Great Expectations

Why are men so screwed up? This is the bedeviling question Susan Faludi seeks to answer in “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.” Publicity surrounding Faludi’s new book suggests that it will do for men what “Backlash,” her extravagantly praised, harshly resented 1991 feminist treatise, did for women. In any case “Stiffed,” which has already become a media event (Faludi appeared on the Sept. 13 cover of Newsweek), will almost surely become the focus of heated debate. This is a good thing and a bad thing. For “Stiffed,” a sprawling combination of reportage, cultural analysis and pop psychology, is both a trenchant critique of American culture and an embodiment of its most pernicious aspects.

The downsized, pink-slipped, deindustrialized, radically insecure, union-busted, low-wage, restructured economy of the 1990s has not been good for men, Faludi finds. Nor has the shrinking of civic life, and the increased emphasis on consumption (now equated with both patriotism and bliss) at the expense of production (now defined as something that unlucky, unimportant or foreign people do). Our market-driven, image-propelled culture has caught up with the guys: The sexual objectification and noxious voyeurism that have long assaulted (and radicalized) women now haunt, indeed define, men too. The commodity is king, Faludi argues, and men have become mere “objects of corporate desire.”

“[M]en of the late 20th century are falling into a status oddly similar to that of women at mid-century,” Faludi writes. “The ‘50s housewife . . . could be said to have morphed into the ‘90s man, stripped of his connection to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and a gym-bred display of his ultra-masculinity. The empty compensations of a ‘feminine mystique’ are transforming into the empty compensations of a masculine mystique.” The civic responsibilities and utilitarian work that once defined men have disappeared; our profit-obsessed culture has thrust men into “the gladiatorial arena of ornament” in which “superathletes, action heroes, and Viagra studs” reign supreme.

Though Faludi fails to note it, this change has been a long time in the making. “As an impersonal work and political order ignored men’s individual values, skills, and reputation, masculinity lost its organic connection with work and politics, its material base,” wrote historian Stephanie Coontz in “The Social Origins of Private Life” (1988). But Coontz was describing the 1890s, not our own era. “[T]he growing subordination of skilled workers to management contradicted traditional definitions of manliness,” Coontz noted. “The qualities men now needed to work in industrial America were almost feminine ones.”

Indeed, it is the 1850s housewife, not the 1950s model, that is Faludi’s true progenitor, for it was the mid-19th century that saw the emergence of a class of women whose prime function was consumption and whose prime attributes, as historian Ann Douglas noted in “The Feminization of American Culture” (1977), were “curiously ornamental rather than functional.” It was the Victorian era, too, that fostered a culture extolling sentimental feeling over intellect and that exalted piety, suffering, nostalgia, weepy confessionals, domestic sanctity and unctuous emotion. Douglas aptly described this as “the rather cowardly new world of consumer culture”; it is a culture incapable of rigorously analyzing itself or its problems, and it is, alas, ours.

II

Do men constitute a coherent group? Are Rupert Murdoch and his chauffeur, or Mike Ovitz and his gardener, or the Ivy-educated bond trader pulling down $500,000 a year and the high school dropout who works in his mail room, connected in any way? What attributes do men share, aside from possession of a penis?

It is possible to formulate more than one answer to this question, but it is impossible to write an intellectually sturdy book about men without posing it. (Feminists learned, often the hard way, that the corollary question regarding women must be asked and answered if a successful movement is to be built.) Faludi presents extensive interviews with a wide range of men--downsized aerospace executives, Vietnam vets, Promise Keepers, porn-film actors, militia members, editors at a men’s magazine, teens in the Spur Posse and at the Citadel, former L.A. gang leader “Monster” Kody Scott and even, for somewhat mysterious reasons, Sylvester Stallone. She never directly confronts the fundamental categorical question, but she is clearly eager, even anxious, to find a thread that connects her subjects.

For Faludi, that thread is not downward mobility, a deindustrialized economy or even the culture of ornament. The connective male tissue that transcends class and racial divides--and the source of men’s anguish--is, she claims, bad dads. Really bad dads: In Faludi’s view, the post-World War II fathers--who, even if physically present, were emotionally missing in action--smashed, or at least crippled, their sons in unforgivable and perhaps unhealable ways. “From the start, I intended to talk to the men in this book about such matters as work, sports, marriage, religion, war, and entertainment,” Faludi reports. “I didn’t go to them originally to ask about their fathers. But they insisted that I do so. . . . ‘My father never taught me how to be a man’ was the refrain I heard over and over again.” Faludi’s men are reeling, and she is sympathetic to their shock. “What undid them was their fathers’ silence,” she writes. “The sons grew up with fathers who so often seemed spectral. . . . The non-present presence of paternal ghosts haunted.”

This is a startling, indeed counterintuitive, thesis and it seems, at first, untethered to history. Even a cursory glance through the work of America’s familial historians, not to mention the novels of our canonical male writers from the 19th century to the present, would suggest that nurturing soccer dads have never been the norm. (Taking the slightly longer view, one might recall that the great patriarch Abraham--the ultimate role model--was more than willing to sacrifice his son.) Why the particular angst right now?

Faludi admits that fathers have often failed their sons, but she insists that the transgressions of the post-World War II fathers are historically unprecedented. Those returning vets, those good men whom Ernie Pyle rightly celebrated, promised their boys a life of meaningful work, social cohesion and endless prosperity, but all they could come up with were stupid fast-food jobs and crummy shopping malls. Those fathers, “with all the force of fresh victory and moral virtue behind them . . . failed to pass the mantle, the knowledge, all that power and authority, on to their sons. . . . That layer of paternal betrayal felt, for many of the men I spent time with, like . . . the artichoke’s bitter heart. The fathers had made them a promise, and then had not made good on it. They had lied. The world they had promised had never been delivered.” Faludi transforms the story of postwar America into a reverse Oedipal drama in which the elderly but omniscient fathers still hold all the power while their grown but strangely passive sons are doomed to remain on the receiving end of history.

What evidence does Faludi offer to support her various claims? Fatherhood has certainly changed in the last 50 years, but how do we know that the fathers of the 1950s were less present, or more ghostly, than their predecessors? How do we know that, before the advent of television, boys “sat in delight learning about themselves from the patriarch,” in the words of Christian fundamentalist Gordon Dalbey, whom Faludi approvingly quotes? How do we know that the fathers of, say, 1860 or 1914 or 1929 did not also promise their sons a world (as fathers often do) that was then cruelly ruptured (as worlds often are)? And how do we know that the Baby Boomers were sideswiped by history far more than the young men who lived through the stunning carnage of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction, through the devastating economic collapse and ruthlessly repressed strikes of the 1890s, through the great black migration from Southern farms to Northern cities, through the trauma of World War I and the shock of the Great Depression? Without comparative evidence, it is impossible to evaluate Faludi’s thesis; what proof--of a particularly deep wound or of its cause--does she give us?

The astonishing answer is: none. Faludi provides no statistics comparing family formations of the 1950s with those of other eras, and she cites no evidence from either literature or history that supports her claim of a unique historic failure. (Indeed, like many of her Baby Boomer cohorts, she often seems to believe that history essentially began in 1945.) Instead, Faludi offers us hundreds of pages filled with men talking about their bad fathers, their sense of loss, and their unshakable belief that nobody else ever had it so bad. In short: We know these things to be true because people sincerely feel them to be true; we know there was a golden age of fatherhood because today’s men yearn for one. In this perfectly tautological world, nostalgia creates reality.

This enormous lapse in evidence is not just an act of intellectual negligence. It also, ironically, replicates the consumer culture that Faludi so passionately criticizes. The essence of that culture--whose emissaries are Oprah and Sally Jessy and Jerry--is that feelings are truths; that pain is profound; that beliefs need only be articulated rather than interrogated and examined; and that the present moment, like the present feeling, is always extra-special and often extra-bad. Thus the structure of Faludi’s book--with its endless, uncontested testaments to the bewildered suffering of the sons--reifies the basic assumptions of the culture she despises. As such, “Stiffed” is the perfect illustration of what Douglas called the sentimental culture’s “curious immunity from history,” and of the radical subjectivity of the consumer.

Though Faludi’s rules of evidence may be postmodern, her view of history is pre-Hegelian. In her scheme--shared, apparently, by the men she interviewed--fathers are all-powerful figures who own the world, which is theirs to bequeath to their children (or at least to their sons). In this scheme, stasis, continuity and immutability are the greatest virtues. In this scheme, parents not only prepare us for, but protect us from, historic change; anything less is a “desertion,” a “betrayal” and a “lie.” This is the world-view of a frightened, pre-modern child. And indeed, by defining themselves primarily as fatherless sons, Faludi’s men condemn themselves to an eternal childhood--but also preserve for themselves the seductive powerlessness, and the spotless innocence, of the very young.

Faludi’s version of our nation’s political economy is drenched in innocence too. Undoubtedly, the turbo-capitalism that now engulfs us is startlingly cruel, unstable, inegalitarian, disorienting and amoral. But Faludi repeatedly refers to an older America--which, presumably, existed until at least the late 1970s--in which jobs were secure, labor was respected, “work institutions . . . promised . . . brotherhood and masculine dignity” and the “pact between employer and employee” was “built on . . . loyalty.” This utopia will be difficult, I believe, for historians, or indeed any clear-eyed citizen, to recognize; it approaches the Reagan-esque kitsch of a “morning in America” ad.

III

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois warned that “sordid money-getting” and “apples of gold” could never “make men.” Du Bois demanded “work, culture, liberty . . . not singly but together.”

Faludi ends her book in a Du Boisian spirit with a call for a new--or rather, a newly reconstituted--model of manhood in which useful labor and social engagement would be key. She is surely right that, in modern-day America, the dialectic between the falsely inflated, endlessly flattered, increasingly powerless individual and the incredibly shrinking civic world has become horribly deformed. She is right, too, that the solutions offered to men--more sex, more money, just more!--only serve to increase their isolation.

But because Faludi, too, ultimately severs her analysis from social, economic and political complexities, and especially from thorny questions of class and power, it is difficult for her to formulate any plan of action. How does one build a social movement against bad fathers--and why, in any case, would such a movement threaten global capital? How can one fight the “corporate leer” that, Faludi argues, infantilizes us all, without fighting the corporation itself?

Faludi aches to transform the world, but she makes her task--and ours--much harder by rejecting “confrontation,” which she designates an exclusively “male paradigm.” (This will be surprising news to millions of women, and it is a strange statement coming from a feminist. Faludi has apparently forgotten that at various times everything from lust to intelligence has been identified as male.) In any case, though she admits that confrontation has been the organizing principle of all modern social movements, she declares this model kaput. “Men have no clearly defined enemy who is oppressing them,” she insists. Well, there are men, and there are men. Her statement may describe Rupert Murdoch, but it does not describe Murdoch’s chauffeur or the thousands of workers whose unions Murdoch has crushed. Faludi’s categorical confusion--her romantic need to gather all men under one big tent--ultimately hobbles her.

As men inch their way through their crises, Faludi writes, their challenge “is not, in the end, to figure out how to be masculine--rather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to be human.” This is the generous vision that has always guided feminism, and it is the generous vision that informs this book. But “Stiffed” is ultimately a disappointment and a missed opportunity; it lacks clarity, precision and what Douglas called “the corrective bite provided by a sense of historicity.” Not surprisingly, then, it cannot even pose the question: What is to be done?