11-16-2004, 07:33 PM
As if men hadn’t suffered enough indignities of late (loss of breadwinner status, declining sperm counts, T.V. 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!
Thomas777
11-17-2004, 01:39 AM
Feminists are really such quasi-intellectual clowns that I don’t really understand how anybody can take them seriously enough to get upset about them. I do get a kick out of Faludi’s (and others’) use of gobbledygook and nonsense language…its almost reminds me of the quite funny skit that the Negro comic “Damon Wayans” used to put on where he would pretend to be an “educated” black convict who would explain things to his cellmates like “articulating the cervix of the situation” or discuss the “electrical college". Faludi’s muck is inadvertantly hilarious.
That said, let’s look at her premise: Men born durng the 20th Century were chauvenist simpletons who were raised to believe that they were entitled to rule the world. What about:
- - 10% of factory workers (virtually all men) dying on the job in the early part of the century?
- - Conscription into service in world wars that extinguished thousands of lives in combat a day?
- - Men literally being forced to beg in the streets to keep their families from starving during the Depression?
Yep, men sure had it grand in the 20th century. In fact, life from 1914-45 for men in America was like a big episode of “the Man Show”…it was all chauvenism, “pimp living”, beer and girls. Faludi got it right.