther away from the promised land of adult manhood-less triumphal, less powerful, less confident of making a living or providing for a family or contributing productively to society."
Incapable of wit or flat assertion, Faludi employs hypnotic repetition as her main power of persuasion, massaging the reader into submission. As her metaphors become fruitful and multiply, ("Lured from my intended course, I sometimes lost sight of the bright beacons and media buoys marking the shoals where men and women clashed, and also lost sight of that secure shore..."), every chapter becomes longer than it needs to be, and every chapter seems longer than the one before.
To get a handle on her swelling narrative, Faludi uses cinematic crosscutting to foster the impression that postwar history is a streaming montage-an Altman-like epic where everything connects. However far the book roams, though, it holds fast to a simple story-idea. The idea is that the American man is a disappointed boy.
After the second world war and Korea, Faludi contends, veterans returned to civilian life with a stoicism that locked out everyone who hadn't shared their harrowing experiences, and even those who had shared them. They put the past behind them with a vengeance, swapping their khakis for grey flannel suits. They married, moved to the suburbs, and stowed their worries in a briefcase, sipping their cocktails after a hard day at the office in enforced silence. Don't bother your father, he has a lot on his mind. "The sons grew up with fathers who so often seemed spectral, there and yet not there, heads of household strangely disconnected from the familial body."
And so, instead of initiating their sons into manhood, these holograms in cardigans bequeathed them nothing except the promise of more material goods-a bigger car, a hi-fi set. "With much fanfare, the fawned-over sons of the postwar generation had been handed their keys to the kingdom and for a while they revelled in their prosperity." But it wasn't enough. A generational link was broken.
Everywhere she goes on her journey, Faludi encounters greying male boomers who are down in the dumps, having missed out on too many fishing trips. Malaise is difficult to measure, and Faludi doesn't cite many statistics to indicate how pervasive the social toll of this father-son estrangement really is. (Recent developments suggest that having a hazy dad hanging around the house is better than having no dad at all.) Instead, she treats her postwar scenario as a poetic truth-an impressionistic fact.
The other broken link is the bond between working men. For generations, men forged their identities through labour, taking pride in what they could do with their hands and muscles and engineering know-how. Faludi doesn't cite her nemesis, Camille Paglia, but her valedictory section on the Long Beach Naval Shipyard recalls Paglia's remark that when she crosses a bridge or passes a skyscraper, she often thinks, "Men made this." But such men are now an endangered species, a lunch box line of Willy Lomans.
Cheap imports, defence downsizing, information technology and entrepreneurial success stories have consigned the ranks of blue-collar workers to the pit. Like many on the left (and some on the right) with a political investment in downgrading the US as a land of disenchantment, Faludi stresses only the bust side of the boom-and-bust cycle, treating the economic boom of the 1990s first as if it didn't exist, then as if it didn't matter ("as the economy recovered, the male crisis did not"). Instead of an apprentice studying under a union elder, instead of camaraderie among co-workers, it's now every Dilbert for himself; and building a website doesn't bolster the spirit or ennoble the physical landscape.
In a section on pornography, Faludi falls for the hype that because women are more visible in adult video, they are the ones in control. It is an odd notion, that porn is an expression of female power. Far from mirroring the moribund status of men, the current porn scene crudely reflects the resurgence of male bravado and male prerogative in pop culture. Aside from a few pockets of girl power, American pop culture in the 1990s is full of guy humour and horniness, as evidenced by Howard Stern and his imitators, Beavis & Butt-Head, South Park, The Man Show, Maxim magazine, much of hip-hop music and the bruises worn as medals in Fight Club. Immature and cartoonish as most of these items are, their popularity and their attack-energy signify that millions of young men no longer feel inhibited by feminism. They know that they can joke their way around it.
Faludi is aware of this-she refers to "amped-up virility," but chalks it up to over-compensation for basic insecurity. She cites research findings that teenage boys rate being funny as the personality trait they value most and being athletic as their most prized skill. "These young men understood that the wisecracking stand-up comedian and the muscle-bound sports star were the most watched and most highly valued male objects of our time." What Faludi doesn't understand about boys or men is that being funny has always been prized, not because it makes a guy stand out, but because it helps him fit in.
Humour makes someone popular, a part of the gang. But reading Stiffed, you would get the idea that men never crack jokes, except to cover up their anguish. You would also come away with the sense that popular culture doesn't convey rebel energy and pent-up desires; that it is solely an instrument of social control and indoctrination. The men in Stiffed are like the masses in so much leftist literature of the 1930s: a poor herd always on the receiving end. In fact Faludi has an atavistic left-wing nostalgia for the good old bad days when the only question was: which side are you on? Just as Bruce Springsteen makes a political fashion statement by dressing like a railroad worker on stage to show his kinship to Woody Guthrie, Faludi, figuratively speaking, garbs the men in Stiffed in old dungarees and work shirts-ideological hand-me-downs from John Steinbeck, James T Farrell and Studs Terkel. Men are now a spiritual proletariat worse-off than their political sisters because they are too out of touch with their feelings to articulate their rage.
After six years of interviewing sad sacks, Faludi scratches her head over this epidemic of male passivity. "Why don't contemporary men rise up in protest against their betrayal? If they have experienced so many of the same injuries as women, the same humiliations, why don't they challenge the culture as women did?" Faludi concedes that men lack a clearly defined foe and battlefield. What new realms should they be gaining-the media, entertainment and image-making institutions of corporate America? But these are institutions, they are told, which are already run by men. Is technological progress the frontier? Why then does it seem to be pushing men into obsolescence, socially and occupationally?
Not waving but drowning in her own swirl, Faludi manages to offer the prospect of men joining with like-minded women to create "a new paradigm for human progress." After 600-plus pages purporting to show that men are expiring by slow suicide, her prescription is "a new paradigm." Like many cultural declinists, Faludi practises a politics of piety, which is not politics at all, only a high-minded handwringing.
The difference between Backlash and Stiffed is that the alarm bells in the first book did capture something in the air, a complicated tension between men and women in the workplace which exploded in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas battle. But nothing in Stiffed rings true.
I am a boomer, the oldest of four brothers, and my father served in Korea; but when Faludi writes of "fawned-over sons" being handed "the keys to the kingdom," I can only wonder: what keys? What kingdom? Dad must have been holding out on us; and the other dads, too. Nobody with whom I grew up had the lofty sense of entitlement that Faludi eulogises as having ended in ashes and stale beer. For all its invocation of the common man, Faludi's book carries a severe, college-educated, upper-middle-class slant.
Also, I don't know any man who feels that he is on pantyhose display in a world that he never made (and I work for Cond? Nast, which Stiffed paints as a wading pool of narcissism). What men my age brood about is probably what men our age have always brooded about: waning powers, inklings of mortality, feeling past it. For most men, these blues are something you go through and eventually get over; but in Faludi's America-that tornado alley of backlashes, betrayals, undeclared wars, and domestic apocalypses-the quiet struggles of maturity simply don't make for gripping allegory.
l Edited from an article which first appeared in the New Republic. Reprinted by permission © 1999, the new republic, Inc.
