Great Expectations

That a writer of Susan Faludi’s powerful scholarship turns her interest toward the lives of men makes the lives of men seem suddenly more worthy of study. If she proclaims a “crisis in masculinity” as the bonne raison for her efforts, we agree that the signs are everywhere. “The Troubled Life of Boys” (as the cover of the New York Times Magazine called the problem) has become what she calls “American manhood under siege.” We agree, because good men, good feminists and good journalists--and Faludi is two out of three--rise to the occasions of crisis and siege. The decade that opened with Faludi’s declaration of “The Undeclared War Against American Women” in “Backlash,” is closing with “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man”--both nothing if not big works; 662 pages in the current text: exhaustive, fully annotated, painstakingly researched. Size, it turns out, might matter after all.

So does sense. And Faludi makes a fair share of it in “Stiffed” as she examines the men whose lives have occupied this last half-century. This book, rich as it is in history and sociology, compelling narratives and social studies, will serve as a reliable source for those wondering what the century we are about to leave was like. Faludi is faultless at the assembly of facts and flawed only when it comes to interpreting them.

Her take on the generation that came of age during the Great Depression, went to war and came home to live in the suburbs rings true. Faludi also hits home with what she calls the “national male paradigm”--a truly useful construct--to which she assigns “four aspects”:

” . . . the promise of a frontier to be claimed . . . the promise of a clear and evil enemy to be crushed . . . the promise of an institution or brotherhood in which anonymous members could share a greater institutional glory . . . the promise of a family to provide for and protect. . . .”

But regarding the boys in her own neighborhood, men in their 40s and 50s now, Faludi finds their “mission to manhood” conflicted by rapidly changing values. She is dogged by constantly evolving questions. Why do men seem so angry? And why at women in particular? Why are they given to “ranting” and “tantrums”? Surely they know it’s not women or women’s causes.

“And so my question changed. Instead of wondering why men resist women’s struggle for a freer and healthier life, I began to wonder why men refrain from engaging in their own struggle. . . . Given the untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove themselves in our culture, why don’t men revolt? . . . Why haven’t men responded to the series of betrayals in their own lives--to the failures of their fathers to make good on their promises--with something coequal to feminism?”

If this sounds slightly like a gender-vexed Professor Higgins asking why can’t a man be more like a woman, it is important for Faludi to keep the discussion focused on the ways in which men have failed men. The stories of men’s lives, which make this book so readable, also provide the framework on which she builds her account of men’s betrayals. They include instance after instance of men being fired by their bosses, downsized by the economy, dishonored by the country they go into battle for, abandoned by their fathers and football teams and dumped by their wives. The dissing and downsizing are regarded as betrayals, while the divorce is more a part of the natural order of things. Men are, at once, the power-crazed architects of a culture that victimizes women and powerless architects of a culture that victimizes men. Even when oppressed, they are the oppressor.

“When the frontier that their fathers offered them proved to be a wasteland, when the enemy their fathers sent them to crush turned out often to be women and children trembling in thatched huts, when the institutions their fathers claimed would buoy them downsized them, when the women their fathers said wanted their support got their own jobs, when the whole deal turned out to be a crock and it was clear they had been thoroughly stiffed, why did the sons do nothing?”

This is a conundrum that drives the next 400 pages and, as young men of the 19th century in search of their fortunes were told to “go west,” Faludi is drawn to Southern California in search of insights. “In the early 1990s it seemed like the epicenter of ‘toxic masculinity,’ to use a phrase then much favored in the press.”

“When I first arrived in southern California, the economy was in tatters. The downsizing in the region was harsher than in many other areas of the United States. The recession was deeper and had gone on longer in an economy dependent on a relatively small number of enormous defense-related corporations. California’s trials were useful exaggerations, as were other signals from the margins of male experience, whether the rage of deserted Midwest football fans or the militia vengefulness over the immolated Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. One man . . , a self-described ‘patriot’ and avid fisherman, once explained this societal dynamic to me in terms of a river: ‘If you want to see what’s happening in the stream called our society, go to the edges and look at what’s happening there, and then you begin to have an understanding--if you know how a stream works--of what’s going on in the middle,’ he said. ‘You have to be very careful not to mischaracterize what you’re witnessing as “fringe elements,” thus assuring the listener that he’s OK because it’s not about him, which is bullshit.’ ”

II

Following the patriot and fisherman’s advice, Faludi is careful not to characterize the wife beaters, the chronically unemployed, rapists, porn stars, war criminals, survivalists, militiamen, gangsters, astronauts, action figures and crazed football fans that populate these compassionately told “his-stories” as “fringe elements.” They are, rather, ordinary citizens gone astray because the culture or the society or the economy or their fathers or all of the above have dissed them badly. One wonders why O.J. Simpson or Hulk Hogan or sitting presidents go unexamined, emblematic as they are of men’s lives and times.

To make something essentially “male” out of something essentially “sick,” “sad,” “savage” or “extreme” is a construct men and women of the generation under study here are well accustomed to. Behind every husband is a warden, behind every lover a rapist, behind every soldier a war criminal, behind every sports fan a “Big Dawg” who will dress up like a basset hound, take to the bleachers and sit out in the cold, rooting for the home team in Cleveland, Ohio, where he doesn’t have a life. There is more to ponder in the million men who have gone to a Promise Keepers rally than in the 100 million men who have not; in getting to know a few attendees of a Promise Keepers event, she surmises much about the many: “. . . [M]ost of the men in the stadium were there out of fear that their families would junk them because they didn’t have high-paying, flourishing careers.”

How Faludi comes by this intelligence is anyone’s guess, but defining a subject by the few or the extreme raises the specter of Andrea Dworkin when carping about feminists. We get the details but miss the point.

What is singular about Faludi is the sheer perseverance of her inquiry. She traces every lead, makes every connection, sits through every interview following her best instincts in pursuit of the facts. And the reader willing to sit through this book is richly rewarded by her erudition. She identifies so much of what it means to be a man these days, so many of the often opposing forces at work in our lives, the damned-if-you-do and if-you-don’t imbroglios. Her observations about a culture now dominated by the mall and the marketplace rather than the factory, in which display is more important than production, in which performance is more important than value and media interest more important than message, are hard-won and well woven into the fabric of the male experience. But when she names the stars and connects them for us, too often she misses the constellations and is surprised “that the journey men led me on ultimately led me back to feminism. . . . If my travels taught me anything about the two sexes, it is that each of our struggles depends on the success of the other’s. Men and women are at a historically opportune moment where they hold the keys to each other’s liberation.”

So a woman without a man is not like a fish without a bicycle? This is progress. But if men’s lives lead her back to feminism, she misses or dismisses its impact on their lives. When she is given a sketch of an artichoke by a man who wants it to “diagram the hidden core of longing inside the opaque skin of things,” it is his metaphor. She only borrows it. “[H]is drawing serves just as well to depict my travels with men, who suffered layers of betrayal, each of which concealed a deeper betrayal.

“The outer layer of the masculinity crisis [is] men’s loss of economic authority. . . . Underlying their economic well-being was another layer of social and symbolic understanding. . . . Realizing that loyalty, whether to a corporation, an army, or a football team, no longer allowed a man to lay claim to male virtue--that it was likely, in fact, to make him a pitiable sap--could be devastating to any man. . . .

“Beneath it lay an even deeper and more private layer of male betrayal. . . . Behind all the public double crosses, they sensed, lay their fathers’ desertion. . . .

“ ‘My father never taught me how to be a man’. . . . ‘I was not guided by my father’. . . .

“That layer of paternal betrayal felt, for many of the men I spent time with, like the innermost core, the artichoke’s bitter heart. The fathers had made them a promise, and then had not made good on it.”

By this reasoning, patriarchy is to blame for the oppression of women and patrimony’s to blame for the betrayal of men. Either way, by Faludi’s lights, the dads are to blame. Is it possible that Faludi has not peeled enough of the artichoke? Or that she quit asking when the answers did not suit her cause? Or that she was listening for the facts but not the meaning of them? The “bitter heart” of men’s betrayal, like the home fire of men’s comfort, is not fiscal or fraternal, corporate or paternal. “The core of longing inside the opaque skin of things” is why men go to war and go to work and compete and preen, bluster and blather, hold forth, hold on, live and die. It is desire and honor, hunger and love. And very often it is female.

III

The changing roles and wants of women have changed the lives of men at least as much as corporate downsizing, the migration of football franchises or the media-driven infotainment culture. The once-firm footing of fathers and sons--the sense they had of where they stood--has been eroded by second- and third-wave feminism. Men returning from Vietnam returned to vastly different rules of intimate engagement than their fathers did returning from World War II. Their fathers could not guide them through such perilous territory. They’d never been there. No man had. Feminism--the male-bashing, emasculating, all-men-are-rapists or sperm donors or the-butt-of-a-joke brand that is practiced by the victim-chic culture we now inhabit--has been a fact of Everyman’s life for the last 30 years. And if the national male paradigm requires a “clear and evil enemy,” so does the national female one. Too often in the worthy cause of women’s rights, men have been used as the clay pigeons and crash dummies or agents of an evil empire.

If, as Faludi correctly affirms, “men never had the power they imagined,” it is likewise so that they never had the power women imagined them to have. It is an irony that in an effort to mitigate the impact of feminism, Faludi must underestimate the power of women in the lives of men. That feminism has been the organizing principle behind so much that is good and just and triumphant in the last half century is undeniable. That it has played a hand in the betrayal of men is no less true. But that is a country Faludi is unwilling to visit. In a book that makes room for so much minutiae, the detour around this difficult fact seems deliberate. Perhaps she knows what she’ll find when she gets there--that once it has been packaged, marketed, sound-bitten and downsized from the transcendent principle it was to the narrow special interest it has come to be, like so much of the political landscape, late-century feminism is no longer relevant to the lives we lead.

In the end, Faludi sounds a little like Paul writing to the Romans, a letter in which he tries to uphold the value of circumcision to the Jews, while downplaying its importance to the Gentiles--an effort to appeal to both the haves and the have-nots. Little wonder the writing as well as the reasoning in “Stiffed” go in circles sometimes. Too often, Faludi tries to protect a sexual politic she may have evolved beyond, from sisters who have plenty of their own and from brothers who have had enough.

That women have been oppressed is not a secret. Nor is it news that men have been betrayed. And Faludi’s willingness to take on the big work of these issues has produced two important books. But we are members of an evolving species, victims and beneficiaries of history and herstory. The blaming of fathers for the trouble with sons, like the blaming of women for the trouble with men or the blaming of husbands for the trouble with wives, can be defended or debunked by the arrangement of facts. But the exercise keeps us from the deeper meaning of our lives. Justice, liberation, equal rights, reproduction, morality, security, education, the environment, sexual respect--these are neither men’s nor women’s issues. They belong to humankind.

Faludi, like the rest of us, is a work in progress. She sees, in the lives of men and of women, human wonders, human failings, human possibilities. And therein lies the final promise of “Stiffed,” because she gets so much so right so often: There’s the hope, still unrealized but maybe just a matter of time, that we might truly “get it” after all.