The Man Question

Cathy Young from the March 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Some of the stories in Stiffed are poignant, gripping, and well-told, even if they tend to go on and on. Faludi does offer some interesting insights--for example, on the peculiar mix of gender traditionalism and New Sensitive Manhood in the Promise Keepers movement. And I suppose there is some value simply in her recognition that men are not powerful oppressors but human beings whose stories deserve to be heard and whose suffering deserves compassion (even if she makes such an odd selection of stories to hear and so misdiagnoses the suffering).

But what does it all add up to? Faludi wants men to rebel against their "ornamental imprisonment" as women did against theirs, and suggests that feminism --which, in her peculiar interpretation, becomes an anti-consumerist revolt--can offer men a key to their own liberation. However, she cautions, men cannot simply follow the feminist model of activism: Women could fight against "a clearly defined oppressive enemy" (male domination) and lay siege to patriarchal bastions, while men have no turf to conquer, no identifiable antagonist to defeat.

Faludi suggests that men need to find a new, noncombative paradigm of liberation, and that in doing so they will actually help revive feminism, since the "paradigm of confrontation" has outlived itself for women, too. It's an intriguing idea, but what is this "new paradigm"? What is it that men should actually do? Here Faludi is exceedingly vague; she mentions men who went to the Million Man March or Promise Keeper rallies not in search of an agenda but simply to be with other men and find "a place where they could start to think about their situation afresh." That's a pretty small payoff for a 662-page tome.

Given the way Faludi overdraws her portrait, it's tempting to conclude that there is no "male dilemma" at all. It's certainly true that most American men are happy (or at least satisfied) with their family lives and their work, even if it's not "meaningful" by Faludi's standards. They would not recognize themselves in Stiffed and its melodrama of betrayal. Nevertheless, not everything is fine for men, though for reasons far different than Faludi supposes. The cultural climate has been infected with a view of masculinity as "toxic," a fact Faludi barely mentions, probably because doing so would implicate feminism in men's distress. That's the one thing she wants to avoid. The tendency to blame men for anything that goes wrong between the sexes can and does affect public policy and the legal system. Many men are genuinely confused by women's expectations and feel that feminism has led only to a new set of double standards. Finally, there is men's often involuntary estrangement from their children. If one group of American men feels truly "stiffed," it is divorced fathers, bafflingly absent from Faludi's account.

Those "men's issues" are explored by Warren Farrell in Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say. Farrell, whose last book, The Myth of Male Power (1993), has become a men's movement bible, views the male predicament from a radically different perspective than does Faludi. Interestingly, his interest in this subject, like hers, grew out of feminism. In the 1970s, he served on the board of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women and became the feminists' favorite "liberated man" (he even published a book by that title). Then he began to talk about the male side of the war between the sexes, which cost him his friendship with Gloria Steinem and earned him Susan Faludi's ridicule in Backlash for "standing up for men, the new downtrodden."

Farrell's basic argument is that both men and women need to be freed from the rigid roles of the past, and here he takes a decidedly optimistic view of the liberating potential of technological and cultural change. Today, he says, we are in a period of "gender transition" in which both sexes have to make difficult adjustments and deal with complicated dilemmas.

But seeing women as the oppressed sex, we have focused only on women's problems and men's faults. As a result, gender issues are often reduced to "women good/men bad" clichés. Family violence studies showing that women can be aggressors as well as victims have been ignored or swept under the rug; discussions of working women's "second shift" of domestic labor have neglected male contributions and downplayed the fact that overall, American women have more leisure time than men. Male bashing flourishes not only in the feminist movement but in popular culture, from sitcoms to greeting cards. ("Grow your own dope...plant a man" is one of the more innocuous examples cited here.) This atmosphere, Farrell argues, poisons relationships by feeding women's anger at men--"the most dangerous forcefield of anger ever aimed at either sex."

One need not accept Farrell's implausible view that men and women have always had equal-but-different roles with no real imbalance of power to see the value of his perspective. It is quite clear that in the past 30 years, women's options have expanded far more than men's; women can now work or stay home without incurring any significant social disapproval, but a stigma still attaches to a man who lives off his wife's earnings. Moreover, it's often women who actively enforce the male provider role by shunning men who fail to perform it. (Some of Faludi's stories illustrate this point--many of the white-collar workers who lose their jobs are promptly dumped and sometimes treated quite horribly by their wives--but she is interested only in the men's feelings of "emasculation," not in what this says about women's attitudes.) As Farrell points out, even women who have or aspire to successful careers usually don't see lower-status men as marriage material, and that's one form of traditional prejudice one hardly ever hears feminists criticizing.

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say makes a persuasive case that male disadvantages, in areas from education to health care to criminal sentencing, have not received the attention lavished by academics, the media, and government on real or imagined female troubles. For instance, initiatives to empower girls eclipse the fact that boys are the ones increasingly falling behind in schools. Farrell chronicles the tendency of institutions to shut out nonfeminist perspectives on gender issues--what he calls "The Lace Curtain," a term coined by conservative writer Nicholas Davidson--and shows that feminism has become the "one-party system of gender politics." His argument that feminist demands for special protections often overlap with traditional chivalry toward women is not wholly original, but it's a point that bears repeating. In Farrell's memorable phrase, "protecting women creates sexual equality no more than welfare payments created class equality."

Unfortunately, like many feminists, Farrell can't resist overstating his case. Thus, in his discussion of housework, he does an excellent job of exposing flaws in studies that indict men as shirkers, including Arlie Hochschild's much-hyped book The Second Shift; but his list of 50 categories of male contributions to the household gives a major opening to those eager to dismiss his entire case. Farrell splits a single category--"repairs"--into multiple items ("carpentry," "gas/electric failures," "remodeling," etc.), lists activities that take place once a year or less often (putting up Christmas lights, stereo hookup, car buying), and comes up with such bizarre items as "options generating" (suggesting which restaurant or movie to go to).

Farrell's description of anti-male biases in the media and culture, while mostly on-target, also includes some dubious assertions--for instance, that man-hating feminist Andrea Dworkin "has been given mainstream credibility by...reviews and coverage in The New York Times," starting with the assignment of her book Pornography to "a feminist (Ellen Willis) to review." Willis is a well-known foe of anti-porn feminists, and her review of Pornography was extremely negative.

A more serious problem is Farrell's wholehearted embrace of platitudes about the need for men to "be in touch with their feelings"--not to mention the little anecdotes illustrating what an emotionally evolved fellow the author is (e.g., he cries over The Bridges of Madison County). After a while, the talk about "caring," "sharing," and "love" gets so treacly that one feels like reaching for a volume of the Marquis de Sade or watching the World Wrestling Federation.

Indeed, the contrast between Farrell's and Faludi's view of the world is not always in Farrell's favor. However bizarre Faludi's definition of work may be, she at least believes that men and women cannot respect themselves or feel truly human unless they have "something worthwhile to do" (emphasis hers). Farrell laments that traditional male roles encouraged a man to become "a human doing" defined by work, rather than "a human being" defined by feelings. In his rendition, everything men have achieved throughout history is reduced to the onerous role of "performing."

Of course, men should not be stigmatized for expressing emotion--though there is a big difference between having feelings and coddling them--and men's suffering should not be seen as unworthy of compassion. But Farrell considerably exaggerates the degree to which men have been subjected to such standards; and surely today, when political candidates are routinely psychoanalyzed by the media and public schools are teaching students how to express their feelings, the last thing we need is more jabs at the already-battered virtue of emotional reticence.

Is the current lack of political interest in men's problems caused by the stigma against male complaining and indifference to male feelings, as Farrell thinks? Such norms have never been a barrier to addressing concerns about the plight of male workers such as, say, coal miners or factory hands. It's only when an issue is framed as a gender issue that female disadvantage tends to be magnified and male disadvantage to become invisible. This mentality needs to change, but that can be accomplished without encouraging men to join the touchy-feely Oprahfied culture. It's one thing when a man talks about the pain of losing his child in a divorce; it's quite another when he ruminates that the role of suggesting social activities "often involves having one's ideas rejected, which can be emotionally taxing."

If one has the patience to cut through the psychobabble, Farrell's ultimate recommendation is a sound one: "to create not a women's movement blaming men, or a men's movement blaming women, but a gender transition movement." Unlike Faludi, he actually proposes a fairly specific (and mostly positive) agenda for this movement, from recognizing fathers' rights to ending discrimination against men in areas such as the military draft to special protections for female crime victims.

Both Faludi and Farrell end up painting much too bleak a picture of men's lot. Still, if these books signal the start of moving beyond the oppressor/oppressed paradigm of male-female relations, that is something to be applauded. One can only hope that the movement is in the direction of ending the victim sweepstakes, not adding men to the roster of contestants.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.15.10 @ 12:31AM|#

chjgfn

log in or register to reply