The Man Question

Cathy Young from the March 2000 issue

Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male, by Susan Faludi, New York: William Morrow & Company, 662 pages, $27.50

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, by Warren Farrell, New York: J.P. Tarcher, 371 pages, $24.95

The debate about gender has been, by and large, a debate about women. For centuries, the "Woman Question" had no male counterpart; men's condition was seen as the universal human norm, and little thought was given to how equality would change male roles. Over the past few decades, however, the notion of a universal human anything has been left in tatters, and feminism has increasingly shifted its focus from formal barriers to equality to cultural beliefs about gender--including the male gender. Meanwhile, three decades of often turbulent change in relations between men and women have given rise to talk of a "decline of males" and a "crisis of masculinity" and engendered a fledgling men's rights movement.

The latest book to wrangle with the Man Question comes from Susan Faludi, whose previous contribution to the gender wars was the 1991 bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. An almost completely mythical exposé of a society-wide, decade-long effort to undo women's gains, Backlash was not a very male-friendly book. Its central thesis was that men feel threatened by gender equality, and so male-dominated culture mounts a "backlash" whenever women make even modest steps toward this goal.

Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male is the result of Faludi's six-year exploration of "the American male dilemma," which began, by her own account, as an attempt to find out just why men "so often and so vociferously resist women's struggles toward independence and a fuller life." It says a great deal about the original spirit of her project that the first stop on her quest to understand men was a batterers' counseling group (which is rather like starting a study of women by hanging out with hookers). But along the way, Faludi became convinced that she was asking the wrong question; that the "male crisis," while real, had nothing to do with feminism; and that men--even the batterers--were, like King Lear, more sinned against than sinning.

So who's doing the sinning? Faludi says it's mainly modern capitalism, which strips masculinity of its positive and meaningful aspects.

Interestingly, unlike many feminists, Faludi does not equate traditional masculinity with abusive, egotistical dominance. Rather, she notes that cultural concepts of manhood have always been based on caretaking, social responsibility, and productivity--values she sees embodied in the workingmen of a glorified industrial past, like the rugged steel factory foreman in the 1946 photo on the cover of Stiffed. The older order may have "exploited men's health and labor," may have "broke[n] the backs and spirits of factory workers and destroyed the lungs of miners," but at least, Faludi writes wistfully, "it defined manhood by character, by the inner qualities of stoicism, integrity, reliability...the desire to protect and provide and sacrifice."

Is this the same Susan Faludi who once described male attachment to the provider role as the chief obstacle to women's progress? Yes, it is. But she has hardly turned into a new traditionalist. Her romanticized portrait of blue-collar manliness is strangely unsexed: The workingman's sense of male identity, she asserts, came from doing something "worthwhile," not from being masculine per se. She carefully skirts the fact that this identity was based on a sexual division of labor: the ability to take pride in doing a "man's job" (i.e., occupational segregation by gender) and in supporting a stay-at-home wife.

Faludi's account of the plight of men today is just as skewed. Men, she writes, "find themselves in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture and awarded by lady luck," where "useful" work matters less than glamor, where they can only "enact a crude semblance of masculinity" before the media's looking glass. The modern man, Faludi argues, doesn't really get to be a man. The best he can hope for is to play one on TV.

Imprecations against an age in which image has eclipsed substance and entertainment has usurped life are hardly new (and one need not be an anti-market grouch of the left or the right to believe that these critiques, however overblown and hysterical, contain some valid points). The new twist Faludi adds to this theme is that "ornamental" masculinity has reduced the 1990s man to a condition much like that of the 1950s woman, a state of "objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching, and mirror-gazing."

To reach this startling conclusion, Faludi has to employ a rather sweeping definition of "ornamental" masculinity. She is not merely, as one might think, talking about the ubiquitous male Calvin Klein models and other signs of male vanity on the rise. Most of us would see important distinctions between a model, an athlete, a venture capitalist, and an astronaut; in Faludi's jaundiced eye, they're all equally passive objects of the public gaze, all creatures of hype rather than real accomplishment.

Upon a closer look, it turns out that Faludi's real gripe is not with passivity, but with individualism: "The team of men at work [has been] replaced by the individual man on display," she grieves, as if these were the only options available. She gets misty-eyed about the scene in the 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima in which John Wayne promises the young recruits he will teach them to "move like one man and think like one man." Recounting Shannon Faulkner's fight to get into the Citadel, Faludi can't resist sympathizing with the male cadets who wanted no part of her: They were, after all, a brotherhood, and Faulkner a media-savvy self-described "individualist."

Faludi's other bugaboo is an ever-changing society. The fathers' betrayal, it turns out, is that the world they left their sons was different from what the sons had expected. Today, Faludi laments, "the father has no body of knowledge or authority to transmit," and "each son must father his own image, create his own Adam." Indeed, it seems that in her ideal world, sons would, just like in medieval times, routinely join their fathers' trade. When Los Angeles gang-banger-turned-author Kody Scott talks bitterly about desertion by his father, National Football League player Dick Bass, Faludi reflects, "But even if Dick Bass had been around...what sort of knowledge could he have deeded a son? Bass wasn't likely to pass on to Kody the ability to become an NFL football player." Is Faludi really saying that a father's only real function is to teach his son a useful craft? Has she ever paused to think that most of her working-class heroes slaved away at back-breaking jobs so that their sons wouldn't have to do the same kind of work?

As most critics have noted, Faludi's study of the "male crisis" is based on an odd cast of highly unrepresentative characters--some colorful, some tragic, some merely pathetic. There are laid-off shipyard workers and middle-aged victims of corporate downsizing. There are the infamous "Spur Posse" boys who engaged in a points-for-sex contest, and who seem far more excited about being on TV than they are about the sex. There are Promise Keepers and militiamen, rabid football fans who are devastated when the owner of the Cleveland Browns decides to move the team to Baltimore, and male porn stars undone by erectile dysfunction. And there's Sylvester Stallone, whose angst gets more than 30 pages of text.

Faludi apparently realizes that her unorthodox sampling technique might undercut the validity of her case in some people's eyes, so she tries to neutralize this criticism in advance by quoting one of the militiamen: "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...of what's going on in the middle." It may be a catchy metaphor, but it's certainly suspect social analysis.