BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Two Views of Modern Men’s Tribulations

MANHOOD IN AMERICA: A Cultural History by Michael Kimmel

Free Press $30, 544 pages

THE MASCULINE MYSTIQUE: The Politics of Masculinity by Andrew Kimbrell

Ballantine Books $23, 367 pages

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Few cultural phenomena of the last decade have been riper for parody, or more infuriating to some, than the so-called men’s movement. Men have held the sociopolitical tiller since the dawn of time, so what do they (perhaps I should say “we,” since this reviewer too is male) have to complain about? Male problems are of man’s own making, or caused by a disinterested Mother Nature (yeah, let’s blame her!) their source lies either in our stars or in ourselves.

It’s an oversimplification, to be sure, to say of these volumes that Michael Kimmel takes the “ourselves” route, Andrew Kimbrell the “our stars.” But the distinction is meaningful, for it helps explain why “Manhood in America” is the better book by far. A professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Kimmel recognizes that men are responsible for past and present conceptions about manhood, and just as importantly, that “the fish are the last to discover the ocean”--that men often overlook the fact that the world is largely and literally man-made, tailor-made, to suit them. Kimmel’s historical approach to the notion of masculinity helps us appreciate how the current manhood “crisis” came into being.

Kimmel--unlike Kimbrell--puts the word “crisis” in quotation marks because he doesn’t consider it a new development. Men in early America were (with some exceptions, notably African slaves) generally independent actors, of whom the yeomen farmers extolled by Thomas Jefferson were one archetype. The Industrial Revolution changed all that; economic success in the marketplace became the standard against which men judged themselves, with masculinity being achieved rather than assumed, and tested on an ongoing basis.

The self-made man in the United States, Kimmel argues, was early celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville and later by Horatio Alger. By Alger’s time, though, the worm had begun to turn; the Western frontier was being tamed and colonized, industrialization had created a dependent working class, and men turned to leisure--sports, often--to regain a sense of identity. The self-made man (the term dates from 1832, apparently coined by Henry Clay) wouldn’t disappear from the American stage, but in this century became a largely mythic figure.

Hemingway wrote of rugged men like Robert Jordan, Fitzgerald gave us rich, successful men like Jay Gatsby, and Arthur Miller provided their antithesis--failed, powerless salesman Willy Loman, who feels “kind of temporary about myself.”

The key figure here, of course, is Gatsby, who, by reinventing himself as a man of independence and integrity, is attempting to live out the sort of life that all men, once upon a time, were supposed to have. He likewise illustrates perhaps the single canniest sentence in Kimmel’s book--that “Manhood is less about the drive for domination and more about the fear of others dominating us.”

Kimbrell, a lawyer and activist, covers much of the same territory as Kimmel, but his book comes with an agenda. Indeed, “The Masculine Mystique” is a self-conscious manifesto, one suggesting that the ills of post-modern man can be traced to our industrialized, commercialized, mechanized life.

Kimbrell, unlike some of his fellow travelers in the men’s movement, doesn’t directly blame feminists for the cultural discomfort of many males today. But in anguishing over men’s particular troubles--frequent addictions, rising suicide rates, child-custody losses, economic decline, and so on--he never acknowledges that these phenomena are products of a heavily male-dominated society.

Kimbrell would like us to see him as a sensitive, modern man: His most important point, and it’s a good one, is that our patriarchal society has disfigured the idea and realization of fatherhood--but he comes off as essentially disingenuous. Sure, men are victims of many things, their homicide and suicide rates eclipse those of women, for example, yet even the dimmest reader will be struck by the deficiencies and partiality of Kimbrell’s portrait--his failure, above all, to discuss the fact that men are unparalleled victimizers as well, and by no means only of themselves.

Kimbrell’s bashing, blaming tone, and his misleading, self-protective castigation of anonymous social forces rather than the men behind those forces, ends up damaging his argument irreparably. Does Kimbrell really believe he can bully readers into believing that men aren’t bullies at heart? Here’s one fish, at least, who should study oceanography.