Erzsébet Báthory
11-16-2004, 07:33 PM
The Male Eunuch
By JAMES WOLCOTT
Stiffed: The Betrayal of The American Man
by Susan Faludi
As if men hadn't suffered enough indignities of late (loss of breadwinner status, declining sperm counts, TV ads 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 patronizing, which makes her tender concern all the more shaming. Men are now officially pathetic.
After stirring up the henhouse with her best-selling and award-winning tract Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American 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 American Man, which declares that men are not guilty of being the enemy. They are not the mobilizers and the beneficiaries of the backlash. No, they are victims, too, dazed captives in a jar. "[A]s the nation wobbled toward the millennium," Faludi writes, "its pulse-takers seemed to agree that a domestic apocalypse was under way: American manhood was under siege."
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's "beauty pageant" and to compete in the swimsuit competition, "where the odds did not seem to be on the men's side." As men lose to women in the looks department, they blame women for their second-class showing. They shouldn't. "[J]ust because men have wound up in a beauty-contest world doesn't mean women have put them there. The gaze that plagues them doesn't actually spring from a feminine eye," Faludi observes, borrowing a term from cultural studies and beating it senseless. "The gaze that hounds men is the very gaze that women have been trying to escape." It is 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 poking out this prison searchlight can the sexes join forces and rise to confront their overseers. Runway models of the world, unite!
Other commentators have called for a truce between the sexes and a marriage of common interests (Cathy Young's Ceasefire! is a spirited example), but Faludi plays peacemaker on an epic scale, as if mending a continental divide. Despite its irate title and a cover photo by Gordon Parks of a representative hardworking American Joe, Stiffed is a gentler dispatch than Backlash, more of a soft sell than a wake-up call. In a cover story for Newsweek Faludi was photographed inside sitting on the floor in a pixie pose, holding her bare 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 odysseys anymore.) "This is the story of a feminist's travels through a postwar male realm," she writes. "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 traveled the length and the breadth of America on her own listening tour, sprinkling a little empathy wherever she went.
Her safari took her into a country where men continue to lead lives of quiet desperation, and yet, like the "silenced" women in Backlash, are quite talkative. Exploring the fringes of male tribal behavior on the premise that what happens at the edges creeps into the center, Faludi suspends judgment 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 used ("`I felt degraded,' he said, and his analysis of his degradation was one any female stripper would find familiar"), you can picture her nodding with understanding, like Judy Woodruff in a cutaway shot.
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," "This Eager Violence of the Heart," "A Woodsman in a Microwave World"), its oracular utterances ("a man didn't have to go to Vietnam to confront the jungle"), and its pat generalizations too boring to quote, Faludi's tome is an almost selfparodying product of crisis-mongering newsmagazine journalese, squeezing the life out of every topic to make a debatable point. Sentence after sentence unfurls like the flag at Iwo Jima as the author surveys the Zeitgeist to stereophonic fanfare, conflating the president of the United States with Obi-Wan Kenobi: "If Ronald 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 from the stardusted dream, 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."
Faludi inflates the significance of a continuing identity crisis at Details magazine--its gawky metamorphosis from a gay-oriented downtown journal into a swinging-bachelors guide--into a soap opera of grave import. Watching the new editor and his art director ponder a lingerie spread, she remarks that "the gaze, it seemed, had at last reverted to its traditional vector, the male eye viewing the female body." When the gaze goes on the blink and Details suffers another editorial convulsion, she intones with Vulcan solemnity, "The magazine's invasion of the `feminine' ornamental sphere had failed." Return to the ship. (Curiously, Faludi effaces her own bit part in this saga, treating the Details office as just another stop on her journey. In fact she was hired as a contributing editor at Details by the very editor overseeing the "hetero-izing" revamp that she characterizes in Stiffed as an attempt "to hide from male readers their own fears of their own naked passivity in the face of display culture, their own prone positions as the objects of corporate desire." Kinky!)
Incapable of poison-dart wit or flat assertion, Faludi employs hypnotic repetition as her chief power of persuasion, massaging the reader into trance-like submission. Whether the reader is nodding in agreement or just plain nodding off seems lost on her. As she murmurs the same phrases over and over and 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..."; "Its surge had washed all the men of the American Century into a swirling ocean of..."; "Its tsunami force had swamped...," "If there was an enemy behind this cultural sea change..."; "Navigating the ornamental realm..."), every chapter becomes longer than it needs to be, and every chapter seems longer than the one before, creating the illusion of a book feeding on itself and engulfing unsuspecting villagers.
To get a handle on her swelling narrative, Faludi uses segues and cinematic crosscutting ("Across the continent from Conde Nast headquarters, in a small corner of the San Fernando Valley...") to foster the impression that postwar history is a streaming montage--an Altman-like epic where every fluky thing 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.
Faludi tells this story in the form of a space-age parable. In the opening chapter, punnily titled "The Son, the Moon, and the Stars," Faludi imagines a typical boy in a Davy Crockett cap standing with his father in the suburban backyard. The two of them stare upward, tracking the gleaming speck of a manned spacecraft passing in orbit. It is a Spielberg-like epiphany that ends in a Springsteen-like lament. "When I talk with men who grew up during the baby boom," Faludi writes, "this mission to manhood shows up in their minds not as promises met but betrayals, losses, and disillusionment. It is as if a generation of men had lined up at Cape Kennedy to witness the countdown to liftoff, only to watch the rocket--containing all their hopes and dreams-burn up on the launchpad." This fizzling letdown is the result of a generation of boys being raised by fathers who emotionally stranded them.
After World War II 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 gray 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 with the familial body."
And so, instead of initiating their sons into manhood, these holograms in cardigan sweaters, as bland and puzzled "as those perfect dads on television," bequeathed them nothing except the promise of more material goods--a bigger car in the driveway, 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 reveled in their prosperity." But it wasn't enough. A generational link was broken, forcing male baby-boomers to form baboon tribes.
Everywhere she goes on her journey, Faludi encounters graying male boomers who are down in the dumps, having missed out on too many fishing trips. Malaise is tough to measure, and Faludi doesn't cite a raft of statistics to indicate how pervasive and widespread the social toll of this father-son estrangement really is. (Recent developments suggests 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.
Impressions can differ, though. When Gloria Emerson did her own personal survey on the state of masculinity in Some American Men in 1985, she was struck by "the great tenderness many men, more than I thought, feel for their own fathers." She wrote: "Stuffed as we are with our daily rations of psychoanalysis-publico, it is not a revelation how the harsh father damages the male child. What is not so apparent is how the father who loves his son and makes it known, even in the sorriest circumstances, lifts the child to a privileged order from which he can never be expelled." It certainly isn't apparent to Faludi. Perhaps the situation between fathers and sons has worsened since 1985, for Faludi meets mostly grievance and regret. She keeps bumping up against a frustrating wall of silence between fathers and sons, a dead dial tone. "Men spoke to me of waiting, year after year, for a sign, a late-night confidence, a death-bed confession, even--desperately--a letter delivered posthumously, for any moment that would decode the mystery of their mute fathers." At least Hamlet had his father's ghost to put him wise.
The other broken link is the bond between working men. For generations, men forged their identities through industrial labor, 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 lunchpail line of Willy Lomans.
Plant closings, cheap imports, defense downsizing, information technology, and entrepreneurial success stories (to which whole magazines such as Fast Company and Tycoon are devoted) have consigned the ranks of blue-collar workers to the dinosaur pit of economic progress, tarnishing the survivors' pride in craft and making them feel alienated, alone. Like many on the left (and some on the right) with a political investment in downgrading America as a land of disenchantment and former glory, Faludi stresses only the bust side of the boom-and-bust cycle, treating the economic expansion of the 1990s first as if it didn't exist, then as if it didn't fundamentally matter ("as the economy recovered, the male crisis did not, and it became apparent that whatever men's afflictions were, they could not be gauged solely through graphs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics"). She mourns the derelict sites of the pre-post-industrial economy as if they were the bare ruined choirs of a broken faith. Instead of an apprentice studying under a union elder, instead of camaraderie among coworkers, it's now every Dilbert for himself; and building a website (wowee!) doesn't bolster the spirit or ennoble the physical landscape.
The book's official mourner of the passing of industrial might is, of all people, Sylvester Stallone. He serves as Faludi's guide to American manhood, her faithful Tonto. In a chauffered car from the set of Cop Land, an ensemble film with which the star hopes to win some acting respect from his peers, Stallone, tired of flexing his oiled muscles and being treated like meat, rides pensively, "consumed with his chances of rejoining a meaningful workaday world." For Cop Land, of course, Stallone put on weight and walked with a limp, thereby fulfilling Faludi's mental image of the American man as a puffy, hobbled soul-searcher. As the sedan nears the George Washington Bridge, he points to its iron majesty and remarks (weirdly like Paglia): "See that? The incredibly detailed work that went into it? That's work. That's when men had a real craft, when they really built something. Imagine looking out and seeing this and thinking, `I did that.'"
Elsewhere in her book, Faludi devotes an exhaustive chapter to the genesis of the "Rambo" mystique, examining the scripts as if they were variant texts of Lady Chatterley's Lover and diagnosing the films' true subtext as the conflict that Stallone had with his father, an Oedipal struggle that she cites as symptomatic: "Offscreen and on the political stage, the male electorate was having as hard a time reconstructing the public father as Sylvester Stallone had deconstructing his private one." As Sly goes, so goes the nation.
Stallone cuts an almost surrealistic figure as the model of masculinity in Stiffed, a barbecued ham given to soul-searching pronouncements that he seems to sense Faludi wants to hear. His exaggerated image provides the right cartoon billboard for Faludi's exaggerated fears. As the screenwriter Stirling Stilliphant observed so eloquently in an interview in Backstory 3, "Stallone has one talent--that is to have soaked up all the bullshit which has accumulated in La La Land over the years, coated it with an ersatz patina of culture and fine art, and created from his bootstraps a genuine, authentic Monster." (Then Silliphant added, "In person he can be, I understand, a warm and delightful friend.") A high-priced victim of voyeurism, Stallone is living proof to Faludi that no mere mortal man can bear up under the body armor of "ornamental culture." If Rocky/Rambo, licking his wounds like Achilles at a banquette at Spago, feels listless, deflated, and unfulfilled--"`I'm surprised they even gave me this booth,' Stallone said, only half-joking. `I'm like driftwood in here'"--what hope can there be for your average loser?
According to Stiffed, futile exhibitionism is man's lot in the 1990s. The Cleveland Browns fans in the Dawg Pound, the initiator of a Waco documentary who finds himself shunted aside at the Academy Awards, the sexual predators of the Spur Posse who become tabloid-TV bad boys for a brief spell ("`Maury Povich, he lied to us,' Chris Albert shouted, kicking hard at the leg of the blackjack table"), a former gangbanger and confessed killer named Monster Kody who publishes a bestselling book about his exploits only to end up back in the slammer ("`Did you see me on ESPN?' I hated to tell him I hadn't; I knew he'd be disappointed")--nearly all of Faludi's subjects are bobbing heads competing for camera attention because they didn't get enough nurturing from dear old clueless dad.
"For a generation of men who had to pursue their destinies in a Planet Hollywood world [Stallone being one of Planet Hollywood's original backers]," Faludi writes, "the journey often seemed almost an extension of that old TV series Route 66. Like that show's protagonists, they, too, often felt like orphans turning endlessly off some open road, pulling into unfamiliar towns, looking for fathers they could not find... All that was left was the road which, like the actual Route 66, seemed to end, literally for some, metaphorically for many more, in Hollywood." And Route 66 leads Faludi metaphorically if not literally to the Ventura Freeway, which in turn takes her to Van Nuys Boulevard in San Fernando Valley--the heart of the American porn industry, its Bizarro Hollywood.
Here Faludi examines a naked colony of unaffiliated males in their Naugahyde habitat. First excerpted in The New Yorker, "Waiting for Wood" is meant to be the knockout chapter of Stiffed, the crescendo of all of Faludi's themes, an electrical shocker. Instead, it is a study in how a journalist can get the particulars right and the overall picture dead wrong.
Like so many reporters investigating the skin trade, Faludi hangs around a porn set to soak up the cheesy atmosphere and tell us how tedious it all is. ("After several clockwork transitions and an endless anal scene....") She pays the inevitable visit to the World Modeling Talent Agency, which may look like a roach motel for porn rookies, but don't be fooled: "It is a backstage door to the current American dream and an emergency escape hatch for some who find themselves capsizing in a reconfiguring American economy." (It is difficult to resist quoting Faludi's sentences. They are so awful.)
The World Modeling Talent Agency is where the ornamental culture gets downright nasty. As aspiring starlets stack up in the waiting room like runway jets for a "talent call," a former Chippendales dancer who calls himself Damon Rose tries to pester his way into being seen by the production scouts, only to be ejected. "Damon Rose slunk out shamefaced, flung back into the masses in the main room, where I spotted him busy converting hurt to aggression. He had sneaked up behind an actress and grabbed her breasts. She shook him off, then turned to appraise his pectorals. `Your boobs are bigger than mine,' she said. He laughed uncertainly, then wandered off, his face sunk in despair." What a dork.
For Faludi, however, Damon Rose is another sideswipe victim of the porn world's power-shift towards women, whose improved status has come at men's expense. Like the shipbuilders and the dockworkers whom she memorializes, male porn performers have been deprived of an opportunity to ply a decent trade. They are humping on screen because of the new economy. "They had all bailed out of sinking occupational worlds that used to confer upon working men a measure of dignity and a masculine mantle but now offer only uncertainty." Having nowhere to ply a trade with traditional tools, they are forced to grab hold of their own faucet for income and validation.
Paid less than their female counterparts, under constant pressure to perform, male porn performers are the ultimate freelancers in the brutal capitalist jungle. The spotlight of "display culture" burns hotter on them, reducing some to a crisp. The martyr in Faludi's morality tale is Cal Jammer, a porn actor who suffered from wobbly wood on the set (or in Faludi-speak, "Much to his frustration, he often found his erections held hostage to his feelings"), was taunted by catty crewmembers, and finally shot himself on the front lawn of his estranged wife, a stripper turned porn actress whom nobody seems to like.
When Elvis Presley died, cynics said, "Good career move." It wasn't for Jammer. His posthumous career went nowhere. Faludi notes that after the suicide of a female porn star named Savannah, who killed herself after a car accident which left her disfigured, the porn biz rushed out compilation tapes and phony tributes to cash in. But poor Jammer's suicide failed to attract any money-grubbing vultures; and this is conclusive evidence, writes Faludi, that "women were more marketable, even in death."
Here, as in much of her book, Faludi is letting her thesis do her thinking for her. Jammer faded from the porn shelves not because he was a man in a woman's realm but because, unlike Savannah, he was a utility player, not a star. If Jammer had been as famous as John C. Holmes, one of the first major porn stars to die of aids, he might have gotten the same tacky sendoff. (Holmes, a.k.a. "Johnny Wadd" and "the human tripod," was the model for "Dirk Diggler" in Boogie Nights and is the subject of a documentary recently shown at the Toronto Film Festival.)
Faludi falls for the hype that because women are more visible in adult video, they are the ones in control. (She quotes a producer who complains about porn being infected by "the feminization of Hollywood.") It is a distinctly odd notion, that porn is an expression of female power. Yes, porn actresses are glossy "cover-box girls" who develop their own fanclub followings, but the turnover in porn starlets is rapid and brutal, while men in the business--such as Randy West, Peter North, Ron Jeremy, Ed Powers, even a grizzled geezer like Jamie Gillis--not only continue working long past their first paunch and prostate problem, but also front their own lines of tapes where they "break in" new girls to the business. Still others, such as John Leslie and Paul Thomas, hang up their socks and graduate to the director's chair where, through the prudent use of dry ice and flashbacks, they become "auteurs." When it comes to the men, old porn stars never die, they just chip away.
As for the younger bucks, two of the most prominent male stars today are Rocco Siffredi, a sexual swashbuckler who presides over a series of Eurotrash-orgy tapes with titles such as Never Say Never to Rocco Siffredi and Rocco: Animal Trainer, and has reached such notoriety that he recently appeared in the very explicit art film Romance; and Max Hardcore, who dresses up porn actresses in Lolita outfits before he manhandles them. The mistreatment of women in Siffredi's and Hardcore's tapes is so raw, gagging, and physically intrusive that even the seen-it-alls in the porn world have expressed qualms.
The upscale erotica ("X-rated versions of Victoria's Secret ads") that may have prevailed when Faludi was visiting the San Fernando Valley has been overturned by a much meaner variety. Moreover, the introduction of Viagra into the porn scene has removed most of the existential angst of "waiting for wood" that Faludi charges with such significance. On many porn shoots today the problem isn't getting it up, the problem is getting it down so that everyone can go home. Some male performers have turned into battering rams, wearing the poor women out. No, in porn, cock remains king.
Far from mirroring the moribund status of men, the current porn scene crudely reflects the resurgence of male bravado and male prerogative in popular culture. Aside from a few pockets of girl power (typified by "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), pop culture in the 1990s bears the condom ring of guy humor and horniness, as evidenced by Howard Stern and his imitators, "Beavis & Butt-Head," "South Park," "The Man Show," "Shasta McNasty," Maxim magazine (whose success has turned other men's magazines into bimbo eruptions), the dopey adolescent stardom of Adam Sandler, the locker-roomish slapstick antics of the Farrelly brothers, the needling misogyny of Neil LaBute, the playboy presidential bid of Donald Trump, the bruises worn as medals in Fight Club, much of hip-hop music, and the rebirth of professional wrestling as a postmodern Gotterdammerung. Immature and cartoonish as most of these items are, their popularity and their attack-energy signify that millions of young men no longer feel hemmed in or inhibited by feminism. They know that they can joke their way around it.
Faludi is not unaware of this bantam strut of hormones--she refers to "amped-up virility," and in a recent issue of Newsweek she touts Fight Club as "an incisive gender drama" for sensitive brutes--but she chalks it up to over-compensation for basic insecurity. "As successful manhood increasingly got measured in how much you were viewed, many men sought to draw the gaze in ways that didn't leave them feeling `emasculated,' that made them feel they had captured the spotlight rather than succumbed to it. As [Michiko] Kakutani noted, when a market-research firm polled teenage boys on their aspirations, they rated `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 thus most highly valued male objects of their 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.
Humor makes someone popular, a part of the gang, not an object on a pedestal. 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. Unable to find a proletariat in the present, Faludi has to import a proletariat from the past to accommodate men as a victim class.
Faludi has an atavistic leftwing nostalgia for the good old bad days when it was workers versus bosses, and the picket lines were drawn, and the only question was, Which side are you on? Now everything is muddier, and well-meaning personal gestures substitute for organizing. 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, an underclass and overclass of depressed Okies, worse off than their political sisters because they are too out of touch with their feelings to articulate their rage.
"As I traveled through this new landscape of masculinity," Faludi writes, "I was struck by how many men I encountered had the feeling that something or someone had stripped them of their usefulness and stranded them on a new decorative planet." After six years of interviewing sad sacks, Faludi scratches her head over this epidemic of male passivity. "My travels led me to a final question: 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? Why can't men seem to act?" Actually, that's three final questions, and it leads to another rash of inquiry as 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, that are already run by men; how can men invade their own territory? Is technological progress the frontier? Why then does it seem to be pushing men into obsolescence, socially and occupationally? What kind of frontier conquers the American man instead of vice versa? Is technology not the frontier but the enemy? But if the American man crushes the machine, whose machine has he vanquished?
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." Of course, it is always easier to isolate problems than to propose workable solutions, but what a dinky pop-fly. Sixhundred-plus pages purporting to show that men are expiring of slow suicide, and her prescription is "a new paradigm," a phrase with which Tony Blair probably brushes his teeth.
And the suggestion that the key to men's future well-being is to follow a feminist lead? Men will never do that--out of idiot pride, if nothing else. Robert Bly is right: men have to address their own messes. Perhaps the reason that Faludi is so fuzzy when it comes to practical agitation (the term is John Jay Chapman's) is because she is essentially a moralist using pop sociology to trick out her own misgivings into trend lines that indicate a more widespread slump. When Faludi obsesses about ornamental culture, for example, it is clear that she has spent too much time in the sunglass glare of Los Angeles, where she lives. Like many cultural declinists, she practices a politics of piety, which is not politics at all, only a high-minded handwringing.
She got by with it once. 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 that exploded in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas battle. But nothing in Stiffed rings true. The book is a series of muffled notes, and not just because so much of the material has dated so quickly. (Now that Cleveland has regained a football franchise, the cruel jilting of the Browns' "Dawg Pound" contingent--which Faludi uses as a textbook example of how the average fan gets shafted by luxury-skybox owners who care more about the bottom line--has turned out to be a temporary separation, not a tragic parting. One prominent member of the "Dawg Pound" is currently doing a victory dance in Wal-Mart ads to promote Direct TV.)
The shock of recognition is what's missing. 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 eulogizes as having ended in ashes and stale beer. For all its invocation of the common man, Faludi's book carries a severe collegeeducated 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 Conde 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 don't make for gripping allegory.
A Haunting Postscript. At the end of Faludi's journey came another journey, a shorter one, yet one fraught with its own perils. I mean her book tour. "I've just finished writing a book on the cultural crisis besetting men," she informed the readers of Harper's Bazaar in October. "It comes out in the fall, and I've been bracing myself for the plunge into the cauldron of ignorance and cliches." In the article she mentions her boyfriend, a writer named Russ Rymer. On one stop of this hell tour, Faludi was interviewed by the New York Post while Rymer ran interference ("`You have a radio interview in 20 minutes,' he reminds her gently"). "Russ lived the birthing of this book," she told the reporter after Russ excused himself. "As she talks, she dreamily studies the cover of Stiffed--which features a picture of a handsome construction worker from the 1940s. `Don't you think the guy on the cover looks a little like Russ?' she asks."
If the personal is the political, then perhaps Susan Faludi went marshmallow on men in Stiffed not because of feminist outreach, but because she found herself a nice fella, someone to look after her. The working-class hero on the cover of her book is actually her own Prince Charming in disguise. Her girlfriends must be so jealous.
JAMES WOLCOTT is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. His novel The Catsitters will be published by HarperCollins next year.
http://www.tnr.com/archive/1199/111599/coverstory111599.html
By JAMES WOLCOTT
Stiffed: The Betrayal of The American Man
by Susan Faludi
As if men hadn't suffered enough indignities of late (loss of breadwinner status, declining sperm counts, TV ads 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 patronizing, which makes her tender concern all the more shaming. Men are now officially pathetic.
After stirring up the henhouse with her best-selling and award-winning tract Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American 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 American Man, which declares that men are not guilty of being the enemy. They are not the mobilizers and the beneficiaries of the backlash. No, they are victims, too, dazed captives in a jar. "[A]s the nation wobbled toward the millennium," Faludi writes, "its pulse-takers seemed to agree that a domestic apocalypse was under way: American manhood was under siege."
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's "beauty pageant" and to compete in the swimsuit competition, "where the odds did not seem to be on the men's side." As men lose to women in the looks department, they blame women for their second-class showing. They shouldn't. "[J]ust because men have wound up in a beauty-contest world doesn't mean women have put them there. The gaze that plagues them doesn't actually spring from a feminine eye," Faludi observes, borrowing a term from cultural studies and beating it senseless. "The gaze that hounds men is the very gaze that women have been trying to escape." It is 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 poking out this prison searchlight can the sexes join forces and rise to confront their overseers. Runway models of the world, unite!
Other commentators have called for a truce between the sexes and a marriage of common interests (Cathy Young's Ceasefire! is a spirited example), but Faludi plays peacemaker on an epic scale, as if mending a continental divide. Despite its irate title and a cover photo by Gordon Parks of a representative hardworking American Joe, Stiffed is a gentler dispatch than Backlash, more of a soft sell than a wake-up call. In a cover story for Newsweek Faludi was photographed inside sitting on the floor in a pixie pose, holding her bare 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 odysseys anymore.) "This is the story of a feminist's travels through a postwar male realm," she writes. "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 traveled the length and the breadth of America on her own listening tour, sprinkling a little empathy wherever she went.
Her safari took her into a country where men continue to lead lives of quiet desperation, and yet, like the "silenced" women in Backlash, are quite talkative. Exploring the fringes of male tribal behavior on the premise that what happens at the edges creeps into the center, Faludi suspends judgment 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 used ("`I felt degraded,' he said, and his analysis of his degradation was one any female stripper would find familiar"), you can picture her nodding with understanding, like Judy Woodruff in a cutaway shot.
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," "This Eager Violence of the Heart," "A Woodsman in a Microwave World"), its oracular utterances ("a man didn't have to go to Vietnam to confront the jungle"), and its pat generalizations too boring to quote, Faludi's tome is an almost selfparodying product of crisis-mongering newsmagazine journalese, squeezing the life out of every topic to make a debatable point. Sentence after sentence unfurls like the flag at Iwo Jima as the author surveys the Zeitgeist to stereophonic fanfare, conflating the president of the United States with Obi-Wan Kenobi: "If Ronald 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 from the stardusted dream, 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."
Faludi inflates the significance of a continuing identity crisis at Details magazine--its gawky metamorphosis from a gay-oriented downtown journal into a swinging-bachelors guide--into a soap opera of grave import. Watching the new editor and his art director ponder a lingerie spread, she remarks that "the gaze, it seemed, had at last reverted to its traditional vector, the male eye viewing the female body." When the gaze goes on the blink and Details suffers another editorial convulsion, she intones with Vulcan solemnity, "The magazine's invasion of the `feminine' ornamental sphere had failed." Return to the ship. (Curiously, Faludi effaces her own bit part in this saga, treating the Details office as just another stop on her journey. In fact she was hired as a contributing editor at Details by the very editor overseeing the "hetero-izing" revamp that she characterizes in Stiffed as an attempt "to hide from male readers their own fears of their own naked passivity in the face of display culture, their own prone positions as the objects of corporate desire." Kinky!)
Incapable of poison-dart wit or flat assertion, Faludi employs hypnotic repetition as her chief power of persuasion, massaging the reader into trance-like submission. Whether the reader is nodding in agreement or just plain nodding off seems lost on her. As she murmurs the same phrases over and over and 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..."; "Its surge had washed all the men of the American Century into a swirling ocean of..."; "Its tsunami force had swamped...," "If there was an enemy behind this cultural sea change..."; "Navigating the ornamental realm..."), every chapter becomes longer than it needs to be, and every chapter seems longer than the one before, creating the illusion of a book feeding on itself and engulfing unsuspecting villagers.
To get a handle on her swelling narrative, Faludi uses segues and cinematic crosscutting ("Across the continent from Conde Nast headquarters, in a small corner of the San Fernando Valley...") to foster the impression that postwar history is a streaming montage--an Altman-like epic where every fluky thing 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.
Faludi tells this story in the form of a space-age parable. In the opening chapter, punnily titled "The Son, the Moon, and the Stars," Faludi imagines a typical boy in a Davy Crockett cap standing with his father in the suburban backyard. The two of them stare upward, tracking the gleaming speck of a manned spacecraft passing in orbit. It is a Spielberg-like epiphany that ends in a Springsteen-like lament. "When I talk with men who grew up during the baby boom," Faludi writes, "this mission to manhood shows up in their minds not as promises met but betrayals, losses, and disillusionment. It is as if a generation of men had lined up at Cape Kennedy to witness the countdown to liftoff, only to watch the rocket--containing all their hopes and dreams-burn up on the launchpad." This fizzling letdown is the result of a generation of boys being raised by fathers who emotionally stranded them.
After World War II 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 gray 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 with the familial body."
And so, instead of initiating their sons into manhood, these holograms in cardigan sweaters, as bland and puzzled "as those perfect dads on television," bequeathed them nothing except the promise of more material goods--a bigger car in the driveway, 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 reveled in their prosperity." But it wasn't enough. A generational link was broken, forcing male baby-boomers to form baboon tribes.
Everywhere she goes on her journey, Faludi encounters graying male boomers who are down in the dumps, having missed out on too many fishing trips. Malaise is tough to measure, and Faludi doesn't cite a raft of statistics to indicate how pervasive and widespread the social toll of this father-son estrangement really is. (Recent developments suggests 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.
Impressions can differ, though. When Gloria Emerson did her own personal survey on the state of masculinity in Some American Men in 1985, she was struck by "the great tenderness many men, more than I thought, feel for their own fathers." She wrote: "Stuffed as we are with our daily rations of psychoanalysis-publico, it is not a revelation how the harsh father damages the male child. What is not so apparent is how the father who loves his son and makes it known, even in the sorriest circumstances, lifts the child to a privileged order from which he can never be expelled." It certainly isn't apparent to Faludi. Perhaps the situation between fathers and sons has worsened since 1985, for Faludi meets mostly grievance and regret. She keeps bumping up against a frustrating wall of silence between fathers and sons, a dead dial tone. "Men spoke to me of waiting, year after year, for a sign, a late-night confidence, a death-bed confession, even--desperately--a letter delivered posthumously, for any moment that would decode the mystery of their mute fathers." At least Hamlet had his father's ghost to put him wise.
The other broken link is the bond between working men. For generations, men forged their identities through industrial labor, 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 lunchpail line of Willy Lomans.
Plant closings, cheap imports, defense downsizing, information technology, and entrepreneurial success stories (to which whole magazines such as Fast Company and Tycoon are devoted) have consigned the ranks of blue-collar workers to the dinosaur pit of economic progress, tarnishing the survivors' pride in craft and making them feel alienated, alone. Like many on the left (and some on the right) with a political investment in downgrading America as a land of disenchantment and former glory, Faludi stresses only the bust side of the boom-and-bust cycle, treating the economic expansion of the 1990s first as if it didn't exist, then as if it didn't fundamentally matter ("as the economy recovered, the male crisis did not, and it became apparent that whatever men's afflictions were, they could not be gauged solely through graphs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics"). She mourns the derelict sites of the pre-post-industrial economy as if they were the bare ruined choirs of a broken faith. Instead of an apprentice studying under a union elder, instead of camaraderie among coworkers, it's now every Dilbert for himself; and building a website (wowee!) doesn't bolster the spirit or ennoble the physical landscape.
The book's official mourner of the passing of industrial might is, of all people, Sylvester Stallone. He serves as Faludi's guide to American manhood, her faithful Tonto. In a chauffered car from the set of Cop Land, an ensemble film with which the star hopes to win some acting respect from his peers, Stallone, tired of flexing his oiled muscles and being treated like meat, rides pensively, "consumed with his chances of rejoining a meaningful workaday world." For Cop Land, of course, Stallone put on weight and walked with a limp, thereby fulfilling Faludi's mental image of the American man as a puffy, hobbled soul-searcher. As the sedan nears the George Washington Bridge, he points to its iron majesty and remarks (weirdly like Paglia): "See that? The incredibly detailed work that went into it? That's work. That's when men had a real craft, when they really built something. Imagine looking out and seeing this and thinking, `I did that.'"
Elsewhere in her book, Faludi devotes an exhaustive chapter to the genesis of the "Rambo" mystique, examining the scripts as if they were variant texts of Lady Chatterley's Lover and diagnosing the films' true subtext as the conflict that Stallone had with his father, an Oedipal struggle that she cites as symptomatic: "Offscreen and on the political stage, the male electorate was having as hard a time reconstructing the public father as Sylvester Stallone had deconstructing his private one." As Sly goes, so goes the nation.
Stallone cuts an almost surrealistic figure as the model of masculinity in Stiffed, a barbecued ham given to soul-searching pronouncements that he seems to sense Faludi wants to hear. His exaggerated image provides the right cartoon billboard for Faludi's exaggerated fears. As the screenwriter Stirling Stilliphant observed so eloquently in an interview in Backstory 3, "Stallone has one talent--that is to have soaked up all the bullshit which has accumulated in La La Land over the years, coated it with an ersatz patina of culture and fine art, and created from his bootstraps a genuine, authentic Monster." (Then Silliphant added, "In person he can be, I understand, a warm and delightful friend.") A high-priced victim of voyeurism, Stallone is living proof to Faludi that no mere mortal man can bear up under the body armor of "ornamental culture." If Rocky/Rambo, licking his wounds like Achilles at a banquette at Spago, feels listless, deflated, and unfulfilled--"`I'm surprised they even gave me this booth,' Stallone said, only half-joking. `I'm like driftwood in here'"--what hope can there be for your average loser?
According to Stiffed, futile exhibitionism is man's lot in the 1990s. The Cleveland Browns fans in the Dawg Pound, the initiator of a Waco documentary who finds himself shunted aside at the Academy Awards, the sexual predators of the Spur Posse who become tabloid-TV bad boys for a brief spell ("`Maury Povich, he lied to us,' Chris Albert shouted, kicking hard at the leg of the blackjack table"), a former gangbanger and confessed killer named Monster Kody who publishes a bestselling book about his exploits only to end up back in the slammer ("`Did you see me on ESPN?' I hated to tell him I hadn't; I knew he'd be disappointed")--nearly all of Faludi's subjects are bobbing heads competing for camera attention because they didn't get enough nurturing from dear old clueless dad.
"For a generation of men who had to pursue their destinies in a Planet Hollywood world [Stallone being one of Planet Hollywood's original backers]," Faludi writes, "the journey often seemed almost an extension of that old TV series Route 66. Like that show's protagonists, they, too, often felt like orphans turning endlessly off some open road, pulling into unfamiliar towns, looking for fathers they could not find... All that was left was the road which, like the actual Route 66, seemed to end, literally for some, metaphorically for many more, in Hollywood." And Route 66 leads Faludi metaphorically if not literally to the Ventura Freeway, which in turn takes her to Van Nuys Boulevard in San Fernando Valley--the heart of the American porn industry, its Bizarro Hollywood.
Here Faludi examines a naked colony of unaffiliated males in their Naugahyde habitat. First excerpted in The New Yorker, "Waiting for Wood" is meant to be the knockout chapter of Stiffed, the crescendo of all of Faludi's themes, an electrical shocker. Instead, it is a study in how a journalist can get the particulars right and the overall picture dead wrong.
Like so many reporters investigating the skin trade, Faludi hangs around a porn set to soak up the cheesy atmosphere and tell us how tedious it all is. ("After several clockwork transitions and an endless anal scene....") She pays the inevitable visit to the World Modeling Talent Agency, which may look like a roach motel for porn rookies, but don't be fooled: "It is a backstage door to the current American dream and an emergency escape hatch for some who find themselves capsizing in a reconfiguring American economy." (It is difficult to resist quoting Faludi's sentences. They are so awful.)
The World Modeling Talent Agency is where the ornamental culture gets downright nasty. As aspiring starlets stack up in the waiting room like runway jets for a "talent call," a former Chippendales dancer who calls himself Damon Rose tries to pester his way into being seen by the production scouts, only to be ejected. "Damon Rose slunk out shamefaced, flung back into the masses in the main room, where I spotted him busy converting hurt to aggression. He had sneaked up behind an actress and grabbed her breasts. She shook him off, then turned to appraise his pectorals. `Your boobs are bigger than mine,' she said. He laughed uncertainly, then wandered off, his face sunk in despair." What a dork.
For Faludi, however, Damon Rose is another sideswipe victim of the porn world's power-shift towards women, whose improved status has come at men's expense. Like the shipbuilders and the dockworkers whom she memorializes, male porn performers have been deprived of an opportunity to ply a decent trade. They are humping on screen because of the new economy. "They had all bailed out of sinking occupational worlds that used to confer upon working men a measure of dignity and a masculine mantle but now offer only uncertainty." Having nowhere to ply a trade with traditional tools, they are forced to grab hold of their own faucet for income and validation.
Paid less than their female counterparts, under constant pressure to perform, male porn performers are the ultimate freelancers in the brutal capitalist jungle. The spotlight of "display culture" burns hotter on them, reducing some to a crisp. The martyr in Faludi's morality tale is Cal Jammer, a porn actor who suffered from wobbly wood on the set (or in Faludi-speak, "Much to his frustration, he often found his erections held hostage to his feelings"), was taunted by catty crewmembers, and finally shot himself on the front lawn of his estranged wife, a stripper turned porn actress whom nobody seems to like.
When Elvis Presley died, cynics said, "Good career move." It wasn't for Jammer. His posthumous career went nowhere. Faludi notes that after the suicide of a female porn star named Savannah, who killed herself after a car accident which left her disfigured, the porn biz rushed out compilation tapes and phony tributes to cash in. But poor Jammer's suicide failed to attract any money-grubbing vultures; and this is conclusive evidence, writes Faludi, that "women were more marketable, even in death."
Here, as in much of her book, Faludi is letting her thesis do her thinking for her. Jammer faded from the porn shelves not because he was a man in a woman's realm but because, unlike Savannah, he was a utility player, not a star. If Jammer had been as famous as John C. Holmes, one of the first major porn stars to die of aids, he might have gotten the same tacky sendoff. (Holmes, a.k.a. "Johnny Wadd" and "the human tripod," was the model for "Dirk Diggler" in Boogie Nights and is the subject of a documentary recently shown at the Toronto Film Festival.)
Faludi falls for the hype that because women are more visible in adult video, they are the ones in control. (She quotes a producer who complains about porn being infected by "the feminization of Hollywood.") It is a distinctly odd notion, that porn is an expression of female power. Yes, porn actresses are glossy "cover-box girls" who develop their own fanclub followings, but the turnover in porn starlets is rapid and brutal, while men in the business--such as Randy West, Peter North, Ron Jeremy, Ed Powers, even a grizzled geezer like Jamie Gillis--not only continue working long past their first paunch and prostate problem, but also front their own lines of tapes where they "break in" new girls to the business. Still others, such as John Leslie and Paul Thomas, hang up their socks and graduate to the director's chair where, through the prudent use of dry ice and flashbacks, they become "auteurs." When it comes to the men, old porn stars never die, they just chip away.
As for the younger bucks, two of the most prominent male stars today are Rocco Siffredi, a sexual swashbuckler who presides over a series of Eurotrash-orgy tapes with titles such as Never Say Never to Rocco Siffredi and Rocco: Animal Trainer, and has reached such notoriety that he recently appeared in the very explicit art film Romance; and Max Hardcore, who dresses up porn actresses in Lolita outfits before he manhandles them. The mistreatment of women in Siffredi's and Hardcore's tapes is so raw, gagging, and physically intrusive that even the seen-it-alls in the porn world have expressed qualms.
The upscale erotica ("X-rated versions of Victoria's Secret ads") that may have prevailed when Faludi was visiting the San Fernando Valley has been overturned by a much meaner variety. Moreover, the introduction of Viagra into the porn scene has removed most of the existential angst of "waiting for wood" that Faludi charges with such significance. On many porn shoots today the problem isn't getting it up, the problem is getting it down so that everyone can go home. Some male performers have turned into battering rams, wearing the poor women out. No, in porn, cock remains king.
Far from mirroring the moribund status of men, the current porn scene crudely reflects the resurgence of male bravado and male prerogative in popular culture. Aside from a few pockets of girl power (typified by "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), pop culture in the 1990s bears the condom ring of guy humor and horniness, as evidenced by Howard Stern and his imitators, "Beavis & Butt-Head," "South Park," "The Man Show," "Shasta McNasty," Maxim magazine (whose success has turned other men's magazines into bimbo eruptions), the dopey adolescent stardom of Adam Sandler, the locker-roomish slapstick antics of the Farrelly brothers, the needling misogyny of Neil LaBute, the playboy presidential bid of Donald Trump, the bruises worn as medals in Fight Club, much of hip-hop music, and the rebirth of professional wrestling as a postmodern Gotterdammerung. Immature and cartoonish as most of these items are, their popularity and their attack-energy signify that millions of young men no longer feel hemmed in or inhibited by feminism. They know that they can joke their way around it.
Faludi is not unaware of this bantam strut of hormones--she refers to "amped-up virility," and in a recent issue of Newsweek she touts Fight Club as "an incisive gender drama" for sensitive brutes--but she chalks it up to over-compensation for basic insecurity. "As successful manhood increasingly got measured in how much you were viewed, many men sought to draw the gaze in ways that didn't leave them feeling `emasculated,' that made them feel they had captured the spotlight rather than succumbed to it. As [Michiko] Kakutani noted, when a market-research firm polled teenage boys on their aspirations, they rated `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 thus most highly valued male objects of their 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.
Humor makes someone popular, a part of the gang, not an object on a pedestal. 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. Unable to find a proletariat in the present, Faludi has to import a proletariat from the past to accommodate men as a victim class.
Faludi has an atavistic leftwing nostalgia for the good old bad days when it was workers versus bosses, and the picket lines were drawn, and the only question was, Which side are you on? Now everything is muddier, and well-meaning personal gestures substitute for organizing. 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, an underclass and overclass of depressed Okies, worse off than their political sisters because they are too out of touch with their feelings to articulate their rage.
"As I traveled through this new landscape of masculinity," Faludi writes, "I was struck by how many men I encountered had the feeling that something or someone had stripped them of their usefulness and stranded them on a new decorative planet." After six years of interviewing sad sacks, Faludi scratches her head over this epidemic of male passivity. "My travels led me to a final question: 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? Why can't men seem to act?" Actually, that's three final questions, and it leads to another rash of inquiry as 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, that are already run by men; how can men invade their own territory? Is technological progress the frontier? Why then does it seem to be pushing men into obsolescence, socially and occupationally? What kind of frontier conquers the American man instead of vice versa? Is technology not the frontier but the enemy? But if the American man crushes the machine, whose machine has he vanquished?
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." Of course, it is always easier to isolate problems than to propose workable solutions, but what a dinky pop-fly. Sixhundred-plus pages purporting to show that men are expiring of slow suicide, and her prescription is "a new paradigm," a phrase with which Tony Blair probably brushes his teeth.
And the suggestion that the key to men's future well-being is to follow a feminist lead? Men will never do that--out of idiot pride, if nothing else. Robert Bly is right: men have to address their own messes. Perhaps the reason that Faludi is so fuzzy when it comes to practical agitation (the term is John Jay Chapman's) is because she is essentially a moralist using pop sociology to trick out her own misgivings into trend lines that indicate a more widespread slump. When Faludi obsesses about ornamental culture, for example, it is clear that she has spent too much time in the sunglass glare of Los Angeles, where she lives. Like many cultural declinists, she practices a politics of piety, which is not politics at all, only a high-minded handwringing.
She got by with it once. 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 that exploded in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas battle. But nothing in Stiffed rings true. The book is a series of muffled notes, and not just because so much of the material has dated so quickly. (Now that Cleveland has regained a football franchise, the cruel jilting of the Browns' "Dawg Pound" contingent--which Faludi uses as a textbook example of how the average fan gets shafted by luxury-skybox owners who care more about the bottom line--has turned out to be a temporary separation, not a tragic parting. One prominent member of the "Dawg Pound" is currently doing a victory dance in Wal-Mart ads to promote Direct TV.)
The shock of recognition is what's missing. 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 eulogizes as having ended in ashes and stale beer. For all its invocation of the common man, Faludi's book carries a severe collegeeducated 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 Conde 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 don't make for gripping allegory.
A Haunting Postscript. At the end of Faludi's journey came another journey, a shorter one, yet one fraught with its own perils. I mean her book tour. "I've just finished writing a book on the cultural crisis besetting men," she informed the readers of Harper's Bazaar in October. "It comes out in the fall, and I've been bracing myself for the plunge into the cauldron of ignorance and cliches." In the article she mentions her boyfriend, a writer named Russ Rymer. On one stop of this hell tour, Faludi was interviewed by the New York Post while Rymer ran interference ("`You have a radio interview in 20 minutes,' he reminds her gently"). "Russ lived the birthing of this book," she told the reporter after Russ excused himself. "As she talks, she dreamily studies the cover of Stiffed--which features a picture of a handsome construction worker from the 1940s. `Don't you think the guy on the cover looks a little like Russ?' she asks."
If the personal is the political, then perhaps Susan Faludi went marshmallow on men in Stiffed not because of feminist outreach, but because she found herself a nice fella, someone to look after her. The working-class hero on the cover of her book is actually her own Prince Charming in disguise. Her girlfriends must be so jealous.
JAMES WOLCOTT is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. His novel The Catsitters will be published by HarperCollins next year.
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